I played Dragon's Dogma II without having experienced the first one.

Like most open world games, I ended up spending a lot more than the estimated time to finish it, in order to experience as much of the game as I could (I saw all endings and decided to finish at lv.76). I had fun, but in my opinion the game was over-hyped.

What I liked
- Visuals. There wasn't a lot of variation in terms of biomes, but the scenery was gorgeous.
- Character creator. You could achieve impressive results. As always, more hairstyles and hair colours would have been welcome.
- Most vocations felt really different from each other. I started as an Archer but tried several others till I settled on the Magick Archer. There was another side to this I'll touch later.
- The sense of exploration, at least the first few dozens of hours, was great. At the beginning it would really surprise me with some arbitrary encounters unfolding in unexpected ways. I got vibes of Skyrim. Eventually it became repetitive, but again, this could be on me for overstaying my welcome.
- Boss fights were epic.
- Pawns as companions were an interesting mechanic.

Specially at the beginning-middle of the game you could easily write a cool story based on what happened on a random game session. This is probably the highlight of the game.

What I didn't like
- Story. I guess they didn't really worry too much about it to focus more on gameplay, but it was so inconsistent. It opened threads it never bothered to close. There was also a moment that made me rage as I was getting close to the end that caught me completely unaware and added some time pressure that eventually devolved into nothing.
- Characters lacked personality for the most part. In the case of pawns it is justified, but I didn't really care for most NPCs.
- Quests weren't particularly interesting. Friendship quests in particular were repetitive escort missions and they didn't even bother to randomize the destinations. There were also some completion bugs. Nothing serious, but I reached the end with a dead quest that should have failed.
- Lack of variety in enemies or bosses.
- The Dragonsplague was an interesting concept in theory, but the implementation left to be desired. I'd spent more than 50 hours till it first appeared, and then it was a pain in the a##e for a while to completely get rid of it. I felt no sense of threat and it didn't really add any compelling challenge; it just turned pawn management into a chore.
- Save system. I can see the point about feeling a deeper connection with your Arisen, so there's only a single profile, but some of the decisions regarding how saving works are odd, to put it mildly. At least they added the option to reset the game after a patch.
- I tried all vocations except for warrior/fighter and trickster. Even if I liked that they felt different, part of those differences involved an unbalance in terms of efficiency. Archer was ok but it lacked damage and both mage vocations were kind of frustrating (except for the levitate ability). Then I swapped to the thief and I could just rip enemies apart by smashing a button. With the magick archer I found my sweet spot, but it also felt significantly stronger than the mages.
- All flavours of lizard mobs and the stupid Dullahans 🔥😡🔥
- Portcrystal scarcity. The whole microtransaction controversy has muddied the developers' statement about being intentional, but even assuming good will on their side, I don't think this worked well, and I'm saying this as someone who preferred going to places by walking 80% of the time.