Dragon's Dogma 2 - Review 

The music was the biggest shock for me personally. I think all us OGs booted up the character creation demo and got alittle worried, only to later discover in the full release, the new composer paid hardly any homage to the absolutely crazy soundtrack of the original, no _Into Free, Eternal Return, or Coils Of Light,_ - the only returning score was the _End of a Struggle_ track, and even that was watered down and doesn't feel as impactful as the original. Sorry for the rant ; _ ; Also NO GRANSYS OR NIGHT TIME SKY JINGLES 😭😭😭

I'm totally expecting a Dark Arisen type expansion. It's Capcom! They can't resist. A decade later and I'm still annoyed with them for making Marvel vs Capcom 3, and then like half a year later, releasing Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. It's like they are intentionally withholding content to double dip sales. Makes me hesitant to buy DD2 if the _real_ full game is hidden for later.

0:40 - Jormangandr didn't want the cyclops to waste his chance

I love the combat but needs more quest variation, you dont get to do memorable things like liberating a fortress from goblins like in the first game. Also missed opportunities to help Harve Village or any village defend it (or help prepare) from large scale attack. Most quests are just talk to NPCs in correct order or escort them to a location.

Excellent review, you touched on many of the same highlights and disappointments that I think a lot of us og DD1 players are felling. Your point about the heavy reliance on cave systems was spot on. I didn't even think of it, just had a sense of lack of diversity in the types of enemy lairs. It's still a great game, and I love the classic monsters they've gone for, but we could have had a few more like: Satyr's, Dryads, maybe a tree monster (poisonous vines), Cerberus, etc. I think my main disappointment is the ending. I don't feel compelled to go to NG+. In the first game I was always excited to go fight my previous character. I loved the Everfall. I wanted an expansion on the Seneschal, we always knew there had to be something above the character that started the cycle. Instead we got Dragon Info Dump. Boring. A solid game, but the potential wasted.

I really enjoyed your review and am thankful you touched upon a lot of the negatives I experienced in the game. I feel a lot of content creators are shilling this game and don't truthfully talk about A LOT of it's negative points. I have 100+ hours sunk into the game and overall felt the Cons outweighed the pros for me. While I did have fun, I more often than not felt frustrated. I am so glad you talked about the Dullahan issue, since I had this exact same gripe; we do a quest that introduces a really tough and cool enemy, only for us to never encounter it again for half of the game. I would like to list other things I disliked: - Movemeant feels clunkier than in the first game (the removal of the double jump sucks). - The reduction of our 8 skills to 4 is just stupid and a useless limitation (even if some skills go into core ones). - Drakes. Ahhh Drakes... The name of the game is Dragon's Dogma and yet these iconic enemies are THE WORST fight in the entire game. They were great in the first game, but Capcom managed to make this fight an absolute chore and frustrating. They completely changed how Dragon Forging Worked and now we have to grind these annoying lizards who either: A) Fly AWAY with almost no recourse for stopping them or finding them again and invalidating a whole epic fight; B) Have absolutely inconsistent spawn rates; C) SPAM METEORON AT 3 BARS OF HP (SO DAMN ANNOYING). In the first game we had Drakes, Wyrms, Wyverns, Cursed Dragons, Grigori, Ur Dragon, Hydra and Arch Hydra (Yes I know those last 2 aren't dragons, but they were still awesome lizards). A Drake would fly away? Hit its back till you broke its spine (you got a drop for that), boom problem solved. You could break their horns too. Each one of them felt unique and distinct and appropriate to the moments of the game. In Dragons Dogma 2 you just have Drake for most of the game. Dragon's Dogma 1 felt truly unique and you always found something new, be it enemy or location/NPCs. The Water God Dungeon, Moon Tower, the Thieves Castle, The Catacombs (that were huge and mazelike), The Witchwood, The Everfall, etc. ALL THIS WITHOUT DARK ARISEN. I feel so disappointed in Dragon's Dogma 2 and will not be buying DLC at full price, which Capcom will probably try to use as a way to double dip sales. Create a problem and sell us the solution in a nutshell. I have more issues, but I feel this is enough and will end my rant here. Ah I almost forgot, we just get infinitely staggered or grounded for 1/3 of combat, which IS SUUUUUPER FUN, right? 🤢

Played the first game for the first time about 6months back. Enjoyed it more than I thought I might. It’s a product of its time, in good ways and bad, but it was very unique. I’m going to set aside some time to watch this review

I'm most disappointed that the line "the path splits here, let's be doubly sure which way we're going" is taken out

It's a masterwork of a game in many ways, but your critiques are all spot on. Outside of it being perhaps one of the most beautiful games ever made (high praise from me, given that I prefer more stylised anime aesthetics as a rule) and having unmatched ARPG combat, every other feature and system feels undercooked, and some of them represent outright regressions in comparison to DDDA. I suspect that Capcom *still* didn't have the confidence in this one to fund a team big enough to fully realise what the series aspires to be, so I hope DD2 has been successful enough that subsequent DLC or sequels can build upon what is a very solid skeleton.

It’s definitely not the first game I had to re wire brain a bit to enjoy it.

Was waiting for your review Alex. You are usually pretty fair in these. I hope they receive some patches soon because I know right now my PC definitely couldn't run it.

The first game is probably my favorite game of all time, i have to agree with most of your criticisms for dd2. I was disappointed to see that they didn't do what the first game did post-Grigori where they not only had the everfall but there were changes all over the map with new enemy types in spots you were not expecting them. I'll never forget going back to the water god's ruins after the sky was filled with ash to find a wyvern casting spells at me it was so cool. Bluemoon tower was another memorable location with the griffin chase and then going back post-dragon to find a wyrm at the top. Dragon's Dogma was truly special and I'm having an absolute blast with the sequel, however it does feel like it's lacking in some of the charm that the first game had. I haven't beaten it yet but so far it's sitting at a solid 8.69/10 for me👌

Great review. Absolutely love this game and have been enthralled with it..

I did not play the first game, so I have no point of reference. Judging DD2 in isolation, and ignoring the stuff people have covered quite enough at this point like performance and microtransactions, the game has been enormous fun through the 60 hours I'm at now. Combat is obviously great, it's repetitive in ways but dynamic in others and balances out to something amusing enough that I'm still not tired of it. I have essentially the same feelings about pawns, hilariously dull in some ways but also surprisingly responsive to immediate circumstances. I've basically ignored the main story path as I progress through the game's second half, which I think is the way to do it because its importance is clearly negligible, but I enjoy the side quests. Difficulty and the knowledge that NG+ is basically going to be nothing are my biggest complaints. You level twice as fast as you need to for a good challenge. If they don't want you to be challenged, why only one save slot, and only one character profile at a time? What's the point of NG+ if there's literally nothing new about it? That, I just don't understand. On PC luckily I can mod the difficulty at my leisure if I feel it get boring, but obviously console players don't have the option. It's just sadly not going to have longevity with players if they don't add anything to it.

On ps5 here and had no performance problems. No crashes and no feezeing. Over 110 hours.

dragon's dogma 2 is just dragon's dogma again but with nicer graphics and slightly tweaked gameplay. I didn't want anything else. The game is quite unique and easily misunderstood. It's a rough gem and I'm glad it didn't try to be anything other than itself.

I enjoyed my time with the game but also found it disappointing. I don’t know how else to put it. By the time I unlocked the true ending I just didn’t want to play it any longer. Really have mixed feeling about.

DD2 is an SSS+++ Tire Game. Smokin!!! Sexy!!! Style!!!

A few issues I have with your complaints: Firstly, there are simply more vocations than the first one (10 > 9, with the Warfarer giving an astonishing amount of combination possibilities while not trivializing the other vocations), with the existing vocations having far more of identity than DD1's. As far as the color coding goes, it just served for flavor to demonstrate a shared theme, ppl making hyperbolic speculations about it were, and continue to be, just delusional. I genuinely struggle to see the issue here, the existing vocations are all unique and rarely feel redundant when compared to one another, inflating it just seems detrimental to the pawn and party composition systems. Secondly, and far more specific, the Sphinx boss fight is a riddle. You are not meant to one shot her, but to fight her while not hitting her human parts, a fact that is subtly hinted throughout the quest by environmental clues. And I will finalize with two topics that correlate with one another, the endgame is literally the unmoored world which has comparatively more to it than the Everfall, which was just a bunch of small rooms or arenas where you fight a group of enemies or a boss, with absolutely atrocious drop rates (e.g. ~2% chance) for the top gear in the chests - not to mention that stupid free fall thing you had to do to navigate it, and that the Urgh-dragon was a convoluted, obnoxious, dogshit of a fight. The unmoored world on the other hand not only introduced a great sense o urgency to the game, which until then was severe lacking, but also allow you to immerse yourself in the current crisis without having to bother with rerolling/godsbaning yourself for gear. For better or worse, the game put almost all of it weigh behind creating an emergent gameplay system - heavily dependent on the new physics engine and NPC behavior, which differentiates it greatly from DD1 far more direct, arcadey and snappy gameplay. But all in all, I do agree that the game could do with more dungeons, something akin to a procedurally generated dungeon system like Bloodborne's Chalice dungeons.

Love the game, but everywhere I look is a step back. Less vocations, less mobility skills, less skillslots, augments are weaker, more class restrictive armor and pawn badges are a stripped down version of monster knowledge. Very weak OST. Way too many caves and almost no big dungeons except for dragon's breath tower (compared to bluemoon, catacombs, ancient quarry, soulflayer etc) Way too much gear purchasable from vendors that should have been quest/ exploration rewards. All the trash mobs (even in Battahl) excluding slimes are harpy, saurian and goblin variants. I also feel like Battahl is way too dense and my cart always got destroyed. Dullahan and Medusa aren't bad, but we lost evil eye, cockatrice, hydra, magic undead knight thing. Main quest basically ends 5 minutes after you get to Battahl and it didn't have the impact of dd1's Grigori cutscenes.

Someone once said that Dragon's Dogma 1 was the most 7/10 game ever made, but I'd go a step forward and say that Dragon's Dogma 2 is not so much a game, as a tech demo resume for an actual game studio to pick up. I have never seen a combination of the most HYPE leudonarative and in-play game moments just wandering these Quixel mountain assets, while simultaneously being subjected to one of the worst main story campaigns I've ever played. The quests ontop of that, range in quality from mind boggling, back of the fryer, 30 year old Macdonalds patty quest designs-- I recall one where you have to carry a pot and WALK half way around the world without breaking it. Which gave me Castlevania 64 vibes-- to some of the most ballsy mechanical quests that if you're not looking up a guide, have you asking yourself HOW they got away with it, to a quest where you just STAND for two minutes naked and let an NPC punch you in the face to progress. I felt like the developer himself was punching me in the face saying "Thanks for the 90 dollars!" They never fixed ANYTHING from the first game. The Warrior is still the worst class in the game, especially on a pawn. And you instantly notice this when the game first came out, everyone was rushing to play Warrior, and now, all you see is thieves and sorcerers. So, the balancing is out the window. Hell, the best looking armor in the game is worse than your starting clothes. And again, this archaic 90's RPG design where Y sword outclasses X Sword, in a game with limited equipment.. where you want to role play... what were they thinking? I mean they're already ripping off Dark Souls and half the other games catalogue list in terms of theming and mechanics, yet they aren't committing to Fashion Souls? The game feels half finished. Like Dragons Dogma 1 did. And I realized Dark Arisen was kind of an apology letter to the fans when it came to the former game, but at this point, I'm feeling like it's by design. Like if we want the good Warrior Skills, the Armor customization, half a missing catalogue of enemies, and quests that arent 90's escort and fetch quests we gotta sit back and shell out 80 dollars for a "DLC" patch fix.

It speaks volumes about Dragon's Dogma when most of us like/love the game but are still very disappointed xD Hopefully (VERY LIKELY imo) a DD:DA kind of DLC will come along and shore up most of our complaints/wants :)

Do u suggest playing the first one first :P

I agree that the game feels like many steps forwards, and an equal amount of steps backwards. For example, the map is 4x larger than the original, but its mostly just a bunch of narrow long pathways that zig-zag all over the map. That's NOT what I consider "open world." The game introduces some new monsters & vocations, but also takes out the same number of monsters & vocations that were in the original. And I could go on & on. Not a terrible game by any means and is good overall, but it sadly makes so many minor mistakes that all add up to being somewhat disappointing. And I sincerely hope that there is DLC content in the works, cause most of this game's failings can easily be remedied by new content in the form of DLC. But I also get the feeling that more content was being made for this game but was sadly left out for the purpose of using for paid DLC.

BRING👏BACK👏FESTE👏

I totally agree with all of your criticism. The story was absolutely garbage and obviously has a huge chunk cut out to sell as dlc. Yes, the dungeons are also all garbage besides 1 or 2 unique ones. Yes the end game is lame, and the ng+ not being more difficult is super disappointing. Yes the OST is garnage besides the tracks that were literally just moved over from the first game. I also have many more quibbles than you with the game. I dont like the classes, i really enjoyed having daggers and a bow, its literally all i played in the first game (assassin, strider, and ranger). I also dislike the movement. The first game felt tight and precise, and movement felt good. In the second game, the momentum and auto climbing are very annoying much of the time. The stumbling around, bouncing off walls, auto climbing and jumping off of ledges wothout any prompts from the player, its so annoying. Also something i dont hear many people complain about is the art design. The first game had so much personality that is just gone now from the second game. Anodyne was like a floating magical oil slick that you drenched yourself in to heal. In this 2nd game its just a generic magic orb. Also the creatures look more generic like something from fable or wow instead of lean, mean and scary. Its not a terrible game but im super disappointed. It seems like they took steps back instead of forward in every aspect.

The good stuff should be locked away in dungeons and behind bosses. Good point

Dragon's dogma had 9 classes ( fighter, strider, mage, warrior, ranger, sorcerer, mystic knight, magick archer, and assassin) this game has 10 (fighter, thief, archer, mage, warrior, sorcerer, mystic spearhand, magick archer, trickster, and warfarer) even if you count the archer and thief as one they then have the same number of vocations.

It is my favorite game I’ve ever played, it is really made for the hardcore fans of the first game (which is very few people) you can play it any way you want to and that’s a point that is missed a lot. It is a fantasy simulator, you can live out your ultimate fantasy, and that to me is beautiful

It was a good experience dd2 but imo the original is a much better game .

"in a way, elden ring is a very simple game" I'm not a game dev but that reeks of armchair game dev...

For me it just feels like itsuno overhyped his game and didn’t really deliver the game felt rushed the end game was bad for the fact they force you to go to NG+ and you don’t get rewarded for it unlike the first game you got hard mode after beating the game you got the UR dragon riftstone which let you fight him whenever there’s no point of going to NG+ on DD2 the end game looks crazy but the fact they don’t let you enjoy it the story felt rushed and bad the whole time I felt like the main vocation was the thief because of all the sneaking around you had to do like seriously bro it’s so bad and barely any enemies there just re skin of old monsters also my guess is the new dlc since it’s releasing so fast my guess is they cut out a big portion of the game just to make it a dlc I beat the game twice I deleted my save and made a dwarf named IRON FIST and I beat the game naked and barehanded 🤦‍♂️that’s how easy this game is when Itsuno said hey you will feel more overpowered I didn’t expect to feel overpowered because the enemies are so weak all this game accomplished is make me go back to DD1 even tho it’s unfinished and it had a lot of content taken out it feels better than whatever the mess dd2 is and that hurts to say because I waited 12 years for a part 2 I played DD1 every single day 8 hours a day for 12 years my damn ps3 burnt out witch forced me to get a ps4 which was disappointing because then I didn’t have my guts and Griffith armor and weapons which that’s another thing I expected in DD2 the guts and Griffith equipment

Repetitive and boring

Honestly I love the first game so much, I was a champion for it even before it was released and have put so so many hours into it. This just looks disappointing, it's more of the same but less at the same time. I won't be buying it anytime soon. I thought it would be a lot better than this and had also hoped there would be some sort of co-op play integrated maybe to the effect of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite guild halls or something. It would have made the game a lot better despite the clear lack of monster variety/vocations. It really doesn't grab me.

I really liked monster killing part of this game that I just made a new character in monster hunter world