What did you do today in DA? [Spoilers]

Branson Cadash went and recruited the Templars. I was very much on the fence about whether to go for them or the mages, mostly because the quest to get the mages is WAY more inspired than the Templar one. But last time I really enjoyed the camaraderie you got to build with Dorian, and since I've never paid much attention to Cole I thought maybe I'd make more of an effort to use the quest to engage with him the same way.

Aaaand... for the first three quarters I was pretty sure I'd end up reloading and going for the mages instead. Champions of the Just is... just... so clumsy and boring and uninteresting, and even when you're locked into a 'battle within the mind' with a demon the visions you're shown are mostly garbage and childish and there's no reason why they would faze an actually adult Inquisition agent. Some of them did strike a little bit of a chord, but since the sequence is almost completely non-interactive (which is another huge missed opportunity among many that Bioware would have recognized and prioritized in a heartbeat if they'd still been in the business of writing actual RPGs by then) it all kind of falls flat.

And Cole... I love characters that speak in metaphors and strangely insightful gibberish, but for that to work their dialogue needs to be very well-written, and/or spoken in short sentences with meaningful emphasis. Cole seems to spout mostly nonsense that means absolutely nothing, and when he does say something genuinely interesting it's packed into fairly long and fast sentences that go aaaaaall over the place, so it's hard to catch and appreciate properly, at least in his introduction when you keep asking him to explain stuff.

That said, after getting the awkward "You're another spirit in an Envy demon's mind prison, why the fuck should I trust you?" phase out of the way and seeing for himself that Cole does in fact just want to help, I think Branson feels a little bit compelled to enable that spark of helpfulness and altruism the same way Cassandra and some of the others have gradually coaxed it out of him.

Working in the underground, he probably has more experience working with dysfunctional and abnormal people than any of my other Inquisitors to date, and would have learned to recognize that people like that can still be helpful, and maybe even dependable, if the loyalty underneath their oddities is true and they're slotted into the right place and surrounded by the right people to bring out their best. So while he can barely make heads or tails of what comes out of Cole's and Sera's mouths, being mostly a casual, straight-talking, no-nonsense badass himself, I figure that he maybe feels a bit protective of them and their desire to contribute to the crisis even though nobody in the rigid human world really knows what to do with them...

So that's what I'm going to try to lean into, that he's kinda-sorta taken them under his wing. Also chose to recruit the Templars as partners rather than enslave them, even though Branson's first thought was to go "Yeah, you're mine now.".

Partly because the PR of having a public alliance with the Templar Order is going to heavily boost the Inquisition's credibility in Thedas compared to dissolving the order and absorbing its members, partly because I really like to see the Templars as an organization getting to do their actual job of protecting the world from dangerous magic and one of the only actual clear-cut instances of that in the series is by helping suppress the Breach, and partly because of those Envy visions warning Branson where things could go if the Inquisition gets too powerful and hungry.

So overall I got more out of the quest than I thought I would, but it's still mostly terrible compared to In Hushed Whispers.

Looking forward to seeing where things go next. Unlike my other Inquisitors who have mostly just felt very weird and noncommital about the "Herald of Andraste" thing, Branson decided that the only way a dwarf being an Andrestian religious icon was gonna work to the Inquisition's benefit would be if he went all-in and played it up as much as possible in public. So things will get interesting when all those claims of being Chosen by the Prophet start actually being put to the test.