Let's say there is a slider that has Cartoony on the far left and Photo-Realistic on the far right.
I think the content of the Dragon Age franchise (realistic politics and social issues in a world that is home to various sentient anthropomorphic races and where magic exists) requires that the visuals be farther to the right side of that slider than the left. The content should dictate the visual style. While full photorealism would be a mistake, the visuals in DA2 just do not jive with the content for me. The colors and contrasts are too bright and stark respectively; in other words, the style is too much to the left, too much to the "cartoony" side.