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Dragon Age gets a feature-length movie, BioWare debuts a trailer

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Dubbed Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker, the upcoming Blu-ray and DVD release tells the story of Cassandra, a young warrior who is thrust into a conflict that turns out to be far more complex and far-reaching than it initially seems.

Here, have a look at the flick’s official plot synopsis:

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In a land where battles are fought with swords and magic, a young heroine rises to glory as Templars, mages, and dragons clash. Cassandra, a brash and beautiful warrior, must stop a conspiracy that threatens the realm’s most powerful religious order. Accused of treasonous crimes and hunted by friend and foe, Cassandra must clear her name and overcome her rage in order to save the day and take her place in legend.

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Seems like pretty typical Dragon Age-type story stuff, no? Throw in a same-sex romance subplot and that could pretty easily double as canon straight from one of the video games.

While the film won’t hit shelves until May 29, BioWare and Funimation dropped a trailer for the thing last night that does a pretty solid job of reiterating the above plot details, as well as offering a look at how well-animated the film is. Funimation has made its fortune as one of the premier names in anime (at least here in The States), and while Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker doesn’t appear to be anything utterly stunning purely based on its aesthetics, the look of the film is totally serviceable, given its apparent blend of BioWare canon and anime-style art design.

Actually, if anything, it seems that this sort of stylized artwork should be perfectly suited to a video game adaptation. The closest parallel we can draw based on this trailer would be to the cinematic cutscenes in the PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, only with a bit less unnecessary pretension, and a few more mainstream anime character tropes. As for whether or not that look will appeal to Dragon Age’s built-in fanbase — a group who stereotypically prefers the series to Japanese-style roleplaying epics specifically because it eschews the histrionics inherent to fantasy spawned in the Land of the Rising Sun — remains to be seen, but assuming the story is up to snuff and the movie doesn’t rely solely on massive amounts of pandering fan service to attract viewers, we could imagine this whole thing working out quite nicely.

Then again, the Dragon Age fanbase is notoriously finicky when it comes to, well, anything really, so it’s entirely possible that the Internet masses might rebel against this adaptation purely because it doesn’t contain enough Mabari warhounds. BioWare devotees are weird like that.

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Earnest Cavalli
Earnest Cavalli
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Earnest Cavalli has been writing about games, tech and digital culture since 2005 for outlets including Wired, Joystiq…
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