I really think the game is good, I need to make this clear. But it does have some flaws, and unfortunately, these flaws are very critical in my opinion. I'll divide my review in pros and cons.

Pros:
-> Graphics: The game is visually stunning, you really want to explore the world and see all that it has to offer. The effects are amazing, very well done, and to see a sorcerer cast a tornado is awesome.
-> Gameplay: The gameplay is engaging and the combat is very, very fluid. It's a mix of Hack'n'Slash, Shadow of the Colossus and Skyrim (in the sense of exploration and random encounters on the roads). Sometimes the camera is a little clunky, but it doesn't bother at all.
-> Systems: the game does its systems amazingly well. The pawn system makes you think you're playing a coop game sometimes, and you never really feel alone while running with your mates around the world. The necessity of camping it's another great feature for me, because you really feel that you're living an adventure in many moments, just because of a little feature like that.

Cons:
->Story: The story is a mess. The writting it's not good at all, it's basic and have a lot of cliches that are used poorly here. It's like Game of Thrones rewritten by someone that just saw a recap of all seasons and doesn't get the dialogues and context. If you didn't do the "secret true ending", you're getting an ending that is LAME, and it feels like crap to end the game like that, until you find that is more. Then the story gets good and, moments later, it's finished again quickly. The story is SHORT and rushed, you really just go through the two capitals, the first one having plenty of quests, the elven capital being completely ignored and having a couple missions in Bakbattahl. It's very poorly organized and it ends with no building for the climax, you just realize you're in the final quest when you're doing it.
-> Performance: Performance sucks. The game it's not "heavy" like Alan Wake 2, it's just poorly optimized. The graphics and effects doesn't justify why the current gen consoles and modest PC's can't run it at 60FPS, it's just an engine problem, because they used an engine made to be used in linear small/medium sized games, and then had the decision to throw it in an enormous open-world game. It didn't worked well.
-> Repetitiveness: unfortunatly, as much as I loved exploring the game, in the end of my 50h I could'nt stand anymore facing the same enemies, in the same spots, over and over again. They really should've used some randomness here, and more enemy variety. I wasn't bothered by through most part of my gameplay, but as you progress, it becomes really boring in this sense.

Conclusion: it's a very good game, I really think that, and I want to play it again when some DLC drops or a major performance patch. But the flaws are big, and you can't ignore that. I would recommend the game anytime for people that likes open-world RPG's with a lot of immersion, but I wouldn't recommend for people that don't have time or pacience to run a lot and explore a lot, by foot, with limited fast travel. One of my favorite games is Death Stranding, so walking was not a problem for me, but If you really like fast travels, that's a no-no to you for this game.

The game is great overall, but it has the potential to be even better. First, let me address the negative aspects I encountered. Every time I stepped outside the city, I had to face a lot of monsters. It felt like I had to attack 50 to 100 monsters from city to city, which made it difficult to enjoy the beauty of the world. Additionally, the frame rate issues made the game hard to play and caused frequent crashes. However, the inclusion of pawns is one of the best ideas in any game, and the gameplay is good with a variety of classes to play. I would rate the game 86/100.

Dragon's Dogma II asks, "What if Dragon's Dogma was prettier, had a slightly different (but not much different) story and came out today instead of a decade ago?" and the answer is that I would put 118 hours into it and love every minute.

It's everything good about Dragon's Dogma, from the combat to the innovative pawn system and all the little emergent gameplay moments, but bigger and better. Even the lows are higher this time, with the story and quests at least a little more interesting than last time. Although not by much—this is still Dragon's Dogma, after all, and the world is still very much one of generic fantasy role playing.

But that's sort of the magic of Dragon's Dogma. The contrast of this generic fantasy world full of basic D&D monster manual creatures that is then enlivened by this highly dynamic set of gameplay systems. The fact that a griffin can crash down and interrupt your party at any given time, or that your pawn can pick up an enemy and toss it at another or even at YOU, is made all the better by the fact that it's contrasted against this generic setting.

The magic of Dragon's Dogma is that contrast. That it's the best, most fun action RPG you'll play this year. That you can grab onto the side of a griffin and stab it as it rises into the air, carrying you halfway across the map before it dies and crashes you to the ground. And that all this happens in a very self-serious, stone faced fantasy land.

It's wild and crazy gameplay mechanics set against basic D&D trappings. D&D filtered through the gameplay sensibilities of the Devil May Cry team. It's the greatest.

feels like an inferior version of dragon's dogma 1. a rough draft that somehow got polished into a full game.

i'm not sure if the game revolutionizes' the combat of dragon's dogma 1 enough to justify its pretense as a sequel — and the plot is just as barebones, except without any of the mishmash charm that made dd1 so endearing. the interesting bits of plot they introduce (and was present throughout all of prerelease marketing) is fully dropped two hours into the game; if you wanted political intrigue or fleshed-out characters, look elsewhere. this was the same case in dd1, for what it's worth, but you'd think that in 2024 there would be something else here. there's a line said towards the end of the game, to the effect of "a well-crafted tale has no excess; for each character's inclusion" which made me literally burst out laughing because the literal only characters worth any sort of narrative utility are sven, phaesus, and the titular dragon — if only to remind you that a game called dragon's dogma should probably have a dragon.

probably a better experience for people who've never touched a dragon' dogma game. as it stands now, i just wish it was interesting.

It's quite clunky and I have my issues with this game. The story kind of sucks and gameplay for heavy weapons is so impossible to play with. Fromsoftware games put standards way too high when it comes to the experience of wielding heavy weapons smoothly and sucessfully. The pawns are very refreshing though and I love how they work, talk and interact with you and your actions. It's something I haven't experienced in other games. The pawn mechanics are also very well made as well as combat with big bosses (being able to grab onto them is so fun and fresh). I wish it was given more attention to detail

If you know you made something special the first time because of, and not in spite of, its very incompleteness, do you try to replicate that when you're given a second try?

Is the philosophy here to just be unconcerned with a fully polished, balanced experience and lean instead on the quirks of ambition?

For months, the DD2 subreddit has been awash in people gnashing teeth over the game's shortcomings. They sold themselves the belief that DD2 would discard DD1's emptiness and dreamlikes qualities, or package them into a proper game this time, something with only the positives and none of the negatives. Now a good part of the active fanbase is convinced that Itsuno's "vision" is sham because DD2, in fact, could not be perfect.

But I think I'm convinced more than ever that that vision is real because DD2 is so beautifully flawed. If a piece of media can't be literally everything without being crushed under its own weight or turned into a Star Citizen pyramid scheme, then what is DD2 doing?

It's the pinnacle of RPG imagineering. Freeflowing expressive combat, organic and opaque questing, never seeing the same companion twice (except on rare occasions and then its a delight), coyly hiding much of itself so you feel an urge to learn. Itsuno's vision is to create a reason for this experience to exist as a game, and not a movie, book, etc.

Now it just needs a hard mode or Itsuno is a fucking hack.

A great deal of games don't give a shit about getting from point A to point B. Which is unfortunate, because it is frequently a requirement. The usual solution to absolving the assumed tedium of long travel between two points is to provide fast travel.

Dragon's Dogma 2, like its predecessor, understands that if getting between point A and point B isn't itself interesting and insisted upon, the artifice of the game world will suffer. You can come up with infinite lore reasons for why fast travel makes sense and not a single one will ever dispel the cursed viewpoint that is incurred in the player by allowing, or even encouraging, expedited fragmentation between the beats most likely to make one coo with excitement.

Obviously, I make gratuitous use of fast travel in many games. The problem isn't that the fast travel is there, but rather that it is often the major, or only, solution to that other thing. Going between point A and point B just isn't that interesting most of the time.

A great deal of emphasis, both systematic and thematic, is put on travel in Dragon's Dogma 2. Notably, going between two places is how anything happens at all, and much of the time there isn't really any way to do that except walk or perhaps ride an oxcart. Certainly, if you happen to be with an NPC who needs to get somewhere, you'll be walking much of the time. You can run for a little while, but you'll always be walking again at some point.

Walking in Dragon's Dogma 2, particularly in the early hours, can be an enticingly dangerous undertaking. But more than that, it is time-consuming. Intentionally so. This game wants you to realize that slowly traveling between two places isn't getting in the way of the game, it is the game.

To that point, Dragon's Dogma 2 also realizes and comments at length on the fact that nothing is ever a linear path between two points. All travel is circular. It may be quite roundabout, but one way or another you will go back to where you started. Often you will go back many times.

Gamers hate repetition. That's something of a dirty word in video games. Which is funny, because when we talk about games we often talk about the effectiveness of their gameplay loops. That so-called "effectiveness" is often just a way of talking about how adept said loops are at hiding their inherent repetition.

Dragon's Dogma 2 defiantly asks you to recognize and come to terms with repetition as a fact of life, in its world and your own. You can go on deluding yourself into thinking you're on a linear path, or you can recognize the circularity. Choose the latter, and new depths of meaning will open up to you. This is the choice Dragon's Dogma 2 invites you to make. The rest is up to you.

Al igual que la primera entrega, tiene ideas muy buenas y mecánicas muy interesantes, pero no termina de conseguir redondear el conjunto.

Quitando los problemas de rendimiento, que son abundantes y muy molestos, hay poquísima variedad de enemigos para ser un juego tan largo, lo cual hace que sea extremadamente tedioso encontrarse a los mismos una y otra vez. También hay sistemas intencionadamente obtusos que creo que son más un estorbo que algo que beneficie al conjunto. El equilibrio y la dificultad desaparecen por completo a partir de cierto punto.

Decían que era un generador de historias y es cierto que he tenido momentos y anécdotas divertidas, pero no creo que sea para tanto una vez pasas de lo superficial.

Me he divertido con él las 45 horas que he jugado, pero creo que ya he tenido suficiente. Quizá vuelva a intentarlo más adelante, pero ahora mismo no tengo ganas de más.

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Just like the first entry, it has some really good ideas and interesting mechanics, but it doesn't manage to stick the landing.

Performance issues apart, which are abundant and very annoying, there's a noticeable lack of enemy variety for such a long game, which makes it extremely tedious to face the same ones over and over again. There are also intentionally obtuse systems that I think are more an annoyance than something that benefits the whole. Balance and difficulty completely disappear after a certain point.

They said it was a story generator and it's true I've had some fun moments and anecdotes, but I don't think it goes much further once you go beyond the surface.

I had fun with it for the 45 hours I've played, but I think I've had enough. I may give it a shot again later, but I don't feel like it now.