Adventure games are an extremely popular genre, but when you really get right down to the specifics of what makes a game feel like a real adventure, I don't think any game comes nearly as close as Dragon's Dogma and its sequel. Every venture out of town is considered and planned, and those plans are subsequently broken in different ways on each excursion. For me, Dragon's Dogma II is a series of hits of the same high that Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom or even Death Stranding provides.
Dragon's Dogma II puts you in control once again of the Arisen, a character of your own making who is selected by the dragon to control Pawns. In addition to a Pawn who is also of your own making, you can have up to two Pawns created by other players to form your party of four. Pawns can be any of 6 vocations while the Arisen has access to a few more specialized ones, and your team composition determines your approach to battles. Combat is largely the same as the first game, where you pick your four weapon skills based on your vocation on top of a couple of other baked-in unique abilities. You can also pick up and throw smaller enemies (or friends), as well as climb all over bigger ones a la Shadow of the Colossus. There's a little something for everyone with each vocation, and I am a big fan of both the new ones (special shoutout to Mystic Spearhand) and the slight reworks to the old ones. While admittedly there isn't a great variety of smaller enemies (mostly the same as the first game with some slight variations on Harpies and Saurians) and the large monsters could be spread out a lot more evenly through the world, but I personally never got tired of fighting cyclopes' or minotaurs whether it was my first time or my tenth time. You definitely feel a good sense of getting stronger as you and your Pawns chunk through those health bars faster and faster.
For fans of the first game, you'll also find the plot structure is pretty similar. A mostly straight-forward fantasy adventure with very light political intrigue that gets a bit weird with it as you go on. Above most other games, I highly recommend playing DD2 without a guide because the plot is counting on both the player's (and their Pawn's) ability to figure out the right direction and even beyond that, make mistakes. I can't count on two hands the number of major quests I royally screwed up, and yet still stumbled my way through the story. Some quest lines will even straight up drop if you don't make your own effort to pick them up and continue them, and many side quests aren't even presented to you unless you happen to talk to the right people. Whether you are in or out of town, curiosity is at the forefront of DD2's design philosophy. While still a bit on the barebones side, the main plot does have a few cool set piece moments, and the last few hours especially were stellar.
As I mentioned in my opening paragraph, the real draw of this game for me was the moment-to-moment. The exploration, the adventure. I took the same route out of Vermund countless times as I explored the Western side of the country, and by the time I eventually reached my intended destination, something different always happened. Maybe I found a new cave I hadn't spotted before with a new Pawn's help. Maybe I was ambushed by a Minotaur and knocked across a river. Maybe a Drake landed and utterly destroyed my party. The term 'friction' has been thrown around a lot to describe this game and its become a bit of a buzzword, but it is absolutely true. Traditional fast travel is (mostly) discouraged so that the player can experience lots of moments like this. It's a constant battle of tradeoffs, is it worth picking a fight with that Cyclops while the party needs a rest? Oh no, a Gryphon just landed on us and it's time to find out if we are prepared to fight it, or lead it back to the city where a good number of people will probably perish (but can be revived if you've got the item to do so). I could go on and on about all the cool moments I encountered, and suffice to say I thoroughly explored the map as best I could in doing so. It's been so refreshing just playing an open-world game like this where I can open my map and point at a spot and think okay, I want to go there because I want to. There's no icon there (yet) so maybe I'll find something cool. It is the antithesis of guided checklist open-worlds.
To be absolutely clear, it is not a game for everyone. I am not trying to gate keep or be pretentious about it, but the focuses and game design philosophies behind Dragon's Dogma II (and Dragon's Dogma for that matter) are very specific. It is more often about the journey than the destination, and the lack of fast travel and direction will probably cause a lot of people to bounce off. But for me, this is exactly the type of game I have been craving and as a follow up to the first game, I am happy to say that Dragon's Dogma II is just more Dragon's Dogma. At least at the time of writing, it's my GOTY of 2024.
Dragon's Dogma II puts you in control once again of the Arisen, a character of your own making who is selected by the dragon to control Pawns. In addition to a Pawn who is also of your own making, you can have up to two Pawns created by other players to form your party of four. Pawns can be any of 6 vocations while the Arisen has access to a few more specialized ones, and your team composition determines your approach to battles. Combat is largely the same as the first game, where you pick your four weapon skills based on your vocation on top of a couple of other baked-in unique abilities. You can also pick up and throw smaller enemies (or friends), as well as climb all over bigger ones a la Shadow of the Colossus. There's a little something for everyone with each vocation, and I am a big fan of both the new ones (special shoutout to Mystic Spearhand) and the slight reworks to the old ones. While admittedly there isn't a great variety of smaller enemies (mostly the same as the first game with some slight variations on Harpies and Saurians) and the large monsters could be spread out a lot more evenly through the world, but I personally never got tired of fighting cyclopes' or minotaurs whether it was my first time or my tenth time. You definitely feel a good sense of getting stronger as you and your Pawns chunk through those health bars faster and faster.
For fans of the first game, you'll also find the plot structure is pretty similar. A mostly straight-forward fantasy adventure with very light political intrigue that gets a bit weird with it as you go on. Above most other games, I highly recommend playing DD2 without a guide because the plot is counting on both the player's (and their Pawn's) ability to figure out the right direction and even beyond that, make mistakes. I can't count on two hands the number of major quests I royally screwed up, and yet still stumbled my way through the story. Some quest lines will even straight up drop if you don't make your own effort to pick them up and continue them, and many side quests aren't even presented to you unless you happen to talk to the right people. Whether you are in or out of town, curiosity is at the forefront of DD2's design philosophy. While still a bit on the barebones side, the main plot does have a few cool set piece moments, and the last few hours especially were stellar.
As I mentioned in my opening paragraph, the real draw of this game for me was the moment-to-moment. The exploration, the adventure. I took the same route out of Vermund countless times as I explored the Western side of the country, and by the time I eventually reached my intended destination, something different always happened. Maybe I found a new cave I hadn't spotted before with a new Pawn's help. Maybe I was ambushed by a Minotaur and knocked across a river. Maybe a Drake landed and utterly destroyed my party. The term 'friction' has been thrown around a lot to describe this game and its become a bit of a buzzword, but it is absolutely true. Traditional fast travel is (mostly) discouraged so that the player can experience lots of moments like this. It's a constant battle of tradeoffs, is it worth picking a fight with that Cyclops while the party needs a rest? Oh no, a Gryphon just landed on us and it's time to find out if we are prepared to fight it, or lead it back to the city where a good number of people will probably perish (but can be revived if you've got the item to do so). I could go on and on about all the cool moments I encountered, and suffice to say I thoroughly explored the map as best I could in doing so. It's been so refreshing just playing an open-world game like this where I can open my map and point at a spot and think okay, I want to go there because I want to. There's no icon there (yet) so maybe I'll find something cool. It is the antithesis of guided checklist open-worlds.
To be absolutely clear, it is not a game for everyone. I am not trying to gate keep or be pretentious about it, but the focuses and game design philosophies behind Dragon's Dogma II (and Dragon's Dogma for that matter) are very specific. It is more often about the journey than the destination, and the lack of fast travel and direction will probably cause a lot of people to bounce off. But for me, this is exactly the type of game I have been craving and as a follow up to the first game, I am happy to say that Dragon's Dogma II is just more Dragon's Dogma. At least at the time of writing, it's my GOTY of 2024.