Divinity II: Developer's Cut From Dragon Slayer to Dragon

The story kicks off with you joining the Dragon Slayers, and it does not go as planned. Soon you are a Dragon Knight instead, able to shift between human and dragon at will. On the ground you swing, dodge and cast in third person; in the air you fly and rain fire on everything below. The two forms feed each other: you pick which one a fight calls for, and the best moments come from chaining them. Leap off a cliff, turn mid-air, and come back down as something with wings. It is the reason to play this game, and nothing else plays quite like it.

This is Larian before Divinity: Original Sin, and the wit is already in full voice. Quests that start as banal errands have a habit of turning into investigations, cons or outright farce, and the dialogue is written by people clearly enjoying themselves. You get real room to decide how things go: a wide range of moral choices shapes how objectives play out, and the storyline unfolds differently depending on what you do and which skills you bring. One trick helps everywhere: you can read minds. It digs up hidden motives, solves quests and even unlocks new ones, so eavesdropping on thoughts becomes a habit fast.

Your base of operations is the Battle Tower, a colossal stone claw looming over Sentinel Island, bound to you through a relic called the Dragon Stone. From there you head out into an open world built for a long haul: the ultimate edition packs in over 100 hours of gameplay. Along the way you can conjure spirits to build your own fighting creature from body parts collected in battle, and its power is literally the sum of its parts. The resulting abomination fights at your side once summoned. It is exactly as dignified as it sounds, which is the point.