There are a great many things I like about Dragon’s Dogma 2. I enjoy combat in the classes I’ve played. I think the pawn and pawn rental system is interesting. I like the dynamic large monster fights. I like the way the game tries to troll you at every turn with frustrating but kind of funny systems.
But one aspect of the game (well, besides fast travel) that I cannot get past is how utterly bad this story is from a large-scale fantasy RPG perspective.
The main storyline is baffling. You are the Arisen, a figure with a unique scar and power and that makes you meant to rule. There is an imposter you’re hunting down and a bad guy trying to summon a dragon. This unfolds in a series of winding quests that take you through a handful of big towns and very few actual setpieces, culminating in a bizarre final chapter on an island that is essentially one big boss fight (which is optional, it turns out) and then a staredown with the final dragon which is another boss fight (also optional).
The final fight was essentially ruined for me because when I went through the gate, I didn’t realize there was no new zone to truly explore, I just stumbled into the end of the game. I thought there’d be another major city or more monsters to fight, and I was down a pawn when I went in and at level one of the new Mystic Spearhand class I’d just gotten in the previous mission. I tracked a giant boss marching through the landscape, unaware I was supposed to be attacking him the whole time rather than confronting him later, but the game autosaves as you go, so there’s no going back. When I finally figured it out, he was too far and NPCs killed him for me, netting me zero XP.
I came upon a “town” with nothing but a bed, and later, a pawn stone where I got at least one party member back. But again, then you’re thrown into the final encounter, a dragon I knew I was not equipped to face. I picked the “coward’s ending” where I just left, but that didn’t let me just go back to the normal game, I was save locked before the fight, and couldn’t even Ferrystone out. In the end, I realized I had to reload a very old inn save to even be able to continue to play at all since I wasn’t taking this thing on with a level 1 subclass.
The incoherence of the main storyline is not much improved in side missions. There was a mission where I was supposed to prevent someone from being assassinated. Before I understood how the mission worked she was dead and I had failed. Autosave meant I couldn’t go back. So many of these other missions are “go find this guy who’s missing” and it’s just someone in a cave with a few monsters and then often a tedious escort quest back. Longer storylines either get aborted in weird ways or stop dead unless you look up a litany of YouTube guides. And even then, I still have not found a single compelling quest on the story front. Part of the issue is created by your silent protagonist and your swappable pawns meaning that that there is not a single NPC with a storyline you care about in this game, and the larger world does not even seem terribly interesting from a lore perspective instead.
From a gameplay perspective, I love Dragon’s Dogma, but the structure and content of its actual missions are terrible, and the ending in particular really soured my entire experience. Maybe some disagree. Maybe some say I’m missing Dragon’s Dogma 1 for more “context,” but I do not think this was well scripted, and is easily the worst aspect of an otherwise fun game.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
