It still feels unreal that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is actually here and I’m reviewing it. It’s been twelve years since the original came out, and it seemed like Capcom had no interest in revisiting the IP, despite it being such a cult classic. I thought that I’d never see the brilliance of its Pawn system again. Yet, here I am still in disbelief, happily playing through the long awaited sequel of one of my favorite Action RPGs. Does it live up to the hype that such a long wait brings? Is current Capcom able to at the very least match what made the first so addicting and beloved? I’d say for the most part, yes.

The thing is, Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t feel like a game we’ve waited twelve years for and leaped frogged an entire generation of hardware to finally experience. For better and for worse, it feels like something we should have gotten last gen from a normal development cycle time. It doesn’t feel like a current gen title in framerate or visual fidelity, but we will get more into that later. While it feels dated in those aspects, it makes me happy that it has retained so much of what I loved about it. It sort of feels like if you missed the original launch and went back to play the Dark Arisen update of the first game. A lot of that feeling does come from the bit dated visuals, but its general story setup also feels similar.

Don’t worry if you get lost with the beginning cutscene, its pretty vague, and won’t be touched on for a while anyway. You begin your journey in a slave mining camp where they send pawns to work. You quickly find out that pawns are looked down on, and viewed as lesser beings by some. Guided and helped by a mysterious ghostly man named The Pathfinder, you escape the encampment on the back of a griffin, only to be shot down by Ulrika. Who is Ulrika? Well, during some flashback exposition you find out she is the one you saved right before the great dragon eats your heart. Thus, you become the Arisen.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t do a great job telling the player why the Arisen is so important. You just know that in the land of Vermund, being the Arisen means you get to be king and can summon pawns at your will. Being king is where the majority of the main story is going to focus. See, when arriving to the main city, it seems a false Arisen has already taken your throne. Impersonating an Arisen is usually met with a swift death, but those around you have seen what you can do and how you summon pawns and are able to convince Captain Brant that the false Arisen is the one on the throne. Here begins an interest Game of Thrones styled story filled with betrayals, murders, and plenty of political intrigue.

Don’t be discouraged by this news if you aren’t a fan of political intrigue and such, there is still plenty of medieval fantasy goodness all throughout. That being said, I really enjoyed how they handled a lot of this because it isn’t just a bunch of boringly long cutscenes. They put a lot of it in your hands and majority of the missions have alternate outcomes depending on your decisions and actions. It is still very much gameplay forward, and player actions are first, so it doesn’t feel like cutscene slog of political boredom. This is actually true for a good chunk of the entire games missions, and why I love it so much. A slight decision of what evidence to show to a captain, and what evidence to put on a dead body, can completely alter the outcome of an entire character and quest line. 

Unfortunately, if a certain outcome of a quest isn’t to your liking, it’s much harder to reverse that through saving, since  the game only provides you one save slot. This means if you fail a quest, let a quest time out, or just don’t like the ending you got, you likely aren’t going to be able to reload and change decisions. I’ve had some unfortunate turn of events/decisions, and I’ve had some characters die on me and caused me to completely fail a quest line, but you have to accept fate and move on. It’s not that the game doesn’t hold your hand, because it still gives you plenty of information, but it lets you make mistakes/decisions that you have to live with.

However, all is not lost if an important character dies. For example, you befriend an Elf character and help him complete his coming of age mission to impress his father, as well as save his sister and you really bond. He then wants to lead you to a special quest, but he unfortunately dies. Well, as long as they didn’t fall into the watery brine (more on that later), you can always pick up their body, take them to a cemetery and revive them with a Wake Stone. A Wake Stone can be used on yourself if you fall in battle or on ANY NPC you bring to the cemetery. It’s systems like this that allows anything to happen, but still gives the players a bit of control of their own world. Its one of the many reasons you can feel so connected to this world.

A common theme you’ll notice with why I enjoy Dragon’s Dogma 2 so much is that sense of freedom and importance everything has in the world. This is also reflected in the general gameplay and combat as well. When you first start the game you will pick your first Vocation which is essentially your class. You have the standard fantasy starting Vocations: Fighter, Mage, Thief, and Archer. You’ll pick this for yourself and for your main Pawn companion that you also get to create. As you proceed through the game you will unlock special classes like The Trickster who uses illusions and team Augments. Mystic Spearhand that combines melee combat and magic, while the Magic Archer combines the obvious two. There is also Sorcerer, Warrior, and Wayfarer to find.

What I enjoy about how Dragon’s Dogma 2 treats Vocations is that it actively encourages you to change things up not only for yourself, but also for your pawn. The reason this is beneficial is because there are Augments that are unlocked in each Vocation that can be used with any build, and it also helps keeps things fresh and fun. Leveling up happens in two ways, one for your characters base stats which is an automatic level up that you don’t get to choose. However, depending on what your current Vocation is certain stats will level faster than others. This is also why its good to swap between Vocation if you want a true all around bad ass.

The second way of leveling is directly to your Vocation. In combat you get Discipline Points (DP) in which you accrue to level up your Vocation. Each Vocation can level up ten times, and each level up will unlock a new Skill, Core Skill, and Augment in which you’ll need to spend your DP on to unlock. Skills are your main combat moves that you assign one of the face buttons and will require Stamina to use. Core Skills are passive abilities that you can use anytime, like the archer being able to jump off enemies heads or the Thief being able to wall jump. Augments are modifiers that can be used between Vocations. For example, the Thief Vocation grants you the Verve Augment that increases your strength. Now when you switch to a Warrior or Fighter you can use that to increase your strength even more.

Switching up your Vocation is definitely encouraged, as well as switching up your Pawns Vocation to balance out your team. Although, another thing you should consider is how your other Pawns benefit your team. As I mentioned before, the Arisen has the ability to summon Pawns through the Rift – a transcendental realm that connects different Arisen and their Pawns. Essentially, you get to pick from a pool of other Arisen’s Pawns and recruit them on your team. This is randomized to fit your level or you can select a specific Pawn, let’s say from a friend, by using a specific Pawn code. You won’t be able to level up or modify these Pawns and they won’t level up like yourself and your Pawn.

Picking the right Pawns is very important to your overall battle efficiency. As you continue playing and trying out other Vocations, you can really tailor what you want or need from recruiting a new Pawn. Obviously the important thing is to have a well balanced team, but ultimately it comes down to how you want to attack certain things. With the freedom of choosing your Vocation and skills, never feel bad in swapping out Pawns that are a better fit for you. Are you a power house Damage Dealer Warrior and you want to pair up with a Defense focused Fighter that will launch you off their shield so you can do critical damage to a cyclops’ eye? Would you rather have a Mage that supports and imbues your weapons with elements or a Sorcerer who does more DPS magic? The choice is yours and the options plenty.

When you’re recruiting your Pawns you’re able to check all of their skills and abilities and even their tendencies and personalities. You don’t need to worry about a Pawn being disloyal because they’re only their to serve you, but maybe you don’t like their sarcastic personality while exploring, swap them. A new system for Pawns introduced in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the Specializations. These further help make each Pawn unique as well as even more helpful. The Chirurgeon allows Pawns to use curatives on the Arisen and other allies on their own initiative. The Forager allows the pawns to pick up useful crafting items. There is even the Woodland Wordsmith that allows you to read the Elven language, without it (or other ways to read the language) it is impossible to know what they’re saying. The Pawn system remains one of the best party systems in an Action RPG game.

The Pawn AI I feel should get praised, because for the most part, they’re pretty dang smart. They will play off of each others skill moves quite often making some really cool dynamic fights. Watching as my warrior pawn does a Helm Splitter to knock the cyclops off balance, and then my Thief use his rope tool to trip it up, was a really cool moment. These moments happen quite often and differently depending on the team you have. They also learn behaviors based on what you do as well. If you pick a lot of flowers and loot everything, they will start following you and helping out. Or if an ally pawn goes down in battle, they will pick them up and bring them to you so you can revive them. Unfortunately, they can and will accidentally kill themselves mostly due to trying to follow you while you mountain goat up some mountains.

Another aspect that I absolutely love is how natural and organic the exploration is. For the most part you will be given a quest marker, although sometimes you may need to decipher where to go from an item or dialogue. However, its the journey between and how the game naturally draws you to hidden stuff that I love. During your journey your pawns will perhaps mention they saw something in a direction and with guide you to something. Or if a Pawn you hired already found a secret area with their own Arisen, they will mention it and you can allow them to guide you. Besides guidance from Pawns there are large structures that will point you in a general direction of something important. Then there is the classic placing of a group of enemies to draw your eye.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 really encourages you to explore and one of the ways they do this is by limiting fast travel especially early in the game. Its not that there isn’t ANY fast travel, you can use Ox Carts to travel between most of the main cities. However, anything else you will need to plan your trip and loud out and prepare for a journey. That being said, around the five or so hour mark you’ll start finding Ferrystones from secret areas, large enemies, or from vendors to buy. These are limited items used to fast travel to any Portcrystal location which is typically any major city.

As you continue through the game you will find more and more Ferrystones throughout. Essentially, as the game requires you to travel farther, it starts providing you with more Ferrystones. Then as you proceed through the main story, and even some important side quests, you will get Portcrystals that you can place anywhere in the world. You can place up to ten of these which is a good amount, but don’t expect having that many until end game. For me I really enjoyed the balance of exploration and choosing when I really needed to fast travel. It put more importance on each large journey with the fact that I couldn’t just freely fast travel around.

Speaking of the Ferrystones and Portcrystals, I do have to mention the massive list of microtransactions that come with this game and the ones causing the most uproar have to do with those two items. People felt it was predatory to offer a paid for fast travel item before you can even actually get those items in game. Those are completely valid feelings, and for the record, I find these MTs to be a bit scummy. However, not to defend these at all, I just want to provide some insight on how it felt for me.

For one, it’s a single player game, so how you want to play your game is up to you. If you feel like you need any of these items sooner or a boost to get the most out of it, you do you. Also, the fast travel system in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is exactly like the first game. Capcom did not change it or, in my experience, make Ferrystones less available to push those microtransactions. As I said, I don’t necessarily agree with them having them in the game, but at no point does it ever push the store in front of you. In fact, if I wasn’t told there were MTs, I wouldn’t have even known they were there.

It’s time to talk about the least impressive, and I may say the most disappointing aspect of Dragon’s Dogma 2: its visuals and performance. I mentioned above that this game feels like it was lost in time in a way, like it should have came out last gen, easily. Its not to say it is ugly, there are still some really great aspects of its world design, but ultimately the overall visual fidelity falls short. The lack of highly resolution textures and models is clear since everything has a very soft look to it. As a default the game has ray tracing lighting and shadows enabled, which I will admit do look much better than when it’s off.

Unfortunately, even with turning the ray tracing off, there isn’t an option to play this game at 60fps. Yes, even with its lower resolution, not impressive overall visuals, and turning ray tracing off, you won’t be hitting 60fps. On top of that, in cities the game will struggle even hitting 30fps when its loaded with NPCs. The community has found that actually killing off NPCs shows performance improvements. Perhaps an option, but I’d rather have Capcom optimize their game more. While the framerate struggles in the towns, luckily out in the world exploring and in battle it seems to stay at the 30fps mark.

Fortunately, while the visuals may leave something to be desired, the sound design is extremely well done. The soundtrack here is brilliant, offering so much variety for various situations. The nice exploration playful tunes with the ambient sound effects of the forest playing nicely and then all of the sudden the rousing intense battle music as a massive troll jumps out from behind a hidden tree grove. Or the triumphant melody that plays as you hold onto a griffin while it’s soaring through the sky and you’re plummeting your sword into it to bring it down. Besides the soundtrack the various sound effects from the combat, the magic abilities, and even the enemy goblin cries are well done.

The voice acting I will say is the only downfall for the sound design since it can be a bit hit or miss. There are some decent voice performances here, and some not so great, but that is to be expected with such a large game. The chatter of your Pawn group is really nice when they’re trying to help you and direct you. However, they chit chat a lot and will repeat some things a bit too often. It kind of got on my nerves a little, and I realized why they added the Aphonite’s Tome Specialization for Pawns. This will make them generally remain silent, providing little advice on situations and sharing few discoveries they’ve made.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is exactly what I wanted; an updated sequel that still hold true to what made the first game so beloved. While it may not be perfect with its lack luster visuals and performance, it more than makes up for in deep gameplay and addicting exploration. The Pawn system still remains one of the coolest party systems in an RPG, and I love the dynamic feel of them. This is absolutely a game of the year contender and may be my personal game of the year already.

 

Graphics: 8.0 Overall fidelity certainly isn’t pushing any boundaries, but the art style and world design is fantastic.	Gameplay: 9.0 The variety in vocations and customization in the gameplay has a ton of depth. The pawns still remain a fantastic party gameplay system.
Sound: 9.5 Sound design is really great from enemy screams to the ambient noises while exploring. Soundtrack is fantastic with some intense and rousing battle music.	Fun Factor: 9.0 While there are some performance issues and a lack of enemy variety, this is still one of the best and most engrossing Action RPGs I have played in a long time.
Final Verdict: 9.0

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X.

A copy of Dragon’s Dogma 2 was provided by the publisher.