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.
Yeah dragons dogma felt like a prototype for a real game. I have trouble getting into it for a lot of reasons, though from what I've seen the late game seems to be way more dungeon crawly and atmospheric than the walking across the open-world forever.