Dragon Age, will contain spoilers

I'm a huge nerd and for the last few months I've had a raging nerd boner for Dragon Age. I beat it within a week of starting it back in March, which is a record for me, usually I take a month or so but this game had me staying up past my bedtime just to play I love it so much. Then I promptly made every race/class/gender combo I could and started playing through the opening areas, and the DLCs, oh the DLCs had me starting new games to play them through. Then the expansion came out and that was awesome too, I beat it in a few days and had nothing to do but go back to the original and start fumbling around with different plot options.

With J away and the recent announcement that DA:2 is coming out in March I couldn't believe how much I still wanted to do, like beat the game about 6 different ways at least. I think the thing I love the most about this game is every time you play it through you still get a different twist to your characters story. I played a Nobel human, so my characters personal story was one of revenge for her family. I focused on relations ships with only 3 of the NPCs in my party even leaving one to die in a village instead of saving him and bringing him with. So I got very little conversation from most of my party. The game has romantic side plots and I focused on Alister and once I secured his seat on the throne my character became her queen, we used dark magic so we'd survive killing the end boss. We made many changes for the better in our kingdom.

Your party also chats while you're running, so not only is your personal story and interactions different each play through you get to hear different NPC conversations depending on who comes out in the world with you. My first play through consisted on mostly groups with Shale (A golem and my tank), Wynne (a mage and my healer), myself a (duel weilding warrior), and Leiliana (a rogue, and an Archer). Sometimes I would take Alister as my tank. Shale mostly throws her weight around, but Alistair and Wynne have a lot of greatly funny talks, Wynne teases Alistair for sneaking peaks at your bum, Alister calls her old and she retorts with dirty old lady humor.

This time I played a mage, and I switched up my party a lot more, I made my entire crew my best friends. My character flirted romantically with a few party member before settling on Alister. I took Alistair as my main tank and off-specced Morragain my healer, I went back and forth between Ogren and Zeveran as my extra damage. No one in my party abandoned me or tried to kill me (at least not more then once). But being a Mage I couldn't become Queen, and Alistair broke it off with my character, I decided to do the big -dies to save everyone- ending. I admit when they did the memorial and what everyone else did after I died, I cried.

I'll admit this second play through was a three day whirlwind where the kids watched cartoons on my computer so I could have the TV (well when they wanted to watch cartoons at least). Last night the amount of time I'd been playing showed it's effects in my dreams (along with a nice shout out to Neverwhere which I'd just finished reading). I had a dream where I was protecting my parents house from the Darkspawn Blight. I was also an opener (like Door from Neverwhere). Alistair was helping me though sometimes he was J. My parents home was reverted to what it probably looked like in the 1800s when it was built. I found a saw edges sword that had magic and began using it to take out dark spawn 5 at a time. However I woke up before the blight was ended (and just as the fighter jets showed up oO).

Tonight I hope I sleep more and dream less.