The pleasures of Dragon Age: Inquisition are worth suffering through its tedium

An exclamation point is used to indicate something dramatic, but its appropriateness lies in the eye of the beholder. Writing about the opening of a new neighborhood karaoke joint might prompt me to end a sentence with an exclamation point, but that probably wouldn’t be the case for, say, the president of the United States, who might save attention-grabbing punctuation for expressing his feelings on the opening of a new missile silo in Iran.

Likewise, in Dragon Age: Inquisition, if some hunter needs animal pelts or some poor soul from a tiny farming village wants a benevolent stranger to put flowers on a dead relative’s grave, these requests might deserve a symbol of heightened emotion in their eyes. But when you’re trying to save the world from a supernatural rift spewing angry demons everywhere, minor dramas in random people’s lives seem ridiculously frivolous. So why mark it on the map with a giant exclamation point? This no-task-too-small problem has plagued fantasy role-playing games since the dawn of time (the ’80s) but is more acute than ever in the third of BioWare’s expansive fantasy saga—a game that succeeds after you learn how to manage its many excesses.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, as the saying goes, but none are weightier than the crownless cranium of the lead character in Inquisition. The player-created protagonist begins with the singular (but juicy) role of action hero who must close the aforementioned interdimensional rift with a right hand mysteriously imbued with magical powers. After a clumsy opening sequence sets up the game’s overarching mystery about your possible status as a medieval messiah, you and a handful of rebels establish the Inquisition as an answer to growing strife between the Chantry, Dragon Age’s version of the politically powerful Catholic Church of yore, and a group of disenfranchised mages. The name of your organization is highly ironic considering the historical context of real-life inquisitions—overzealous judicial arms of the Church in Europe that punished people for crimes of religious heresy in rather hideous ways. You play the heretic here; bypassing the authority of the Chantry in order to create your own independent faction free of official religious ties.

Once a base of operations for the Inquisition is established, the realm of Thedas slowly begins to open up to your whimsical wanderings, and not coincidentally, the game grinds to a near screeching halt. Like many video games that offer “open-world” experiences, Inquisition is overstuffed with activities and side quests that glow on your map and beg to be accomplished, and the amount of hats you’re asked to wear pile up faster than the corpses of ghouls you’ve slain. Your hero, in addition to saving the world with sword or staff, can don the hats of oligarch, miner, diplomat, administrator, blacksmith, botanist, astrologist, interior decorator, armchair psychotherapist, judge, jury, and—well, you get the picture. There’s enough jacking-of-all-trades that you start to resemble a Dungeons & Dragons version of Teddy Roosevelt (speaking of presidents), without our former globe-trotting adventurer-in-chief’s keen sense of knowing when to pass the buck.

Light delegation does exist, but it’s largely illusory. Once you get down to the business of Inquisiting, you can head down to the war room and gaze upon a map of potential conquests and political conundrums marked like pieces on a chessboard. You then choose from three trusted advisors of your inner circle—a general, a spymaster, and a diplomat—to address each situation in their own way. Cullen, a former Templar, predictably favors a show of military might, whereas Leliana opts for espionage and assassination from the shadows. It’s an intriguing feature that rings hollow after realizing that you can’t actually fail any of the missions; they simply take a set amount of time to accomplish.