Review | Dragon’s Dogma 2

Dragon’s Dogma 2 finds you in the role of the Arisen.  You have been chosen by an Ancient Dragon to fight it to the death and stop the world from being destroyed.  It is Capcom’s take on what if Monster Hunter met a really basic version of The Elder Scrolls Oblivion.  For over thirty hours I hacked, slashed, and magicked my way to glory.  I enjoyed the first title, but I adore the second.

The Premise

As the title begins you appear to be crowned as the new King of the the land.  Things fade to black and you awaken as a slave, working away in a mine.  As fortune would have it you are the Arisen and this mine is full of Pawns.  They are beings capable of traveling between worlds and are fiercely loyal to the Arisen of each land.  With their help, you’ll escape and work your way through two warring kingdoms. 

A plot is afoot to try and end this dragon v. arisen cycle without you and you’ll have to navigate politics and feelings alike as you run across farmlands, deserts, and all manor of beautiful vistas.  Dragon’s Dogma 2 is first and foremost an action game.  There are light RPG mechanics, many of them feeling right at home from the Monster Hunter games.  You’ll rarely make choices in dialogue, instead, everything feels linear outside of a few key decisions.  Even then I never felt fully locked in if I made a mistaken choice, though the game does not let you save on your own.  Every major action leads to an autosave for your only file.

Early on you’ll be in the medieval Europe-style kingdom before working your way to a more middle-eastern themed one.  They have been at war with one another for a while, though lately, it’s more cold war than one filled with outright conflict.  I’d advise taking your time early on to learn the game’s many systems if you never played the first title.  There is a lot to learn here and as you progress in the story you’ll hit various quests that require quickly being completed or else you fail them forever.  The main thing to know is you’re the chosen one, and your end goal is to kill the Dragon that has selected you to be its foe.  How you go about that can lead to multiple endings, and as any fan of the first game knows there was only one “true” ending in that title.

The Arisen and their Pawns

Dragon’s Dogma 2 begins with you creating your main character.  While you can change up their makeup and hairstyle later this is a set-in-stone choice as far as body shape and face is concerned.  It’s a deep creation system that allows you to make some beautiful and a lot of hilariously ugly combinations of humans or Beastren.  After the game’s introductory tutorial area, you are guided to a riftstone.  These allow you to summon one main and two-temporary Pawns.

Pawns are your party in Dragon’s Dogma 2, a game that has no online multiplayer.  Instead, you’ll create one main pawn who will accompany you throughout the game and hire two initial pawns who are either generated by Capcom or other player’s created main Pawns.  It’s a fantastic system that encourages experimentation and constant change as Pawns cannot level while with you outside of your main one.  The game has 10 total vocations for you to choose from and the Pawns can be six of these (we’ll hit on them all later).  Finding your favorite combo of class-types is key to the game’s combat, though a Mage is pretty much always required as the party’s healer.

One of my favorite parts of the Pawn system is how key their skills and knowledge can be to any quest.   If you use a pawn that has completed a quest before they can guide you directly to where you need to go, as otherwise, the game is happy to simply give you a text prompt of where something might be and dare you to figure the rest out.  There is a race that can only be spoken with if you have a Pawn that happens to speak their language as well, and they are damned useful for the most part in combat.  While pathing or enemy attacks can lead to their deaths occasionally, thanks to the game’s excellent physics systems, they are top-tier AI partners otherwise.

To keep you from being able to summon in a far higher level Pawn that can break the game’s progression you’ll need Rift Crystals to summon in any pawn that is higher level than your character.  To earn these Crystals you can either find them in the environment or earn them when your Pawn is used by other players and returns to you after a night’s rest.

Vocations

Dragon’s Dogma 2 has ten distinct vocations, they are:

• Fighter
• Archer
• Thief
• Magick Archer
• Mystic Spearhand
• Mage
• Warrior
• Trickster
• Warfarer
• Sorcerer

Pawns can use:

• Archer
• Fighter
• Warrior
• Thief
• Mage
• Sorceror

The Vocation system allows you to instantly change between skill sets in any major city as you please.  Four are available at the start, two unlock via a quest and the remaining four require you to do a questline with an NPC that is located somewhere out in the world.  The game does a good job of explaining each Vocation in the game so I won’t bother here.  Just know that they determine which weapons, armor, and skills you will have available to you.  The most important is the mage, as they are able to heal party members with one base and other various spells.  I almost always ran with at least one Mage and Fighter in my party as they are the classic Healer and Tank combo.  I preferred playing as a Sorceror and Mystic Spearman and would have either a ranged or melee to compliment me depending on my choice.  By the end of my 30+ hours in my initial playthrough, I had unlocked 7 of the classes and played a fair amount of all of them.

It can be tough to keep your gear up to snuff with each.  While there is some crossover in similar style Vocations a lot of the best gear in the game is tied to just one.  To get this gear you’ll mostly need to buy it with in-game gold, though some can be found either in loot chests or by defeating certain enemies.  Each of the four unlockable Vocations that require you to find a specific NPC tend to give a great weapon at the end of their short quest chains.

Dragon’s Dogma 2’s gear system is mostly tied to gold and NPC drops to first purchase and then upgrade your weapons and armor.  You’ll need to have both The Arisen and your Pawn as geared as possible to keep the game’s difficulty in check.  Thankfully, that means going out and exploring its gigantic map as you slay hundreds of foes along the way.

Hack ‘n Slash Greatness

Dragon’s Dogma 2’s best feature is its physics-based combat system.  This is no Souls-like, it’s much closer to Capcom’s own Monster Hunter series.  X is your main attack, Y is a unique one per subclass, and the right bumper varies greatly depending on your chosen Vocation.  As a Mage  X is a weak magical bolt.  Y casts a bubble of healing for all allies.  The right bumper allows you to expend stamina to more quickly, and the left bumper is a modifier button.  Holding it lets you use the face buttons to choose abilities that you have unlocked and set for each Vocation.

You can press in the left stick or tap B to go into a dash mode which quickly consumes stamina, and the right trigger lets you grab objects and enemies.  That grab is one of the best parts of the game.  If you’re a big tanky tough class you can pick up enemies and toss them, grab boulders and hurl them from clifftops, and anyone can jump on a giant beast and climb all over it as you attempt to bring it down via weakpoints.  All of this is backed up by a deep physics system that allows for emergent gameplay in a genre that rarely sees it.

I mainly played on PC, while my colleague Genghis played on Xbox Series X.  Performance on PC was rough at first and far better closer to launch.  Xbox Series consoles run at an unlocked framerate that seems to mostly hover around thirty.  During some intense combat sessions, Genghis said it felt like it dropped to the low 20s and it could be rough at times.  A few friends in the industry like Jez Corden of Windows Central told me they found the game to be perfectly playable on console.

Your d-pad is used to give commands to your Pawns and holding the left bumper modifies that into either using consumables or turning on your lantern.  The game is as dark as can be at night time, so you’ll want to make sure that Lantern is full of oil.  Ghosts and worse come out when its dark and the game’s difficulty can spike considerably.  The reward for this risk is certain drops you’ll need for both quests and equipment upgrades.

Every Vocation uses the same stamina system.  Every major action you do will use it up, but regular attacks (even when charged) will not.  It’s a constant balancing act of using your abilities and making sure you have enough stamina to keep moving around.  If you run out during a fight you’ll start up a long recovery period that your Pawns can snap you out of.  DD2 has status effects, debuffs, and consumables to help with them as well.  It’s a deep, familiar set of systems that all work together to keep things difficult but fair feeling.

Questing, Sites, and Sounds

Quests might be the only negative I have for Dragon’s Dogma 2.  Most are fetch-focused, with others being “kill this” the majority of the time.  They’re rarely bad, and in this game even an escort mission can be fun with how resilient everyone is.  My biggest problem is just how small they feel outside of a few main quest moments.  This is a big game, with a huge map, and far too often I felt like I solved a “town-wide” issue by getting a single item for one random person. 

For all the scope and scale of the combat, the writing and solutions for most problems feel far too by the numbers.  It’s tough to get that deep into specifics without massive spoilers, so I’ll just say that for a game that features Capcom’s best English voice acting I wish the writing had matched it for how issues are resolved.  Perhaps it’s a technical limitation of sorts, and it didn’t take away too much.  It just stood out to me in a sea of otherwise fantastic execution.

Graphically DD2 is thoroughly competent.  It has a style and amount of interaction it’s going for and while it may not be the most technically amazing feat it can convey a sense of awe and wonder that few games can.  Character models are a massive step up from the first title, and the RE Engine does a great job of mixing gorgeous vistas, lighting, and destructibility to help cover what is a surprisingly linear feeling map most of the time.  A few areas have vast swaths of open land to journey through, but most of the time you’re on a pretty set path as you either journey for fun or questing.

Console performance is as stated, barely acceptable.  It’s rarely unplayable but unlocking the framerate isn’t going to help many out there unless they have a capable VRR (variable rate refresh) capable display.  On PC at 4k/max settings my 5800X and 7900XTX varied from 45fps in cities to 125fps in the open world.  This game is simulation heavy and my slightly older CPU felt the strain when a large number of NPCs were around. The game supports various upscaling methods on PC and I did use its ray-tracing for my entire playthrough.

While the character writing and voice acting are some of the better on the English side for Capcom, its music is even better.  It’s an incredible soundtrack that elevates a pretty, fun action-focused RPG into something far bigger.  Epic Orchestral music with singers giving it their all as they chant shit I can’t understand makes fighting a gryphon, troll, or Chimaera just that much-damned cooler.

Bugs and DLC

I did run into a large number of bugs during my 30+ hours with DD2.  Most of them were related to quests, with NPCs disappearing or refusing to move until I did a full restart.  One in particular never fixed itself and was the only quest left undone before I was forced to move on for good.

I was thrown through the environment roughly 100,000 feet to my death until I hit a weird pocket dimension once.  Outside of that the physics-based funtimes felt polished up.  NPC pathing can sometimes be an issue with my Pawns struggling to figure out how to get around a large enemy, or AI in the cities running into walls after I bumped them off course.

The game features a small DLC shop as well.  This is something most find annoying in $70 single-player titles.  They are mostly in-game-use items and oddly enough have a limit on how many you can purchase.  I never felt the need to buy any of them and I think they are harmless for the most part.

Wrapping Things Up

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a fantastic video game.  It improves on every facet of the first title.  An excellent main quest is paired with Capcom’s best English VO and some incredible emergent combat.  It’s fully approachable if you’ve never given the first one a go, and any Action RPG fan owes it to themselves to learn just what the Dragon’s Dogma truly is.