Dragon Age: Leliana’s Song

Originally announced at E3 2010, this prequel to the Dragon Age: Origins story tells the tale of the Orlesian Bard, Leliana.  It features a more detailed back story of how her and her mentor came to the land of Ferelden to play a “game” of intrigue their criminal ring developed.

You play the DLC as Leliana and it features three new playable characters who follow Leliana as well.  They are a dwarf Warrior named Tug, an elf Mage and another warrior you meet later on, named Silas.  This characters are pretty fleshed out and have a decent back story themselves, if you take the time to read the codex entries.  Even though the characters are pretty well set to go from the beginning of the game, fear not as you can customize their abilities as the DLC progresses.

The DLC adds some new weapons and armor as well and contains 8 quests.  Though this content is much longer than the disappointing Return to Ostagar, it doesn’t hold much weight and in the end you feel like you didn’t get all that much accomplished.  As this is a prequel, you should already know how it is going to end, if you played Origins at all. So the ending is a little limited in where it can go.  I do think that it could have been written a little better though or could have tried to spin-off the other characters a little better.  This way, if they appear in another DLC or even better Dragon Age 2, I’d be much happier.

There is some re-playability as there are points in the story where you can make decisions that effect other characters not involved in the Origins story.  There are also 3 added achievements for those that feel the need to collect them.  One big thing the DLC adds, aside from extended play-time is an item that does transfer over to your main campaign (including Awakenings) if you get one of the achievements.  Without spoiling anything it is a decent item that should make the main game a little easier.

All in all, this is probably the best DLC for Dragon Age to date.  It rounded out one of the best characters in the game and got me back into the title for a little while.  Normally, I don’t like prequels to anything, but this one did entertain me for a while.  I’d suggest getting this to anyone who is enamored as much with Dragon Age as I am.  If you didn’t find Dragon Age all that great, it might appear as more of the same.