Dragons Dogma II is a great game overall, with a few flaws that started to irritate me the more I played the game.

The gameplay itself feels great, responsive and every attack feels heavy, as if there is real weight behind it. Exploration is rewarding in the sense that it's really intriguing to see what the world has to offer, what big monsters it hides and what cinematic scenario will unfold. I really loved it up until about the 20-hour mark. Fighting the same enemies every 5 meters and not really getting anything of value was a bit demotivating to say the least. Still, I really liked it, and this part of the game is why I'll probably finish some remaining quests.

The story, though, what happened there anyway? The story was like this: 5 little infiltration quests, go talk to this random guy, farm 15 stones, here you have a sword and boom, final boss. It all felt extremely rushed, underdeveloped and not really explained. Why did we have to fight the Talos? Who the hell is Phaesus? I reached Batahl and wanted to play the story just a tad bit more, and suddenly the credits rolled. The last 5 quests were so uneventful and sudden that I couldn't believe it, actually.

So the story is a point of criticism, but not a big one, because I didn't play the game for the story, but for the world, the exploration, and the gameplay. I enjoyed all of these aspects of the game, but they failed to create something that really stood out.

Last month I played the original Final Fantasy for the first time (review link) and fell in love with it. Right after that I played Final Fantasy Remake for the third time (link). Even though FF Remake has some huge problems, most of which were very noticeable because I was playing trough it for the third time, FF Rebirth has some even bigger problems, which stand out, even during the first playtrough, while making some of the best moments of the original even more elevated.

I finished Rebirth in roughly 33 hours, which is not a lot in comparisson to most people. The reasons are quite obvious. I ignored and did not interact with most of the game world, sidequests and mini games. But let me adress those first and let's start with the minigames.

The minigames are not bad, there just not my cup of tea. In nearly every game I ignore mini games, cause I really don't like them in general, I don't feel any sense of fun but a sense of wasting my time. Thus we reach the first critic that I have, but it's a small one. I know that many people have this opinion that this should not be a critic point, cause the original also had a huge amount of minigames. I know a lot of people think this shouldn't be a point of criticism, as the original also had a large number of mini-games. That doesn't really make it any better, as I didn't enjoy the minigames in the original either. But my real problem is that in Rebirth you are forced to deal with the mini-games. You have to deal with the card game, you have to play a couple of games of it, and you have to play various mini-games in Costa del Sol. I really didn't like that, especially as the minigames make it so painfully obvious that you're playing a game that also suffers from extreme ludonarrative dissonance.

When I mention that the game is far too much of a "video game", it may not be entirely clear what I mean, as you may think I'm contradicting myself. But the word that sums up the problem very well is this: Padding.

Remake already had some problems in this area, but Rebirth really takes the cake. I have never experienced a game with such poor pacing. The game is already very long due to the length of the story, open world, side quests and so on. As I said, even ignoring everything but the main story, it took me about 33 hours. If you remove all the unnecessary padding, and I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, the game would probably have taken only 25 hours.

There isn't a single area where nothing is stretched. Almost no elevator in the game works directly. You have to suck in Mako, turn on the power, flip switches, throw crates, etc. to get it to work. But then it only goes up one floor and you need a new lift, which you have to reactivate using these methods, stretching everything again. The worst chapter in this area was definitely chapter 12, where you have to climb slowly, push crates, shimmy along a wall, balance over a beam, push a crate, etc.. All that stuff is so extremely slow. All these things are so extremely slow and they interrupt the whole flow of the game way to often.

The next thing that really hindered my enjoyment are the most of the changes they implemented. They take and throw so much out the window. The horror, the weirdness, and especially the subtlety - it all feels sanitised. The Game Design in general is completely baffling to me. Why does Chadley stop you every 5 seconds? Why does the world map have to have objectives everywhere instead of encouraging natural exploration? Why did we need a card game, and another upgrade menu, and party upgrades, and a crafting system, and world map pylons, and the world's slowest interaction buttons, etc., when FFVII is already a massive game. Putting all that stuff into the game just reduced the amount of work that went into the extremely important core elements of FFVII and the remake, like animation, graphics, performance, physics, etc. I also don't want to start with Dyne. They really butchered his arc so bad, it's laughable. There was no suspense, no sublety. We already knew that Barret didn't kill the people, cause we were able to see Dyne standing in the Elevator. There was no sense of horror, cause there was no blood and the corpses were nicely placed under a blue linen. Dyne is not a highly depressed and desperate man who has only one goal left, which is called revenge. No, now he is mentally ill, sees ghosts and is completely stuck in his ways. We don't have an emotional goodbye where he jumps off the cliff, no. We have, even though the whole other team is right outside the gates, suddenly we have a small army of soldiers there shooting and ultimately killing Dyne.

Dyne's last words are also completely contrary to the original. His last words here are "生きて、苦しめ!". This means something like: Live and suffer!

And what happens then? Literally a minute later - we have a boss fight against a comic relief villain in a giant frog-like mech.

But I think I can stop here, I know that those things in general are highly subjective. Many people like the open-world and the changes. I also liked a few changes, funnily enough the one where I rather saw some people expressing their displeasure. The finale. But as a long-time Kingdom Hearts fan, I'm probably used to this torture.

To conclude: The game wasn't bad, no question. But for me, far too many things were unnecessary and frustrating. The game was too long, the game threw the things I loved about the original out the window, and for me it is too much of what many would have called a "Ubisoft game" some time ago. I don't regret playing it, cause I have to say that the last 4 hours and a few small things were too good. However, if I calculate it as a percentage of the hours, I felt more frustration, annoyance and disappointment than fun and admiration while playing it.