@Ganymede said:
Fenris's anger was hard to empathize with. I think this is mostly because his plight is overshadowed by how the storyline leans in favor of Mages, in my opinion. No matter how I played, I eventually sided with the Mage's plight, rather than take the position that Mages ought to be purged.
This was one of the things that kind of bugged me about DA2. The first game presented some decent reasoning for why the Circles existed and what was actually dangerous about magic. DA2 sometimes paid lip-service to this (like, most of Fenris' points, while extreme, have a kernel of correctness to them), but by the end you're clearly a freedom-hater who loves oppression and violent purge murder if you don't side with the mages. I keep meaning to do a replay where I side with the templars, but I can never entirely bring myself to do it.
I will say, DA:I has made me appreciate DA2 more. Whatever flaws it had, the compact nature of it was one of the things that probably helped me invest in the companions. DA:I is so diffuse and big it's harder to care. Though diffuse is kind of the point, so I'm not sure how much of that's a criticism, and more it just not being the ideal game for me. Open-world games tend to kinda lose me after awhile, and a lot of it is just...that.
