Dragon’s Dogma 2 is, like Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, a sequel to a personally beloved game that I never thought I’d get. But where Catalyst failed because it largely abandoned what made the original great, this game has the opposite problem. It is deeply faithful to the 2012 original. Almost the entire cast of monsters, the pawn system, and much of the approach to combat is barely distinguishable from that twelve year old game. On the one hand, that’s great, because the original was great. On the other, twelve years have passed. Surely they could have gone a bit further to expand the original’s ideas.
Let’s start with the good parts. Although it is mostly unchanged from DD1, the combat here can be among the best I’ve seen in any game when everything comes together. Provided you’ve lucked into playing a class that works well with the terrain and enemy you’ve found yourself fighting, DD2’s systems allow for some incredible moments to happen organically. At one I point I enacted the classic “jumping off a cliff onto a dragon’s head” moment from every RPG cutscene, and in another I grabbed onto a fleeing griffon in time to be carried to its nest to finish the fight. Enemies can continue to spawn even when you’re in another fight, leading to memorable moments like another battle where I stumbled upon two cyclops at once only to be further interrupted by roaming gangs of bandits and orcs. When it works, there’s no other game out there that can deliver what this can.
Alas, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes circumstances work against you to create fights that are just miserable grinds. I spent ages fighting another dragon not because it was truly that difficult, but because my stupid pawns couldn’t understand how to dodge one of its attacks and were constantly dying every time I revived them. At other times, you might encounter a slime that your mage pawn just refuses to finish off or, when playing a mage yourself, a group of enemies who lock on to you and stop you from being able to cast anything. At its very worst, the game seems to punish you for trying its boldest ideas. One class is completely incapable of dealing damage and relies on distracting enemies for your pawns to finish off, yet the game features several 1v1 fights that happen with no warning. Surely it would not have taken much playtesting to realize that forcing the player into duels while playing as a class that literally cannot deal damage is bad design.
Still, the best part of DD2 is its world. Not the worldbuilding, mind you – that’s dire. I mean the physical environment you’re exploring. This is what Bethesda worlds used to be: you can point yourself in any direction and be guaranteed to find new locations worth exploring, plenty of secrets, and some wonderful emergent encounters. It’s been a long time since I’ve played a game this good at rewarding you for exploration. There’s almost always something interesting around any given corner, whether that’s one of the hidden Seeker Tokens, an optional cave, or rarely even a whole sidequest. And you’ll get to do a lot of this exploration if you want to, because the main quests will only take you to a tiny fraction of the whole map.
But then we have to come back to that dire worldbuilding. For as fascinating and beautiful as the physical geography of DD2’s world is, the creatures and cultures that live on it leave a lot to be desired. The cast of enemies has barely been expanded at all from the original, and while there are cool new enemies like the Medusa or Dulahan, these are rarely encountered. Instead, you’ll spend the overwhelming majority of your time battling wolves, harpies, and saurians that have been copy/pasted from 2012. Although you can expect interesting secrets around every corner, you can also pretty much guarantee that those secrets will be guarded by yet another band of the same six orcs. The human residents are hardly more interesting – everyone and everything is pretty transparently just there to set up whatever quest they’re part of, and most of it has no function once you’ve completed that quest.
It’s hardly surprising that the writing is equally dreadful given that it was terrible in 2012, but it’s more egregious here because there’s more of it and they’ve repeated themselves far too much. DD2 is very good at including twists at the end of its quests and allowing for multiple outcomes, but since it doesn’t track most of those outcomes, almost all of the quests never mentioned again and feel inconsequential as a result. One sidequest chain early on can lead to the death of an allegedly major character in a royal conspiracy, yet no one seems to notice that he’s gone. Even main story quests have you undertake allegedly critical missions that are totally forgotten immediately afterward. It feels every quest was written by a different person and none of them talked to each other. All of this eventually leads up to a final encounter with the dragon that’s almost identical to that from the first game, up to including the same offer of saving the life of your favorite NPC by not fighting. Except that the NPC doesn’t die anyway and likely has no reaction to anything going on, so I can’t imagine why you’d ever consider taking that offer.
That in turn leads to the sequence that damaged my opinion of this game the most. After you beat the dragon in a wildly anticlimactic fight that’s far easier than random encounters against regular dragons, you’re treated to a silent sequence in which you finally become the ruler of Vermund. Credits roll, but if you waste enough time you’ll eventually find out that it’s not the real ending and be sent back to right before the fight with the dragon. At this point, you’re apparently supposed to do something wildly unintuitive that has never been communicated to you as an option, despite the fact that you appear to be in a cutscene. If you don’t do this in time, you end up right back in the dragon battle and would have to repeat the entire loop again. I absolutely couldn’t be bothered to do all that a second time when I was already ready for the game to end, so I just exited and accepted that I’d only ever see the second best ending. If you continued, it sounds like you’d just get a fairly long sequence of story heavy quests and eventually a better ending. I don’t think I missed anything, but the option is there for anyone who still wants more of the game after the deeply disappointing third quest chain.
I’d be remiss not to mention performance and microtransactions since those have been the main controversies around the game. I mostly had no performance issues running on a 4070-Ti and an nVME drive, but I say that as someone who is fine with 30 FPS. If you want full 60 all the time or have older hardware, you’ll likely need to compromise on settings or play a different game. I say “mostly” no issues because I did have a semi-frequent bug where exiting a menu would cause the game to drop to about 5 FPS until I opened and exited the map and there were a few times when the frame rate dropped noticeably in cities. I didn’t have any crashes or significant bugs. As for the microtransactions, they certainly leave a bad impression in a game that already costs $70, but they’re all for items that are easy to obtain in normal gameplay. I don’t like that they exist, but I don’t think they impact players who don’t buy them.
There was a time from about 10-40 hours played when I was confident both that I’d be giving this a 95%+ and that it’d likely be my game of the year. I’ve been pretty negative in this review, but that’s because the bad parts of this game are all the more frustrating for how amazing the good parts are. This really does have some of the best combat ever when everything is working and I had more fun exploring this map than anything since The Witcher 3. Even though my last experiences with this game are equally memorable for how underwhelming they were, I had a wonderful time with this game for dozens of hours and would still recommend it with caveats. I never expected to get another Dragon’s Dogma after twelve years, but equally I didn’t expect so much of its content to have arrived fossilized from that game. Give it a chance if you’re prepared to look past its worst parts. It may actually be best for someone who never played the original. After all, the recycled enemies and story won’t bother you if you’re seeing them for the first time.
Rating: 80%, although some parts of the game would get 95% and others 50%.
Time to beat: 53 hours to reach the neutral ending while doing most content.
MSRP: $70
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041