What’s better than a game where you walk around and press one button? A game where you walk around and press no buttons!

I played this game back in 2006 when it first released and I really enjoyed it, then a power outage happened while I was saving and it was my only save file. I never had only one save file ever again and that’s a pretty big impact on me. I bring this up because this game is a massive time investment and I was very much not willing to get back into the mix, 60 hours down the drain. Zodiac age completely and absolutely fixes this. The game comes with a 2x/4x speed up mode that completely trivializes all the leveling and walkin around you have to do. Very much like the speed up mode on emulators, it makes the game accessible in a way it previously was not. I was able to beat this game in around 30 hours because of this feature.

Now I will actually talk about the game itself, like I said at the start. You essentially just setup menus and actions before you start combat and let the game play itself. It feels like a miracle that this game is fun. But the environment, story, characters, leveling system, license board, gambits, hunts all combine together to make this very enjoyable experience.


It was very cathartic to come back to this game and beat it. That’s all I got to say. Good times

Pre warning: I have not finished this game yet.

Ok I am finally back on the backlog train after being completely derailed by balatro. This was the game I was playing concurrently with it. This is an overall fairly enjoyable game that I would only recommend to people who are willing to work hard for the fun they can get out of a game.

This is probably the most important thing I can say in this review, dragon’s dogma 2 makes you work to extract the enjoyment out of it. It is the product of a creative sticking to their vision even though it goes against many of the tropes and ideas that modern games are built upon. For instance, you have almost certainly heard this by now but this is an open world game with no easy to access fast travel mechanics. The game does have fast travel via ferrystones and Oxcarts, but these both have stipulations that mean you won’t always have access to them. Hence walking to and from places to finish quests will be a large part of your experience in this game. I don’t completely hate this, it means you have to be very thoughtful with the order in which you do things and have to think logistically about resources and where/when to use them. Difficulty and obstacles are always a challenge for developers to balance. Too much difficulty and the player gives up but too little and the player will not respect the game or beat it too easy and move on.

Dragon’s dogma instead opts to those multiple wrenches at your gameplay experience that force you to pay close attention to what is going on around you. For instance much ado has been made over the dragon’s plague mechanic where your pawn’s can become sick and if you go to sleep when they are sick, well they can destroy a whole village worth of NPCs effectively hard locking you out of quest progression and ending your time with the game. Personally I love this, even though you are playing a game I appreciate a game not completely validating you, life won’t completely validate you. Even though you might be playing for some escapism, I personally prefer the emotional experience of being humbled by a game. Dragon’s dogma is filled with an uncanny indifference towards the player. It’s filled with much uncanny awkwardness in general. When I played the original dd, I thought to myself there is no way this was intended to be this awkward and weird of a game. I was completely wrong, dd2 shows that the vision was completely intentional. Pawns are in someways like robotic children, they say words but with no feeling around them, they incessantly babble, but they are always helpful. Then there is the FMV meat cooking videos. The fact that you can pick up and carry NPCs to certain locations to retrigger their quests. This is a very video gamey video game. Something the medium has lost touch with in many ways.

So yeah dragon’s dogma 2 isn’t for everyone. I myself will have to come back to it someday.