I love Pepper Grinder, but it needs updates. More than that, it needed more time in the oven.

Grinding/drilling through the dirt is so satisfying, bolstered by great use of HD Rumble on Switch. Grinding through gravel and popping out of the Earth, at its best, is one of the best feeling game mechanics in years to me. It is that special. The level design is great and has light collectathon elements -- big Donkey Kong Country and Yoshi's Island vibes. There are ideas used once or twice alongside level/visual themes only used a few times, and for the most part they're executed great. The difficulty during levels is breezy but not overly so. The music rips, too.

If all of Pepper Grinder was like this, it would be one of the best 2D platformers I had played in years. Skipping over the water man...it feels so good! Unfortunately, the game faces regular, frustrating issues with punishing bosses, inconsistent checkpointing, bugs, strange hitboxes, and other design quirks that leave me feeling more mixed here than any game I've played in some time. The bosses in particular -- why is there such an unearned difficulty spike here? Why am I doing Metroidvania-style pattern recognition bosses after skipping over the water using my silly drill? Why are there no permanent health upgrades to accommodate?

This still could end up in my Top 10 (or at least honorable mentions) at the end of the year because the stuff that hits really hits. But the whiplash between total elation and "almost quit the game" level frustration makes it a really difficult thing to evaluate. Excited to see what the developer does next.

Oh my god, why didn't I play this before.

I'm pretty excited to see how much they'll add to the formula on the second game.

edit: well, I got pretty excited when I first played it, but...after a few hours I realise the gameplay loop just isn't interesting enough for a game of this kind unless you screw the game up with cheats, and even then it just feels gimmicky. And the only really fun class to play with is the hacker.

I've never been the biggest fan of the first Dragons Dogma game. Tbh. I never finished the game yet I still deciced to play the second one. I overall enjoyed Dragons Dogma 2 but I do think it has some major flaws and no I'm not talking about the microtransactions. Because for everyone who has lived under a rock, Capcom has done this for years and never anyone complained. Not for Monster Hunter World and not for Resident Evil 4 Remake. And why even would I buy mtx to ruin the experience that the developers had intended. Anyway this out of the way, I like the character creator and it's probably one of the most detailed ones I've seen in recent years. The climbing monsters was also fun and it reminded me of games like Shadow of the Colossus. I liked that your Main-Pawn has their own voice, it gives you the feeling that your Main-Pawn is an actual side character. But that the character of the Pawns is just not there. Because they keep saying the same lines over and over again and the dialogue is boring bin general. The problem comes with the core gameplay loop itself. Most of the quests are Fetch-Quest which maybe was intentional because selling point of Dragons Dogma 2 is the traveling that you do during the quests, almost like on a roadtrip where the journey is the goal. The side activities are also useless, you can buy everyone a round of beer or go to the local fun house. What does it do? Nothing, no buffs and no rewards. When I pay 20.000 gold to sleep with someone than I at least what a cool cutscene but no there is nothing.

Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno said that "the traveling is only boring when your game is boring" and I agree but the problem with Dragons Dogma 2 is that the gameplay loop gets indeed boring fast. Because you have these dynamic encounters during your travels between cities where you have to fight Orcs or Ogre. At first fighting them is fun but the more I play the more I noticed that I mostly fought the same enemies at the same locations over and over again. The result is that the fighting gets repetitive very quick and the time between fighting one horde of orcs and the next one was often very small. What did I do ? I told my pawns to wait somewhere and then ran past all of the dynamic encounters. So the core gameplay loop is boring, the characters and quest aren't memorable at all because the dialogues mostly consist out of pressing "next" and in the whole game there were maybe two opportunities to choose your answer. Since the dialogue system is rather shallow, the romancing feels also very trivial. Same can be said about the housing, you can buy 2 houses but you can't customize them. They are only there for you to rest and customization in general isn't a big part of the game. Armor is locked to the vocations which means "Fashion Souls" is not possible. This may not be a problem for some people but I'm just a sucker for customizing stuff and it's a missed opportunity in my opinion. A good example is probably the fight against the Dragon Endboss. It kidnaps a character that supposed to be Important to your character based on affinity. The problem is that there is no way for you to tell how high the affinity between your character and the NPC is. Which lead to a hilarious situation where I thought I was romancing Doireann and expected the Dragon to take her hostage but instead that stupid Lizard took her brother for whom I did like two quests. So the Dragon Endboss took a character hostage that I didn't care about and then gave me the decision to fight him or just walk away. I decided to just walk away and got one of the most underwhelming endings in recent years. This just showed that the story and characters are extremly boring and there aren't really any main-characters. The while storyline with the false Arisen also didn't get resolve at the end. So after that I reloaded my save file, fought the Dragon and got an ending almost identical to the first one. Which disappointed quite a bit and is reminiscent for the rest of the game. Because Dragons Dogma 2 is overall a rather disappointing game with gameplay mechanics that feel rather shallow like the romancing, housing, activities or the dialogues and a core gameplay loop that gets annonying fast. As said before the story and characters aren't there. All of them are really shallow or have like 2 lines of dialogue. But I liked that the game creates situations that are different for every player s and which you will tell your friends about, similar like Elden Ring did. Like when the first Dragon I was about to beat deciced to jump into the water and got itself eaten by those hentai noodles. I can still recommend the game in some form because you can have fun with it but sadly most of the mechanics lack depth, story, characters and quests are nothing memorable. I know there is a "secret" ending but I did not care at the end. This results in a game that's mediocre at best.

Games I finished in 2024 Ranked