To be fair, there have certainly been moments when I feared I was succumbing to a form of Stockholm Syndrome with this game  that I had been taken captive and only through some psychological dependency was I convincing myself that I was actually enjoying it. And that would make some sense, because Dragon Age struck me precisely at the emotional core of who I am as a gamer.

Image Dragon Age: Origins: A world of Tolkien-like scope is packed into this game from Electronic Arts. Credit... Electronic Arts

Being raised an only child in the middle of the woods in a house without television before the Internet age, I basically grew up on single-player fantasy role-playing games  Dragon Age’s progenitors like the Bard’s Tale, Might and Magic, Ultima and Wizardry series. Some of my strongest memories of childhood are of meticulously mapping out dungeons from the Bard’s Tale games on graph paper.

Thankfully, you don’t need graph paper to enjoy Dragon Age, but it is unabashedly old-school in its relentless depth and considerable challenge. To succeed in Dragon Age, particularly at its higher difficulty levels, you will need to study its intricate though coherent combat dynamics. You will want to read the game’s Internet message boards to glean the insights of your fellow players. You will need to hone your tactical awareness and thoroughly understand the abilities and limitations of each member of your band of adventurers  each spell, each weapon, each special attack move. If those things don’t sound like fun, Dragon Age is not the game for you.

But a great single-player role-playing game cannot be made from play systems alone. Even more important to a great game of this sort is that it provide players with a world they actually care about saving (in this case defeating the demon menace by rallying mages, elves, dwarves and men to the cause). That means setting, plot and personalities, and it is in these elements that Dragon Age is perhaps the best electronic game yet made.

In particular, not even the Grand Theft Auto games, as fabulous as they are, are populated with such a panoply of fascinating, nuanced, realistic characters. In Dragon Age, the avatar that you create can adventure along with as many as three companions simultaneously out of a total of nine that you can discover. Setting aside your pet war hound, each of your bipedal comrades  the conflicted and vacillating knight, the hilariously rakish bisexual assassin, the court bard turned nun  feels like a real person. They have their own agendas and their own moral compasses. (In Grand Theft Auto everyone is a bad guy.) Some care about doing the right thing. Others care only for themselves. Some will abandon you or even attack you if they disagree with your choices as the story unfolds.

In all, Dragon Age must contain hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, words of dialogue. And there is no way to hear even half of it on a single playthrough because the characters interact with one another in various combinations and there are so many different ways to approach each conversation, not only with your main companions but also with the hundreds of other characters who populate Ferelden.