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).

Figure I should finally just log this even though I do plan on playing more.

It's a really engaging shooter that does a fantastic job putting the focus on cooperative work, by using a biting satire to wrap us all into propagandized patriotism under the guise of DEMOCRACY!!! YEAAAHHHH!!! HOORAH BROTHERS!!!

The tight controls, great gunplay, and hectic encounters obviously help too, and the game being expertly designed for both maximum money up and maximum funny up is just icing on the cake.