if you think back to what the big, critically lauded titles and series were back in 2012ish, the ones praised unto the heavens for their writing and characters, it would have been like, mass effect, bioshock, dragon age, gta, that type of thing. just really boring stuff that, whenever it tried to reflect on either the outside world or on itself, showed time and time again that it was made by people with very little interest in anything outside of their own relatively narrow perspectives. world of warcraft, the greatest paragon of shit AAA writing, was still popular and respected, and -- it shames me to admit it -- i was probably still playing it. i was starting to think i hate games because i couldn't stand to treat any of them seriously anymore.

so when this came out it was not so much a revelation as a telepathic message directly to me from seattle, WA, halfway across the world. it said "yeah same but check this out".

(to be fair, it's not like there weren't interesting and well-written games around at the time, ones that i got to play a bit later. but dragonfall felt like the turning point for me.)

here's the one spoiler i'm gonna give you as my reason why i loved this so much, and still do. there's a party npc who's this kind of annoying computer nerd, whose conversations with you mostly consist of him whining about his super hot and smart possible spy ex gf who ghosted him. if you apply bioware logic to that, you'll be thinking, oh, i see, his quest is gonna be that he uses his 1337 hacker skills to locate her and drags me to rescue her from some complete non-threat no-name asshole with a gun, giving complete lie to everything that was said about how smart and capable she is, and then they get back together and have many babies and i'm supposed to pretend that this was a happy ending. so, because i was sick of this type of shit, i told him at every turn, no, drop it, shut the fuck up, don't be a stalker, if she wants to contact you again she will, fully expecting that i'm just leading this storyline to a bad ending.

turns out i was not! turns out someone thought of the characters in this story -- and this is true of more than this one quest -- as people with motivations and not just props in the heroic tale of {CHARNAME}.

shadowrun as a setting is a good balance of cool and goofy (as long as the racist bits that everyone would like to forget don't come to the fore), and cyberpunk berlin (depicted here in broad strokes but with a lot of love) is not somewhere you get to visit a lot in games that aren't about ww2. the characters are fantastic, and the gameplay is just xcom but that's fine by me. it's a good ass game is what it is.