Better than it deserves to be...
Written by Jason Venter
Published Apr. 24, 2024
I like Dragon’s Dogma 2 more than the logical part of my brain tells me it deserves.
Fantasy RPGs and adventure games are kind of my jam. Falling within that area, Dragon’s Dogma 2 already had my interest, even though I didn’t play the first installment in the series. Give me a really cool world to explore, and maybe some neat character classes and pretty things to look at. Once you do that, I’m pretty much sold. From there on, it’s not a question of whether I’ll like your game; it’s a question of how much.
And I do like Dragon’s Dogma 2 a lot, but it has some definite issues. There are two pretty big ones, even.
The first of those issues is that the story kind of sucks. Kind of. Sometimes, it’s really good. But otherwise, it leaves me scratching my head and wondering how the creative team could say it’s complete. I don’t even usually care about narrative in games like this, but I still felt the slightest bit robbed.
The second issue is that the various bits and pieces didn’t quite come together the way they should have on a technical level. Sure, the game looks absolutely gorgeous in places. I still enjoy following the road through the fields just outside the capital city, Vernworth, watching the castle spires rising against the distant skyline. It’s just plain beautiful. Then I enter the city and things slow to a crawl.
I’m not the sort of guy who cares about 60 FPS. If your game runs at that speed, it’s no skin off my nose. But I’m also good with 30 FPS. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom suited me fine. I didn’t find myself constantly dreaming of a “silky smooth” 60 FPS. Even Pokemon Scarlet and Violet didn’t bother me all that much, with their animation and framerate issues in towns.
But Dragon’s Dogma 2 slows down a lot in Vernworth, even when you’re running down a narrow, empty alleyway. There’s not usually combat, unless monsters creep in from the fields outside the city walls, so it’s not a massive issue. But it’s kind of distracting, you know? The slowdown happens even with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and an RTX 4070 video card, with a fast i7 processor. The game’s Steam page currently notes that with recommended specs, which are below what I’m running, the framerate “might drop in graphics-intensive scenes.” It’s being truthful.
Like I said, I’m not typically the sort of guy who cares about 60 FPS. The game remains plenty playable, especially outside of the city when I’m slaying monsters. So, let’s take another look at that other key issue I mentioned: the story.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 starts with your character working at a mining site, off in the corner of a sprawling world map. Things go awry, as they tend to in out-of-the-way mining camps at the start of big RPGs. You soon find yourself roaming the mainland to the north. Before long, you meet with people who let you know you are the Arisen. Your lot in life is to become really powerful and then wield your might in a battle with a “dragon.” This duel has the chance to save the human race, or at least keep things going as they have.
Shortly into the campaign, you arrive in the city of Vernworth and begin performing tasks for a gentleman named Brant. These chores feel like typical early-game stuff. It’s easy to put them off until later as you accept more interesting side quests. But you’ll chip away at the work Brant wants you to do, with the expectation that as a reward, you’ll get to dig into a story with some meat on its bones. I expected that much, at least. Instead, I found that by the time I tended to the last of those errands, I was coming up on the halfway point or so. A few more missions later, I suddenly found myself participating in a grand battle with the dragon.
I want to be careful here, because there are some surprises in the endgame that do work to the game’s credit. Though it’s not immediately clear, you have a few options at your disposal and they can change what all happens. That’s really cool. However, I just can’t get over how brief the campaign is as a whole. It spends time introducing some characters and dynamics that promise intrigue and worthwhile twists, and then it does almost nothing with them.
Fortunately, nearly all of the game’s other elements save it from falling apart due to those two flaws. The technical issues might yet go away after a future update, while the weak plot can be pushed to the side because optional quests pick up so much of the slack.
There are dozens of side quests, actually. They help you better understand the principal players in the main story, and they introduce secondary characters you might grow to appreciate. Even lowly vendors have people they care about, who you may need to rescue. Side quests take you to portions of the map you may have no other reason to visit. I spent many dozens of hours with Dragon’s Dogma 2, and the myriad side quests were the main reason I kept coming back.
I also liked the character vocations. In another game, they would be called classes. Your hero follows a particular vocation that teaches useful combat skills and passive abilities over time. They change how you approach combat. You might prefer to get in close and hack away at a foe with a huge great sword. Or, you might try to pick off adversaries from a distance with sorcery or by firing arrows. I spent most of my time as a thief, because I could grapple enemies and pull them to me, then knife them in the guts before moving onto another target. It’s very satisfying.
While your own character roams the battlefield, cutting apart everything that moves, they are accompanied by at least one pawn. You create that pawn at the start of your journey. He or she has access to multiple classes, though not as many as the hero does. I made my pawn a mage, which meant she offered support healing when my life dropped. Sometimes, I had to issue a command to ask for aid, but mostly she was good at responding when the need arose, without any extra prompting.
Your hero character and their pawn are joined by two additional pawns, if you agree to let others follow along. A lot of them are created by other players. I spent a few hours traveling with an elven archer named Frodo who looked a lot like Elijah Wood. The pawns you meet don’t level up over time, so you’ll likely swap them out regularly over the course of your adventure as you stumble across superior options. Meanwhile, your own pawn might sometimes have adventures with other players that you don’t get to see. They periodically present you with rewards from other players. It’s a neat little system that I didn’t use much, simply because I found favorite characters and tended to stick with them. But a lot of players seem to like my pawn, probably because she is a mage and mages rock.
Combat in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is interesting, especially early in the game when enemies are at their most ferocious. There are some smaller monsters, such as goblins and harpies, but you’ll soon find yourself going up against gryphons, ogres, cyclops, the occasional minotaur, and so forth. These brutes fill the screen, forcing you and your pawns to roam around the battlefield while other mobs join the fray. Some fights may drag on for quite some time, especially if the sounds of battle summon nearby wolves or worse. It’s all very dynamic.
By the end of a long campaign, the game will have rolled out its biggest surprises. If you play as many hours as I did, some of the bright points will have lost their luster. There aren’t enough unique enemy varieties, for instance, especially given how much time you spend battling monsters. Also, given how big the world is, fast travel would help a lot. That feature is available, technically, but you have to spend costly crystals or you have to ride on wagons that are attacked halfway through most journeys. This lack of convenient fast travel forces you to retread a lot of the same ground while battling more of the same few enemies, all on the off chance you will decide to explore other caves and ravines the game has provided you with no real reason to visit. The world stops feeling dangerous and becomes a chore.
Fortunately, even though the flaws are plain to see, I truly enjoyed the bulk of the more than 100 hours I spent with Dragon’s Dogma 2. Its world is one of my favorite fantasy sandboxes in recent memory, which the underwhelming plot, poor technical optimization, and sometimes repetitive combat can’t take away from it. If you’re looking for an enjoyable and occasionally remarkable quest that will sink its teeth into you and not let go, try Dragon’s Dogma 2. I like it more than it probably deserves, and you might wind up feeling the same way.
