Re. 'charming' - my issue with that is that it is meant to be funny, satirical sometimes, and lackadaiscal, and it is, but it is most of the time neither funny nor with personality. It is generically lackadaiscal. For instance, the setting isn't that wacky; sometimes it has its moments like the snowmen jailors or the rats schtick, but often enough it ends up being a very watered down 'just one turn off the beaten path' and not very imaginative.
Take the early example of the orc who drank a love potion. That's a good starting point for a potentially satirical, hilarious, black humour, or otherwise memorable encounter. Instead it plays out in the most boring way imaginable - the dialogue is just "Oh I just love her so much!" "No, you fool, she is dangerous!' It would be like HK-47 speaking standard English and making earnest arguments about why humans should die, which makes the whole character embarrassingly unfunny - or if instead of Morte having an entire backstory re. pillar of skulls, he was just a happy skull who died one day and was enchanted, and spoke like your next door neighbour instead of a wiseass with an accent. 'Creative' or 'original' is not the yardstick here, I don' twant something with literary vlaue or anything (and HK-47 is nothing if not cliche). But if they want to have a funny they should at least go alll out and execute it, as they did somewhat with Jake's dog.
Again, there are moments where it does have some charm, but they tend to be the small short side encounters, e.g. the goblin totem village in Silverglen. All the prime time characters tend to be terribly written in some kind of Automatised Disney Dialogue Generator: Bellegar "I am so awesome kiling things", only slightly redeemed by the clone harem; Arhu "Lo, the world is in danger, my good friends, and I shall talketh to thee all the time in this B-grade epic voice!", Tapestry of Time "I am so mysterious in fact I am so mysterious that I just don't make a whole lot of sense and you're not even interested", Icara the "Oh I am just such a nice lady and that's about it really would you like a cupcake"... and worst of all that fucking imp who talks for pages and pages and nothing he says makes sense or is funny or is 'charming'. You don't call 'charming' a character that spouts lines that might as well have come from a random word generator.
I love the game, I liked DD too, but it's for the gameplay. In fact, what charm D:OS does have comes a lot from gameplay-oriented moments, like the memory of lining up oil barrels just right to take out the Lighthouse guard - combined with a few decent moments of writing.
I wanted to kill that ridiculous rhyming court minstrel first though, I wont lie.
