Being the sucker that I am for surprise sequels to decade-old franchises,
Dragon's Dogma 2 has taken over my life for the past week.
Performance is poor, ranging between 20-80FPS on a strong machine depending on where you are in the game world.
On its own, this would be forgivable - it's still quite playable for the most part, and stretching in-house tech to breaking point is something of a series tradition - but unfortunately the game is also quite crash-prone, and inconsistently so. Sometimes hours will pass without issue, and other times it'll hit you back-to-back-to-back. Autosaves are frequent enough to prevent heavy progress loss, but it's still a huge pain to reboot, reload, and wait for the REFramework mod to reinitialize so you can play with sane FOV and no obnoxious vignette effect.
Surprising, given RE Engine's strong track record, but it is what it is; fixes have been promised, so it's probably better to wait a few weeks if the game is on your radar.
The game itself, however, is. Great even, if you appreciate the series' rough diamond JWRPG styling; in the moment to moment, it's every bit a refinement of the original formula: action-packed adventure through a dense, meticulously-routed DnD world, with Capcom-signature tight combat, plenty of good bosses, and secrets tucked away in every naturalistic nook and cranny.
Per tradition, story and characters aren't much to shout about; acting and characterization is improved, which makes for a likeable cast, but there's less of the uncanny party hat goofiness that gave the original such distinct personality. As implied in a pre-launch interview, focus is more on the journey than it is on the framing, with much of the fun emerging through encounters in the world.
Indeed, DD2 is a game of moments. Be it riding a griffin all the way to its nest unbidden for excellent reward, having a boss monster blindside your pleasant gondola ride, or hurling your first asshole NPC into the sea because
who's gonna argue? there are plenty of memorable things to experience.
Combat is superb; noticeably heavier than the original, putting it somewhere closer to Monster Hunter than Devil May Cry, but with a recognizable suite of movesets that feel distinct and refined. Precise climbing is a little harder now, but in trade you can run around on top of monsters and use your normal grounded moveset given a decent foothold, which is very nice.
The vocation changes are broadly good - Warrior no longer gets shafted for skill slots, and bow-only Archer is a whirlwind of dropkicks and trick shots. The new vocations are cool too, ranging from quirky V-style gimmick play, through wild
It's Mahvel Baybee combo mad, all the way to DMC5 Dante Irregular Full Custom. It doesn't feel balanced, but it certainly feels fun.
That said, it also feels a little safe; for what refinements and additions we did get, many of the really cool things they added in Dragon's Dogma Online - such as Thief being able to grapple-zip up to a cyclops' head and helm splitter back down - are still absent.
I'd say my first 40-some hours with the game were adventuring bliss; move aside Elder Scrolls, out of the way Elden Ring, this is how you integrate tight level design and action principles with an 'open world' formula. Heavily restricted fast travel coupled with a world that's worth brawling through is a winner.
But alas, the honeymoon period doesn't last forever. Having seen the full scope, it's a great game, preferable to most in the genre by my measure, but it's not god's gift to open world action RPGs. It doesn't necessarily even fully eclipse the original; the overworld dungeons are plentiful and have some fun tricks in them, but are mostly caves. Towns are more numerous, but there's no memorable dedicated labyrinths like Bluemoon Tower or The Catacombs, no incidental NPC strongholds like the bandit forts, and nothing comparable to Bitterblack Isle.
An unfortunate omission, though one I was too preoccupied to notice until hour 60 or so. Indeed, it's the things that come in the late game that are most interesting. What sort of things?
To recap, the original Dragon's Dogma had a pretty wild post-game: After you beat the Dragon, Gran Soren - the hub town - collapses into the ground, commencing the monsterpocalypse and revealing a chasm known as The Everfall; A series of high-level chambered dungeons, the bottom of which magically portals back to the sky above town, forming an infinite loop.
This is on account of a unique cosmology. The portal is not to the sky above town, but instead to that of another world:
So it's sort of like a medieval version of the TV show
Sliders 
This ultimately leads to the true ending, and revelation that
all the world's a stage - the Arisen / Dragon cycle exists to select a new Seneschal -
nee god - to watch over and sustain the multiverse. Though being god isn't a great gig - you have no agency, effectively acting as a cosmic battery until the cycle either repeats anew, or is forcefully restarted by your hand to commence New Game+.
That's some Stephen King shit right there, awesome. And it was going to be even more wild - the implementation we got was drastically cut down by budget constraints, omitting the moon and any kind of 'shared hub' multiplayer that might be implied by the annotations.
Dragon's Dogma 2... Does not do this. Contrary to the spoiler tag, it has no parallel universes to speak of, and only briefly touches on the idea of a Seneschal.
It does have a metatextual endgame, which starts strong; the player can discover a way to 'break out' of the credits and loop back to the final boss, and from there do a plot-related action to reveal the lovecraftian horror behind it all and commence a World of Ruin style endgame, where resource economy and boss density explode, granting easy access to fast travel and top-tier gear.
The game is so confident in this, that it even hits you with a late title drop - some 50 hours in - changing the title screen to read "Dragon's Dogma 2" instead of the numeral-implied "Dragon's Dogma".
Bloody hell, the whole PR cycle has been about how this is Itsuno's vision fulfilled! And there was that one interview that asked about the moon and got a knowing wink answer! It's finally happening!
So you set off, battling through now-dry sea trenches to evacuate the population centers to a newly unearthed ruin of Gran Soren(!) - autosaves are disabled, death without a 1UP hands you a cool Bad Ending #2, and passing time via inn rests causes major quest hubs (and juicy sounding endgame quest entries) to be wiped off the map. Holy shit! Stakes!
Safe to say, I was too busy being blown away to actually save said juicy quests from doom, and ended up with a half-full hub. Fair enough, I took what I assumed to be Bad Ending #3, and resolved to NG+ immediately, rush down the main quest, and see what must be the third and final layer to the game.
Which is where things go off the rails slightly. Hours 60 through 80 were still fun, but less a joy than the first playthrough - the main quests are all quite fluffy, and the Sphinx - which I'd missed on the first run - is pure suffering. She's a radical monster design, but her riddles are full of perma-fail traps, weird abuses of the system design that could have been so much cooler with a bit more thought, and a disappointing ultimate reward. The sort of shit you dedicate a whole playthrough to from the start, and obsessively follow a guide for.
Anyway, back to endgame with foreknowledge and top-notch gear, I clear all of the evacuations and world defense stuff with top marks, and... The aforementioned juicy quest is nowhere to be found. Turns out that if you allow a certain overworld boss to die of its own accord (which you may, on account of the climbing system being fucked for that specific fight for some reason) then that quest simply never happens.
And it turns out to be more fluff anyway - despite being given by the one character who appears to understand the world's cosmology, drops mega-loaded jargon about endgame events, and is actively working to avert the calamity... It's nothing. A cutscene and some spectacle that closes the same kind of sky-hole you've been dealing with the whole time, and has no further impact.
Whatever then, head back to the now-full hub to commence the ending cutscene and... It's Bad Ending #3 again. No true final boss fight with the lovecraft monster, no breaking the unmoored world out of the cosmic recycle bin and opening the everfall to anchor it to a post-game multiplayer moon superdungeon, fit to justify all of that sweet grindable gear, NG+ specific vocation/ability buffs, and crazy gameplay depth enabled by the final vocation, bugger sodding all.
And that appears to be it, given a bit of googling around. You and your pawn sacrifice yourselves to reboot the world without the Arisen / Dragon cycle, the false-benevolent god - who I assume was the lovecraft the whole time - makes a woe-is-me death speech that sounds suspiciously overwrought (to the point where it could be taken as "okay have your peaceful fake world, I'll watch silently this time"), and that's that.
God damn it, this is what happens when you get excited. 24 extra hours of playtime for little payoff, all down to a melange of set expectations and overstated NPC / quest importance.
Ah well, it's bloody disappointing that the game doesn't hold up to the original's strong metatextual conceit, but that's not enough to kill it overall.
In the end, Dragon's Dogma 2 is a great game, but with some notable flaws whose severity will vary based on your expectations.
It's best thought of as a reimagining of the original release, before the Dark Arisen expansion and multiplayer spinoff, placing it comfortably in-line with the Resident Evil remakes' grounded redux of the original material.
It's not the DD grognard's wet dream that some of us were hoping for, but is a lot of fun, and lays strong foundation for a prospective expansion.
