Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Divine Ascension (DLC)

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a turn-based RPG that drops you into Rivellon, a world where magic is outlawed, gods are dying, and every companion you travel with has their own agenda for stealing the divine throne you are all chasing. You pick a race, a class, and an origin story, or build a custom character from scratch, then get immediately thrown into Fort Joy, a prison island that functions as one of the best tutorial areas in the genre. It teaches you that enemies have elemental surfaces you can chain into combos, that high ground is worth fighting over, and that ignoring resistances will get your party wiped on Classic difficulty before the first act is done. The combat system is where this game earns its reputation. Action points govern everything: movement, skills, consumables, even talking during a fight if a companion has the right ability. You will stack Warfare with Huntsman for devastating backstabs, abuse Necromancer's Bone Cage for free armor, or run a four-person glass-cannon magic party that vaporizes encounters and then immediately dies to a stray arrow. Build variety is real and it holds up well past hour 40, though the late game does compress some of the creativity as you optimize toward boss encounters. The Honour Mode difficulty, which gives you a single save file, is genuinely punishing in the best possible way. The writing is where I will go to bat for this game hardest. Each of the six origin characters, Fane, Sebille, Ifan, Lohse, the Red Prince, Beast, has a fully voiced personal quest that intersects with the main story in ways that keep changing the context of what you thought you understood. Fane's storyline in particular hits differently once you reach Act Three and realize how far back the betrayal actually goes. Companion approval exists but it is not a morality meter; it is more like each character quietly judging whether you are the kind of person they would follow into godhood. Larian respects player intelligence here. Exposition is delivered in dialogue you can actually skip if you already know the lore, and there is enough environmental storytelling in books, item descriptions, and ghostly echoes that second and third playthroughs surface entirely new threads. The weak spots are real and worth naming. Act Two on the island of Reaper's Coast is enormous and occasionally tips from "dense open-world" into "filler-adjacent grind" when you are hunting the last handful of quests before the gate opens. The multiplayer co-op mode, which lets up to four players each control one origin character, is genuinely special and one of the few co-op experiences that does not water down the RPG depth to accommodate group play. But the PvP arena modes feel bolted-on and are mostly ignored by the community. The Switch port runs acceptably and the controller-optimized Definitive Edition interface is solid across platforms, though PC with a mouse remains the cleanest experience for inventory management. If you are weighing this against other tactical RPGs right now, the honest case is this: few games in the genre give you this much systemic depth, this much narrative payoff, and this much reason to replay with a different origin. The critical pileup around DOS2 is not hype decay, it is a game that keeps delivering on reread.

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