Pre warning: I have not finished this game yet.

Ok I am finally back on the backlog train after being completely derailed by balatro. This was the game I was playing concurrently with it. This is an overall fairly enjoyable game that I would only recommend to people who are willing to work hard for the fun they can get out of a game.

This is probably the most important thing I can say in this review, dragon’s dogma 2 makes you work to extract the enjoyment out of it. It is the product of a creative sticking to their vision even though it goes against many of the tropes and ideas that modern games are built upon. For instance, you have almost certainly heard this by now but this is an open world game with no easy to access fast travel mechanics. The game does have fast travel via ferrystones and Oxcarts, but these both have stipulations that mean you won’t always have access to them. Hence walking to and from places to finish quests will be a large part of your experience in this game. I don’t completely hate this, it means you have to be very thoughtful with the order in which you do things and have to think logistically about resources and where/when to use them. Difficulty and obstacles are always a challenge for developers to balance. Too much difficulty and the player gives up but too little and the player will not respect the game or beat it too easy and move on.

Dragon’s dogma instead opts to those multiple wrenches at your gameplay experience that force you to pay close attention to what is going on around you. For instance much ado has been made over the dragon’s plague mechanic where your pawn’s can become sick and if you go to sleep when they are sick, well they can destroy a whole village worth of NPCs effectively hard locking you out of quest progression and ending your time with the game. Personally I love this, even though you are playing a game I appreciate a game not completely validating you, life won’t completely validate you. Even though you might be playing for some escapism, I personally prefer the emotional experience of being humbled by a game. Dragon’s dogma is filled with an uncanny indifference towards the player. It’s filled with much uncanny awkwardness in general. When I played the original dd, I thought to myself there is no way this was intended to be this awkward and weird of a game. I was completely wrong, dd2 shows that the vision was completely intentional. Pawns are in someways like robotic children, they say words but with no feeling around them, they incessantly babble, but they are always helpful. Then there is the FMV meat cooking videos. The fact that you can pick up and carry NPCs to certain locations to retrigger their quests. This is a very video gamey video game. Something the medium has lost touch with in many ways.

So yeah dragon’s dogma 2 isn’t for everyone. I myself will have to come back to it someday.

Finally, a backlog breaker. This is probably going to destroy my desire to play any other games for a while. I have long had obsessions with rougelike games. Binding of isaac and slay the spire both managed to capture inordinate amounts of my gaming time. Maybe on the same level as street fighter and other fighting games in general.

I was extremely skeptical about this game upon initally seeing it. It's just poker and cards I thought to myself. But I took a chance because slay the spire and inscryption showed me that deck builders and rougelikes can an incredibly engrossing combination(also I had a friend recommend it).

I have absolutely no regrets, the way a lot of people talk about vampire survivors is how I feel about this game. It is visual, auditory, sensory joy. When I take a run my mind is awash with potential systems I can tweak to solve the ever daunting goal of the game(which in this case is to finish 8 antes of cards a series of 3 games with different challenges).

There is something about the clustering of strategies, the immense difficulty and constant encourage to keep trying and the myriad of systems and how they work together that is so so wonderful. I have always had a mind for statistics(I worked as a data analyst for a couple years) this game rewards understanding of statistics and critical thinking. All you are really doing is organizing poker hands with powerups but the amount of ways the games powerups allow you to do that is just atonishing. The game has a shop that you can access in the middle of the game and in that you find the main way you go about acquiring power in a run which can take you anywhere from 2-3 hours(possibly shorter if I can get more efficient at playing this game). The game has both temporary and permanent powerups. The temporary powerups coming in 2 flavors: the arcana cards and the joker cards. Arcana cards are single use, they affect the money you spend or the cards you are playing, joker cards can be held in a hand of 5 and as long as you hold them you can use their power(the powers can range from being able to make straights with gaps like 1 to 3 can be considered a straight or adding multipliers to hands with certain conditions met like a hand with diamonds). The games permanent powers come in 2 forms as planatary cards and vouchers. The vouchers are the most expensive items in the game and provide a permenant bonus and the planetary cards gives bonuses to which hands you play.

I took the time to explain a system because this game doesn't just have that it has other systems as well and they all work together to create a meta that even the creator of the game says he does not have completely figured out.

I think this game is a wonderful testament to what can be possible even with the most seemingly simple ingrediants.

Man I am kinda disappointed in myself for not being able to finish this one.

First I tried balanced mode and I kept getting my ass whooped then I switched to explorer and then to story and kept losing and I decided to pack it in.

I really like this game, I think I built my character and team very poorly. At chapter 4 they said you are supposed to be level 13 and I was level 9 basically soft locking me out of completion.

This game is the game Larian needed to make before they did baldur’s gate 3. In many ways it’s better than bg3, I think the combat can be at times much more interesting but I was so much more motivated to do better in bg3. I really put in the research into that game.

No excuses, I just suck and should have tried harder. Oh well.