I finally beat Dragon's Dogma 2 and I'll start off here by saying that the drama that came with this game at launch was all bullshit and none of it mattered. It has already been forgotten. Except PC performance which I totally understand.

I'll try to be honest with myself because while I do really think DD2 is a great game, it has some glaring flaws that I couldn't ignore by the time my 80+ hours were over.

First, the combat. I seriously love it. I thought all the classes were fun in different ways and I love how messy and chaotic it can be. It's so much more weighty and "realistic" than your average action RPG. I can't explain how incredible it feels to first fight a griffin, have it soar into the sky with you on it, and bring it crashing to the ground for a kill.

However, the game is pretty lacking in enemy variety I would say. While I was still having fun fighting later in the game, the fifth dragon or the twentieth ogre did get pretty old.

The game still does the limited fast travel, which by end game opens up much more. But you still spend a lot of the time being restricted from which cities you can teleport to and from. I think this leads to an interesting dilemma for the game and it's this:

Wandering around and exploring is literally 10/10

Trying to get to a certain place to finish quests or side missions is 0/10

And this all feeds together because by about half way through the game I couldn't have cared less about the story or really any of the characters in the game. This meant that when I did try to buckle down and make some progress, I was just trying to get it over with so I could go back to exploring on my own. Then on your way to do some boring side quest, the tenth cyclops you've fought shows up and it's just like... ugh. So no matter how fun the combat is, it will get tedious when you're sent off to fight another griffin so that some idiot can sketch it or whatever. Like, who cares.

I'm just rambling now sorry, but overall I do think DD2 is great. It's just a game that shines best at the beginning. The first 40 hours were absolutely incredible. But not everyone is going to have the patience to stick it through to the end.