uuuuuUUUUUUUUUUUUGH

This is not really a review, just an opportunity for me to rant - because the gaming industry is currently at an absolute low in some ways and I'm sort of reaching a boiling point about it.

So I love the original Dragon's Dogma. It is, to me, the perfect game that just happens to be woefully imperfect. I love its worldbuilding, I love its gameplay concepts, I love its open world. I love so many things about it, but almost every aspect of it that I enjoy comes with a big ol' asterisk that prevents me from being able to give it the bright shiny gold star that I so desperately want to confer. Unfortunately, it languished in that lukewarm spot between "cult classic" and "abject mediocrity" that had me resigned to the sentiment that it would never get a re-release, let alone a sequel.

Of course, my fears ultimately ended up being unfounded, with the game receiving a fantastic PC port in 2016 and a sequel being officially announced a few years later. Seldom in my life have I ever been so excited for a release, and you'd better believe I was there each time Capcom finally loosed new details on the game. And now it's here!

The prevailing sentiment amongst those who have played Dragon's Dogma II seems to be that it is very much the original experience with some nips and tucks. To some, that might be massively disappointing - but to me, that is an absolute godsend. As far as I was concerned, the OG was a rock-solid concept that simply needed some careful polishing. The idea that Dragon's Dogma II could be loosely described as "Dragon's Dogma but better" is the very definition of a perfect sequel for me. As such, my excitement since its release has absolutely rocketed through the roof... Or that's really what I want to say, but the truth is Capcom's really managed to hurt my feelings this time around.

I'm not as flummoxed by these practices as I think some are because I was there when Capcom was shipping games with characters already on the disc that you had to pay extra to unlock. They were very much trendsetters in the hellscape that is the world of in-game purchases, and as a result their more recent monetization practices seem almost amusingly mild by comparison. In the case of DDII, it seemed to me that at the extra purchasable content was purely to "skip the line" with regards to features that already exist in-game, and thus were simply of the bog-standard "baiting the impatient" flavor. Note that I'm not blaming the "impatient" in this equation - I totally understand how irritating it can be when things such as character modification are arbitrarily gated off, and dangling an opportunity to unlock it at any time in exchange for a few extra bucks is unquestionably a dick move. However, it's not being excised from the base game altogether to be sold to you, so at least in that respect you have the option of ignoring it and simply working your way around it. To me, that's much more benign, even for as lame as it is at the end of the day.

But it IS lame. And so is the $70 price tag, and the shitty PC performance, and Capcom's usual shrugging off of player's complaints, and the fact that I have to reckon with all of these things if I want to play this game that I have eagerly been awaiting for years. I just moved to a new house - a life event that I am very glad for, but also one that is unquestionably a drain on one's finances. I'm really not in a position where I can go tossing every spare cent I have at the next big shiny thing, which already makes my primary hobby a very difficult one to entertain in 2024. However, more and more I'm running into the issue that even if I was the kind of person that could afford to pick up every new release, I don't know that any of these companies actually deserve it. Sony and Microsoft are selling $500 Netflix machines with barely any software to actually justify their existence. Nintendo is out here knocking over emulators and fan projects as if it's ever going to prevent people from pirating their games. Rockstar's assuredly going to ride off of Shark Cards from Grand Theft Auto 6 until I'm in a retirement home, CD Projekt Red is doing their best to pretend like they didn't sell lies to a whole generation of gamers based almost wholly on their Witcher 3 clout, Todd Howard found a way to resell Skyrim another time by dressing it up as a space sim, Konami is proving they will abuse their IPs as many times as it continues to make them money - and yeah, it's still making them all money! People are still buying the games! Day one! Repeatedly! Knowing full damn well it's probably not going to be worth it! And yet, the reason why I'm so miffed about this is because for once I feel like it absolutely would be worth it - because Dragon's Dogma II really does seem like it's the game I've wished for, but does that mean I should be dumping my wallet out for Capcom yet again? I don't know that I should. I know that if I buy the game in its current state, no matter how much I ultimately may enjoy it, it's going to make me feel dirty. And I hate that. I love games and I hate this. It makes me want to tear my hair out.

I can't roast anybody who has purchased the game and is having a good time with it right now. Life's hard enough and damn, if you're having a fun enough time that it makes your 70 bones feel like they were well-spent, who am I to deny you that pleasure? But just once - just once - I wish everybody would be willing to throw their hands up and say "I don't care if this game is the next coming of Digital Jesus, I want you to quit jerking me around". Because I'm tired of getting jerked around. I have massive respect for the people who worked a bajillion hours to make this game match the vision they had in mind for it. I know this isn't their fault. I want to reward them for their hard work by making this game a success, and I know my dumb ass is probably still going to buy the game once I can afford to (and once the game isn't melting people's CPUs). But another year of this and I'm likely to start writing off modern gaming as a whole in favor of diving into the "good old days" - because even if I feel like an old codger for saying it, there was at least a time when I didn't have to feel like a jackass for being excited about my hobby.