Review
Played on: Xbox Series X
Released: 2024
I bought Dragon's Dogma II on a whim, must've been last year, an old-school, western styled, RPG. However, it's developed by Capcom and directed by Hideaki Itsuno's visions of an RPG from when he was a young man. While it's made in Japan, it doesn't come off that way in its presentation and atmosphere at all. It's more in the vein of the subdued and natural colours of Skyrim, combined with the third person fighting of Witcher 3.
While I lack the knowledge of the franchise from the first title, I never delve into hardcore RPGs in general, which I gather was popular as it sold 9,4 million copies but has faded since release back in 2012. Nonetheless I made the choice to try this one out! Perhaps I was tempted in by the separate character creator you can download for free, much like how Saints Row does, and saw how incredibly detailed the characters look. Or maybe it was the RE Engine tempting me?!
However, as I began my adventure and fought through my first few hours, I contemplated if I'd bit off more than my puny RPG skills could chew. I was finding it difficult, confusing and vague in its main goals.
Let's take a closer look!
You take the role as the Arisen, the hero which battled a dragon and was marked by it. As a backdrop, you're in a kingdom with two main factions in a long drawn geopolitical conflict, although I didn't much attend this matter with much though as I focused on my own character.
After an impressive introduction fight with the dragon, which brands you as the chosen one, the story shifts gear and becomes a gradual affair of building acquaintances and navigating the quests at hand.
The walk to the main city, Vernmouth, of the map teaches you the ropes of both the combat and the pawn system. The latter allows you to have three pawns follow you around on quests. These can be chosen from rift stones, or simply by be asked from a one passing by you on the road, where pawns from other real-life players are available for purchase through rift points. The more you pay, the better the pawn. It's a unique system and choosing a team of pawns with different skillsets, known as vocations, is wise to cover all aspects of combat. One mage, one sword fighter, one archer etc.
Your main pawn can follow you basically through the playthrough, levelling pretty much at your own pace. However, the two other pawns should be swapped out from time to time to get ones at a higher level. The main pawn, and yourself, can at any time change vocation and thus embark on a different route of combat and tactics. Within each of these vocations are a handful of special attacks and magic to unlock, further deepening your skillset at hand during combat.
The first few hours can be overwhelming to those who aren't deeply into hardcore RPGs. There's a lot to get your head around in terms of gameplay elements, the pawn system and the sheer difficulty of enemies. In addition, resources and money is extremely scarce. Gradually gaining experience allows you to build enough levels to take on quests, just be aware that a quest might pay handsomely but sends you far into the wild and contain difficulty spikes.
In Vernmouth, you meet Grant, a sort of revolutionary character. He'll guide you through a set of initial quests aiming at you, the true Arisen, taking over the throne in the city. However, I found some of these initial quests tough to complete with little info about what to do and where to go. You need to keep attention to dialogue before each quest, even though they're on the boring side, and explore thoroughly at the destination to find out exactly what to do. Some quests completely baffled me, resulting in googling some answers to progress.
This first steep hill of difficult quests and enemies puts Dragon's Dogma 2 in a category not entirely suited for casually jumping in, like I did. Luckily, perseverance pays off and as you gradually level up, search for resource and hidden chests, talk to store owners and build yourself experience through side quests. Finding a comfortable balance between risk and safety through the meticulous gameplay.
The problem is the story pacing and how subdued it comes off to the player. There's noticeably little use of cutscenes here, and main events are low-key in presentation. The intro dragon fight is a grand start, but thereafter it takes hours for anything remotely exciting to happen. There's tons of audio dialogue here, but as you take on quest after quest with little exciting happening, it becomes a little tedious.
Pacing also drops considerably thanks to long walks to reach various destinations on the map. A recent patch added an infinite Ferrystone allowing as many fast travels as you wish if you've activated a fast travel point at your destination. In other words, you need to get to the places you can fast travel first.
That said, you can pay to ride ox carts between towns to avoid walking the furthest destinations, but an ox cart trip isn't without its dangers; you can watch it in realtime, or you can doze away the time as you ride. However, you're often brutally awoken by the cart being ambushed from enemies. Aid in protecting it and the journey continues, break the cart during the battle and you're left walking home at night.
Nighttime is brutal, be warned, bringing out vicious creatures in larger numbers. Your visibility is extremely limited forcing you to use a lantern, which in turn consumes fuel, to light up your path. Heading home or setting up camp as the sun goes down is highly recommended until you reach a level where you're comfortable fighting whatever the darkness brings.
Inspired by the Sicilian coast for most of its map, it's a pretty backdrop for your adventures. With castles set on the edge of dramatic hills going straight down to the sea and green woodlands stretching out across land with that south European vibe to them. There's a distinct natural palette of colours, yes even a subtle yellow tint to it all, aiming at an earthy and what I imagine looks like the Middle Ages.
This subdued colour range gives it an organic visual appearance, combined with a day and night cycle utilising some excellent lighting. Sunlight can feel bright during day, with a soft and warm tone during sunsets, while nighttime is pitch black. A stark contrast to the streetlights of modern cities.
Visually, it's modest when it comes to variety, aiming for a realistic depiction of scenic nature with a modest use of buildings, probably how it was during the Middle Ages. As such, it might come off as a little bland at times, but its beauty lies in the high detail of textures and the way houses and castles are made to look life like. There's a lot of similar woodland, coastal and mountain environments though, only changing on the second part of the map to a canyon and desert themed backdrop.
The game utilises the RE Engine, made famous by Capcom's Resident Evil franchise, which in turn offers some pretty visuals, especially on the characters. However, here I feel the engine is stretched far beyond what it perhaps was designed to do when it comes to performance for an open environment. As a result, regular amounts of enemies are somewhat limited in numbers giving the open world an empty sensation, while towns are more crowded with characters.
There are two graphics modes; graphics and performance. Graphics adds raytracing, which results in better shadows and light bouncing off environment, it grounds everything better together cohesively. This mode also has an option for motion blur; however, I found too exaggerated and opted out.
Performance mode cuts ray tracing and motion blur all together, allowing the framerate to reach as high as you've set your console. It ran way above 60fps on my Xbox Series X, giving it that super responsive 120fps feel. That said, it's a lower resolution in this mode and can look fairly blurry, but it not too bad and I've seen much rougher performance modes!
In a positive twist, the latest patch has fixed the huge framerate drops, so newcomers will arrive to a stable performance!
Overall, the story a little dry to follow, it needs something to engage the player and put your character more in the spotlight. Apart from some key decisions here and there, you can't do dialogue choices in normal conversations. I guess the whole point here is that you slowly rise to fame as the Arisen and begin you journey as basically a nobody.
The silent protagonist angle doesn't help get me closer to my custom character though, seeing this beautifully detailed custom characters simply stand quiet in all cutscenes feels like a lost opportunity.
In the vein of steep difficulty, it doesn't properly end with the first credits. After the last boss and the credits roll, you're thrown back into the map which has become the Unmoored. Here, the sky is red and everything is chaos with lots of hard enemies to defeat. Your goal is to defeat the main bosses and evacuate all the main towns, within a set time limit as the world is ending. It's a harsh difficulty curve to make the credits roll a second time. I'm not a fan of this "true ending" design.
At the end of the day, DDII delivers a well crafted and good looking, albeit challenging, hardcore RPG. With an immersion and gameplay diving deeper than most titles in the genre, even on easy. Simply surviving is a challenge of its own out in the relentless wild with limited healing and shelter, you need to prepare for tough journeys across the map. Nighttime will eat you alive unless you build a solid team of pawns and various vocations. At least having decent CPU controlled pawns helps you out of some tricky situations and the controls are satisfying.
You must make your own memorable moments, and they will most likely happen randomly during encounters and out in the wild. I had some great ones, with tough battles or making it just about alive to shelter, but they aren't these big moments of action. It's an experience that rewards you lowly and has a realistic approach to a more grounded experience closer to how medieval times were.
If you're looking to expand your RPG experience outside the more popular franchises and love a challenge, Dragon's Dogma II allows you to get deep in a realistic RPG way. It's a slow and tough progress, but if you've already mastered all that Skyrim or Witcher 3 offers, then this might be worth sinking your teeth into. For casual players I 'd recommend skipping this one.
