Dragon's Dogma 2 Review

"For Thy Heart"

Campaign

March 27, 2024 at 7:46pm
By Jason Stettner

It’s a tale we’ve seen echoed in the past, but one that arisen once more for the current generation. This is of course Dragon’s Dogma, an epic role playing game about one individual’s fateful battle against a dragon. A dragon that has ripped this character’s heart out and marked them to be the Arisen.

It’s an interesting premise and one that throws you freely into a massive open world to explore. It’s a game of choice without the traditional hand holding one may expect but still enough guidance to know exactly where you’re headed.

The spectacle is grand, and the journey is as expansive as you aim to make it. The narrative is lengthy, or decently compressed depending on the quests you take and the journey you decide to explore. There are many side adventures, world events and other happenings to come across.

It’s an exciting adventure and one of those genre defining role playing experiences that you only get so often. It really was quite a wonderful time and I’ve experienced it in a couple ways at the time of doing this.

If you’re particularly knowledgeable of choices your time with the game may go even further beyond what you might expect. It’s a neat sense of choice, and freedom while never feeling as though you’re particularly lost in what you’re doing. It’s a world where you’re propped up as a hero and that in itself feels rather motivating.

This largely comes from your team of Pawns, where you can have up to four of them. You have your main ride of die Pawn and then two others you’ll be swapping out constantly for better skill levels or abilities. It’s an interconnected world where these Pawns are derived from other players.

They’ll be there with you during camping and cooking. They’ll high five you after battle, they’ll grab enemies that are attacking you and say supportive details. The Pawns will assist in exploration, gathering items like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite and always be there to lend a hand in your travels so that you don’t miss anything cool.

They’re an essential aspect of the story, the gameplay and are just such a neat support system. It makes the world feel lively as you may come across some wandering, or just make a single player game feel cooperative. It’s really interesting, and an important aspect to highlight story wise as they factor deeply into the narrative. A well thought out, and exciting story at that.

Gameplay

You’ll start by creating a character within probably the best character customization system I believe I’ve ever seen. From there you’ll end up in the greater world eventually choosing a vocation or well class that you get comfortable with. You will of course have the option to change things up with more stuff later on but you build upon your skills.

Early on you’ll make a Pawn which shares the character customization you enjoyed, you do that basically back to back so you’ll spend awhile in that system. From there on out it’s fairly open. You go wherever and do whatever.

The main quests will push you along but you feel more free just stumbling into weird monsters to fight or perhaps gathering the odd side quest. You can’t really fast travel so the game encourages you to walk about which may sound tedious but it’s actually not bad once you get a hold of things. Movement can be aided by managing your weight or also taking fast travel mechanics.

This includes the odd ox cart for travel or also using these special ferrystones that take you to portcrystals. The map will reveal itself as you travel and change in terms of the biome as you explore. Starting from grassy hills to oceanic cliffs and also into the burning arid lands beyond. The world is gorgeous thanks to the ray traced illumination that’s present.

For context, I was playing this on the Xbox Series X which aims for a reconstructed 4k resolution at 60fps. This is one issue for the game, is that the performance is all over the place. It’s mostly 30fps to like 40fps when going about but can dip really badly. This is basically my one big hurdle for perfection here, that performance level isn’t great.

It’s technically impressive and stunning, but it isn’t smooth frame rate wise with this uncapped choice. It also has HDR and Dolby Atmos support if those are features that intrigue you. When it comes to combat I loved the setup here. Based on your vocation you’ll have unique weapons and abilities, just like your Pawns. Combat is frantic, always a panic and filled with challenge as you attempt to best enemies.

It does have weird difficulty scaling at times if you move too quickly I noticed but for the most part it wasn’t too bad and very dynamic. I loved jumping on massive creatures Shadow of the Colossus like and jabbing them to straight up riding the odd dragon. It’s crazy, expansive and exciting with a good balance of danger. It can be overwhelming at times, but all the time you’ll have items that allow you to create an edge.

It really can be a rather exciting offering in that regard. The saves system could be a tad better as while it’s always close to where you are, if you are stuck the only other option is your last inn save which could cost you hours if you don’t check into those. It could also use the option to create a new save, but at least new game plus is present with a twist too if you do things in certain ways.

The Conclusion

Dragon's Dogma 2 is incredible, it’s an expansive role playing game that hits the desired fantasy level just right. I loved having the support of the Pawns on my journey and this grand sense of freedom. I felt like I could go anywhere while still being on task if that’s what I desired.

This open world is glorious, detailed and beautiful to take in. I do wish that the performance was better and that’s really my sticking point from perfection on this one. I loved the narrative, the concept of the dual between Arisen and Dragon.

The stakes felt high, while also being intimate as I ventured off doing the odd side adventure. There are some fun romantic elements to dive into, and some other surprises. It really was a world filled with mystery as I was never sure what weird adventure I might get into or if something strange might happen.

There’s a lot of depth here as you balance weight to camping and of course cooking those gorgeous looking meals. They used real footage of meat by the way. It will certainly surprise you, and I believe that will be in the best of ways. I think you’ll love your adventure and this is definitely an early game of the year contender for me. It was a remarkable time, I loved it.

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Dragon's Dogma 2 Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Capcom

Rating Overall: 9.8