for all of the ubiquity of the big-ass fantasy JRPG it hides a secret in its gargantuan underbelly: very few games even attempt to make the physical process of the traditional fantasy adventure fun enough to be the load-bearing part of the experience. you perform the decorum of an adventure, fighting fuckers and exploring (or pillaging?) new lands, but focus is scarcely allowed to rest on anything besides the most sexy and emblematic parts of the adventuring process.
more often the idea of a grand fantasy adventure is invoked for what is essentially narrative framing in a game where you manifest a power fantasy, or you engage in a story, or you exercise mechanical excellence. and these are all well and great but i think that many of us still have an unscratched itch for a game where you crest a hill with your familiar compatriots and gaze out over the landscape and you see a distant port village, rolling fields, and jagged mountains with a dragon’s cave, and you know that every landmark and many more you haven’t seen yet are the breadcrumbs that will lead you to the next visceral, novel adventure.
it’s incredibly easy to root for dragon’s dogma as it wants so desperately hard to be this game that we crave. and at its best, it is.
it’s difficult to think of another title that captures the full process of a self-guided adventure with such a level of literalization. the rate at which your party’s performance decays without rest and the stinginess of good vendors and services outside of cities is strong enough to pull even the most committed cartographer out of patrolling the map algorithmically and come back in to smell the hearthfire. there’s a humility to the landmarks in the way they attract intrigue and wonder without being ostentatious elden ring megastructures.
not just the world is constructed so that you get to experience the organically emergent qualities of an adventure, the same is true in the moment-to-moment gameplay as well. DD2 isn’t exactly a strand-type game, but the roughness of the world is so tangible it is not just seen, but felt. no shockers here, itsuno combat feels good, but more importantly, it further augments the broader vision of the game. with combat as physical and grounded as this, even my jaded ass had my action RPG goggles knocked off. instead of looking at these monsters through the lens of i-frames and super armor, you navigate combat through your physical intuition.
i’ve seen a lot of (justified) pushback to the screeching about mtx and performance that has accompanied DD2’s release, but some part of me believes that a large amount of dissent was always inevitable on release and people had to tangle with just how frictional dragon’s dogma could be. maybe in something more arcadey like monster hunter there’s more of a case for streamlining but nahhhh yall just bitchmode, can’t handle any of the spicier brain chemicals with your dopamine. don’t get me wrong, not only do I personally love the more prickly parts of the experience, but it’s absolutely necessary for the kind of vision at hand. this game would be destroyed if fast travel was readily available, quests would lose all their weight and urgency if they could be done whenever, and dragonsplague would be trivial if its downsides were ignorable. thousands of redditors, screaming in agony. a symphony to my tired ears.
dragon’s dogma 1 could not fully escape the allegations of being a menu game. dragon’s dogma 2 dodges this, retaining nearly all of the systems from DD1 that were interfaced through these menus but also ensuring far fewer interruptions to the meditative diegesis of its core gameplay loop.
however, the black mark on the original that the sequel cannot escape is that the game is tragically front-loaded. there comes a point, like there is in many of these games with a large exploration focus, where your hands stop fumbling in the dark and finally feel the walls of the room around you, or, as is more often, the cage around you. my guess is it’ll hit most people around an act and a half in as the enemy and encounter variety dries up. the reliance on elemental palette swaps does stretch the small roster a little farther but it also poisons the well a bit, as the fantasy of fighting a new kind of guy is intruded on by the palpable sense that this new creature is as they are for the sake of authorial convenience.
hilariously, i think they could’ve gotten it just about perfect if they toned down the density at which enemies show up in the overworld, which would’ve also made walking around a bit less rote. the game so deftly pushes you into its more structured downtime so it’s shocking how reluctant it is to you give you much at all while you’re out and about. but the way it is now yeah the game definitely becomes a meat grinder. once you reach the point where the enemies you’re fighting feel expendable, regardless of how good the combat feels, it cannot escape the sense of being an empty exercise. dragon’s dogma 2 often feels like the first level of a game extended far past its natural run, mirroring the legend of how its predecessor had to be released when only a quarter of its area was prepared. dragon’s dogma 2 is a much longer game than 1, but i think you could make a really compelling argument that there isn’t really any more meat on its bones in order to compensate.
for better or for worse, dragon’s dogma 2 might go down as the strongest possible indictment of the game that itsuno and so many others have been yearning for for decades. this game had capcom money, a guaranteed audience, and no shortage of talent, and yet it ends up falling this obviously short? but that’s the gamble you play with ambitious games. it’s a gamble worth playing. despite the questionable amount of gas in the tank, for stretches at a time, dragon’s dogma 2 makes that dream in our heads tangible. and, if you can buy into the fantasy, that alone is enough.
more often the idea of a grand fantasy adventure is invoked for what is essentially narrative framing in a game where you manifest a power fantasy, or you engage in a story, or you exercise mechanical excellence. and these are all well and great but i think that many of us still have an unscratched itch for a game where you crest a hill with your familiar compatriots and gaze out over the landscape and you see a distant port village, rolling fields, and jagged mountains with a dragon’s cave, and you know that every landmark and many more you haven’t seen yet are the breadcrumbs that will lead you to the next visceral, novel adventure.
it’s incredibly easy to root for dragon’s dogma as it wants so desperately hard to be this game that we crave. and at its best, it is.
it’s difficult to think of another title that captures the full process of a self-guided adventure with such a level of literalization. the rate at which your party’s performance decays without rest and the stinginess of good vendors and services outside of cities is strong enough to pull even the most committed cartographer out of patrolling the map algorithmically and come back in to smell the hearthfire. there’s a humility to the landmarks in the way they attract intrigue and wonder without being ostentatious elden ring megastructures.
not just the world is constructed so that you get to experience the organically emergent qualities of an adventure, the same is true in the moment-to-moment gameplay as well. DD2 isn’t exactly a strand-type game, but the roughness of the world is so tangible it is not just seen, but felt. no shockers here, itsuno combat feels good, but more importantly, it further augments the broader vision of the game. with combat as physical and grounded as this, even my jaded ass had my action RPG goggles knocked off. instead of looking at these monsters through the lens of i-frames and super armor, you navigate combat through your physical intuition.
i’ve seen a lot of (justified) pushback to the screeching about mtx and performance that has accompanied DD2’s release, but some part of me believes that a large amount of dissent was always inevitable on release and people had to tangle with just how frictional dragon’s dogma could be. maybe in something more arcadey like monster hunter there’s more of a case for streamlining but nahhhh yall just bitchmode, can’t handle any of the spicier brain chemicals with your dopamine. don’t get me wrong, not only do I personally love the more prickly parts of the experience, but it’s absolutely necessary for the kind of vision at hand. this game would be destroyed if fast travel was readily available, quests would lose all their weight and urgency if they could be done whenever, and dragonsplague would be trivial if its downsides were ignorable. thousands of redditors, screaming in agony. a symphony to my tired ears.
dragon’s dogma 1 could not fully escape the allegations of being a menu game. dragon’s dogma 2 dodges this, retaining nearly all of the systems from DD1 that were interfaced through these menus but also ensuring far fewer interruptions to the meditative diegesis of its core gameplay loop.
however, the black mark on the original that the sequel cannot escape is that the game is tragically front-loaded. there comes a point, like there is in many of these games with a large exploration focus, where your hands stop fumbling in the dark and finally feel the walls of the room around you, or, as is more often, the cage around you. my guess is it’ll hit most people around an act and a half in as the enemy and encounter variety dries up. the reliance on elemental palette swaps does stretch the small roster a little farther but it also poisons the well a bit, as the fantasy of fighting a new kind of guy is intruded on by the palpable sense that this new creature is as they are for the sake of authorial convenience.
hilariously, i think they could’ve gotten it just about perfect if they toned down the density at which enemies show up in the overworld, which would’ve also made walking around a bit less rote. the game so deftly pushes you into its more structured downtime so it’s shocking how reluctant it is to you give you much at all while you’re out and about. but the way it is now yeah the game definitely becomes a meat grinder. once you reach the point where the enemies you’re fighting feel expendable, regardless of how good the combat feels, it cannot escape the sense of being an empty exercise. dragon’s dogma 2 often feels like the first level of a game extended far past its natural run, mirroring the legend of how its predecessor had to be released when only a quarter of its area was prepared. dragon’s dogma 2 is a much longer game than 1, but i think you could make a really compelling argument that there isn’t really any more meat on its bones in order to compensate.
for better or for worse, dragon’s dogma 2 might go down as the strongest possible indictment of the game that itsuno and so many others have been yearning for for decades. this game had capcom money, a guaranteed audience, and no shortage of talent, and yet it ends up falling this obviously short? but that’s the gamble you play with ambitious games. it’s a gamble worth playing. despite the questionable amount of gas in the tank, for stretches at a time, dragon’s dogma 2 makes that dream in our heads tangible. and, if you can buy into the fantasy, that alone is enough.