Season Review: Dragon Age: Absolution Season One

Overview:

Miriam and her friend Roland join a group of mercenaries to steal the Circulum. When the heist goes wrong everyone has to deal with the fallout.

Our Take:

Netflix continues to do really well with its video game adaptations. Maybe animation is the way to go for those instead of live-action? DOTA: Dragon’s Blood, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf (I guess you could argue this one a bit), Arcane, and the massively popular Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Unfortunately, I would say Cyberpunk set the standards really high and this did not meet those but it was still a good show to watch and will be a joy for Dragon Age fans.

As you might have guessed Dragon Age: Absolution is based on the Bioware Dragon Age series of games. Which is one of the main reasons it has fans as excited as they are. If you’re as big a fan of the games as I am then you’ve been waiting a long time for the upcoming Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. It has been almost ten years since the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition so fans would gobble up just about anything at this point. The studio could just phone it in at that point but luckily Red Dog Culture House didn’t do that. I was honestly surprised that it wasn’t Studio Mir that did this one. They seem to be behind a majority of Netflix’s features and this even looked like their style.

Since we’re talking about the animation studio it would be a good time to mention the animation. The characters are animated well, from their facial animations down to their action movements. I was really impressed especially by the action scenes. There weren’t quite as many battle scenes as I thought there would be but the ones they did have were fantastic. Definitely a highlight of the series for me. When magic was being used it popped off the screen and you felt like you were in the middle of the face-to-face fights.

Bioware games live and die by their characters so they had to stack up here as well. You have Miriam, Roland, Qwydion, Hira, Lacklon, and Faribanks make up the heist group. They are voiced by Kimberly Brooks, Phil LaMarr, Ashly Burch, Sumalee Montano, Keston John, and Matt Mercer respectively. The last two main characters of the antagonist side are Rezaren and Tassia voiced by Josh Keaton and Zehra Fazal.

The voice acting in this was fantastic as you could probably guess based on the cast and I fully expected Matt Mercer to steal the show given his pedigree but the main two that stood out to me were Kimberly Brooks and Ashly Burch. Kimberly has extensive roles under her belt, especially in the video game world so this role makes a lot of sense for her. Miriam was an interesting character with a lot of layers so they did the right thing by hiring an actor like Kimberly to bring it to life.

This is going to come off as a bit biased but I LOVED Ashly Burch’s performance as Qwydion. Mainly because it reminded me a lot of her role as Sasha in Attack on Titan and that was one of my favorite roles of hers. The best way I could describe Qwydion has controlled chaos and no one is more suited to voice a character like that than Ashly.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the story but the best way to put it is that it would be what you expect from this type of show. It’s not bad and I would say it plays very safe with everything. The biggest problem I have with it is the length, for whatever reason Netflix just keeps giving us only six to eight episodes a season. I don’t know how we got lucky with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and they gave us ten in that one.

I somewhat get it because I think they are setting up for another season and they reached a perfect stopping point. But still, the rest of this arc could have used a little more love and fleshing out so I still look at it as an issue personally.

Would I recommend this show though? Yes absolutely, especially if you’re a Dragon Age fan. There are a lot of fun little easter eggs here and you might even recognize some of the in-game abilities being used in the fight scenes. It doesn’t quite reach the stature of Netflix’s last big animated show but I don’t feel like many could. You should definitely give this a watch and one of the bright sides to its short length is you can watch it in one evening.