Dragon Age 2 is a game about kindness.
The world isn't kind to you at all. You lose your home, twice. You lose your family, again and again. You can't make it through with all of your friends alive and on your side.
The world hasn't been kind to them either, and as you carry on your day-to-day life, it isn't the big things that stand out.
BUT I DONT WANT TO WRITE ABOUT KINDNESS RIGHT NOW I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS SO I'M THROWING MY RELATIONSHIPS PART DOWN HERE SO I DON'T FORGET IT!!!
Dragon Age 2 is a game about relationships.
Most of yours are bad.
You lost your home and everyone who lives there. All of your relationships before Kirkwall, gone. Those people are dead or vanished or on the other side of the sea, and you hear from them rarely or at all.
You've lost or will lose your whole family.
You are not your mother's favorite child.
But you've got a couple of [people][people] who stick with you. Bad people, sure, or complex, at least. But they are your friends. No matter what, no matter who you isolate and disgust and alienate, the game sends you into the final battle with a full team at your back.
Merrill loves her clan, and her keeper, and at the end, she brings their destruction. Anders puts your life and his on the line for a futile stab at saving his former lover, someone taken away from him. Varric is trying to save his brother from himself. Aveline is in mourning. If you play your cards wrong, almost all of them will be against you - Aveline will leave, Isabela will leave, you can lose Fenris and Anders and Sebastian and Merrill. But if you balance everything right - and it is balance - then almost all of them will stand with you at the end. Even against their own morals, because in the decade you've known these characters, they have come to trust you, and love you, and will stay by your side.
Between the killing and the questing, you and your friends play cards. You drink together. You give each other gifts. You make plans. Plans - as if you aren't about to go climb into a cave full of demons and dudes who want you super dead. They have lives without you. They flirt with each other, go to church together, read books and hang out. They all lost their families - and you're there for most of it.
You have each other. When things go bad, again, and again, your friends are at your back.