Dragon’s Dogma 2

Concise Review:
Amazing and unique combat that’s hampered by a lack of enemy variety, boring quests, and a slew of QOL issues that hurt the overall experience rather than added to it. I’d describe this game as a fun time that doesn’t reach its potential. I think the 88 on open critic is too high.


Journal:

Early first impressions, which for a game like this mean very little as RPGs take a bit of time to get into. But, first impressions are the graphics overall are meh but not bad enough to distract, the story feels meh but I barely know anything so this is way to early to tell, the combat seems like it might be pretty great. The early highlight was a big ogre fight where I was jumping and climbing in the ogres back stabbing it along the way. It was pretty awesome.

The cooking meat graphics are weirdly incredible for an otherwise mostly meh looking game.

I have some complaints which I will get to at some point, but the fights against large enemies are so awesome in this game. Climbing giant enemies is executed very well. It’s super fun and epic.

The combat in general is awesome. I love it. The takeaway that developers should learn from this game’s success is that there are still plenty of new creative combat systems and general game mechanics to be played around with. Not every excellent combat system needs to follow the soulslike formula. 

I’ve been liking the warrior vocation a lot. It’s slow but heavy hitting and I love jumping on top of enemies with the heavy downward stab attack. It’s so epic. I am interested in the other vocations as well though. I’m having a similar ish feeling as I had playing Diablo where I want to test out all of the different classes.

I really liked the Warrior but now that I have fully levelled up I’m switching to thief. I do like how the game encourages you to test out multiple vocations. Warrior was pretty awesome though. Might be tough to top.

Going in to this game I expected it to be more like the Witcher 3, or Baldur’s gate 3, or Skyrim. What I’ve found is it’s actually closer to Elden ring. The fun part of the game (so far) has been exploring the map, discovering new enemies, levelling up my vocation, and just in general killing all the enemies in sight because the combat is awesome. What hasn’t been great has been the actual quests and the stuff that happens in the cities. 

I think that CEO saying “we don’t have fast travel because it’s fun to explore in our game, other games make traveling boring” is an idiot. He should not have said that, first because then they added micro transactions to buy fast travel packs (what the actual fuck?), that makes you seem like a slimy company, and then two, your game isn’t doing something different than other open world games. I had high expectations for this open world. I expected lots of random encounters or other rewarding things to happen and from what I’ve seen so far there really isn’t anything special or unique that justifies not having fast travel. In fact, I’d explore the map more if there was fast travel. There are sections of the map I havnt seen that I’d like to go check out but I’m not walking halfway across the map fighting the same 4 types of enemies to see what’s in the areas I missed. Especially when my guy is constantly running out of stamina. There really are a number of QOL issues in this game. I respect some of the attempts to be different but I think they clash with what type of game this actually is.

The enemy variety is feeling worse and worse the longer I’ve played. Both for bosses and normal unit. There’s a lot of repetition. I still love the combat but at this point I wish there was more out there. 

The thief is definitely better than the warrior but I don’t like him quite as much. He’s almost made the game trivial at this point, although that’s probably partly just because Im a high level now. But the combat has been pretty easy recently. Defeating dragons is still a bit challenging but the rest of the enemies have been quite easy.

So I beat the game not realizing it was going to be the last fight, and then the game saves immediately after, so I can’t go back and my last save at the inn was a long time ago. So my options are start NG+ which has no level scaling and I’d have to redo a bunch of stuff that will be trivial and I don’t want to do. Or I could return to my last save at the inn and redo the last story stretch, again losing many hours. Neither options is great. I kind of wanted to fight a few more bosses before finishing the game and I wanted to go back to warrior for a bit because I liked him more but after finishing the game and having these setbacks I think I’m just done. Which is a rather disappointing ending.

I had an itch that I wanted to play the warrior just a little bit more and I’m am happy I did. The warrior is my favourite class. The thief is too easy and repetitive. The warrior is epic. I bit the bullet, replayed the boring stretch from my last imm save so I could switch back to Warrior and explore the last few areas before calling it quits. There were major areas I hadn’t seen at all. Don’t get me wrong, same enemies, pointless loot, and the environment itself is still pretty much the same biome but there are still some cool areas to check out. I am back on board with playing this game a bit more. This rarely happens.

THE GOOD:
- Climbing on giant enemies is awesome. Other game will (and should) copy some aspects of this game mechanic. Normally in games when you fight large monsters you just hack at their feet but this game nails what it should feel like to actually take down a big beast.
- The combat in general is really solid. It actually feels unique which is rare these days.
- I respect how this game is actually pretty different in a number of ways. There’s no skill tree. That surprised me at first.
- The pawns system is unique and pretty solid. I like the balance of having one pawn who levels up with you and you are responsible for upgrading her gear etc. but then the other two pawns are all short term loans. Plus I like that they are other peoples pawns. Some peoples creations are interesting we will say.

THE BAD:
- I wish there was fast travel. I get what they are going for, and the exploration is fun but there are still times I’d rather fast travel back to town. Elden ring is the greatest exploration game ever and it has fast travel. DD2 should have a more usable fast travel system.
- They don’t include fast travel because they want you to explore the world, and they are correct that the map exploration is the highlight of the game, but what I don’t think they realized is the lack of fast travel limits how much I explore the map. There are some areas that I would go explore more if I could fast travel. I just don’t want to have to walk past the same area for the fifth time to get to the new area. I also expected more random encounters to occur based on the CEO dude saying it’s so fun to travel in his game. It’s just like any other open world game. I don’t get what he thinks is special.
- The stamina drain for sprinting is too fast for a game that wants you to runaround everywhere.
- There are stealth missions when the game has no stealth mechanics. Like I walk right past guards who say hey you can’t go in there but then nothing happens. It’s funny. I think they should have removed those style of quests. 
- I don’t really like the missions that happen in cities so far. I really just like the exploration wilderness or enemy camp missions because the combat is really fun. It’s carrying the game.
- Why don’t they just have a normal save system? Let me have back up saves? The one save system discourages creativity because I’m worried I’ll fuck up a save and then have no way to go back.

THE MEH:
- I’ve found the story to be very meh so far, I’m not super deep into it yet but it hasn’t grabbed me at all yet.
- The world aesthetic is alright but not that great. I’m still relatively early but I bet I’ve seen roughly 30-40% of the map so far and again, based on CEO dude bragging about fun it is to explore in his game I thought it’d be better. It’s not bad, but it’s not that good either. 
- Graphics and performance I’m saying is meh but it’s borderline bad for a AAA 2024 game that in Canada after tax costs $106 fucking dollars. It unfair to compare game’s graphics but AA Helldivers 2 which was a reduced cost game looks way better.

Final Score: B+