I was also blown away by DragonsDogma because my expectations were low. And just bought it because it was 15 bucks or so and then played 3 or 4 days in a row because it was a really good game.
But the last time i was completely blown away was Xenoblade. I have never touched a Monolith Soft game before and I was actually disappointed by the graphics (the trailers mostly showed the strange character design/faces etc and not much of the vistas) but when I played it I was like "OMG I feel like a little chiild again best RPG I played after for a least 12 or so years"