Dragon's Dogma II

released on Mar 22, 2024
by Capcom

Dragon's Dogma is a single player, narrative driven action-RPG that challenges players to choose their own experience – from the appearance of their Arisen, their vocation, their party, how to approach different situations and more. On your journey, you’ll be joined by Pawns, mysterious otherworldly beings, in an adventure so unique you will feel as if accompanied by other players while on your own adventure. All of these elements are elevated further by the latest in graphics, artificial intelligence (AI) and physics technology to create a truly immersive fantasy world in Dragon's Dogma 2.


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Genres

RPG


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less of a "sequel to dragon's dogma" and more of a "what if dragon's dogma had a budget"

the peaks are absolutely insane but there's still a lot of conflicting subsystems and rpgjank - i was really hoping for they'd add more non-boss monsters (they added uh.. slimes) so you're not just fighting saurians 80% of the time but alas. the new big guys are really fun and the world design is spectacular. i just be running around looking for caves. i be in the caves, mining, digging- you wouldnt get it.

let me be clear, i like the limited fast travel, i like the friction, i like the only-one-save-file-deal-with-it approach. but i also wish i could, like, ask a pawn to throw me over a river or whatever, and like, maybe access more than 4 abilities without having to go to the Menu Stone. or co-op! imagine co-op! goodness! these are the kinds of things i expected to be expanded - they were not. maybe thats on me.

oh it does also run like shit but like, cry about it....

I'm not done the game yet or anything, but I've done the main quest and a bunch of side quests, so I felt like writing up about it.

As much as I decently enjoyed dragons dogma 1 it was definitely an extremely annoying game with jank overload and just the most egregious traveling ever even though I was playing dark arisen I didn't even know the eternal ferrystone was a thing so most of it I was just playing normally. It has fine combat, but you get pretty busted pretty quick, and the game felt like it ended multiple times just to keep going.

This game very much ends a bit abruptly. Despite that, though, I enjoyed it a bit more being a more straightforward boss rather than a script fest. Dragons Dogma 2 has some great gameplay with a great sense of exploration. I know that people will dog on the enemy variety and how often you'll find hobgoblins, harpies, or bandits, yet I find the enemy variety to be quite good since they offer different changes to your playstyle. (I'm especially glad there's no evil eye) I hope this game reaches the group that finds games nowadays to be boring or the people who think devs don't make more bold games anymore.

Overall, I think this game shouldn't exist in a good way. I'm glad we got it even with its performance issues and use of microtransactions (which are extremely tame for microtransactions and the first game already used). I think it's worth playing, and there's a lot of secret substories you probably wouldn't know about and secret bosses you wouldn't find just doing the main story. Like the first game, there's way more to it than just killing the dragon. I recommend it.

I think Dragon's Dogma 2 is a pretty bold game. From what I've heard, the way the game is designed is pretty similar to how the first game functioned but as someone who only dabbled in Dark Arisen, I was taken aback by how uncompromising they are being with their vision. I just wish I liked this game more.

The thing I really enjoyed with this game that I had nothing negative to say about is the combat. I love how strange and dynamic the combat is especially with the larger monsters in the game. While the fodder enemies (goblins, harpies, and wolves) gets a bit obnoxious with how many of them you run into on the road, every time I encountered one of these huge beasts was a joy to play. I also loved that each vocation was perfectly viable in combat and has a good set of abilities to play around with.

The combat gets super exciting and cool when your skill synergized with your pawns...the unfortunately reality for me is that the pawns worked about 10% of the time. Most of the time I played this game, my pawns often fell off cliffs / into deep water to thei death, rarely had meaningful things to say (Mostly yelling about how I pick everything up, pointing out ladders or chests I can't get to) and not provide anything helpful even when the quest is marked with the symbol of that pawn having information. This made it seem like I was constantly fighting the game for those sweet sweet moments where the pawn system works in favor of the game's design to produce the cool moments you see online.

And while I praised the game for being uncompromising in its design, the flaw that I noticed with the pawn system and its AI really exacerbated some of the obtuse and frustrating systems within the game for me. When you have to run back into town on-foot (due to the limited fast travels) because your pawn fell off and died due to no fault of your own, it's really hard to shake the feeling that the game is not exactly being mindful of your time or being able to make meaningful progreess. Some people may see no problems with it and engage with the immersive nature of some of Dragon's Dogma 2's systems, I mostly found it frustrating.

Overall, there's a lot of interesting things I found super interesting about this game. But when the game is so focused around systems that has issues that may cripple some player's experiences, I began to understand why there's such disparate reactions to this game. I may return to this one day but maybe I'll see if there's some patches first.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is a return to the "hardcore/cult classic" dark fantasy role-playing game. The power fantasy combat returns, combined with a thrilling world to explore. The game does not cohesively come together, much like the original. Which is a shame, but I'm already hopeful for a "Dark Arisen" expansion to further explore the combat.

Pros:
- Vast open world, that is rewarding and interesting to explore
- Gameplay and combat are excellent with lots of vocations
- The Pawn system remains one of the most innovative and unique game systems
- Voice acting and dialogue are excellent

Cons:
- Enemies quickly lose any threat to the player. The game stops feeling challenging quickly.
- Lack of monster and enemy variety
- Due to above, exploration loses it's thrill, and you mow through packs of weak enemies.
- Quest design does not complement fast-travel system, unless you read guides and plan ahead.
- Story has weak pacing, was short, and lacking depth.
- No Mystic Knight, Trickster was a complete mistake
- (Disclaimer: I'm no music expert) The OST was high-quality, but felt deprived of anything unique or emotional

Overall:
Dragon's Dogma 2 is a game that is fun to explore, with excellent combat and multiple vocaitons/party synergies to try. The pawn system returns, and the enemies from the original; but the player grows strong too quickly and outlevels the game/enemy design. The games looks really good, with improved UI over the first title. There are perfomance issues in towns, but I never had issues during combat. The story starts strong, but quickly falls off. The true ending was somewhat satsifying. They wanted to focus more on the story, but most of what I found interesting they used from the first game. I found the soundtrack largely forgetable. The original featuring "Into Free" by Bz was going to be hard to beat, but it feels like the ignored the originals electric guitars and unique OST which is a shame.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is a fun dark fantasy adventure. The sense of adventure, and preparation is excellent. The combat and pawn system serve only to highten it. I'm definitely hoping they release expansions that focus on the combat, because that is the true strength of the game.

This is going to be a weird review, simply because I will hardly be explaining elements of Dragon's Dogma II itself (which honestly feels thematically consistent with the game, in terms of the framing of game-as-sequel DD2 finds itself in), and rather talking mostly about myself. Let me preface this by saying I have nearly 500 hours on the Steam release of Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, as well as countless hours on both the original release and the DA release on Xbox 360 before that. I will also say that it is a shame about the performance issues of the game and that the microtransactions are a complete and utter nonissue, and I will not be addressing any of the controversy beyond that. On with the review.

This is among my favorite games I've ever played, and one of the major reasons for that is that it did one thing that I don't think I've ever seen a game really do: It treated itself as a true sequel, and did so with a massive budget. What I mean by that is that the game made zero concessions on itself or gated itself in any way to be friendly to people new to the series, instead honoring the intelligence and time investment of its longtime fans. This game was made to be the ultimate cult game sequel. It is the perfect dream that many people, like myself, thought would never happen. It took all of the weirdness of the systems, all the thematic elements, and all of the ramifications of the lore from the first game and doubled down on them in a way that felt the most intelligent and consistent of any sequel of anything I think I've seen across art and media... ever. And everything that DID have a more dramatic change made was changed in a way that made perfect sense. It's astonishing.

It felt like a game made for ME, specifically, which is something I've never experienced before. If you have a deep love of the first game like I do, then this is... perfect. There was not a single iota of disappointment I held for this game other than the very unfortunate performance issues it has launched with, of course. That has also never happened to me with a sequel or spiritual successor to anything before; There's always some niggling doubt about a system or gameplay change, or a writing or thematic inconsistency, or just SOMETHING that makes a sequel feel slightly uncanny compared to what came before it (a perfect example would be something like Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2. RPG Military Star Trek turns into edgy space military shooter with RPG elements. Don't get me wrong, I love the entire OG Mass Effect trilogy, but it was incredibly tonally and thematically all-over-the-place from game to game).

Everything that did undergo a major change makes PERFECT sense. As an example, the deeper layer of the pawn system in the first game (With all the different inclinations, how your playstyle would/could eventually change the inclinations in real-time, etc.) was... kind of a mess. You were more often fighting AGAINST it rather than letting it play out naturally, and that's if you even knew the system was there AT ALL. It was often more advantageous to alter your own playstyle to keep your pawn from going off the rails than to let your pawn's inclination change. While the revamped Pawn system in DD2 is, essentially, a simplification from DD1, I would personally in no way qualify it as a "dumbing-down"; rather an intelligent streamlining of an unwieldy feature. That's one of the few instances of where things were simplified from the first game, and I think in every single place where something similar was done, it was the correct, consistent choice. Dragon's Dogma was a complex, and at times, obfuscated and confusing game. DD2 is no less complex, but it IS a good bit less obfuscated and confusing.

This game nails EVERYTHING about what a true sequel to Dragon's Dogma should be, and, in doing so, it truly feels like the game was made for ME. And if you at all felt the same way I did about the original DD, then this game was made for YOU. Not the mainstream audience, not Capcom corporate (who still nevertheless did its best to f**k with it), not fans of other open world Action RPGs... YOU.

I played my favorite game (Final Fantasy Tactics) ever for the first time 21 years ago, and I've replayed it annually since. It has had an effect on my life in more ways than I could probably even comprehend, let alone articulate (check out my review on here to get a peek into it). No matter what games I've played since (and some that have certainly made a huge impact on me), no game has ever even made me entertain the IDEA that it could dethrone FFT, even whilst playing the game for the first time or in direct aftermath of completing a life-altering game. It just never happened. Any amazing game that I've played since then, even at their emotional apex of my interactions with it, has never even so much as made me consider that it was in the same stratosphere as Final Fantasy Tactics. FFT is so far ahead of my second favorite game of all time, Persona 4, that it may as well be on its own list entirely. The very moment when I realized I was deeply, madly in love with Persona 4, it was already a given that all it had done, all it could do, is take the spot of my second favorite game of all time. Every game since FFT has only been able to fight for the No. 2 position. There was simply no room at the top. The list of my favorite games may as well just start with P4 and go from there, while FFT sits alone in its own heavenly golden palace, never even interacting with the other games. Orders of magnitude beyond anything else I've experienced. It's on that high of a pedestal for me.

Dragon's Dogma II just stormed the palace.

It'll be a long time before I can untangle all of my thoughts to be able to determine whether there is, in fact, a new ass on the throne. But the fact that I'm even CONSIDERING it has shaken me to my core. Never in 21 years. Not a single shred of doubt. But I do know one thing for certain: In the two 14-hour marathon days I pulled prior to beating the game's true ending today, there was a singular thought that I just couldn't shake from my head: This is the greatest game I've ever played.

minha pawn é a pessoa mais preciosa do mundo e eu daria o mundo pra ela