Catching Fenris

An update to my last post (minor spoilers at that link): thanks to some excellent advice and encouragement from the folks on Tumblr, I went back to an older DA2 save (a few hours earlier in Act Two), ran a couple of quests differently to up the Rivalry, and got the outcome I wanted. Fenris romance, activate!

( Delicious spoilers are delicious. )

It was more than worth losing about five hours of gameplay to make this work.

Some thoughts on romancing Fenris from a gameplay perspective, because the Dragon Age wiki is misleading, and I want to share both my experience and the advice I got on Tumblr. ( Minor spoilers, mostly gameplay rather than story related. )

My other thought is that I suspect it is very difficult to Friendmance Fenris while playing a mage, especially an aggressive one who isn't an all-out Templar sympathizer. I had been hoping for a friendly romance, so I left him behind on all the missions where I expected to be helping mages, but that made it hard to get enough interaction with him to move the Friendship/Rivalry needle at all. If I had just embraced the Rivalmance from the start, this would have all gone much more smoothly.

As for my thoughts on the romance itself... I think I'm going to hold that until Act Three. I've heard bits and pieces about how it goes, but I'm really looking forward to experiencing the rest of the whole.