also i should say that unlike john i'm actually enjoying a lot of the game, but i think it pales greatly in comparison to its predecessor.
look at the deep roads in this game. the first game they were a bit of a grind but the sense of scale and differentiation between thaigs made the sequence somewhat worthwhile, as did the fairly spectacular final dungeon. but in this game the deep roads are by comparison pretty unimpressive – it lacks the sense of enormous scale that made crossing the bridge to the dead trenches so awesome.
or look at how, as john points out, the tactics have become seriously neutered. the first game basically put you right in the thick of any given battle and told you "deal with this, right now." and you had to pause and get your bearings and strategize. that meant carefully choosing your party and coming up with a set of tactics that worked for you and worrying yourself about positioning and assessing threat priorities and, basically, actually thinking about stuff. in DAII you mostly just pretend you're in streets of rage for five minutes and occasionally mash the "magics!" button (or the backstab button or whatever). i find myself marking baddies for death a lot, personally, but that doesn't mean the combat's deliberate, it means mostly that i want it to be over faster since i know i'm just going to be hammering the A button for four minutes otherwise. i like that they made the combat look a lot more dynamic and natural, but i don't think they had to completely neuter everything that made the first game's combat interesting to do so.
i guess if you find the first game's combat boring, okay, whatever. but it was a thing you had to learn and get used to, and that in itself was rewarding. how do you master combat in this game? become an expert at timing your "magics!" button presses?
i mean – i guess the whole thing about this game is that it doesn't ask you to think nearly as much. it doesn't ask you to consider routes through any area since all the areas are literally just the same thing over and over again and run you down a totally linear pathway anyhow. it doesn't ask you to consider anything about your characters' stats, strengths, and weaknesses, just whether or not you can equip certain gear (and doesn't ask you to consider party gear, either, since the few things you can equip them with outside of weaponry make such a piddling difference). it doesn't ask you to consider how you approach battles since all battles are pretty much the same in terms of strategy.
and the result is that it plays closer to jade empire, which is mystifying because that game had a lukewarm reception at best and the ideas that they've ported to DAII (specifically the way combat works) are like the ideas that generally panned out the worst in that game. i can't figure out why they've made a european-setting jade empire rather than a sequel to dragon age, mostly. i don't think it's a bad game, necessarily (since i'm playing it, and having fun, and looking forward to playing it more), and i don't think i dislike it, but i am disappointed, and i think it's ridiculous to suggest that finding aspects of a game disappointing is instantly equatable to calling it a shitstain.