I knew you loved this world too much to leave it behind!
Being quite honest with you all- I, like many other diehard Dragon's Dogma fans, never thought this day would come. For years it seemed a forgone conclusion that the quirky little action RPG with a sprinkle of something indescribably swashbuckling and reckless was consigned to forever populate the annals of cult-status curiosity. Even when the announcement was made and the clock fully set- I'd be lying if I didn't confess a bit of disbelieving whiplash, an unwillingness to really comprehend the fact that one day soon I would be playing a brand new Dragon's Dogma adventure, therefore it was only really in the final week that those last second jitters started creeping up upon me. Is the magic still going to be there? Will I find some of those returned design directions cumbersome in the decade apart and deprived of these here rose-tinted glasses? Will I get back that easy 'pick and play' wonder that I've missed from my RPGs of late?
In answering these queries I picked up my copy, on the Xbox Series X for hopes of taking advantage of the 4k offering to see this game at it's best- a decision which might have saved me a lot of the PC launch woes we hear the game suffering from. That being said, even the Series X console version is not free from some stutters, occasional slowdowns in the more busy post-game sections (never prolonged but enough to be temporarily disruptive) and one crash, early on. Although across about 49 hours of playtime, that isn't the most terrible occurrence in the world. I'm also quite surprised to report there were no quest bugs for me throughout the entire game, which seems strange to gloat about but... man, I've endured Assassin's Creed, Baldur's Gate and my umpteenth playthrough of Skyrim across the past few years- totally bugless quests are a novelty to me!
Upon starting Dragon's Dogma you will confronted with the most brazen aspect of this game's ethos- that it is in some ways as much a reboot of the DD franchise as it is a sequel. I was actually quite surprised to see the game entitled 'Dragon's Dogma' on the title screen, sans the 2, and actually 'tabbed out' (so to speak) in order to check that the software name was still called Dragon's Dogma 2 and that Capcom hadn't suddenly decided this was a definitive remake at the last second. (They hadn't, the game is still called 'Dragon's Dogma 2'.) And it is a decent point to check on because with this release Dragon's Dogma appears to be much more of a 'Final Fantasy' style anthology than we might have originally believed. (Although I've never had the opportunity to play the Chinese MMO release- so maybe such groundwork was laid there.)
Sure, those that are familiar with the original might think they know what that entails- to spoil the original game a bit; (it released in 2012- you've had your chance!) that narrative was framed around a loop of 'Arisen' revenants hunting the Dragon that stole the hearts out of their chest only to go on to then become the next Dragon or rise even further to assume the role of 'Seneschal' and watch over the loop on your own. Dragon's Dogma 2 was sold as an 'alternate world story', but we're already familiar with the 'world hopping antics' of our Pawns (player designed companions who remain our allies throughout the game) as they enter the games of other players and return with useful snippets of information- 'Alternate world' is not as grand of a concept to introduce as Hideaki Itsuno may have believed when he said it. But let me be clear for him- this is an alternate universe.
That is to say, Dragon's Dogma 2 doesn't even depict the same Dogma that the original game did. The order of the world that we knew, of Arisen meets Dragon meets Seneschal- entirely irrelevant in this new setting- and I think that is an important nugget of the world for new players to grasp lest they confuse themselves trying to fit in the rules of this new world within the constraints of the one we knew. (Not least of all trying to figure out how any of this is happening in the first place when the canonical 'true ending' of Dragon's Dogma 1 involved, as the theme song quoteth 'Finishing the cycle of Eternal Return'.) This story is a story anew.
And with a new story should come a fresh introduction- for those coming in for the lesson. Here we go- Dragon's Dogma 2 tells the story of 'The Arisen' an immortal warrior chosen by the herald of doom itself 'The Dragon', to be the world's champion. This individual is identified for their display of abnormal will, typically in the form of courage, and then has their heart delicately ripped out of their chests by an overly-long dragon claw before that beast then pops the organ in it's mouth and scarpers. Thus forms the bond between Dragon and the now-immortalised Arisen, and thus starts the prophecy wherein that Arisen must slay their Dragon, lest risk their will breaking against their nerve, thus severing the covenant- roaming the world as a failed Arisen forever more.
To this task the Arisen, the player, commands AI companions known as 'Pawns'. Pawns are soulless beings born to be directed into action by the Arisen, and crucially each one is designed by another player courtesy of the neat 'shared world' of Dragon's Dogma's online! Each player designs their 'Main Pawn' near the beginning of the game to be their one constant throughout the adventure, but that Pawn can spawn in, or be summoned into, other Arisen's worlds to serve as one of their Side Pawns. Everytime you rest (in this game that means sleeping at an Inn or your bed but not when you do it at a campsite) you'll get a brief report of the other people who hired your pawn, be awarded some Rift Crystal currency and maybe even receive a little gift for the hardwork your little helper put in.
Pawns go a little deeper than that too this time around. Quests that they go on enter into the Pawns memory, meaning that when you have an objective that is obscure or far away, knowledgeable Pawns in your party that experience that same quest in another world will chime in to lead you to your destination with pin-point accuracy. (And only the occasional AI pathfinding meltdown.) They can also be equipped with one of a few specialisations which gives them a role beyond their vocations (class) to stand out as unique. One might feed you consumable curatives in battle if you equip them with some, others might democratize picked-up loot automatically in order to prevent the Arisen becoming overloaded and hitting those 'slow down' thresholds in carry weight. And one might just translate Elven for you. Which is so insanely helpful- I've got no idea what the knife-ears are saying about me behind my back!
With the pedigree of the recent Devil May Cry games on the game director's resume this shouldn't be any great surprise, but the amount of small details that go in to make each class feel mechanically simple but blossom with systemic distinction is quite masterful from the design department. Magic Archers will balance a lock-on reticule to disperse their magic effects over a wide range of enemies, or focus in on a single big enemy with a dozen simultaneous effect arrows. Whereas a non-magic archer has to aim true and move fast, with the trade-up being unbeatable single target damage when you get in that perfect zone to focus. Mystic Spearhands are constantly vying for the all-import stunstate which allows for a devastating finisher hit so powerful it knocks entire health bars off some bosses. Fighters become moving fortresses, Thiefs are free-scrambling death dealers- and Tricksters are a particularly difficult to manage class of decoys, feints and enemy misdirection. Not a single class is tacked on to fill a gap- and I have played them all extensively because they're that much fun to mess around with!
And if that isn't enough, there is the final ultimate vocation that even I, with my plus 100 hours playtime, still don't feel comfortable enough to work properly. The Warfarer (not 'Wayfarer' as it is so often mistaken to be) allows the player to wield all weapons at once but only with a very specific selection of skills curated from the larger list. Core skills of each class are retained, as are playstyles, and the Warfarer's special skill is essentially the ability to switch through each in a line- presenting a logistical puzzle of setting up complimentary class switches in the right order; a direct evolution of the Devil Arms system Nero works with through Devil May Cry 5. Warfarer is essentially the end-game way to play the game, and those who master it will essentially have turned their arisen into a medieval version of Dante through bitter trial- a jack of all trades and the all around master to boot.
Together with the slot-in abilities that you can switch between in rotations of 4 in order to refine an exact tool set and you've got yourself dozens of ways to play through the 10 different available classes. The only real let-down of this system is the fact that the absolute tons of great looking weapons and class specific armours you pick up throughout the game hold no further influence upon playstyle. All they offer are stat numbers and the occasional miniscule resistance to certain debuffs. In that vein the game offers similar itemisation to Souls-Borne games in that they largely serve only to feed the 'fashion souls' gameplay angle. To which I can actually attest- there are a bunch of really cool different types of armours throughout Dragon's Dogma 2 that cater to a vast array of medieval fantasy tastes from your chainmail solider to your tin-hat paladin, fur cloaked mountain barbarian and bone horned hunter- all with mix and match potential. I don't typically comment on cosmetic variety in my games, and when I do- it's because I find them particularly noteworthy.
All these tools go into crafting the monster slaying arsenal, with the large-scale boss battles making up the heart of the Dragon's Dogma play cycle. Squaring up against towering Ogres and monstrous dragons feels run-of-the-mill on paper, but until you've scrambled up the swinging tail of a floating drake and stabbed a knife in it's heart sending the beast crashing back to the ground in a brutal heap- you've never seen these scenarios at their best. There's a undeniable cinematic quality in the spectacle of Dragon's Dogma's 'David vs Goliath' approach to boss design, and coupled with the popping beauty of Capcom's RE engine, some of the the most frantic moments of the biggest fights are simply mouth-watering! But the combat is more than skin deep- each boss is infused with inherent weaknesses that the player must pick up and exploit in order to bring creatures low- and they span far more than just your typical elemental weakness! One-eyed Ogres can be blinded, Griffins falls out of the sky if their wings are set ablaze and Trolls lust after women so much they put themselves in harms way. Scrambling up both sides of an armoured Ogre in order to break it's fastenings, stripping the armour that keeps you crawling up to that ever-vulnerable single eye is peak Dragon's Dogma at it's absolute best.
The key most evolution of Dragon's Dogma from 1 to 2 is the way that the team realised the world space- which is a pretty big deal given that the gameplay loop of Dragon's Dogma 2 always revolves around travelling and navigating their overly hostile world. Seeing as these roads are one's you'll be walking up and down for hundreds of hours, part of the thirst for a sequel was the fact that these routes were often so simple and basic and easy to grow tired of. Which is probably why Dragon's Dogma 2 ramps up it's exploration so considerably. You'll find dozens of caves, alternative paths, breakable rock walls, collapsible floors, gaps that can only be covered with special skills, heights that can only be reached with Levitation. I even know you can push a stumbling ogre over a cliff edge in order to form as bridge. (I know it's possible, I just haven't managed it yet.) And just this morning people learned that you can feed stone blocks to the giant discarded trebuchet around the map to destroy even larger clumps of rocks and open up even more paths. 
With the introduction of a whole new biome, the craggy deserts of Battahl, that exploration has spanned out even more with crumbling ruins of some bygone civilisation scattered across the wasteland, and precarious pully-rope bridges that suspend you over the deadly gorges, but themselves are often beset by gangs of harpies. Even the city world spaces you'll be traversing, Vernworth and Bakbattahl, are so much more alive than the duke's city from Dragon's Dogma 1. They are less flat and more varied, stuffed with nooks and crannies to discover, and constructed with obvious cultural distinctions. From the Western European inspired medieval buildings to the Eastern European inspired mountain dig-out homes- you'll feel like you've travelled the breadth of a continent from one end of the world to the other. It makes you wish that the Photo Mode didn't suck so bad. (Seriously- it might as well just be a 'turn off HUD' button for how useless it is!)
The Beastren, who occupy Battahl, are your typical anime 'monster people' race- only with the good grace to actually commit to making them cat people, rather than just giving them vague cat accessories. This race is actually fairly well conceived on a visual level, carrying enough distinctiveness for one to be recognised to another, although obviously not nearly as much as regular humans do. I just wish there was perhaps a bit more material detailing their specific cultures or origins, as even the narrative makes it clear that Battahl is not inherently their land, meaning it's customs are not their ancestral ones. Heck, Vermund was founded by a Beastren! A little more thought could have gone into to realising their narrative distinctiveness, similar to how Races are handled in The Elder Scrolls franchise. (Speaking of The Elder Scrolls- I'm sad that the Beastren don't speak in Khajiiti voices. Big shame.)
One of my fondest memories of an unforgettable trek was during my journey to track down a Dragon to seize it's valuable blood. A journey that led me through an in-game business week of pushing through the Battahli wastes. Making ground until my party couldn't stand straight anymore and then camping over the night. We were beset by duo Ogres and swooping Griffins here and there, and even ended up getting lost down an ancient cave and coming face to face with a Medusa, which I managed to grapple onto the back of whilst it failed and brutally decapitated it. All this before the actual designed intended showdown against the Lesser Drake atop the mountain sliding ruined Coliseum. That alone was my own personal little 'Jason and the Argonauts' style adventure.
The only real problem with all this is the fact that, lo and behold, there's little tangible unique content worth exploring all this world to uncover. Inside all those caves, atop all those rooftops, and tucked in all those back corners- all you'll typically find are a clump of the same few monsters you've seen dotted around the open world. Chests with a small assortment of decent to good consumables stuffed in them. Maybe now and then you'll get a cool piece of armour, but it's rare and there's little logical sense as to where these items spawn. (And you'll need to buy all the best gear anyway.) The bosses, Dragon's Dogma 2's most fun content, aren't plentiful enough for many unique one's to be squirrelled away in these back corners of the open world either- as far as I know I think there are only two hidden unique monster spawn locations- one for each biome.
Which touches on what is easily the biggest let-down of Dragon's Dogma 2- enemy variety. We heard a lot of talk about the way the team have handled monsters since the days of Dragon's Dogma 1 and a little bit of mention of variety. But I remember watching those previews and seeing the same Goblins, Wolves, Ogres and Trolls from the original. Fantastically realised monsters, of course, but one's we were already familiar with. With the full game out, it actually seems there is less enemy variety than we got in the first game! There are no Beholders or Cockatrices or Dire Wolves- in fact, the 'petrification medication' is literally only used for a single boss in the game that spawns in a single location across the map. Killing monsters with fantastic skills, learning their unique patterns and how best to exploit them- that is the height of the gameplay cycle in Dragon's Dogma 2- which is why it is so unthinkable that the team pulled back so heavily on expanding these vectors out! At the very least, if they couldn't greatly diversify the rooster, they could have least focused on monsters unique to the one's we know from the first game! Granted, each monster has been designed totally from scratch, such that Saurians are no longer impossibly annoying to fight and Harpies actually take advantage of the fact they can fly to stay out of reach- But I think we are all saddened by the inability to meet and learn about a fresh new cast of monsters.
Aside from the beastly, the world of Dragon's Dogma is stuffed full of the NPC characters that are designed to give the world a heart- and through a series of robust world generation tools the team have given Dragon's Dogma 2 a decent foundation. You'll find every NPC with a daily life they live, jobs, friends, and frequent haunts- and the player is able to interact with them by learning of their favoured types of gift and showering them in those until they receive some attention in return. The procedural job board from the original game is entirely gone this time around, so there's no hope of earning profitable quests from liked individuals, but sometimes a few might show up outside your home to embark on a 'journey' to some backwater part of nowhere. Don't expect all these NPCs to be fully realised personality driven fonts of exploration- that isn't the point of the game- but expect just enough life to buy into the fiction of this world's existence and why you might care to keep people safe. Particularly given how easy it is for NPCs to die now that monsters have a chance to invade the capital cities!
I love how you can find certain NPCs walking the wilds and being beset by monsters who you can choose to save. Fast travel, achieved through travelling in the back of carts, can come under attack by ambushes who will destroy the transport if you let them, and might even murder the drivers too! There's this curious sense of a world simulation happening around you that not many games manage to properly convey, not even those that apparently go specifically for it. (Starfield comes to mind.) I was struck silly when rocking up to the Hot Springs on the otherside of the world from Vernworth, where I bumped into Sven the Regentkin- on his way back from a vacation of his own. Those little moments enforce the fiction of the breathing world, and they alone are what makes a world like this feel so special and alive on the most important level- the inconsequential one!
Beyond the NPCs are the heroes and heroines you'll meet through side questlines and get to know, and of these we have a much more interesting slate to work with. Characters like Ulrika and Menella actually have places of import that shift throughout the world, and the amount you interact with them can ultimately decide their fates in the endgame. Character writing is far from this team's strong suit, however, and none of the cast are what I would call 'fully rounded individuals'. Brant, the captain with which you'll interact the most, is easily the most boring out of this cast. But engage with the game on it's level and you'll find some rudimentarily evolved relationships to tie your Arisen to the world around them- all important steps to making the themes of the game take root- particularly in the post-game sections.
The quests of Dragon's Dogma 2 are their own curious blend of freeform 'figure out where you need to go' mixed with slightly disguised fetch objectives. The actual fun of a lot of these quests are the expectation of scouring the world and listening to clues, or the directions of hired pawns who have already played these quests in their host worlds and want to guide you, to find waypoints not marked on your map. The team knew to feed back into their exploration loop and that results in a lot less quests than a typical fantasy RPG would boast, but a lot more infused with their own dynamic stories you carve simply by travelling their beaten path. It's an interesting way of sprucing up otherwise rather rudimentary quest lines. Yet there's little hiding the fact that many of these quests are pretty bare bones when you look at them objectively and unless you've already brought into the flow of the game and how it expects you to engage with it's world- you'll likely find most largely dissatisfying. And also- stealth missions are a total joke- I have no idea why this game even has one, let alone several!
Dragon's Dogma 2's story was where I was the most curious to see how the team had evolved, given how the original game's narrative was largely bland and unmemorable whilst Dark Arisen was grand and complex. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but Dragon's Dogma 2 seems to have mixed both storytelling tools and come out with something disappointingly straightfaced on the surface with a pleasing amount of background depth if you actively try and engage with the world. The quest to depose the false Sovran should never have been the main drive of the plot, for how weak of a draw it is given that 'king-ship' is a mere side effect of being the dragon-slaying Arisen- but peeling back the layers of the story to peer at the world beneath by listening to the context clues of the right bizarre NPCs, or interpreting the silent ruins conveying non-obvious information: you'll see there's something here, just not anything the team were confident enough to commit to. It's rather disappointing we don't get the massive exploratory environmentally-explicit narrative story it seemed we were building towards from Dark Arisen. Now I have to hope we get another giant expansion re-release in the future to see that height of story out of this franchise again!
And just as the original has, Dragon's Dogma 2 does boast a robust post-game that- I am happy to say- greatly outshadows the original's. Dragon's Dogma's post-game, tied to it's 'secret ending'- (Which is so not-secret I stumbled into it accidentally) is essentially the garnish to the dish you've been building unconsciously the entire game. It's where consequences come to fruition and what you've learned throughout the game really comes into play in a world where the stakes are finally somewhat real. I love the idea they went with, leaning a bit into the world building of Souls-Likes without slipping into being just another copy- my sadistic ass just wish they went even further in some regards! Again, though, I think the team missed a huge trick buy not having a final boss! It seems unthinkable that there's no blow-out post game fight against, I dunno, the Ur Dragon or something? Anything to cap off that genius concept of a post-game! Seriously, it's like the game keeps hopping around all the obvious routes to greatness and I can't even conceive of why!
Conclusion
Dragon's Dogma is as ever itself, which is what we kept the original in our hearts so long to preserve. It's less than average way of handling basic gameplay concepts, a world built around explorative navigation often without explicit waypoints in even the most obscure quests, dynamic world bosses with unique character traits and quirks you'll intrinsically learn how to exploit and inexplicably meaningful world interactions- are all uniquely clever in a way only this franchise can boast. But the game still holds a lot of the hang-ups from the original, in largely risk-lacking storytelling and a frustratingly lacking pool of enemies and bosses- which can often undermine the long journey of 12 years we've gone on waiting for this game. In some ways the game is every bit what it use to be, which is comforting, yet in other ways that is so frustrating it makes you want to tear your hair out! At least the core gameplay has undergone such significant bounds that this feels like a genuine revival for the action RPG genre outside of the Souls-Like sub-genre that every Action RPG has felt obliged towards.
I have enjoyed my time with Dragon's Dogma to the point of light addiction, which is probably why I feel comfortable giving the game my 'Brilliant but with room to improve' 'grade of A-'. In many ways it's the game I wanted, but in many more not the game I think this could have been. Still, Dragon's Dogma 2 achieves just enough that I think with one giant blow out expansion this could easily become a game lovingly referenced for the next 12 years hence. (And look at that, I didn't even mention the word 'Microtransaction.' Guess they truly are utterly impact-less on the title.)
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