The Platinum Series: [5] Dragon Age Origins

Dragon Age Origin was one of the few games I brought with me since returning from Aussie. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of a western rpg games like this, but nevertheless, I try to enjoy the game as much as possible. And as weeks went by, I find myself finishing 2 full playthrough2 of the game, one as a Mage and another as a Warrior. That surprisingly left me with just 1 Trophy left to Platinum: reaching level 20 as the third class, Rogue.

Title: Dragon Age: Origin
Developers: Bioware
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PS3), Xbox 360, Windows, Mac
Genre: role-playing
Release date: November 2009


Platinum difficulty: 4/10.

Overall, I don't think any of the trophy in Dragon Age Origin was difficult to obtain.The slightly challenging one is probably the "Heavy Hitter" Trophy which require you to deal at least 250 damage with your character (we normally deals ~50-100 damage on regular attack/spells). Fortunately each class had certain skills that made this possible, such as Mana Clash for Mage and Arrow of Slaying for Rogue. Heck, we could even use the tome dupe glitch/exploit to pump our character's stats and easily deal the required damage with a simple normal attack. The Platinum was indeed relatively easy, but it still took quite some time to complete because it can took up to 3 playthrough (each for the 3 classes to reach level 20, which can range from 20-30 hours ), plus the 3 additional mini origin trophies (which took about 2 hours each) to achieve the platinum. Or, if you're simply want to rush, get the Awakening extension pack and easily get the level 20 Trophy in a matter of less than an hour, hence making the full Platinum requirement to just 1 playthrough.

Anyway, it took me two and a half playthrough to platinum this. My first playthrough was a mage, and although I didn't follow any proper walkthrough, I'm surprised that I coincidentally followed the recommended path to recruit the allies: Mage, Redcliff, the Elves and lastly Dwarf. But it was a so screwed up playthrough because I didn't know and missed so many things about the game. Missed Leliana at the Lothering, killed Wyne at the Circle Tower, not knowing that she was recruitable; missed getting Blood Mage specialization in my only chance as a mage, and more importantly, my skills and talents distribution was all over the place. My second playthrough as a warrior was better though, since I properly follow the walkthrough, and thanks to this, I managed a clean sweep at most of the trophies I missed in my first playthrough (including save and reload trick to side with both factions in each recruited allies, as well as the multiple endings). And to be honest, although at this point I only got 1 trophy left to Platinum, somehow I can't bring myself to play another playthrough as a rogue....until like a few weeks ago, when I finally decided to just speedrun the game, my final ever playthrough of Dragon Age Origin. Skip most cutscenes, did the Circle Mage and Redcliffe part. By then I was about level 10, but it was all that needed to reach level 20 on my rogue, thanks to the imbalanced gold glitch, which took me no less than 1 hour to jump from level 10 to 20, the Rogue Level 20 Trophy, as well as the Platinum. Well, at least for the main game, since it didn't count the DLC trophies.

Other thoughts

Throughout the game I played mostly on either Casual or Normal difficulty (don't want to hurt my brain by playing on something like Nightmare). To be honest, there was a huge gap between these 2 difficulty, almost as if the Normal was geared slightly toward Hard mode while the Casual mode was an utter joke where it's almost impossible for you to die. I sure hope Bioware could at least balanced the game a bit.

One more thing, the game is glitchy as &^%@#$. It doesn't happened often, but when it did, it really annoyed me. I remember one very common glitch point that happened to me so many times , and that really pissed me off: the locked hall in Human Noble origin story, after the battle scene. On another note, the game also has a "good" kind of glitch - the gold and item dupe glitch, which allowed you to have infinite gold, and infinite tomes. And yes, I did (ab)use them for the lulz, in my third playthrough.


Final thoughts
My final impression toward the game pretty much remained unchanged since I last made my first impression post: amazing story and great length of choices/options for players to choose, but as a whole, it definitely is not the type of games I'd thoroughly enjoy since my interest lies heavily toward jrpgs. Relatively easy Platinum though.