Dragon Age: Origins

Yes, I'm one of the last people on earth to play it.

It's a fun, absorbing game with a highly immersive story, fantastic NPC's, and a lot of choices where the right decision isn't obvious, and I had a great time chatting with/at friends who had already played it while I spent waaay too much time at the computer coaxing my followers along and trying to figure out how to save Ferelden.

This is not to say it's perfect. It isn't. There's quite a large potential triggering event in there that is handled with no subtly or care, and which is not necessary to the story, and there are a couple of rules that make no sense whatsoever.

For the perhaps four other people who haven't played this, I'm going to put major spoilers in footnotes, I think.

(Summary**).

Triggering alert/plus rant in footnote: During the Deep Roads Quest, there is a woman chanting nursery rhyme-style  about rape. There's a decent length of time hat you are left listening to this rhyme as you work your way through the tunnels to find out what happens. It's well past creepy, and it doesn't need to be there. There are already plenty of indications that the person who allowed this to happen is a horrible, crazy person who should never be trusted(1). Also about this point the codex adds the information that men who are captured by Darkspawn go insane/get eaten/turn into Darkspawn creatures themselves. Women get raped and turned into Darkspawn mother-creatures (assuming they live). And this is part of the story why? Yes, I know great art deals with many issues, including on occasion sexual violation. Guess what? Good as it is, Dragon Age does not qualify as great art, nor does sprinkling something controversial in carelessly,  like croutons on a salad, make it "edgy," "dramatic," "dark, " or even, given the unfortunate frequency of use, "controversial." Crude, thoughtless and offensive to no purpose, yes.

Less triggery, but still problematic is Morrigan's suggestion near the end for solving the Darkspawn problem. This is a real shame, because much of her idea sounds like it could make for a really interesting story development later(2)

Those seriously clunky matters aside, the game does let a female player have a lot of freedom. That is to say, I could play as a woman and there was no point at which I thought the game was less rich or the choices more constrained because the PC was female. Unlike, say, Arcanum, which was the first CRPG I ever played, and which I loved, but which did have some limitations on female character choices (the one option a woman could choose that a man could not involved seducing someone. No thanks). I have not played as a male character--may never do so-but there were no points where I felt I was offered less. Also, while they probably did this in part to simplify coding, points to the creators for choosing a gender-neutral title for respect.
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(1) Really, what does it add? Branka left her entire house to die at the hands of the Darkspawn, she was so obsessed. She traps the PC and party with monsters in order to get her way. Anyone who needs more clues to her mental and moral state probably also requires her to wear a black hat and possibly also to carry a sign.

(2) She wants a recent warden to impregnate her; she'll then use the baby as a sort of god-soul catcher and, with luck, bring a non-demonic old god back into the world. If you're playing a male character, this is, I think, less of an issue because a male character might well be in a romance with her. A female PC has to convince someone else to sleep with her. I had Loghain along, and it's clear he doesn't want to at all. A friend who took Alistair told me it's the same way with him which makes forcing (or coaxing) one or the other to sleep with her rape. Somewhere in there, the tattletale Steam engine says I tried Morrigan's path, which is partly true: The idea of bringing back an Old God appealed to the part of me that always breaks suspicious, swirly-black vials, pokes buttons on engines in Forbidden Chambers, and otherwise does stupid things just to see what will happen (Also, maybe it's not so stupid. Why not counter crazed old gods with a non-crazed version?) but between the obvious reluctance and the start of the cutscene...I hit Escape & went back to "Let's just one of us die." It was bad.

What's ridiculous is that this is the only way to get a sort of happy ending for a PC in a romance with Alistair.  Like this wouldn't get in the way of a relationship.

What has Bioware got against happy endings these days anyway? Dark does not automatically equal good, and no one needs a game to tell them that life isn't always fair.