The Dragon Age: Inquisition Companions, Ranked From Worst To Best

It is incredibly fitting that Cole, the spirit of compassion who can join the Inquisition, has the ability to make people forget about him, because that dude is unfortunately a pretty forgettable guy. Cole is by no means a bad character, but his story doesn’t quite live up to the highs of his peers. Cole’s existence as something in between a spirit and a human, and how he chooses to lean into one path or the other, creates some interesting routes for the character, but it ultimately hits with the same fervor as a fairly forgettable side quest. He’s good! He’s just unremarkable against the competition.

Josephine Montilyet is the only advisor in Inquisition who fans didn’t have an established relationship with prior to the 2014 RPG, and she still managed to carve out her place in their hearts. As the Inquisition’s resident diplomat, Josie is always thinking practically where Cullen might send soldiers to handle a problem and Leliana would cut its throat. As her story unfolds, it’s revealed that the most buttoned-up character in Skyhold has a bit of a wild side, but is still a fan of the finer things in life, like theater and team base gossip. Despite her political expertise, Josie is one of the most grounded, charismatic characters in Inquisition. Her story isn’t about some massive faction or world-shattering event, it’s about a girl who is trying to make sense of a world where dragons roam and people can shoot fire from their hands.

Sera, the elven rogue and Friend of Red Jenny, is an acquired taste. She’s impulsive, disruptive, and judgemental, but she is a product of the world she’s been raised in. As a city elf, Sera has seen the worst of how Thedas treats elves and anyone who isn’t seen as part of the upper class. She’s rebellious and pursues her idea of justice with reckless abandon. That means she’s also a source of tension and drama as she butts heads with anyone who doesn’t fit her idea of what elves should be. Sera is thorny but that’s what makes her delightful when you get closer to her, letting you look past the manic angst and see someone who wants things to be better.

As one of the few characters to appear in every Dragon Age game, Cullen’s role as one of the three advisors in Inquisition is the culmination of every story we’ve seen him pass through. This is a man who started out dedicated to the church and his calling as a mage-fighting Templar just to watch it fail him and others time and time again. Like several other characters in Inquisition, Cullen reckons with who he is after the systems he bought into have fallen apart. Depending on the player’s actions, he can grow from all he’s endured in Origins and Dragon Age II, or he can succumb to the rot the church put inside him. He’s an effective symbol for the failing systems of the Dragon Age universe, and an excellent reminder that its people and the world they live in are not beyond saving.

At this point, Varric has become a face for the Dragon Age series, if not the face after appearing prominently in three games. I have a lot of love for the dwarven storyteller, but I think my appreciation for his story in Inquisition has only grown stronger after seeing some of the payoff in The Veilguard. Varric has gone from a simple roguish businessman in Kirkwall to a storyteller recanting some of the biggest moments in history to anyone who will listen. He has become so world-weary by the time of Inquisition but he’s never lost hope. His personal questline isn’t world-shattering, but it’s a reminder that this man has been dragged through unprecedented times, and will continue to be so as we head into The Veilguard this fall. He deserves rest. I hope he gets it.

The return of Leliana, a companion in Dragon Age: Origins, as an advisor in Inquisition was (and remains) controversial given that her appearance seemingly overwrote decisions the player made in the first game. Some of this was explained retroactively through epilogues, but those did little to alleviate feelings of the spymaster being one of BioWare’s seemingly unkillable favorites. Though she serves as a case study in Dragon Age’s complicated relationship with continuity, Leliana’s story in Inquisition, much like Cullen’s, shows one of the few mainstays of each Dragon Age game finally becoming who they were always meant to be. After saving the world once, Leliana has gone from the once soft-spoken bard to a cunning agent of the Inquisition. She is disenfranchised from the church, but not the people she served alongside. She has the potential to become the leader of the church within the Dragon Age universe, and depending on whether you push her to remain compassionate or steel herself, her reign can be paved with kindness or blood. Inquisition is all about watching the world change and seeing the people who make it happen become who they’re supposed to be, and despite the series-wide complications, Leliana shines once more in her third appearance.

There have been a lot of Qunari throughout the Dragon Age series, but none have made an impression quite like Iron Bull. The mercenary is a double agent, but he’s refreshingly upfront about it when you meet him. He’s a fun-loving warrior who likes to drink, kill dragons, bro about with his team, and fuck. But despite his seemingly one-track mind, Iron Bull is one of the only characters who can actually betray you if you give him a reason to. Depending on your choices in the main game, Iron Bull may turn on you during the Trespasser DLC with seemingly no remorse; even if you’ve entered a romantic relationship with him. The Qunari spy told you who he was, and he will still be that by the end if you don’t give him a reason to be anyone else. You can’t judge a book by its cover, even if the title on the spine tells you everything you need to know.

Blackwall, or a man going by that name, is one of the most slept-on characters in Dragon Age: Inquisition. He is initially believed to be a Grey Warden sent to find people to join their Darkspawn-killing ranks. It turns out, however, that he’s not a Warden at all, but a man named Thom Rainer who took on the name after the true Warden Blackwall recruited and was then killed protecting him. Rainer, believing his life otherwise forfeit, assumed Blackwall’s identity and strove to continue his work as a Warden. But in taking another man’s identity, he sought to erase his own, including his past crimes and treachery. As the guilt of his past failings catches up to him, Blackwall’s story can go multiple ways. He can accept his punishment, be given to the Wardens, or be given freedom to atone without hiding. A lot of those big reveals have gone unnoticed by fans because they’re buried under a story that feels like that of a pretty standard, overly stoic fantasy RPG warrior. Once all is said and done, though, Blackwall’s story is a pretty damn effective tale of owning up to one’s mistakes, and proudly being better.

It’s a shame that Vivienne, one of the only mages who isn’t opposed to the Circle of Magi, the mage prison masquerading as a school in the Dragon Age universe, wasn’t in Dragon Age II, the game that had the war between mages and their Templar keepers at the center of its story. As much as I disagree with Vivienne’s beliefs on a fundamental level, I can’t help but be drawn in by the nuance. Vivienne is a mage who fully admits that she and people like her are dangerous, and a system like the Circle could probably alleviate everyone’s problems, but not in its current form. Whereas Dragon Age II paints mages as an oppressed class of people (while also simultaneously believing that they are inevitably going to become threats to society no matter what you do), Vivienne’s view of the situation is far more complex, and it makes you wonder if the catastrophic events of Dragon Age II might have gone very differently if only someone like her had been in Kirkwall. As a person who plays a mage in all of these games, hearing her condescend to me when I say mages should be free still feels like a particularly bad case of tinnitus, but she at least is talking more sensibly about the situation than anyone else in the room, all while having to shoulder her own personal burdens. Dragon Age’s inability to sit with that nuance has been the undoing of a lot of its world-building. It needed a character like Vivienne two games ago.

Religious upheaval is a central theme of Dragon Age: Inquisition, and no companion embodies that more than Cassandra. She’s the first character the Inquisitor gets in their party, and she is immediately suspicious of you. As far as she can tell, you are a symbol of everything she knows of the world changing. If you’re unwilling to play along with her worldview, any potential friendship between the two of you can sour almost immediately. How is she supposed to support the Inquisition when the person at its center is a heretic? Her reckoning only unravels further as she learns that the organization she has followed for most of her life has been corrupt, oppressing mages in ways deemed inhumane by even Dragon Age standards. Cassandra is one of the most devout people we’ve met in a series full of radicals, and yet while she struggles with the truths laid before her, she doesn’t shy away from them in the end. It would be so easy for a weaker person to retreat, deny the truth, and become stagnant. Cassandra watches the world change and decides to change with it.

At first, Solas is one of the less remarkable characters in Inquisition’s roster. He’s characterized by his knowledge of Fade-related magic, has some cool hat tricks to show you in his early conversations, and altogether seems a bit smug and judgy. Things start to change, though, as he reveals he is the source of Big Bad Corypheus’ magic. He shows frustration with the ways of the modern world, his personal quests solidify and reinforce his anger at how flippantly people view spirits, and when all is said and done, he leaves the Inquisition without a word. Then it’s revealed why Solas feels like a person out of time: He is the Dread Wolf, an elven trickster god having awoken to find himself written in history as a traitor to his people. Solas reveals in Trespasser that he barely viewed his friends in the Inquisition as people, and was using them to further his plan to tear down the Veil that separates the real world from the spirit one and bring back the elves’ long-lost immortality. That all changed as he grew to care for the friends he made along the way, but his mission can’t bend to newfound sentimentality. Underneath Solas’ pompous exterior is a man ravaged by guilt for what he did several millennia ago. Should he succeed in tearing down the Veil he created, that guilt will be replaced with a new one as he watches the world burn to correct his mistake. We’ll see what happens in The Veilguard, but Inquisition sets him up as the most compelling antagonist the series has ever put forth.

Throughout Dragon Age, the land of the Tevinter Imperium has been almost exclusively framed as a culturally homogenous, villainous place where mages rule without opposition, slavery is commonplace, and unspeakable evils made it the origin point of one of the Blight, one of the most ruinous phenomenon in the universe. Most of our frame of reference is from characters who were suffering at the ground level, at least until Dorian Pavus struts into view in Inquisition. By all accounts, Dorian should be thrilled with his setup in Tevinter. He’s the son of a powerful family, has been given every resource to nurture his magical talents, and is pretty much guaranteed a spot at the top of the country’s politics. But he is also his own man, and does not wish to cave to the life his family envisions for him. That includes standing proud as a gay man unwilling to continue his family’s bloodline, even as he is threatened with a magical take on conversion therapy at the hands of his own father.

Dorian escapes his home in Tevinter and is clearly jaded by the time he meets the Inquisitor. But as he watches the world change before him, how can he view his home country that, despite everything, he still loves? The Dragon Age series has often fallen into cynical cycles of scorching the earth, as if it can’t conceive of a better option. Dorian Pavus has been put through hell and back in Tevinter. He could have easily been a cautionary tale for how his home country is just as terrible as everyone in the series has ever told us. But instead, he’s a shining beacon proclaiming that it doesn’t have to be this way. Whether or not Dorian shows up in The Veilguard, which takes place partially in Tevinter, remains to be seen, but in Inquistion, he is radical hope personified. He is living, breathing proof that history is defined by those who believe that a better world is possible.