Big fan of the Dragon Age franchise. The strength of Dragon Age has always been its characters as in they usually carry their games, from Alistair to Morrigan, from Avaline to Varric to Blackwall to Viviane every game just has strong interesting diverse characters and that's what always keep me hung on.
Unfortunately this show didn't have any good characters, while some had moments, most of the characters had one architype. 'ME ANGRY, ME MAD AT STUFF'. This whole show just came off as super aggressive.
The lead character Mirium is just bitter and one dimensional and unlikable, and while I understand considering her upbringing, it just falls flat and you don't have enough investment to want her to overcome the horrors of her past, and this show actually got me to hate an Ashley Burch performance, I love Ashley Burch, she cannot do no wrong, and its not her fault, she did great with what she was given but I was not a fan of how this female Qunari was portrayed, she came off like some valley girl, or a forgotten cast member of Totally Spies disguised as a Qunari, it felt so out of place.
The other characters are not that great either, the dwarf was your typical headstrong dwarf stereotype, and you already had that with the lead too. Miriums love interest is also bland and has no personality except she loves the main character, also there is the ending that gives her some merit, but I'll get to that later.
The Villain of this show I liked at first before he was revealed as the villain, but his motivations for being a villain felt very weak, it just kind of happened out of nowhere, and I would have believed it if there was more build but it just happened too fast, especially when you consider where he started from and sure he is messing with blood magic and he is a Tavinter mage and Tavinter mages are known to be a-holes, I think they just wanted this charming bad guy, but he was neither convincing at either
The story was also so played out. Its been done to death so many times, while this adds nothing new. Not only that but I would be okay with played out plots but others have done it a lot better than this. A lot of the character motivation pop the hell out of nowhere. Also there is a big twist that happens with one of the characters and it just comes right the hell out of nowhere too, like I felt a lot of these reveals were like a kid writing a story saying 'and wouldn't it be good if this happened, and then this happened' on and on, to which it makes no real sense other than to happen for the sake of happening.
The animation also seemed to verge on many different styles, from bad CGI that looked really dated with the drawn animation and then sometimes the animation would flick to this anime style at times then back to western animation again. The art style really lacked an identity throughout, but I still liked it when it was good, but quality was very inconsistent at times, the backgrounds looked bland too, Dragon Age always has interesting locations, but here it felt like I had seen this in a lot of animations over the last 5 years.
The best part of the show was the ending, I liked Dragon Age 2 and that ending made me at least interested enough to watch season 2. (if it gets another season)
Overall a rough watch with some good animation (stressing 'some') but despite I hope this season is a learning experience for the team and they make something better with season 2.
