On Veilguard, and What It Means To Over-Analyse Media (No Spoilers)
My goal here is to discuss Veilguard as a whole without talking much about specific plot-beats or decisions, after completing my own playthrough. I wouldn't mind reading this before playing, and I'm very spoiler-averse.
I wrote a big, 5000 word draft talking about specific things I felt fell flat with Veilguard last weekend - I had a good time writing it, I got a lot out of my head, and came to understand a lot better why my opinion on the game was souring over time. The draft itself is nigh-unreadable, but the process was valuable. It got me thinking about the relationship we have to media, and specifically the ways we analyse media that isn't necessarily made for deep analysis.
I know I'm not the only one who loves to watch "trash" and pick it apart for themes, ideas, some kind of thesis statement. I understand this to be something of a core tenet of Tumblr fandom - we're still thinking about this thing we like, and as a result we have worked out a character's whole inner world from a dozen lines of dialogue. I respect that shit. There's a lot of satisfaction in taking a piece of pop media, treating it like any work of literature, and figuring out how it all fits together.
So I played Veilguard, I enjoyed it a great deal, probably the most 7/10 game ever made - extremely competent, fun to play, hard to put down.
So I tried to think about it. Pick it apart. Find themes.
And I struggled?
I'm not saying there's nothing - there are clearly themes about trauma, and fear, and acceptance, there's this pervading sense that there's a millenial work-life balance depersonalisation thing going on. There's a big running theme around feeling the weight of our own decisions.
But to actually play around with, rotate in my mind so to speak... there really just isn't much to work with. It's very thin on the ol' narrative backbone. I think the most obvious lack is that the companions don't really have blindspots. They have A Problem and A Quirk, sometimes related, and not much more. There's no "Sten killed a family" or "Solas is clearly racist" or "" The thing about feeling our decisions, that just isn't reflected in the companions and if you pick a certain type of dialogue option consistently it falls incredibly flat.
I'll look over my partner's shoulder at her feed and there's just screeds and galleries trying to find the seeds of a half-decent romance in the most obvious male love interest, dissecting a 1-second animation and trying to build an entire unspoken character around it, nestled somewhere in his hours of voiced dialogue. Meanwhile I rewatched Buffy Season 2 recently and in Spike's first hour on screen he sets up himself, his beautiful wife, the central conflict, and a thesis statement about Buffy that the viewer can dissect.
I just don't think there's much meat on this bone, to be honest.
I wrote 10x this many words picking it apart, and after doing so I just don't care to edit and post it.
I decided to stash that post and write this one this morning when I had a shower thought - Dragon Age isn't better off with this game's release. I think rushing this out and setting a bunch of answers in stone, while rushing the writing (thus undercutting the foundation of the series - the writers are the core, the characters are the glue) and vindicating every bad instinct their parent company had that got them here. "Oh your single player action game did poorly? Maybe you should try that live-service thing again."
I think they should have taken the core of a game they had here, gutted the writing and setting and plonked the exact same gameplay on some new IP, to let Dragon Age stay the slightly-plodding but endlessly-permutative mine of headcanons and personal preferences it was for the 15 years leading up to it. Bioware get all their "return to form" reviews and folks like me who feel we can't pick it apart get to justify it with "Well at least it's not Dragon Age."
Instead, my review is just "Well, it's not Dragon Age."