Dragon's Dogma 2 Critique - An Overrated Disappointment

A game where you fight 72 unique bosses and over 100 unique normal enemies: 10/10 A game where you fight the same 7 bosses for 95% of the game, 6 of which are reskinned from the first game, and 5 or 6 normal enemy types which are also from the first game: 9/10 almost as good as Elden Ring 🤡🤡🤡 (I know that not every boss in Elden Ring is a banger, but some of the 15 bosses in Dragon’s Dogma 2 are pretty bad too)

The fact that this game has a new game+ but its the same difficulty as the normal game just blows my mind.

I killed 3 dragons right a the start of the game by standing next to the water.

Finished the game last night. I sat in disbelief at the ending, there is zero resolution for the entire Queen Regent arc that you spend the first 70% of the story setting up. The minute you get to Batthal the game loses the plot, so to speak, and never recovers.

You forgot to mention the best gear is found in shops, and not by looting the open world chests.

The problem I find with game reviews like this, especially in the past few years, is that we have become so braindead so as to categorize everything as either the "worst thing ever" or the "greatest masterpiece". Elden Ring is "the greatest masterpiece of all time". Baldur's Gate 3 is the "greatest game of all time". Meanwhile, Starfield is "absolutely f***ing dogshit". Cyberpunk used to be "absolutely f***ing dogshit" and now it's the "greatest RPG ever". I'm so tired of this trend. If everything is either the greatest or the worst, then everything has no value anymore. Where is the nuance?

If you look at the amount of devs that worked on the game, Itsuno had way less than a standard Capcom game usually has. To me, it seems like either someone doesn't like Itsuno or Dragon's Dogma so the series was again sent out unfinished.

Playing this game just made me want to go play Dark Arisen again.

dd2 is a $70 engine showcase for monster hunter wild

Yea the story fell apart for me once i hit battal. I almostly hated that regions story. Giving the godsbane to evil scientist was most braindead writing ive ever seen

The vast majority of Reviews that I've seen are either a "near perfect game" or a "terrible failure."...For me, its somewhere in the middle. Game has a lot to like, but sadly also a lot of issues that range from minor to annoying. And its a mystery to me how so many of these issues got ignored? I loved the original, but this game feels like a number of steps forward & an equal amount of steps backwards. For example, the map is 4x bigger (step forward) but the vast majority of the map is nothing but extremely long & narrow paths that zig zag all over the map (step backwards). Game has more caves & such to explore (step forward) but they are all short & look exactly the same (step backwards). Game introduces a handful of new enemies (step forward) but also removes the same number of enemies from original game (step backwards). And I could go on & on. And I feel like much of the content that was planned for this game but got removed so as to sell as DLC later. I like the game, but it still feels like a disappointment. The original game was extremely dull initially but got much better the deeper into it you got. Whereas this sequel is the exact opposite, where it was good initially but eventually gets more dull the deeper you get into it.

Two people I really dislike for having shilled this game- Rurikhan and Fighting Cowboy. Dude. Those guys are either complete paid shills or they have no concept of what is actually fun in a game. Disingenuous man. There’s no freaking way this game is any close to an 8/10.

Huge DD fan here. Played over 1200hrs on the first one. Even made multiple accounts to build my own pawn party. I was really excited for DD2 and left a positive review of it when I completed it. But like you said at the beginning, I was reviewing what I wanted DD2 to be and not what it actually was. Everything stated in your review is regrettably, but unmistakably true. A colossal missed opportunity to make this franchise everything it could have been. But they missed the mark hard.

The quests are infuriating. I've put in over 100 hours and getting so sick and tired of the vague ignorant quest design I'm about to quit for good. Whoever designed the quests needs a swift kick in the arse.

That save system was pretty annoying. I had to hurry up and quit without saving multiple times because of that shit.

Another bad thing about Dragon's Dogma 2, it uses ALL of your CPU for all the NPCs and the NPCs have almost no reactivity. This is in line with how nobody cares about you stealing everything. You can take Ulrika, chuck her off a cliff, nobody cares. Even her dad (or whatever he is) didn't care he just wanted me to poison the saurians. I started a new game and was going murderhobo at Melve and the only thing that happened was the main quest making me go through the waterfall caves because I killed the guy who tells the guard to open the gate. So really all the game does by chugging all your CPU power is keep track of the pointless affinity system. Or at least that's my theory. It's either that or some other poor optimization.

This game has only 1 new thing going for it : the atmosphere. Otherwise not only does it not really offer anything new, but it even took a few steps backwards from the first game. It has outdated stuff from 12 years ago, such as how the NPC's don't react to you stealing their stuff, and they don't change their dialogue and behavior when one of their loved ones die or was killed by you. They cut down the amount of skills you can equip by half, which greatly reduced the versatility in combat. And they got rid of several classes such as the Strider, Assassin, and Mystic Knight. Some abilities were carried over, but many were removed, such as the ability to dodge roll and double jump. Several spells were removed as well. The brine used to be a lame excuses for the developers to not need to implament any swimming animations and mechanics, but now it has a lore explanation behind it, a sh*tty one. Lesser Drakes were actually more dangerous in the first game, as they had this shout that could instantly kill all your pawns, and they would more frequently try to grab your pawn and control it. And there was a chance that one or several of your gears could get "Dragonforged" during the actual battle, as long as they've been improved at least once. The better the upgrade, the greater chance of dragonforging. Whats confusing is that they brought back 1 enemy type from Dark Arisen (Garm), but none of the others? They missed out on so many opportunities here. But if rumours are true, there is an expansion that they worked on along side of the main game, that will release much later this year. My guess is that they are saving a lot for that one. But i doubt that expansion will adress any of the core issues the game has. The world just doesn't feel alive with people, it feels alive with monsters and organic robots who repeat the same lines of dialogue, and they either have ZERO reaction to theft and murder, or they have an overreaction on you simply drawing your weapon. Also who the f**k designed this worlds map? It's beautiful but why are so many surfaces so slippery? These guys have clearly not been out in nature much.

I bought this game to walk around with a bunch of skimpily dressed female pawns, it's a 10/10 in my book.

The subreddit for this game is nuts. I encountered two game breaking bugs and when i posted about them they basically all tried to gaslight me into thinking they werent bugs. One was every npc in vernworth aggroing to me upon arrival, and the other was the priest in the slums of vernworth being locked in place and not being interractable. Absolute craziness. Went back to BG3 shortly after lmao.

Wait Did you play dark arisen? From the intro it seemed like u only played the original game and not the expansion. Way over 10 bosses especially with bitter black isle