It's rare that I love the first 15-20 hours of a game and then come to actively dislike it by the end, but unfortunately that’s what happened when I finished my 60 hour playthrough of Dragon's Dogma 2. What starts as a seemingly rich open world of interesting exploration and engaging friction turns into a repetitive chore of lifeless quests, copy and paste encounters, shallow combat, endless time wasting, and a terribly boring main story.

There is so much happening in this game and it's really hard to gather my thoughts into one cohesive review (that isn't 30 paragraphs long) so I'm gonna try my best to keep it as brief as possible.

In short, I loved that initial feeling of exploration, where the game prompts you to go out and hunt for secrets and new encounters. Looking at a precarious spot and saying "Hmm, I bet there's a token there" was fun, and led me to always attempt dangerous jumps or risky climbs. Seeking out all the nooks and crannies in the environment was initially a blast too, as the vast landscape is visually engaging, and has lots of layers (both figuratively and literally.) Watching your idiot pawns dive off cliffs unprompted, is both frustrating and funny, but usually worth it for the entertainment. And since fast travel is scarce, choosing your route wisely and having to find spots to make campfires felt like a nice way to extend your journeys, at the cost of using a camping resource of course. Only… that's not what happens. Because you have infinite camps, which means that camping is actively just more effective than returning to a town most of the time, since it's free and allows you to buff your character. Then you start to realize that while it's fun to collect those tokens, the rewards aren't great, and your final reward for collecting 220 (TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY) is total useless dog ass. Then while exploring you realize you're only ever gonna fight the same 3-5 enemy types over and over, with the occasional mini-boss (of which there are only about 3-5 types as well). And your rewards are mostly just crafting materials, with the rare item find usually being a worthless ring, or something I already had. And if you're like me, by this point you might say "Hmm this exploration is losing its luster, I should go check out more quests.” And when you do, you'll be treated to some extremely lame game design where you; walk to a character, talk to them, walk across the map to other characters, talk to them, walk back across the map to the first character, talk to them again, the end. Repeat endlessly for probably 2/3rds of all quests. And because there is so little gameplay interaction, it never feels like I'm actually involved either, I just feel like an errand boy. It also doesn’t help that many of these quests are not very interesting narratively, especially because you have extremely little input/decision making. And even when the quests are interesting, the game has no idea how to raise tension or bring something to a climax, usually stopping before any actual gameplay occurs, going into a short cutscene, and then the quest is over. There is a moment where the Captain gives you a speech about how “You need to wear a special getup to do this quest, but beware, this is a point of no return, so prepare yourself! We make for the ceremony!”, only for the game to enter a 30 second cutscene, have a small issue occur with your pawn, and then the Captain says “Guess we can’t attend now, sorry”, and then you get spat back out to run more errands.

To top it all off, the main story is incredibly uninteresting. It feeds you new details at a snail's pace, constantly repeating the same shit over and over, only for the endings of the game to disregard all of it without so much as a single cutscene to wrap it up. The entire game I was doing countless errands, running everywhere to gather enough “evidence” to weed out the evil plot and basically lead a coup to retake the throne for myself, and yet the game just ignores all of that shit. There is no coup, there is no comeuppance or explanation for the evil queen or the false ruler she had in place, no resolution for her son or anyone else in the palace, nothing. The game just simply shows you taking the throne and completely skips over all of what the game was building towards. It’s a pretty embarrassing attempt at storytelling.

Due to how bland the main story/quests are, it makes it clear that the focus was really on the world and the different systems at your disposal. But if the main focus is on me exploring, then why does every mission just retread lots of the same map space? If you send me on a mission across the map, I'm gonna explore that region until I reach my destination. But then when you send me back across that space MANY times later in the game… the fuck do you want me to do? The area is already explored, I'm not re-exploring it. So now it just feels like a bit of a chore to constantly travel back and forth across the map (even with fast travel). Which also makes me question what the fuck they were doing if they thought that 3-5 enemy types (3 during the day, 2 more at night) was gonna be enough for this bigass 40+ hour game. I'm not re-fighting the same goblins or lizards to get a few hundred XP when I can just run to the mission marker and get 50 times that. The main combat itself is also a bit too simple, as you can kinda just get in a rhythm of spamming the same shit over and over, but I’m not gonna lie and say it’s bad combat, just a bit too simple. Also doesn’t help that several of the classes are just significantly worse than others, meaning you really only have like 2 viable options that don’t suck ass.

Idk now i'm just rambling and this ended up being much longer than I wanted it to be, but this game is just all over the place. It was always gonna be a bit of a mess (even those who love it will agree) but it just sucks that even after all the time it took for them to essentially re-make the first game, this still feels like the first draft of a much better product buried deep inside. It is by no means a bad game, but it is an unbelievably mixed bag of a game that I certainly can't recommend if you care at all about storytelling. If you're more interested in exploration and systemic gameplay, then I can say the first 20 hours are pretty cool! If you don't mind paying $70 for that, then maybe it's worth it. For everyone else, best to wait on it. Also might give them the chance to make it not run like total dogshit (unlikely).

In 2012, I accepted DD1 as an unfinished game with incredible potential to be developed upon in the future. I don't know if I have the heart to accept that DD2 to be in the exact same state. The combat so good but everything else is not done or just bad. I don't think waiting for potential patches or DLC is going to fix the game.

I like different, brutally difficult things. I just don't get enough out of this one to be up for the punishment. Is it incredible at times? Yes absolutely. Is it worth putting up with the bugs and balancing WORSE than the first game? No.

I think I need all the DLC to be out, subtle cheats, and some mods to get the most out of this game. It is a huge bummer to even feel like I got duped into waiting for another unfinished, unfocused, unpolished game because the ingredients are here to make one of the finest games to ever exist. It was just cooked wrong.

this game ended up being a lot less in-depth than I imagined. I felt a majority of the quests didnt require much thought just walk & talk. Travel became so tedious after the 8th trip down the same road with the same dudes on it thank god combat saved this game hard. I made the mistake of starting magey boy but after switching some real fun began. It was easy to ignore how shallow the RPG elements were while murdering fools, I just wish the boss enemies had bigger balls to grab onto and punch. Anyway this game scratched my hack and slash monsters itch very well and not much else, true ending title reveal was hella cool but after the ENTIRE GAME cmon bruh. my ass doesn't want start ng+ just to walk across the world again 30 times I got brain blisters from that. Gonna let some dust settle before this little adventure again. FINAL THOUGHT, Man every motherfucker in the galaxy wanna go on a jaunt but don't wanna put out afterwords .. Like What are we even doing here This game is NOT HORNY ENOUGH

This game, let me tell you, it's so so stupid. It kinda reminds me of Japanese VNs that have a "life simulation" aspect, which basically means you can choose what your character does all week but instead of actually doing it yourself, you watch the calendar days go by and have half a cutscene once in a while. The humour of this game is absolutely atrocious, relying completely on outdated teen-lingo, and you know what? I love it. I do. I've been playing nonstop for the past 3h and i find it so nostalgic. Not that I played this when I was little but it oozes an early 2000s vibe that makes me appreciate this game much more than it deserves.
It's not a good simulator or sims clone and you're probably better off playing something else but it has something of a clumsy charm to it and while I doubt I'll play this for much longer, I'm actually really enjoying it at the moment.

Phenom doesn't add anything new to the on-the-court gameplay, except for a 2-on-2 mode very much like NBA Jam. Story mode now has an open-ish town, free roam aspect where you walk around town with your custom baller (and use your basketball to hit objects and find areas and secrets), partake in mini-games, side quests and main quests (basketball games). Cool aspect for a sports game, but comes off more tedious. Character customization is a lot better, with a ton more clothing options added. Unfortunately, I found that Story mode suffered from difficult matches as it progressed. Majority of matches are played in an arcade Mortal Kombat-ladder like format, which is cool, but much harder since they not only have higher difficulties and often annoying rulesets, but only give you one or a few continues. You can make it to the final opponent on a 6-opponent ladder, but lose and have no continues left and you must start the ladder over again. Fun game, but basically NBA Ballers 1.5 rather than a true sequel.

Dragon's Dogma II is a smoother but somehow a less full experience than Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

I've been thinking of how to "review" this game for at least 8 hours now, and it's all because whenever I think of something DD2 does good I remember that Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen did it equally well or even better which I know I shouldn't do because technically this isn't a sequel to Dark Arisen but a reimagination of the original Dragon's Dogma, but you can't just get the original anymore so I can only do a comparison to Dark Arisen.

What did DD2 bring to the table compared to DDDA: a better more interesting map, exploration is mostly fun, a vastly improved warrior vocation, overall combat feels smoother, 3¹ new races, better enemy and pawn² AI/pathfinding, neat pawn interactions like high-fives after battle and commenting of what other players who hired them did, some unique creatures like the Sphinx³, an ending that made me go "absolute cinema" at my screen, some very good-looking armors⁴, item use shortcuts, open-world being actually open meaning you can grab onto a griffin and just go flying and better⁵ graphics... I think that's it

What DD2 threw away from the table: Combat despite being smoother is less varied thanks to limiting vocations to only 4 skill slots instead of 3 per weapon, reduced vocations from bow & dagger users (strider, assassin & ranger) into dagger or bow (thief and archer), different arrows are only usable if a specific arrow skill is chosen for archer, sorcerers have fewer spells with no area debilitation spells like lassitude or miasma, dark and holy attributes are pretty much gone (supposedly a couple mage spells can do holy), 3 new vocations with 1 being a neat idea but useless (trickster), 1 being a mediocre melee with range (mystic spearhand) and 1 just to make the number bigger compared to DDDA (warfarer), ¹only 1 of the races is playable (beastren), ²While pawns seem smarter overall it feels like they don't really learn anything which is not helped by the fact that you choose your pawns' inclination from the creation screen with only 4 choices available, ³cool idea but very underutilized and unsatisfying end, ⁴armor got simplified into 4 slots because they didn't want all people to run same armors, yet it still happens thanks to there being 1 obviously better than rest option, post-game is very disappointing, and it's time-limited, ⁵thanks to TAA, DLSS and whatever else modern not native rendering tricks everything is either blurry or has ghosting...
AND TO TOP IT ALL OFF: the absolutely PATHETIC item, combining and tool systems. Did you know that in DDDA you could fill a flask with oil and either fill your lantern or equip it and throw it at an enemy causing them to get the tarred debilitation which causes it to take double fire damage and catching fire instantly or how you could combine items into a throwblast equip it and throw it at enemies to do big damage OR at an ore deposit so it breaks all the ore off, and you can pick up the ores without mining? What about combining rotten meat and foreign knife to get backfat oil that restores 600 stamina? Magick medal + ancient ore into monk's periapt?! The only tools that remain are grimoires and lesser versions of periapts that don't seem to stack. I was shocked and stared at my screen with my mouth open for at least 5 minutes when I first tried to equip lantern oil to throw at an enemy and there was... nothing... what downgrade.

There is a pretty known claim that the original Dragons's Dogma was barely what it was fully planned to be [https://imgur.com/a/h4nMo] and I truly feel like Dragon's Dogma II has experienced the exact same thing despite Itsuno claiming that his vision has been realized and if this game ever gets an expansion you know he was straight up lying.
So while the game isn't awful, it has really tough competition at its $70 price while its earlier entry exists fully playable, has more stuff, feels overall more complete and is almost always on sale for only 5 DOLLARS.