...after a year, it's about damn time! Mostly this is just I didn't have a whole lot of time during the school year, and I just didn't put a whole lot of effort into it. And the caveat being I finished the storyline...there's still an absurd amount of content I haven't even touched yet. So I thought I'd leave a few opinions...
As much as I do enjoy the game and as much as I like Arenanet, the story was kind of disappointing and anticlimactic. You'd think a final showdown with a creature called an elder dragon would be exciting, but it was honestly really boring. Cinematically it would totally be interesting to watch, but as far as game play it was really dull. Basically it turned into Deus Ex Machina to defeat Zhaitan. It honestly had a pretty great set up - you've reunited the members of Destiny's Edge, who have all gone into Arah to take on the dragon, but...nothing really happened. Apparently the final mission used to be incredibly difficult. One of the people playing with us told me it took them six hours to finish the first time he played a couple of weeks after launch, but now it's too easy.
Honestly, around level 45-50 I stopped caring a whole lot about the story. The characters weren't really that interesting (there were a couple I wanted to shoot because they were so obnoxious), and a lot of the missions were sort of...side stuff. They didn't really impact the overall course of the game. Except for a few key story missions and the dungeons, most of them could never have happened and the story wouldn't have changed at all. And the dialogue was really lousy. It was kind of after-school special-y a lot of the time, and during the last four or five missions, SOMEONE gets all noble and sacrifices themselves for the mission. The first time it happened (much earlier in the story) it was interesting. When it happens several missions in a row...kinda annoying actually.
I'm kind of disappointed in Arenanet on this point. In the original Guild Wars (and for the most part in Factions/NF/EotN) the story was really tightly put together and interesting, but the only part of GW2's storytelling I felt was on par with GW1 was the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon, which successfully combined fun gameplay with a story that does a really good job of mining the lore of the original game to enrich the story.
Just wanted to put my thoughts down. I definitely enjoyed the game, but I think Arenanet could have done so much better by the storyline for GW2.
