Dragon's Dogma 2 Reviews

Quite possibly the most disappointing sequel I've played. It does not hold a candle to the original base game, (except if you're playing warrior as they get access to more skills than the original). Less skills, both equippable and otherwise, ruins what grace I might have given to the game's still quite fun combat system and while frankly DD2 sports a much better world than DD1 (love bakbattahl), as the core that actually made DD1 an underrated gem, the combat, is severely diluted I cannot in good faith recommend this game if you've played the first game. If you haven't played the first game, then it is fun enough to grab it on sale, at least.

Full of bugs. Game made a mistake during escort, it ended up breaking, had to go back 5hours

I almost never leave short reviews but I really liked a lot of what this game did. Sadly, 1 real patch in, essentially, a year since they launched and the game still runs like sh*t. Unacceptable from a company like CAPCOM that makes as much money as they do. Disgraceful.

Last CAPCOM game I ever purchase after developer Mr. Itsuno was allowed to lie about fame features "Over 1,000 characters inhabit the world, each with their own unique stories and motivations." Liars. This game is absolute trash and almost none of the NPCs do anything at all.

OK so this game is a massive mixed bag. A lot of "if it ain't broke don't fix it." For example, neither the archer nor the thief has a double jump. Thief gets a skill for it. Which takes up a skill slot. Which the devs decided to limit to 4 from 6. Now, it's technically one more skill slot for each weapon since they limited all classes to to one weapon and the expansion of core skills. Again, if it ain't broke don't fix it. But to be fair, the combat is not the biggest drawback. In fact it's where the game shines and it can be argued that this combat system has more of an emphasis on party combat which is fine. The combat, the visuals and the world are all stellar with only those minor gripes about the combat. The micro transactions don't intrude in the game from what I can see. Completely optional. And since there aren't any competitive elements to the game the fact that you can buy wakestones and rift crystals doesn't matter. Nobody has to buy them. I used my wakestone that I got from the delux edition on a random soldier and I got another one within a 15 or so hours of gameplay by looting wakestone shards. The rift crystals are earned by killing monsters, fixing riftstones and of course having your pawn summoned. Pawns of equal level don't cost anything. The biggest use of this currency is in the pawn shop in the pawn guild. But they're not hard to save up over time. I don't agree with the characterizations of the npcs as boring, I think they're fine. Now for complaints without being charitable: Forced dialogue is INSANE in this game. In the first game you were maybe forced to talk to an NPC (meaning approaching them automatically disables player action and initiates dialogue) at like 5 scripted events where in order to progress the main story you literally have to talk to that person anyway. In this game every npc with a quest to offer will stop you, force you to talk to them and to either accept or deny their quest. Pawns will stop you to offer their services even when you have a full balanced party. This can't be disabled and let me tell you, when it happens over and over and over again it is unbelievably annoying. Just put the stupid quest bubbles above their heads and stop interrupting my gameplay! This right here is 75% of the reason for me not recommending the game. It might sound small but I'm telling you it's way more annoying than it sounds. Pawns have way too much free will in this game. The amount of times my pawns have just ran off when they're on Follow Me orders because I got a new quest was staggering. One of them will immediately start running off, announce that they know where to go and then get approval by one of the other pawns. The game just automatically switches them to the Go command. Excuse me, I decide where we go. I decide our formation. I decide who leads who where. Who played the first game and thought, "Man I really wish the pawns would just do whatever they want." It's annoying from a gameplay perspective and doesn't make sense from a lore perspective either. But does this newfound freedom make the pawns any smarter? No! Not at all! Gravity still remains the bane of all pawns. Either they fall off of cliffs and die from fall damage or they fall into water and die. This happens constantly. This is seriously going to come down to personal preference, but the quest objectives are too often vague and the markers are too often just big yellow circles where it's not clear what you're actually supposed to do. I haven't found a quest I actually needed to look up a guide for but lots of frustration. Not an issue I had with the first game. Now, the first game did have multiple conclusions to many quests and the criteria for getting one outcome over another wasn't always clear. But completing the quest was never the sort of frustrating guessing game or mad scrambling around an area with no idea what to do that it is in this game. It was always clear in this game's prequel how to clear the quest. Not sure why they thought this was a welcome change. It's not. At least not for me. This game seems to have optimization issues. The game crashed over and over and over again on the character creation before I found a fix online which was to lower all settings to the lowest, lower the fps to 60, turn off vsync and all post processing/other graphical options, create your character, play an absolutely disgusting looking game until you can create your pawn, save and quit to the main menu, reload the game and then restore your previous graphical settings. That'st to get past the Character Creation! Now thankfully it's been running perfectly after that but I actually thought I was going to have return this game AGAIN because of this. This is just a pet peeve, the npcs and the pawns are sassy! lol Now, for whatever reason you can pick up almost anybody and chuck them into stuff once without much consequence. So if, say, I kill a bunch of goblins attacking an wagon on the road only for the wagon guards to threaten me I can just chuck them into each other and scurry off. Could I just sheathe my weapons? Yes. Will I? No >:3 All in all I mostly like the game but for the wrong reasons. I like the game in the ways that it's like the first one. Fun, fast-paced combat, a wonderful sense of progression and a vast world to explore. The graphical update merely adds on to this. The biggest issue is that they changed or added things that do not improve but harm the player experience. The only addition that I can say is wholly positive is the introduction of the Mystic Spearhead (cool class) and the Illusionist (interesting class). RIP Assassin class though. All in all I'd say wait for a sale and don't buy special editions of this game at a mark up. There's a lot to enjoy here, particularly for people who didn't play the first game, but also for long time fans of Dragon's Dogma. I do recommend the game just not at full price.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game. Climbing on monsters will never get old. My favorite moment was flying on a griffin's back across the map to its nest in an unexplored area. And the medusa is cool as hell. I loved the exploration, the story was interesting enough, and the pawn system can be hilarious. The game is fun the entire time. I ran the game at max settings locked at 144hz, and only saw performance issues when fighting the serpents in the unmoored world. I loved the organic exploration, and how you happen upon quests. The vocation system is fantastic and lets you play around with different weapons and vocations instead of getting locked into a class like other RPGs. It's very similar to the original Dragon's Dogma, which I think is a good thing. Hopefully this gets a large expansion like Dark Arisen. As far as haters go, notice they all seem to have played 40+ hours in their reviews. No sane person would spend that much time on a video game they didn't have fun with.

Idk why so many people hate this game. It’s genuinely a fun experience. The story isn’t amazing or anything, but it does its job. And the side quests are super entertaining. There’s also lots of quirky little details that make the world feel unique. Not to mention, the combat is excellent, if a bit repetitive once you figure out specific enemy weaknesses. Basically, ignore the reviews and judge the game on its own merit, not other people’s expectations of what they wanted it to be. TL;DR Would recommend. Solid game.

Edit/Major side note: Check out the edit at the bottom for a very interesting insight I learned about Dragon's Dogma 2. ORIGINAL REVIEW Dragon's Dogma 2 is the most mediocre tease of a game I’ve ever played. The developers had some great ideas, but the cool flashy combat and immersive features are very shallow and wear off quickly. This game seems like it has a lot of potential but it’s just an empty boring adventure. Not worth $70. This game is very strange, because at first glance everything looks appealing, but it’s all shallow, gets old fast, and there’s little reason to do anything in this game. COMBAT At first glance, the classes (vocations) provide good variety to your combat styles which are the highlight of this game. The vocations and combat are fun, flashy, cool, and powerful. However, the pace of progression is off. You will max out your vocation’s progress super fast and realize there really isn’t more to your vocation. That’s it--you’ve reached the peak of your vocation not even half way through the game. Sure, you can switch to a different vocation, but it feels weird that further enjoyment of class progression is only obtainable from stopping the progression of your current class to play a different class. I like mastering one class at a time during an entire play through; then, if the game is good enough, I’ll do another playthrough on a different class. Classes aren't that deep here--you'll master it in a few hours. Monsters are fun to fight and watching your pawns fight along side you can be really cool. But what isn’t cool is fighting a griffin for 10 minutes and then it just decides to fly away randomly never to return, wasting both your time and resources. EXPLORATION/TRAVEL From the dev interviews and trailers, I was under the impression exploration and travel was going to be innovative and immersive. In one interview I saw, that was literally the director’s inspiration for this game—that getting from point A to B should be just as fun as when you get to point B. At first glance, it’s cool how monsters and NPC’s appear along the way and you have to deal with them. But then you realize a few hours in, the formula is the same every time. You will see the same few things along the way over and over again. I like how dark it gets at night, personally, which requires me to turn on a lantern—it makes nighttime gameplay more immersive. Dungeons don’t have anything interesting. Very little loot, no puzzles, same enemies. Skyrim has way better dungeons. The map icons are not positioned on the mini map accurately so it’s annoying to find things. Your pawns will ping points of interest all the time, which at first is convenient, but you’ll quickly realize those pings are just ladders that lead to nothing worthwhile or herbs you don’t need most of the time. I love exploring every nook and cranny in games, but the moment I knew I was done exploring in this game was when I explored a huge cool looking half-sunken castle, finally found a chest, and all that was in it were a miner’s shirt and laborer’s trousers worth nothing, the kind of items you would find in an early game barrel or something. LOOT At first glance, it’s fun to find chests in all kinds of places--sometimes you have to traverse cautiously, find a hidden path, or rely on your pawn’s info to find it. Then you realize, the last 50 chests you’ve opened all kind of had the same stuff: money, herbs, mundane weapons/armor you’ve seen everywhere, or miscellaneous items you’ll barely ever use. In 30 hours of gameplay, I have found and changed out my weapon/armor once, maybe twice. You will find a lot of the same weapons/armor in the wilderness as the merchants in cities. Sometimes you’ll encounter wandering merchants in the wilderness—cool! Nah, they have the same inventory as merchants back in town, or have things you can find easily in the wilderness on your travels. GRAPHICS At first glance, the world building, scenery, foliage, etc., all look gorgeous. Then you look at the ocean, wondering if your graphics settings are off, and realize it’s actually fuzzy and looks like old PS2 water graphics/physics. And then you’ll Google it and realize the game is poorly optimized. It's not just you or your PC. THE "WATER" For some reason, when you walk through knee-deep water, it turns red and starts eating you. The first time, you might freak out, wonder why this exists, and then tell yourself maybe it has to do with some interesting lore. Then it just gets annoying when you’re crossing a short river, die, and lose some pawns because they don't know what they're doing. I was fighting a dragon one time, fun fight for 10 minutes, and then I watched it back into the water, and got consumed in 5 seconds by the water. All that time, effort, pawn revives, and wakestones wasted because I couldn’t loot it. On the bright side, I got some XP. STORY/QUESTS At first glance, you’ll get into the game and watch some interesting cutscenes. Then realize, quest after quest, it drags on with very few interesting plot twists or updates. So far, I’ve learned very little more than what I already saw in the trailer. Some quests are fun, voice acting can be good, but most of it is pretty redundant and boring. Some quests are designed to force you to actually pay attention or think, which can be great for immersion, but sometimes they are simply poorly designed, confusing, and force you to have to Google it. NPC INTERACTIONS At first glance, they interact with you in immersive ways—saying things as they run past you, stop to tell you something, or run up to you to ask for help. Then you realize, the NPC you just saved from wolves and goblins, walks off, doesn’t say anything to you, and when you interact with them they just say “piss off”. When you speak to NPC’s anywhere, they say random irrelevant things with no context to you, the surrounding area, or nearby events. The first time I saw that I could revive a dead NPC, I used my precious wakestone on them, hoping to have an interesting interaction, only for them to get up, walk away from me aimlessly, and tell me to piss off when I spoke to them. FINAL THOUGHTS Everything about this game is so weird, because you’ll feel like it has potential, and you’ll anticipate a great immersive experience, but it falls short and doesn't feel good. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is like a juicy looking carrot on a stick from the outside, except when you happen to get a bite, you realize it’s just moldy on the inside. Honestly, after playing this, I feel like playing Skyrim because I know I’ll enjoy it more than this. EDIT: So, after watching this guy's YouTube video, "Dragon's Dogma 2 Is Not what You Think It Is" (link below), the vision of this game is actually incredibly interesting and it's execution is a masterpiece. I highly recommend watching it (major spoilers though in the second half). After watching this video, I would rate Dragon's Dogma 2 a 10/10 masterpiece conceptually and 5/10 enjoyably. And, this game was intentionally designed to be both at the same time. It's wild. If you're curious why, watch the video, but here's my super brief summary: This game is designed to be an analogy paralleling the video game industry and freewill. Hideaki Itsuno (game director and designer) wanted to express something quite powerful, poetic, and sad all at the same time through Dragon's Dogma 2. I learned that everything in this game was designed intentionally, even the parts that are bad, and it was for a reason. For that reason (with more context explained in the video), this is a 10/10 masterpiece. Unfortunately, as a player rating a game on how fun it is and whether it's worth someone time to play, it's like a 5/10. Video link: https://youtu.be/8xtQ2STDEq8?si=NNwfjBz4w-rWJO6k

gameplay is really awesome, but what a dumb lore and story

Really enjoying this game. I have a few minor gripes but overall highly recommend. First and foremost, disregard the negative review bombing talking about microtransactions and pay to win. None of the paid content is needed, or even really beneficial if you're sensible with resources. I expect they were added in for the folks that complained about the same fast travel currency (ferrystones) used in dragons dogma one being too skimpy lol. But you can buy and find plenty of these items in game, same with the camping sets. That aside, here are my pros: -Really enjoyed the story, despite criticism elsewhere. It follows a unique concept that expands on interesting points set out in the first dragons dogma. Sure, it could be fleshed out a little bit more, but a lot of the world is explored through sidequests (many of which arent indicated in the quest panel, and require you to explore or listen to prompts given by NPCs). If you rush the story you won't get much out of the game. Adding to this, you can get a "false" ending if you don't consider your actions and blindly rush main quests, and this ending is quite anticlimactic. I can see why people would be upset if they thought that was the actual end of the game. -Pawn system. The allied NPCs seem way more developed than dragons dogma one. They can be a bit crunchy with terrain navigation, but in combat, they seem fairly proficient with lots of customisation and flexibility. Will even run and catch you, saving me a wakestone (revive token) many times, if you fall from a height and theyre nearby. They will also comment on various things going on around you, your party composition, and learn gameplay tips that aid you when assisting other online players. -Combat. I love dragons dogma combat. Its fast paced, immersive, challenging and strategic without being ball bustingly difficult. I also love the feature of being able to climb on larger creatures to target weakspots, that may have knock on effects for the enemy. for instance, cutting or burning the feathers on griffons limits their ability to fly and changes the way they fight. The environment is also adds a new dynamic to fights, being able to lure creatures into traps or loose rocks to deal extra damage. Although some intelligent enemies will do the same to you. - Classes: The game offers a plethora of classes, many of which will alter your playstyle, adding to the replayability of NG+. I won't go into this too much, but it feels a lot more dynamic and unique than skyrim-esq specialisations that just change how well you use a weapon. There are also some new classes/vocations unique to DD2, my favourite being the Mystic Spearhand. As for my cons: -Enemy types. Yep, like the other reviewers, I did get a bit tired of fighting goblins and harpies. Each area has a new goblinoid/bird creature thats a bit harder than the last, but the fighting style is mostly the same. It would also be nice to see a return of some of the classic DD1/DA large beasts like the Hydra, Cockatrice and Wyverns. -Scaling: Aside from the drakes that are crazy hard to fight (substantially harder than end game content, IMO). Once you hit a certain tier of gear, a lot of fights do get a bit trivial. I've heard this doesn't improve much in NG+ but havent tested this much yet. -Vocation beef: Why did you remove Strider, my beloved vocation? I was devastated. Aside from this, it can also be a bit frustrating early game with the melee based classes trying to fight flying creatures, as your ranged options are extremely limited until you get more progression into a class. -Romances: very underdone, similar to DD1. The two "default" romance options do have an extra side quest, which will make them forcibly love you...But it feels very shallow. More quests and interactions would be nice relating to romanceable characters, as well as more options.