While I absolutely understand everyone's complaints about it compared to the first one, I fucking love Dragon Age 2. It's opening sequence didn't drag out as much as DAO. All of the characters, save for the whichever Hawke twin you didn't turn into a Grey Warden, had their own subclass that made each character's gameplay stand out. All of the characters save for Anders' moping about before the third act were good. The side quests were on par or better with the ones from first game (looking at the murder mystery in particular). Plus, the way they set up all of these events within one city shows off how one place can shape the events of the world and I wanted more of it, whether it be in Kirkwall or somewhere else in the world.
Inversely, while people praised it, I did not like Dragon Age Inquisition. The gameplay felt like it was an abandoned MMO made into a single player game. "Loved" how they made the combat commands derp as fuck to where if you character was out of range, it just won't do anything, despite in both DAO and DA2 the character will move to get in fucking range of the command. The potion/poison/trap limit was dumb as hell and made forced you to stay close to outposts instead of adventuring in an action adventure RPG. The side characters outside of the inquisitor came across as having special builds through their actions in cutscenes, but lol nope, they're back to the same subclasses as you like in the first game (at least in that game, they fucking taught your character the subclass). Why the fuck did they get rid of mage healing and replace it with a magic shield that the mage spends half the time in combat recasting the shield spell? Why does Sera have a dwarf head on an elf body? Why does my party flip flop from being badass on the battlefield to getting smacked around throughout the gameplay despite not changing my playstyle? I got so fed up with the game that I straight up stopped playing it and still haven't beaten it despite getting past the halfway point in the game.
