Dragon Age 2 is a game about loss. From its opening moments until its closing lines, the plot is unafraid to let its protagonist lose. Most video games are too scared to let their players know what it’s like when the odds are so stacked, and the way forward is inevitably fraught with pain. Video games, after all, are all about winning.

That’s what makes Hawke’s scattered victories feel so good. There are wins, but they’re never so common, so golden, as to become pure power fantasy. BioWare’s divisive RPG is about the bittersweet life and tumultuous times of one very unlucky hero, and while many of my favorite moments in the game stem from its scattered sweet beats, it’s Hawke’s bitterest defeat that sticks with me the most.

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Unlike its country-spanning predecessor and even larger successor, Dragon Age 2 takes place almost entirely within the walls of a single city: Kirkwall. Though the game struggles to fully illustrate this - time skips in the story don’t alter the city’s appearance much, for example - Kirkwall is a dynamic place, filled with diverse folks and all manner of danger. The core narrative revolves around a conflict between Templars and Mages that will one day affect much of the known world, but Kirkwall is also rife with more insular issues, from rat infestations to serial killers.

Dragon Age 2 - Tutorial screenshot of Flemeth, mHawke, Bethany, and Leandra

It’s the latter I’m centering on here, because a serial killer is responsible for my favorite moment in Dragon Age 2. Hawke puts an end to their murderous streak, but not before losing their own mother to the man’s warped ambitions. Dragon Age 2 is a game about loss.

Not only is poor Leandra slain by the deplorable Quentin - I hate how similar this bastard’s name is to my own, by the way - but she’s then reanimated, pieced back together with parts of Quentin’s prior victims like a Frankensteinian zombie jigsaw, all because she happens to bear a passing resemblance to the guy’s dead wife.

To reiterate, players get to put the killer down like the villain he is. A pervading theme of recurring loss does not mean a story must be endlessly bleak; Hawke knows there will be no further victims. That is our scattered victory, our heroic achievement. But the win commingles with the pain. There’s no bringing Leandra back from such a brink. Her full and final death comes complete with a tearful farewell, as she tells our hero Hawke how proud of them she is before passing on.

Leandra, Possessed

Leandra’s death cannot be prevented. Nor can the death of one of Hawke’s two siblings at the beginning of the game, when the family is fleeing their doomed town of Lothering due to the early events of Dragon Age: Origins. It’s possible (albeit blissfully avoidable) for Hawke’s surviving sibling to perish later on. Oh, and Malcolm? Father to the three kids, husband to Leandra? He died years before the game began.

Why is yet another painful plot beat my favorite moment in Dragon Age 2? It would be easy to tell you I’m a masochist and leave it at that. In truth, I admire the writing’s commitment to poignantly pointing out that sometimes life’s proverbial lemons are just lemons.

There is an unflinching grit to the second entry in this celebrated series. Plenty of choices can be made along the way to its finale - as befits a BioWare game - and even the quest involving Leandra’s sad end is filled with player-influenced variables. But Hawke is no larger-than-life character; they’re just a person, doing their best, trying their damnedest to make a difference in a frequently apathetic world, celebrating hard-earned successes, but mourning hard-felt failures just the same.

Hawke in Dragon Age 2

Maybe if this were the Hero of Ferelden’s saga, they could have mixed some magical MacGuffin to set things right for undead Leandra. Perhaps the Herald of Andraste could have prayed so hard, the woman we knew would come right back to life without so much as a whimper. But Hawke, our famed Champion of Kirkwall, has to carry that weight. As a player, I’ve got to carry it, too.

It’s heavy. It’s harsh. It’s brilliant.