I'm not a role-playing game person by nature. The level grinding, terrible turn-based combat systems, and annoying dialogue that usually plague the genre have turned me off. As a game reviewer, I frankly don't have the hours necessary to get involved in a truly immersive experience.

But Dragon Age is making me amend my notions of RPGs. The combat is in real time, the plot is compelling and I never was bored with its pace (so I never noticed level grinding) and the dialogue (though I wish some of it was skippable) was on the whole well written. The voice actors were on the whole solid. I especially enjoyed the sarcastic quips of Morrigan and the elvish rogue that seemed to channel Antonio Banderas.

Combat isn't just about throwing the same spells and swords at your enemies and hoping they win. Strategy is paramount. The combat system provides a potent set of tools for your battle plans, drawing from Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate series. Instead of turn-based combat, you can control your party members in real time and pause the game to give individual orders or modify a player's tactics thanks to a handy "tactics" tab. For example, I played as a mage with some potent healing spells, so I set his tactics tab to heal his allies when they had less than fifty percent health. Meanwhile, I deployed my tank to draw enemies to him by activating an ability. I had my rogue set in a preset "scrapper" arrangement and I personally controlled our witch, Morrigan, because I like to micro-manage her crowd control spells.

You only can have four players in your party at any one time and one of them must be your character. On your first playthrough, one of your major frustrations may be encountering an NPC who wants to join your party but your own character has significant overlap with their abilities. You don't want to have three mages in your party, so I found it hard to turn away the healer Wynne's abilities or Sten's warrior strengths or Leliana's uh, singing? Actually, Leliana and her strange Eastern European-accented-battle-nun-weirdness were replaced early on by the elven rogue Zevran.

Still, you'll encounter a lot of really compelling characters and have to micro-mange their tactics and armaments and have to make some tough choices as to who (and what--given the initially small inventory) you bring along. That said, you can leave a party member behind for a segment and if the rest of your characters have leveled up, so will they. This concession is important, especially if you manage to anger one of your party members enough that they decide to leave or fight you.