Everyone has reviewed this game to hell and back, so i'll be brief.

•Dispensing with the boring round based combat was the best decision they'd ever made

•Tactics makes a lot of the "unplayable builds" very fun and viable

•The fact that the environments are recycled didnt really bother me because its a city. I suppose i wasn't really surprised that a lot of parts of a city look the same.

•There's some story stuff that bothers me, but its bioware and they cant be trusted to write a good story (see: dragon age origins, mass effect, KOTOR), but the characterization, interactions between hawke and her army of friend/enemies are really worthwhile

•Except for you, Anders, i never really liked him even though i sort of agreed with what he was doing (too complicated to explain)

•Isabella is cool as hell

•The qunari are a genuinely fascinating people and i enjoy every aspect of their culture being fleshed out.

In short, Dragon Age 2 was much more fun to me personally because i enjoyed the smoother flowing combat and what i felt to be more interesting characterization. Theres a few dumb parts but as i said bioware cant be trusted so if you just sit back and stop taking yourself so seriously you can get a huge amount of enjoyment from this game.

I loved loved loved this game. The story was incredible, and especially the end was so real and nuanced that I found myself thinking back to it for weeks after finishing the game. The characters were all well rounded so you actually felt like you cared about solving their issues, and that really got me sucked into the world of the game. Also while DAO was a bit slow to get into, with a larger than life type story, this one cuts right to the chase and feels personal, making the world and it's politics and conflicts much easier to grasp, and have an opinion on. Also while I loved DAO, I did find it a bit long. This one is the perfect length, where I can see myself playing it over and over again, and not feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff there is to do.

But.

The environments are recycled. Over and over and over again. All the caves you go into, all the dungeons, buildings, anything that isn't a specific place like somebody's home or an important building in the city, are the same few things. Seriously? That is just such a lazy design choice, and it really really just broke my immersion and pissed me off. After DAO where all environments were unique, this was just a huge bummer. Especially since the world in this game is so much smaller than in Origins, you'd think that the designers would show at least a bit of effort with this one. However, this is the only bigger problem I had with the whole game, and I still love it to death. I'm just disappointed and frustrated that the environmental design was this lacking.

God, I love this game. I LOVE THIS GAME.

Okay, so the 5 star rating is biased of me. It does have flaws, which everyone else has already covered extensively - the repeating environments and the waves of enemies jumping out of the sky are the two that stuck out to me. We're not going to talk about how terrible everyone's hands look.

But that can't even nudge this out of its place as a firm favourite game of all time. I love the characters. I love the fact that rather than a generic Chosen One world-saving plot, it's centered around this small-scale storyline of one scrappy refugee and their friend group in one shitty little city. I love that the companions feel like an actual tight-knit group rather than co-workers forced together - they feel like they're there because they care about Hawke, even when it's inconvenient for them, not because they have some goal that aligns with yours and so they need to be.

I love the soundtrack, I love the combat (and if you know me you'll know how rare it is for me to say that about games), I love the atmosphere. I love the political machinations of it all, the way your companions have their own stories and motivations that may conflict with and throw off yours, the fact that the game spans ten years so you watch things change and improve and deteriorate and fall apart and be put back together again over time.

I love Hawke! I love that the game actually works the personality-type you lean towards more often into their characterisation, so that the deeper into the game you get, the more your typical approach to situations - diplomacy, humour, aggression - will show in their idle lines and what they do even without your input.

I love the friendship-rivalry system; it's so incredibly interesting, it adds replay value, and it shows you such different sides of each character, both in terms of a platonic connection with them and a romantic relationship.

I love that the story is framed through a narrative of Varric telling the story to Cassandra in the present-day, with her pulling him back at the beginning and end of arcs (and sometimes in the middle of them) to call him out on lies or evasions or comment on your actions, and how utterly Varric slots into the trope of unreliable narrator - not just because he wants to, or because it services the story, but because he's doing all he can to protect the friend he loves.

I love the quests, especially the companion quests. I even happily do the side quests every replay! And that's saying something, because I can't even count how many times I've replayed Dragon Age 2.

I've played it over and over, and I will continue to play it over and over. This game has such a special place in my heart. I don't care about the fact that every cave looks like different angles of the same location - DA2 is almost my perfect experience.

76/100

Pros:

• Liked story
• Setting was interesting, as it all takes place in pretty much a single city.
• Some good character designs.
• Music is beautiful.
• Graphics improvement since Origins.
• Carried over my Origins save file well and it was cool seeing people talk about the choices I made last game.

Cons:

• Many interesting side quests, but they reuse the same maps for all of them. The inside of all the caves are the same layout. Same with all the mansions.
• The new art style is more high-def, but a bit funny looking.
• Companions from previous games have almost different personalities/appearances. The butchered Anders, in my opinion.
• I also found it annoying how they had some quests just to bring back a companion from the previous game for one fight to make references and then the character leaves again.
• They changed the designs of Qunari and Elves - Now all the elves look like goldfish and the Qunari look like tieflings? I can see why they changed the Qunari design, perhaps due to racist undertones in the original? Because of the huge design change, they couldn't bring back Sten from Origins, which made me sad.
• I played with a mod which enabled me to romance multiple people in one playthrough - it seems Isabel is the only woman you can romance if you're playing as a woman, which kinda sucks. They let you flirt with all companions, but it didn't do anything on the female characters.

All in all, it's obvious this game was made as a quick sequel. It could've been amazing with a few more years. I'll be playing the DLC next. To be honest, I'd rather skip to Inquisition just because this art style is killing me.

As we approach the ten year anniversary of this game's release, Dragon Age II remains one of my favourite ARPGs. The game remains one of the few modern triple AAA experiences I can point to where the development team prioritized depth over breadth. You are not tasked with traipsing across the continent of Thedas on a race against time quest to save the world, because, alas 'you are the chosen one'. Rather, you are largely sequestered to a single city, Kirkwall, and it's surrounding environs.

I understand this choice was largely made for the team - by some estimates the team at Bioware had nine months to create this almost forty hour game. I can only imagine the crunch the team went through to ship this game, but a silver lining for me as a player was to see such an amazing outcome from them having to work in strict parameters/timeline. In my own experience, sometimes limited choice can allow for great creativity.

I don't mean to harp on this point but I really wish more teams were able to make short focused games in well established worlds like that of the Dragon Age games that tell a story over a long period, rather than a large map.

This game was from when BioWare were arguably firing on all cylinders - ME 2 had come out to widespread praise the year before, ME3 was just over a year away. DA II feels very similar to in ME2 in some ways, in how that game was a refinement of its first. The combat system was streamlined and the interfaces 'de-clunkified'.

As for low points, this has been widely covered elsewhere and I can largely overlook it because I know the constraints put on the team, but many of the assets in this game are re-used and overused. Take the maps for the 'caves outside of Kirkwall' for example: you often delve into caves on the Wounded Coast, outside Kirkwall to hunt down characters or solve a quest, however the reuse of those assets makes it feel like everyone is hiding out in the same cave, or worst yet you're going to a soundstage and the immersion is broken entirely.

This game should be a joy to any fans of BioWare games from this era and any RPG fans of good characters.

This game failed to live up to its hype. So let go of all that when you load this game up, and let it be what it is. I loved it for the characters and the more intimate moments shared between them. The combat was enjoyable without being overly number-crunchy, at least at the normal difficulty. I enjoyed the experience, but not so much that I didn't cheat a little to smooth out some of the rougher edges, or game the systems when I saw the opportunity. But even in cheating I still got exactly what I wanted. A fun and snappy D&D flavored distraction. A little bit of feeling, a little bit of strategy, a passable story, and a lot of pointless item hoarding. Just let it be that, and you will probably be fine.

The weakest part of this game for me though was the Mark of the Assassin DLC. I didn't even know that the character of Tallis was so derided when I first started the DLC, but I can certainly see why. Another person somewhere online said it best: "She is mysterious to the point of being irrelevant." In a game that otherwise seems to take its writing and lore seriously, with plenty of characters that are wonderfully flawed, Tallis and her mysterious perfection feels out of place. And with the game developers struggling to make an elf look like Felicia Day, she looks and feels like she is from another world entirely.

But hey, Felicia Day fantasy cleavage I guess?