I played a bunch this weekend and I'm towards the back half, having a completed a few companion quest lines.
It's still pretty much what I expected in terms of tone and story in that none of it is particularly good or bad. I had earlier compared it to Guardians of the Galaxy but really it's this year's Final Fantasy 16- starts off strong, is fun to play, but overstays its welcome as the story doesn't do anything interesting with its premise and the mechanics aren't interesting enough to avoid it feeling tedious after a while (I have already dropped the difficulty level- no because I couldn't win fights, but I just got tired of how long they dragged on. I now switch to easiest during side questing and switch back to one of the normal ones for main missions).
I did get up to the stuff with "pronouns" (lol I love that this what people now talk about it, a grammatical term, we are so dumb), and it's all confined to one companion character. And yes it is handled clumsily, stupidly, and my eyes were rolling extremely hard. But no more than any other sub quest line.
While the characters are talking about which pronouns to use and terms like "non-binary," it does feel incredibly odd to see fantasy RPG characters with horns and magic talk like they're on Hulu dramedy. But that is also consistent with the rest of the game. For me, the silliest moment of "fantasy people talking like they're Manhattan millenials" is when the Spanish character is talking about cooking paella. I mean, he's not Spanish, but come on. I think it's more silly and kinda funny that paella exists in Thedas than the term non-binary because the first is a specific dish while the latter is a modern term for a concept that is actually cross-cultural and ancient.
The good side of the story is anything to do with Solas. Yes they confined him (literally) to be more like a Hannibal Lecter role but I really enjoy the side quests that dig into his past.
I also really like Emmerich, his skeleton buddy, and I'm a sucker for the idea of a gentlemanly kind necromancer.
But my romance choice has been Neve- I wasn't gonna do it, it's too obvious, but I can't help it. Tall mystery investigator with a big nose? I mean that is my kinda woman.
Back to the gameplay- it is pretty mixed. The core controls are smooth so putting it on easy to stomp through hordes of enemies can be a good de-stresses and spending a few hours the other day after a pretty brutal morning/afternoon of personal crap was nice. Another highlight was a big important boss fight where I had the default difficulty setting and it was multiple waves of increasing difficulty and I scraped by, which felt good and rewarding.
But then there are these dragon fights which are supposed to be the hardest challenges and they can f*** off because it's that thing I hate- flying around, I can't see where anything is, there's too much crap, and it's all flashing lights and a huge health sponge. *yawn* It's not interesting challenge it's just... volume.
I can't imagine after this game being interested in another "real time + party" combat system, I find the whole thing contradicting itself. It's supposed to be strategic by letting you give commands to other characters which also pauses the action while you scroll through your wheel, but it's also real-time so it feels like neither? I dunno... I had the same issue with the FF7 remakes. Kind of a classic example of maybe it's better to just pick one thing. That's why I did appreciate FF16 actually just committing to straight-up action, even though I had problems with how it handled balance.