This is an amazing game but it is a total rip off of the LOTR and the PC version is much better.
1: amazing story, albeit an extreme rip off of the lord of the rings.
2: amazing graphics, you won't find better on the 360.
3: very challenging on nightmare difficulty.
4: Useful companions, all other games have utterly useless coms, DA:O has very useful ones.
5: Balanced class, although on the xbox the mage class suffers a bit due to the lack of a keyboard.
Now the flaws Dragon age has a few of them which can be tedious:
1: computer controlled fighting, normally i wouldn't really care since it is an RPG, but the animations seem a bit outdated.
2: glitches n bugs, i hate these in video games and Dragon Age has way too many of them. (they aren't game ruining though)
3: Xbox version takes a back seat to PC, like many Bioware games, though with this game way more.
That pretty much sums it up. The critics gave it an 8.5, but that's just too low. This is a great game and one of my favorite RPGs.