Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows
Well...after all this time I've finally mustered up the willpower to review this game...and were it not for YouTuber Mother's Basement taking up the subtitle "Dragon's Dogshit" to describe the Dragon's Dogma anime from a couple years ago, I know what subtitle I'd use for this review. It's a shame, because what other word could be used to describe Dragon's Dogma 2 other than that? Obviously I'm quite a few months late to this party despite having played it when it came out...and equally obviously, I didn't finish the game because almost nobody did. And spoiler alert....as the subtitle I went with implies, Dragon's Dogma 2 is 100% the worst game of 2024, and it isn't even close. The only way any game from here on out could possibly be worse is if it didn't start up at all. Let's just get this over with. I don't have even a single positive thing to say about Dragon's Dogma 2, so if you're here looking for something to convince you to buy, you won't find it here, and you shouldn't find it anywhere, but there are plenty of outlets and individuals so deep in the copium huffing that they've forgotten the sweetness of oxygen.
If you didn't follow along, right at release the game was literally unplayable due to the number of technical problems and continuous crashes. People who bought the game day 1 were out for war with several refusing to come back to the game after the patch that fixed these issues (and only the issues that made the game unplayable). Then, the news broke that the game contained more microtransactions than just about any game released in recent memory. Then came the especially offensive revelation: that if you wanted to restart the game or play the game a second time, you would have to PURCHASE A MICROTRANSACTION IN ORDER TO DO SO! Never before had the world seen such naked greed french kissing and raw-dogging equally naked contempt for consumers and fans alike. We'll get into what makes this worse than it already is just in concept later, but there's still more controversy to talk about. As early reviews came out, it also came out that not a single thing had been changed in the 12 years since the original game...in fact, certain things had been made worse for the express purpose of selling more microtransactions.
So there was plenty of controversy surrounding the game's release, but this introductory segment is typically used to describe concept, story, and characters. So let's talk about how the game screws those things up! In Dragon's Dogma 2, you play as the arisen: an individual whose heart was devoured by the eternal dragon Grigori and who is destined to battle the dragon and continue an endless cycle of violence and rebirth. In the nondescript fantasy world of this sequel, the arisen is the true ruler of the land. However, after being sold into slavery by a Queen Regent in search of power for her son, the arisen must embark on a journey to prove their status and return to the throne. In the pursuit of this goal, the arisen takes control of pawns, a race of humanoid soldiers beholden to the service of a given cycle's arisen. With a full party of pawns in tow, the arisen takes on truly fantastic tasks such as: going to a place and killing a certain number of goblins, going into a building and talking to somebody, going to a place and killing a certain number of lizard people, and going to a place and killing a certain number of some other type of monster. Is it possible that the quality of the story increased after the point where I gave up for good? Yes. But the building blocks of the story are so weak within the first several hours that it's hard to imagine.
How about characters? Hard to tell, because they're all voice acted horribly and written with the flattest "thy" and "thou" script possible....if I took a shot for every time one of these god-forsaken characters said the word "aught," I might actually end up having a good time with the game! Characters in the original game weren't much better, but there were at least some interesting contexts, which this game doesn't even have! In the original game, there was also a false ruler on the throne you were entitled to...but there was a little subplot where you could woo his wife and make a cuckhold out of him, all the while he had to keep addressing you with a smile on his face. No such intriguing options this time around for as long as I played.
Terrible.
The original Dragon's Dogma was filled with bafflingly bad design decisions, but it was a part of the game's unique charm and modest budget. And now, 12 years later, literally all of those bad decisions are present and accounted for alongside some NEW bad decisions and extra doubling down on some existing bad decisions for the purposes of microtransactions.
Firstly, there's combat. Where to begin? There's no sense of impact. When enemies are hit, their character models just vibrate a little bit, so you don't really feel like you're hitting anything. Then there's the lack of any meaningful aiming. I played as an archer, so obviously I had it a little bit better than most people, but if I didn't have the L2 button held down to do manual aiming, the game would just choose an enemy for me to target in the general direction I was pointing at random. When there's just one enemy, this isn't a problem, but there's never just one enemy in a given direction. And like I said, I had it better than others! If you're a warrior or other melee class, good luck fighting with any precision! I'm not saying this game needed a Dark Souls style lock-on, but SOMETHING would've been appreciated!
Speaking of things you'd see in a Souls game that isn't necessarily needed here but would've been appreciated, this game also has basically no way of mitigating or avoiding damage in any meaningful way. There are only two kinds of classes that can avoid damage: shield-users and dagger-users. Shield users can block damage, while dagger users can't actually dodge roll but can use an ability that can kinda sorta be viewed as one. And there's no way of knowing this before you begin playing. I figured that as an archer I'd have a way of escaping from enemies to reach high ground or something, but there's literally nothing. In any other game, I'd simply restart as a different class...............but, as you know, I'd have to pay extra money to do that with Dragon's Dogma 2. Now, the copium huffers out there are already typing out some limp wimpy simp excuses about how you can swap vocations pretty much at will.......but I shouldn't have to. I shouldn't have to not play as the class I want to play as in order to gain the most basic of combat capabilities that we expect in 2024. And you know what makes it especially embarrassing? The tutorial suggests that the player either dodge or block damage....but as I've just stated, you CAN'T do EITHER of these things as the majority of the classes, and you can only do one of the two things with the few classes that DO let you avoid damage. I don't know why this tutorial message is there, but I think it perfectly encapsulates how little love, care, and effort went into this despicable sequel.
Another terrible decision made in regards to the combat is the penalty to maximum health when you die and reload your save....I mean, really. This game took inspiration from Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 2 in THIS way but not in the most basic conveniences of modern combat? So yes, if and when you die, your maximum health gets decreased by a decent amount and can only be restored by resting at an inn or using a full wakestone, which is made up of wakestone shards. These wakestones will, naturally, be the method you'll want to make use of the most, as it means you don't have to go back to an inn to rest...but the shards that make up the wakestones are fairly rare......and would you like to guess how you can get them easily? That's right....microtransactions. Are you starting to see the sinister ulterior motives that drive this product from top to bottom?
But let's get back on topic...this penalty to max health is made even worse because of the fact that just about every autosave happens right as you're entering into a combat encounter. In any other game, you'd be able to take your party and either find a way around the encounter or make a tactical retreat to come back later. Not so in Dragon's Dogma 2. It doesn't matter what you do, your party will 100% aggro the enemies every single time, and even if you get away, you'll likely get away at the cost of all or some of your pawns dying, spelling instant disaster if you stumble across another combat encounter on your way back to town. And you WILL stumble across another combat encounter along the way. That's because encounters have a tendency to just spawn in randomly at certain points at random times. Sometimes new enemies will just phase into existence in front of you right as you finish killing all the enemies in the area. So, let's pretend that you died once, reloaded the save, escaped from the area but lost two pawns in the attempt, then stumbled into another combat encounter. At that point, the game would autosave in a state where it's just you (at lower health) and your remaining pawn with no way of turning the clock back or attempting the initial escape another time. Why? Because there's only two save slots: an "inn" save and a "field" save. The inn save is self-explanatory: it's a save that occurs when you rest at an inn. But the field save is both the autosave and your manual saves. So yeah, you can manually save...but the next time you enter combat, your manual save will be overwritten and replaced with the new autosave. So, your most recent auto-or-manual save is basically all you have save for the last time you rested at an inn, which in many cases was hours ago. Rest assured, you will end up in a situation where you have to fall back on the inn save, and it will piss you off, but there have been several reports of a far more nefarious outcome. We'll be discussing this in detail later, but Dragon's Dogma 2 is the buggiest mess I've seen since Cyberpunk 2077, and there have been several people who have had game-breaking bugs show their faces shortly after an autosave with no way of reverting back to before that bug appeared. That sounds bad, right? Well, just imagine that you got one of the bugs I did, which drastically altered the character you created randomly at some point. Then imagine that, like me, you reload a much earlier save only to find that the changes had stuck even in this earlier save. At that point you have two options: tough it out and keep going or start the game over and hope the bug doesn't happen again. The character creator was released far before the game was, and it's safe to say that the extensive character creation capabilities are the major draw of this game, so you aren't likely to want to keep going with your creation screwed up like that...but remember, dear reader...dealing with it is the only option you have if you don't want to spend real-world money. Now, I can't say with any degree of certainty that the QA is this sucky for the purposes of driving more microtransaction sales...but I wouldn't be surprised.
1. Character's beard type permanently changed after the intro.
2. Character's voice turned female when out of breath.
3. In-game economy is greedy and unbalanced.
4. Quest parameters are purposefully obtuse
5. Pawns will tell you to follow them and then meander around aimlessly
6. You don't get any new (good) armor options for the first several hours
7. Movement is janky overall
8. Around caves the lighting gets especially bad
9. An NPC thanked me for everything I'd done for her after a battle, despite the fact that I'd never seen her before and her character model vanished right after the camera came back to me.
10. It took almost exactly 5 minutes for the game to start the first time, making me think it crashed and causing me to try it multiple times.
11. The stamina bar is horrible even by stamina bar standards
12. It takes upwards of 4 seconds after death before you get the option to respawn.
13. During the first hour, my pawn said "another one of those statues!" I hadn't seen any statues in the first place...and there weren't any statues in the area.
14. Got a message saying an enemy had stolen my lantern, but there were no enemies around, there were no animations of my lantern getting stolen, and after the fight, I just magically had the lantern back.
And that's where I stopped taking notes because the problems were just too frequent.
Let us review:
World's most egregious microtransactions - 1.0
Terrible story, characters, writing - 1.0
Paywall for new game - 1.0
Horrid performance - 1.0
First 10 bugs - 1.0
Remaining bugs - 1.0
Terrible gameplay - 1.0
Indefensible value for money proposition - 1.0
Game still not fixed - 1.0
Not even one positive quality - 1.0
The final score for Dragon's Dogma 2 is a well-deserved...
0/10 - Brink
For shame, Capcom, for shame!
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