Review | Dragon’s Dogma 2 - It's Better (And Worse) Than You Might Think
After putting in over ninety hours of Capcom’s fantasy-themed third-person action RPG, Dragon’s Dogma 2 — one might start wondering if they’ve just wasted all their time. Well, I’m here to tell you that I only half did.
Firstly, it can’t be denied that this is a vast improvement upon the previous game Dragon’s Dogma, which came out in 2012 and cultivated a dedicated following but never reached the level of notoriety that other openworld RPGs of the era did. At a perfunctory glance, you could be forgiven for thinking this is just another bland RPG set in a fantasy world, but you would be wrong, it’s one of the best RPGs in decades. But that being said, for everything that makes this game uniquely great, there are rough edges that make it hard to recommend. Here are some of the many issues have e’re faced me on my grand travels in Dragon’s Dogma 2.
What the game does well is its stunning graphics, innovative gameplay loop, vocational abilities, boss fights that slap, and cool NPC interactions. What Dragon’s Dogma most certainly does not do so well is holding a steady frame-rate, which repeatedly slows down and stutters on the PS5 when entering towns and villages. Thankfully out in the openworld, things improve, and can be tolerated for most of the game if you’re not looking to count the frame rates every ten seconds. The game certainly looks nice, but it could look better, with a distinct feel that the RE Engine is being pushed to its limits. Perhaps on an imaginary pro console things might be better, but considering how taxing the PC version is on even high-end rigs, it feels like the underlying tech needs more optimisation.
Much like the recent Resident Evil games DD2 hits a tonal sweet spot, allowing itself to be silly in places. You’ll run into wonderfully stupid things like your pawns doing cool hi-fives with you when you’re just trying to pick up gold, which can be pretty amusing (for a time at least) but things become more problematic when they go from amusingly janky to frustratingly obtuse. I lost about seven hours of my gameplay near the beginning just because of the single save file system and poorly tutorialised Inn Saves. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you might have to backtrack several hours and repeat the same gameplay all over again. Thankfully, it really is fun as hell to climb on a griffin as it takes to the sky with you dangling off its tail, or shoot an exploding arrow right into an ogre’s face. This freeform gameplay feels great at times like this but it breaks when you’re prevented from doing things it feels like the systems should facilitate. It sucks you can’t go underwater because it’s ‘bad’ for you, or when your pawns randomly walk off the edge of a cliff, never to be seen again, and throughout it all you will forever be unencumbering yourself through tedious inventory management, because those golden beetle collectable things that lighten your pack just AREN’T ENOUGH.
Combat can be thrilling but is also so full of enemy encounters you’ll sometimes be tired of killing hundreds of harpies just trying to cross the road. The fast travel mechanics are also weird and convoluted — you must acquire Portcrystals and Ferrystones and only a limited number of Portcrystals are available, and if you’re an idiot like me, you’ve already sold them for the cool 15,000 of gold. Having said that, acquiring another Portcrystal as a mission reward and placing it in Battahl for the first time was really enjoyable — after so many long, slow, enemy-spammed hikes to the desert.
The game continues a similar theme from the first game but without it being a direct sequel, rather it’s a standalone story. It’s nothing to write home about, but the earnestness within the game actually pays off well. The combat, though tiring at times, can also be really fun, in major part due to the many different vocations, which all have different forms of attack and defence, such as the Archer, Thief, Fighter, Sorcerer, or a combination of them in the form of the Warfarer.
You can assemble a team of ‘Pawns’ who can also utilise the vocational differences. Pawns are the soulless forms made to aid the Arisen (here’s looking at you, No Heart). While they can be helpful to you on the battlefield, they are really quite bland as characters and on many occasions say the same exact things as each other ad nauseam. There’s no rhyme or reason to many of the pawn’s actions — sometimes they will ask you to follow them for a certain reason, only to find they aren’t going anywhere, and if they do go somewhere, they invariably walk right into enemy camps, making it frustrating to have the pawns with you.
The game’s developer Capcom is the creator of Resident Evil 4, and that remake is one of the best games out there, so does that quality carry over into Dragon’s Dogma 2? The answer is, yes, and no. It’s certainly a great game, and if the issues presented here aren’t a problem for you, you’re going to enjoy yourself. But on the other hand, it’s a frustrating game, mainly due to the saving system, and how you can find yourself in an unwinnable situation time and time again. It’s certainly up there with Baldur’s Gate 3 in terms of systemic gameplay that allows for endless ways to approach situations, but in my opinion, it's critically flawed in ways that game is not. Without the technical issues, it would certainly achieve that aim.
After all, it’s great severing bridges and seeing your mythical enemies fall to their deaths, it’s great hearing the dope music after felling towering bosses, it’s great finding thousands of gold and stowing it away in your big fat purse (old Zelda games, anyone?) and it’s great meeting Captain Brant in the tavern at night and doing all the missions he gives you, it’s great. But it also sucks when people randomly come up to you to insult your character and it cuts off important story dialogue, it’s frustrating how shopkeeps say the same thing every time you interact with them, it sucks that there are far too many enemies piled into every square mile, it sucks when you sell important items for money only to find you can’t find or buy back that item anymore, these things just suck, rip the joy out of the experience. But, after getting on the back of a flying griffin, which had kamikazed into the briny water just to kill me, and I found myself on shore, with one of my pawns forever gone, no griffin in sight — I thought to myself, that is pretty damn cool. And that’s all I want from a good game.
