Just as FromSoftware made that ‘Soulsborne’ to kick your arse, Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 was custom-built to be an absolute slog. Via design decisions that feel as heartless as its chesticle-challenged protagonist, director Hideaki Itsuno has curtailed or cut out the creature comforts expected from a modern ARPG.
So much so, they should have just called this “Drags On” Dogma.
None of the above is new news to fans of this series, however, as therein lies the bizarre charm of an openly obtuse GOTY contender. If you’ve got the temperament for wanton abuse, as I do, any journey where you must claw your way forward by inches through sheer determination of will can be…well, amazing.
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Moreover, your end credits fist pump will feel extra satisfying if you’ve also resisted flagrant attempts to make you micro-transact into an easier time. Perhaps you’ve done this purely out of spite, or maybe at every auto-save reload defeat you’ve been chanting The Mantra of Basic Principle that every gamer should have memorised…
“What do we say to the God of Death and Microtransactions? Not today.”
In a moment, I’ll dive into the egregious attempts to nickel and dime us. For now, though, let’s set the scene a bit. If you played the 2012 original, this sequel’s premise will feel like a reheat—a nameless, mostly voiceless, amnesiac adventurer must reclaim their stolen heart from a God-tier dragon of destiny. This time, however, an extra layer of courtly intrigue, a swindled crown, and some fetch-quest detective work has been threaded nicely into the proceedings.
It’s a gripping enough tale that kept me hooked until the end, though the folks who bemoaned the old-timey English of the first game can expect more of the same. I think it adds some clunky, ye olde adventure flavouring to the proceedings. Though, I must lament the overuse of the word aught. If you took a sip of beer every time it’s used, you’d die of alcohol poisoning in no time.
Newcomers should also be aware that the design language of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is just as off-kilter. Boiled right down, this game is Capcom’s mostly successful attempt to create an MMO experience for friendless people. Using arguably the most impressive and minutiae-obsessed character creator in gaming, you’ll need to craft not only a hero but also a sidekick. This AI will be your Main Pawn, a creation that will upload onto Capcom’s servers to inhabit other players’ games just as theirs will filter into yours.
Aside from some preset personality traits and basic d-pad commands (go, wait, to me, help), they’re just like your hero character. Support Pawns are bound to the classes of Fighter, Mage, Archer, and Thief, plus they come with some basic armour, weapons, and sometimes a small gift item. You’ll not feel short-changed by their empty inventories, either, as by default you’ll hire a maximum of two Support Pawns purely as pack mules to hold your ever-growing cornucopia of crap.
Because fair warning: Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the video game equivalent of that dickish airline check-in assistant who could not wait to make you pay, dearly, for excess weight in your baggage. Kleptomania will get you killed, and, with fast-travel options being at a ridiculous premium, your default state will often be one of over-encumbrance and constrained mobility.
In addition to them being two-legged luggage, Pawns are soulless constructs who live to bow, scrape, repeat inane observations, and happily die like lemmings. By all means, leave them to die in a downed state or downsize their arses for more levelled Support Pawns with abilities better suited to your playstyle that’s fuelled by a decent-sized pool of vocational perks.
It’s difficult to get attached to anyone but your Main Pawn. Particularly when there’s a bevy of better options waiting in your local Rift portal, many of them dressed in something from the Slave Princess Leia Spring collection.
Because gamers.
Coming straight from the stab-happy Rise of the Ronin, I went for the Archer vocation and lucked into an easy mode of sorts. Whereas every other class requires careful management of timing, parrying, and the all-important stamina meter, I could sit back and ping weak spots with infinite arrows and fatigueless impunity. Providing my huntress (Robyn Hood) kept her main Pawn (Little Joan) and our Support Pawns running interference, few grunts could reach me.
Mind you, some of the incidental family-sized foes I stumbled across in Dragon’s Dogma 2’s vast and unfriendly sandbox were a different story altogether. Some of these moments turned into 30-minute running battles that had me on the edge of my seat and life bar both.
This was doubly so when my desperate, tactical retreats accidentally pulled in random goblin patrols or roaming wolf packs into the mix. Life got even more interesting when night fell upon me—finite lantern fuel and bugger-all visibility can inch this game into survival horror territory.
Indeed, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is at its best when a stroll (or innocent attempt to “fast-travel” via AI-driven cart) suddenly becomes a maelstrom of AI vs AI battling, OTT magic explosions, exaggerated ragdoll physics, and people mountaineering on monsters like some sort of mini Shadow of the Colossus.
What’s less pleasing, though, are the times when 45 minutes worth of chip-damaging gets ruined by some bullshit one-shot move that manifests when these mini-bosses are whittled down from five health bars to a singular “enraged” one. Think: King Kong’s understudy suddenly unleashes a “gravity be damned” homing missile double-foot sidekick to your face. It kills you instantly from 30 metres away.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is unapologetically brutal in many, many other ways. For starters, every journey into its gorgeous, winding-road-ridden, ambushes-aplenty wilderness is an ordeal waiting to happen. Along with the aforementioned weight restrictions, your food will spoil, you have no mounts to whisk you away from danger, and fatigue (or repeated deaths) will slowly halve your maximum health. The only way to recoup this Loss Gauge is to pay pretty exorbitant motel fees at an inn or to use a camp kit at certain points (which is heavy as hell to carry).
To make matters worse, fast-travelling out of any expedition gone wrong will make you feel like a hobo calling an Uber limousine. Firstly, you will need to have found a permanent Port Crystal in the town in question (or found and used your own one somewhere). Then, you’ll need to spend a Ferrystone to beam yourself there.
How rare are all these? I found five free Ferrystones in my main quest-focused run, in which I killed anybody stupid enough to look at me and looted everything not nailed down. As for free Port Crystals, I found a grand total of one.
Frankly, I’m of two minds about this whole setup. I loathe the MTX creep where one is nudged into spending $4.55 for the convenience of an extra PortCrystal, plus 10,000 in-game gold for another Ferrystone to use with it. Mileage is going to vary, but in my own experiences, this proved to be a system that bred two types of genuine inconvenience.
Firstly, the five-minute process of trekking my arse from a quest-giver on one side of town to the inn on another (possibly just to use a “forward time” function to inch said quest-giver into next steps) is just needless tedium. It makes me begin to hate your sumptuously detailed, vibrantly populated, and deliciously serpentine castle towns, Capcom.
There’s also the far more problematic matter of becoming stranded / auto-save locked into an almost unwinnable situation out in the field. Picture this: all your Pawns are dead and you’re now overstocked with precious items, which now means you have all the marathon running ability and combat effectiveness of Grimace after a Big Mac eating contest. Worse, repeated deaths and reloading have dropped your health to half.
Side bonus: Capcom controls your one save file utterly—so there’s no returning to a “happier times” load. Hell, you can’t even start a New Game without digging into your dashboard options. (My advice: keep a manual cloud backup via PS+ or the like.)
All of that said, and devil’s advocate, resisting the Real Money idiot tax in these moments and fighting my way through came with a ton of satisfaction. It all depends on who you are and at what point your tolerances tap out. If you’re cheap (or wisely principled), are poor at pre-planning trips, and are prone to throwing your controller when games get unfair, Dragon’s Dogma 2 isn’t for you.
It’s also going to be a tough sell if you’re a Performance Mode, 60-fps-or-nothin’ hard-liner. For reasons that defy 2024 sensibilities, Capcom has stuck to an uncapped 30 fps. Outside of the third act, where the odd frame gets spat out, clearly because I was kiting in too many AI into one space, the PS5 mills somewhere between 30-45 fps. Needless to say, adventuring in anything less than 60 frames does not help with the pervading sense of slog in this title.
Visually, however, there are practically no complaints to make. Beyond the odd Pawn eyesore wig out, where they try to climb on a roof in some sort of inter-developer head nod to CD Projekt Red’s Roach, everything looks and runs great. The most mind-blowing spectacles totally belong to the gargantuan boss battles that exist in the third act, which I can’t fully tell you about.
What I’m more than happy to regale you with—and will probably tell my grandkids about someday—is the time a half-dead Robyn Hood dropped a Cyclops and six goblins to their deaths with a sniper shot to a rope bridge support. I’ll probably omit the fact that she also murdered three bait Pawns in the process…
The emergent battles for survival that crop up in this sumptuous sandbox, along with the curated colossus main quest fights, are what make the juice worth the squeeze in Dragon’s Dogma 2. If you have the heart to become the Arisen (figuratively speaking), it’s well worth a full chest of gold.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 was reviewed on PS5 using digital code provided by Capcom.
