Couple months ago I played through PoE1 for the first time, followed by a replay of Deadfire, which I had played a few years ago. Didn't play the DLCs as I don't own them.
Visually beautiful games, and the setting is interesting, but for PoE1 it felt like Obsidian only really had the energy to make three good/interesting companions (Aloth, Edér, and Durance) while making the rest meh or forgettable. Kana Rua, Pallegina, and Sagani were extremely dull characters without anything interesting going on. The Grieving Mother was at least somewhat interesting as a concept, but lacked charisma/personality. Didn't use Hiravias enough to form an opinion. At least the overall writing was generally solid and interesting. I didn't exactly enjoy the combat, so the writing and presentation was basically why I finished the game.

I was surprised at how much worse the companions were in Deadfire than I remembered, though I guess a part of it has to do with knowing how Aloth and Edér used to be and realising that three of the seven potential companions are just companions from the first game. Out of the four original ones, I found only Serafen and Maia Rua to be interesting. I guess the most interesting thing about Kana Rua ended up being his sister.
My main problem with Deadfire ended up being the writing, which was incredibly lackluster in the sense that it could range from pretty good to "American sitcom with a laugh track every 5 seconds" on a whim. The most atrocious one I came across was when Maia wants to talk to you about the first time she killed a man and your dialogue options are:
>I don't care
>Oh, I have to hear this!
Fuck me, this is supposed to be a serious talk, why can I only initiate it by speaking like a teenage girl ready to gossip about boys? Worst part is that this sort of whiplash happened often enough to be noticeable.

Gomen for the blog, wanted to get this out of my system