The type of game that when you recommend it, you have to clarify they need to play a few hours before they'll understand.
To me, many JRPGs have this problem. Xenoblade, Final Fantasy (14 especially), Tales, Kiseki, etc all take forever to get interesting.
Both Dishonored games. Not really from a gameplay perspective, but narratively - and it's actually somewhat of an opposite problem to the JRPG one, where the games are in so much of a rush to get to the "interesting" parts (the eponymous dishonoring), that they speedrun the part where you're actually introduced to the characters you're supposed to care about.
If the first game actually had been about the "Revenge solves everything" tagline that some guy in Bethesda Marketing came up with, then it'd be fine - you quickly establish that the guy who looks like this is evil, and move on to the part where you brutally carve a path through his various associates and allies until you get to him. But that's not what the story actually is (although honestly, it may have been better in that format, but maybe that's just the bad execution of the real thing coloring my opinions).
And it's really disappointing that the second game does the same thing - I would have actually been really into the idea of getting to spend more time with Emily as an actual empress (and you could still fit in gameplay bits in this - the tutorial establishes that Emily and Corvo would go to the city to train, you could have that be in the main story rather than something separately accessed from the menu, and maybe have some extra bits of that), and getting some idea for how things are going politically, maybe even putting some effort into justifying her neglectful rule (from a character motivation perspective at least).
But no - we have to get dishonored in like 5 minutes, and you're now supposed to care that this character who you've known for less than a minute and has like 2 lines is dead.
Yeah it would have been cool if 2 started off with something similar to when you land in that whaling town where there's a bunch of people you can talk to but the game kind of prefers a "fill in the details as you progress" kind of story rather than up front exposition. I think you're supposed to basically get a tour of the empire that you've neglected in an undercover boss fashion as it goes along. Because an Empress can't exactly get a fair reading of the situation when not disguised. Woulda been funny if everyone was extremely nice to Emily and supportive and then you land in the whaling area and everyone's talking smack about the Empress. Can't really remember how much people actually talk about the government though.