I dunno, even first time through I hated it. It screws up the pacing something awful. I mean, you're in this desperate rush to make it to the top of the mages' tower to stop whatshisface before the Templars exterminate all of the innocent mages within the tower, when all of a sudden you blunder into a room where you get locked into conversation with 'horrible monotone monster', who promptly sends you on an hours long diversion with the bare minimum of dialogue, no plot progression and worst of all, no squadmates.
That tactical RPG based on perfectly balancing your team of four goes out the window, and all of the fights become this immensely irritating trial and error process of working out the specific ability you need out of the selection given to you, that you've never seen before and never get to use again.
It's brown, utterly uninteresting to look at, and the atmosphere and music are just dreary.
The concept of shapeshifting to solve puzzles is a good one, I will grant it that. I just wish they could have inserted it somewhere you didn't feel like the clock was against you back in the real world. In other words, if it was it's own separate quest with it's own goal, and not randomly inserted into another, more pressing quest, I might have tolerated it better.