This game is wild, because you can be in the most dire situation humanly possible. Your party is half-dead, you have no potions, your health only regenerates to like half cause you haven't slept in three days and it's night. Then out of nowhere, The Rock will show up, force you into a mandatory conversation where he spouts one of seven Shakespearian lines about how good at killing things he is, then proceed to absolutely decimate any enemy in the nearby area and walk off like nothing happened.
As for everything around your chance meetings with The Rock, Dragon's Dogma 2 is such a tough game to weigh up, because I completely appreciate and quite like how Capcom had a distinct creative vision and didn't budge on it in favour of ease of access. As my film teacher told me back in a uni seminar: "Never judge anything on what you want it to be. Judge it on what it is." And for better or worse, this is Capcom asking you to buy into their core concept of a sprawling adventure, accept it for what it is and understand that the whole idea is the game's more about the journey than the destination. It wants you to interact with the world, so it removes fast travel. It wants you to collaborate with other players, so it subs out fun companions for player-created party members. It wants you to engage with its quests, so it makes them easily failable and often gated by time limits. It's a game with intent, and it's not bothered if you don't like that.
And I think that largely makes for a unique experience that's well worth at least dabbling in to see if it clicks with you. For me, it definitely did. Dragon's Dogma 2's best quality is that it's not about flashy game mechanics or turning everything into a stimulation factory. It wants you to meaningfully engage with it, and so focuses on well-built, inherently fun systems that are great to experiment with. The physics system and the climbing mechanics are dope, and learning how to use them in tandem to take down colossal enemies allows you to make your own big cinematic setpieces that are entirely organic. When you stumble across an ogre and a dragon slugging it out in the open world like some royalty-free Kong vs Godzilla movie, and you join in and start getting to work just as a griffin shows up out of nowhere and decides to yeet you halfway across the map, the whole thing just clicks into place and you fully get it.
But, unfortunately, a lot of its rigid core tenants make for a game that can be MEGA tedious. If you don't want me to use fast travel, why is walking around this world so frustrating? Why can I not walk for a single minute without having to murder an entire civilization of goblins? Why not give me a horse, or add some satisfying traversal methods for my vocation? Better yet, if you're going to lock fast-travel behind carts I have to pay for, make it so 9 times out of 10, the cart isn't just obliterated by a skeleton leaning against it for two seconds. Genuinely, I'd love to see the ox cart company's insurance plan, cause those motherfuckers can't go a day without seven carts exploding.
If you want me to team up with players through the pawn system, give them some damn sauce. Let me customize as much about their personality as their appearance. If side quests are so important, make them more fleshed out, interesting and worth completing, because half of them are just some girl saying "hey, can you bring me some flowers" and then you go to a quest marker, bring them back and she goes "oh cool, thanks man."
It's funny, because when you reach the endgame, it kind of feels like Dragon's Dogma finally hits the nail on the head of what this could've been with a little more refinement and less focus on an arbitrary and very messy story. It throws you into a visually interesting world with some general objectives you need to complete before an invisible timer hits zero, and you know what, it was the most fun I had in the entire game. It stops playing the disapproving parent who's banned me from fast travelling for being too TikTok-brained and just says, here's a truckload of teleportation stones, some bosses that you can fight in any order and some general quests you can complete in between. That's how you make me want to explore. Not by having my generic ChatGPT AI companion hound me to go find a chest with some grass in it because he's super gassed he found it in a random other player's game.
And so, yes. Dragon's Dogma 2 isn't going to be for everyone. Generally, my recommendation kinda goes like this: If you hate monotony, you're going to detest every minute. If you want a big RPG that values exploration over everything else, you're going to fuck with it hard. I think I fall somewhere in between personally, but overall, I had a fun ol' time. It's kind of hard to hate a game where wizard Lizzo can just show up out of nowhere, join your party, get a rampant dragon disease and then go on a murder spree in your local city, forcing you to walk around reviving every single person for hours on end.
As for everything around your chance meetings with The Rock, Dragon's Dogma 2 is such a tough game to weigh up, because I completely appreciate and quite like how Capcom had a distinct creative vision and didn't budge on it in favour of ease of access. As my film teacher told me back in a uni seminar: "Never judge anything on what you want it to be. Judge it on what it is." And for better or worse, this is Capcom asking you to buy into their core concept of a sprawling adventure, accept it for what it is and understand that the whole idea is the game's more about the journey than the destination. It wants you to interact with the world, so it removes fast travel. It wants you to collaborate with other players, so it subs out fun companions for player-created party members. It wants you to engage with its quests, so it makes them easily failable and often gated by time limits. It's a game with intent, and it's not bothered if you don't like that.
And I think that largely makes for a unique experience that's well worth at least dabbling in to see if it clicks with you. For me, it definitely did. Dragon's Dogma 2's best quality is that it's not about flashy game mechanics or turning everything into a stimulation factory. It wants you to meaningfully engage with it, and so focuses on well-built, inherently fun systems that are great to experiment with. The physics system and the climbing mechanics are dope, and learning how to use them in tandem to take down colossal enemies allows you to make your own big cinematic setpieces that are entirely organic. When you stumble across an ogre and a dragon slugging it out in the open world like some royalty-free Kong vs Godzilla movie, and you join in and start getting to work just as a griffin shows up out of nowhere and decides to yeet you halfway across the map, the whole thing just clicks into place and you fully get it.
But, unfortunately, a lot of its rigid core tenants make for a game that can be MEGA tedious. If you don't want me to use fast travel, why is walking around this world so frustrating? Why can I not walk for a single minute without having to murder an entire civilization of goblins? Why not give me a horse, or add some satisfying traversal methods for my vocation? Better yet, if you're going to lock fast-travel behind carts I have to pay for, make it so 9 times out of 10, the cart isn't just obliterated by a skeleton leaning against it for two seconds. Genuinely, I'd love to see the ox cart company's insurance plan, cause those motherfuckers can't go a day without seven carts exploding.
If you want me to team up with players through the pawn system, give them some damn sauce. Let me customize as much about their personality as their appearance. If side quests are so important, make them more fleshed out, interesting and worth completing, because half of them are just some girl saying "hey, can you bring me some flowers" and then you go to a quest marker, bring them back and she goes "oh cool, thanks man."
It's funny, because when you reach the endgame, it kind of feels like Dragon's Dogma finally hits the nail on the head of what this could've been with a little more refinement and less focus on an arbitrary and very messy story. It throws you into a visually interesting world with some general objectives you need to complete before an invisible timer hits zero, and you know what, it was the most fun I had in the entire game. It stops playing the disapproving parent who's banned me from fast travelling for being too TikTok-brained and just says, here's a truckload of teleportation stones, some bosses that you can fight in any order and some general quests you can complete in between. That's how you make me want to explore. Not by having my generic ChatGPT AI companion hound me to go find a chest with some grass in it because he's super gassed he found it in a random other player's game.
And so, yes. Dragon's Dogma 2 isn't going to be for everyone. Generally, my recommendation kinda goes like this: If you hate monotony, you're going to detest every minute. If you want a big RPG that values exploration over everything else, you're going to fuck with it hard. I think I fall somewhere in between personally, but overall, I had a fun ol' time. It's kind of hard to hate a game where wizard Lizzo can just show up out of nowhere, join your party, get a rampant dragon disease and then go on a murder spree in your local city, forcing you to walk around reviving every single person for hours on end.