Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the most vital action RPG since Elden Ring

20.03.2024 - 17:29 / videogameschronicle.com / Hideaki Itsuno / Jordan Middler

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is going to be a nightmare for completionists.

As you play through the utterly massive game, you can almost physically feel yourself missing out on content as story choices are made, loyalties are declared, and vital characters are killed. You’re already mentally booking your second playthrough, even though you’ll probably not begin your second journey through the world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 for eighty more hours.

It’s a game that’s rich in possibility everywhere you turn. The world is so dense that you can literally get to the end of the story, fulfill the majority of the main quest objectives, and then realize there’s a whole faction, town, or multi-part mission you’ve missed. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is begging you to explore.

Despite the twelve years since the release of the original game, Dragon’s Dogma hasn’t taken the lessons of the last decade of gaming to heart – and it’s better for it. It’s a huge, open-world fantasy action RPG, but the game that just conjured in your mind from a mechanical perspective couldn’t be further from Dragon’s Dogma 2’s reality.

Fast travel is a hard-won consumable. There are barely any mission markers, even for vital quests. Do you want to uncover a piece of the map? Well, you better walk over to it. There are no towers here, and there are no endless skill trees. When faced with a decade of open-world games coated with the same artificial flavour, Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t back down; it doubles down.

So much of it feels like game design out of time—in a refreshingly positive way. Right from the off, you’re tasked with reaching the first main city. This is a trite task in any game, setting the player off on a light adventure to get to grips with the controls before introducing them to the larger stakes and the main characters.

In Dragon’s Dogma 2, you can easily lose your guide, which in turn loses a marker to follow, meaning you have to get to the first city, which includes a sub-boss fight all on your own. You begin thinking as if you’re really on this adventure. Sure, if we take the road it will probably lead us straight to the city, but our party is weak and the roads are lined with enemies.

Could we climb the hills that pen us in on all sides? Potentially, there’s plenty of Skyrim-style jumping up odd-shaped hills to go around, but there’s no way of knowing if the other side of that hill will be sheer drop, sending us tumbling to our deaths. Where are we supposed to heal? We’ve no camping items, and we’re between both towns. Did you just hear a Cyclops? Dragon’s Dogma 2 is second only to Baldur’s Gate 3 in how faithfully it recreates the organic chaos of a D&D session.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t play the game for you. For example, if you’re tasked with going into a