I've been a big fan of this genre since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and BG3 executes the hallmarks of the genre (memorable companions, good dialogue, and interesting story choices) excellently.

The game is not without its faults. My biggest gripe is that it is very easy to sequence break quests and the game doesn't always provide good context for those breaks, which feels antithetical to the way the game encourages you to explore everything at your own direction.

That said, the game is so sprawling that it's difficult to hold this fault against the game too hard. It's still an incredible experience that will hopefully induct a new audience into the genre.

NNKII should be catnip to me. It's a game that takes place across three modes [ARPG, RTS, Kingdom management] to tell a story about a young ruler attempting to define their political goals and establish a kingdom. This type of game design is so rare that it was enough to make play through the whole thing even as my interest waned towards the latter third. While no mode of the gameplay is particularly strong, each one interacts well and adds to the thematic goals of the story.

The story itself is very simple and doesn't have any of the political complexities I would want with this type of story, but it's positioned as a kid's tale and fulfills that goal.

Also, you get to play as an issekai'd president who keep's their modern 9mm, which is extremely funny.