My relationship with Divinity: Original Sin II started a tad rocky. My introduction to Larian (and to turn-based games) was with Baldur's Gate 3, which I love to bits. Still on Act 1, I nearly gave up on Divinity.

Part of the reason was the characters. While I was intrigued by Sebille and Lohse, I couldn't say any of them had fascinated me as much as nearly the entire cast of BG3. But the biggest reason was that I didn't "get" the game. The mechanics are significantly different and more complex than BG3, and I found myself losing a lot of battles, even to enemies that looked simple and weak. But when I finally understood how the game works, I was able to play it and properly enjoy it!

The characters grew on me, especially my corpse-eating sweetheart, Sebille, and the narrative with its twists and turns kept me engaged even as the game seems a lot longer and denser than BG3. The technology gap - and the more limited resources, no doubt - is extremely clear here. I mean, just compared the sex scenes... 😅

In the end, Divinity proved to be another of Larian's fantastic works, even if I don't see myself creating 10+ characters as I did with BG3. (I am, however, currently playing a Tactician run with Sebille as my MC! I'll probably stop at two runs, though.)

I have never played the first Dragon's Dogma, though I have a friend that absolutely adores that game. When the second game was announced, and I saw the Vocations, the world, the customisation, I got really hyped. It's safe to say that I expected more.

To start off on a positive note, the combat is quite fun. Not all Vocations worked for me - I never switched back to a previous class so fast as after beating my first enemy encounter as a Trickster -, but they offer a fair variety for different types of players. For the first half of the game, killing goblins and saurians is exciting! Killing your first ogre or chimera, then, feels amazing! But the law of diminishing returns is strong here. Enemy variety is a joke, and later on, when we can kill even the bigger monsters with barely an effort, it becomes just boring.

The same applies to exploration. While the world is gorgeous, it loses some of its charm when I realised how same-y many places are. It's still interesting to explore new locations, but the game would've benefitted from a few more surprises.

My biggest disappointment, however, lies with the story. Dragon's Dogma has an intriguing concept at its foundation, but the plot and the characters are extremely dull. The most interesting character, Wilhelmina, is mostly use as a convenience for the player, and then discarded, but at least she felt like she had her own purpose, her own goals, and actively worked towards achieving them.

Perhaps playing Baldur's Gate 3 before this has elevated too much what I expected from games of the genre, but when I saw the beauty and the details of the character customisation, I thought our character would actually matter. It annoys me to no end how we can't have a single conversation in this game. All the "talking" options we have are reduced to accepting or declining quests, which I don't think is even a choice in most cases, seeing how linear the plot is - and then for the side quests, it's just an option between "do you want more XP and potentially new items or not?"

And here's something that nearly made me give up on the game: it didn't have the decency to let me know I was getting into the point of no return, locking me into the endgame before I was ready. I missed a whole region, two Vocations, and who knows how many hours of gameplay (because again, despite its many flaws, DD2 has a fun factor, and I wanted to enjoy it as much I could before the end), something that a simple message would've avoided.

I played through the boring endgame section, unlocked the two last Vocations, and started the NG+ to try them out, which is why I've been waiting to write this review. But I have only got to Melve (basically the beginning of the game) and am already bored. As much as I'm liking Magik Archer, the thought of doing quests again fill me with dread. Because really, I don't like 99% of the main and secondary quests in this game. The narrative department really needs to up their game.