Dragon’s Dogma 2 is gritty, janky, goofy, tough, and lots of fun

With all due respect to the Capcom team, which poured itself into Dragon’s Dogma 2 and deserves praise, raises, and time off, let me get right to it: I love this game for how dumb it is.

I mean "dumb" in the way most heavy metal lyrics are dumb, but you find yourself rocking out nonetheless. Dumb like when you laugh uncontrollably at the sight of someone getting conked in the head and falling over backward. Dumb as in the silliest bits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, just nowhere near as self-aware (unless, due to translation issues, this game actually is self-aware, then I apologize).

Dragon’s Dogma 2 (DD2) reminds me of playing another huge, dumb, enjoyable game: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Not the first time you play through it, though. I’m talking about the second or third run-through (or that 100-plus-hour save in which you refuse to finish the game), and your admiration of this huge, rich world gives way to utter ridiculousness. You one-shot dragons with your broken stealth-archer build, you put buckets on the heads of NPCs to rob them, and you marvel at how the most effective fast travel is horse tilting. You lunge into possibilities, choose chaos, and appreciate all the ways you can do so.

DD2 gives me those multifaceted Skyrim thrills and chuckles (and a friend confirmed Morrowind works here, too). One time, I had to reload the game because my character—the “Arisen,” savior of the continent, heralded throughout the land—got stuck between a stone hut and an angled hill behind it. Someday, he will challenge the world-conquering dragon, but today, he can’t turn sideways or climb three feet.

Another time, a band of nearby goblins launched an attack against my squad and a band of nearby knights. The knights’ leader, midway through a lengthy, high-falutin dialogue dirge, just kept talking. Even when a goblin set one of his soldiers on fire less than two feet to his right, he kept yapping.

DD2 has a huge, rich, and varied world, full of systems that just barely fit together, regularly bashing into one another in ways that delight, annoy, and astound. But there is a solid, if quirky, game at its core that rewards exploration and experimentation. The plot, while overwrought with nobility and rebirth and destinies, is intriguing in its broad strokes but let down by the aforementioned dialogue.

The game has made me say, “This is so ridiculous” and “This is amazing” to myself in roughly equal amounts, and that feels like an achievement.

The medieval fantasy gig economy

If you’ve never played the original 2012 Dragon’s Dogma, well, neither have I. Here’s the setup: You are the Chosen One. Every so often, an omnipresent dragon kills a dude, eats his heart like a grape off a cheese platter, and then the spirit of that hero, The Arisen, is reborn in somebody else. Your job is to challenge the dragon again and again and again. It’s like the Architect scene near the end of The Matrix: Reloaded, but with a dragon fight instead of an Existentialism 499 lecture.

Being He of the Excavated Chest comes with some neat benefits. The big one is Pawns, who are fighters that exist between planes, helping the Arisen with magic, archery, sword-fighting, trickery, or the like. You, The Arisen, get one Pawn that stays with you, leveling up as you go. You buy equipment for this “Main Pawn,” hand it gear when your pack gets too heavy, and it can’t really permanently die.

That's not the case for the other two pawns you can have. In a system that evokes FromSoftware’s cleverly limited online aspects, you can choose bog-standard generated pawns or pick from characters other Dogma players have built out, each with different battle traits and unique skills. These are medieval fantasy gig workers, almost too literally. They don’t level up with you, so when you grow past them, you give them a gift from your inventory, rate them, and send them back into the ether.

If the game didn’t feel somewhat off-kilter before, the Pawn system is where it can really earn its bizarro bona fides. I grew fond of one rogue-ish knife fighter in my early game party, RickyBobby. While accompanying some soldiers, my party had to fight some harpies. As we were walking away from that fight, the game popped up some tutorial text on my screen, explaining how anybody who falls into deep water will be consumed by “The Brine” and cannot be revived.

A moment later, I realized why I received that lesson: RickyBobby had been picked up by a harpy, dropped into a deep canyon, and thereby released from this plane of existence. In most RPGs, the death of a party member is a shocking aberration. In DD2, it’s a text box that has you press “A” to continue.

Rest in power, RickyBobby. You were definitely a guy who knifed some goblins.

Many levels later, I’m holding onto my party’s mage, Barry Harko (that’s right), way too long. I know it’s just random NPC AI, but ol’ Barry really embodies the game’s blunder-into-disaster spirit. He will cast a healing orb spell directly under the knees of a giant cyclops that has already killed him four times. He’s always the last to catch up when I’ve jumped across some ledge or climbed a ladder. I can make fun of my big stupid mage, but you keep Barry’s name out of your mouth. He’s trying his best.

You won't miss all of your Pawns. They talk a lot, and after a few hours of play, you've heard pretty much every variation of what they can say. Constant remarks about how there are ingredients nearby, and did you know that you can use ingredients, to make items? They'll either pass you by, or you'll turn the volume slider on your pawns way down. Or maybe take just a minute longer to revive them when they fall, enjoying the silence.

Getting absolutely owned and loving it

Like almost every other part of this game, combat is hectic and mildly unhinged, but this part seems intentional. It’s different from class to class, whether you’re an up-close fighter, a back-line archer, a tactical mage or sorcerer, or one of the more niche classes. Conveniently, your hero can swap “vocations” at any town, so no one playthrough is limited to seeing just one kind of fight.

Every encounter is interesting in its own way, but the really big monsters are the game’s specialty. You’ve got a “Grab” command that you and your teammates can use to pin or drag down a tall monster. Or you can climb directly onto certain huge foes while they’re distracted. I’m happy to report that, as an archer, you can do the sensible thing and jam one of your explosive arrows into the giant with your hands, then let go and scamper away.

Also, you can sometimes pick up smaller enemies and throw them at other enemies or off ledges. You’re not the only one left to suffer the cruelty of chaos.

Enemy encounters happen wherever you run into them. Sometimes, you get the jump on a pack of lizardmen and can quietly put an arrow in the leader’s head. Sometimes, you’re talking to the traveling merchant, and your Pawns have to fend off a three-story beast that stomped too close to town while you were negotiating. There’s a bit of close-quarters cave fighting, too, and some solo challenges. But mostly, you’re just getting jumped and figuring out your positioning and strategies on the fly.

The random violence makes all your decisions more interesting. I’m playing an archer and have to pick the four skills I can equip based on assisting the Pawns who are doing the real damage. What’s more effective, a horizontal spread of arrows, rapid auto-aimed shots at the nearest baddie, or making explosive arrows that I can plug into a big dude’s back? Do I spend money on my armor because I’m a low-HP Legolas-aping creampuff or a better sword for my main Pawn? Who needs to hold onto more healing potions or one-shot damage spells?

These kinds of questions matter in DD2 more than in other games due to scarcity. I’m nowhere near the endgame, but in the first 10 hours, you are not flush with anything. You can only fast-travel to a few spots on the map, and doing so requires a very rare and expensive item. You’re always strapped for cash, but you’ve also got a real weight limit, so you’re regularly handing off, selling, and value-sorting. When you take tough hits, you lose maximum hit points, and you can only restore them by staying at an inn or using a camping kit. Inns are expensive, there aren’t many campsites, and your kits are wasted if enemies attack during the night. If you’re heading in straight from Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s a real low-fantasy shock.

More than worth the jank (and patches)

DD2 is a long, long game, from what I can tell. You’re going to walk just about everywhere, which means surprises, encounters, and drudgery. There is one save file (for now), and the game lightly punishes you for save-scumming it. Some side quests have to be done in a timely fashion, so you can’t do all of them. Quests sometimes have maddeningly vague objectives and are marked on your map in a broad area, not a single point. A power fantasy, this game is not.

And yet, I found myself sticking with it. Like Elden Ring, the game plays with the balance between punishing and rewarding exploration. Faced with an unbeatable foe or an uncertain path forward, you can often instead wander a bit, hire some new Pawns, swap out your vocation and skills, or use the game’s loose physics and enemy AI to cheese your way through. If a harpy can kill RickyBobby instantly, I think you’re free to do whatever it takes to get by.

Lots of sites and users are reporting CPU-bound frame-rate stutters and sluggish performance on PC and consoles in this first week after release, especially in busy town scenes. I’ve seen some of that on PC (with an RTX 3070). Every so often, the frame rate will shoot down to cheap webcam levels. I locked the refresh rate to 60 fps, and I'm in no danger at all of hitting that. And I've been frustrated that the game lacks graphics presets besides “Low,” “High,” and setting every single variable yourself.

For its part, Capcom is aware and is "looking into ways to improve performance in the future." Capcom and performance reviewers have suggested the issue lies with NPC behavior bogging down the CPU, which likely causes stutter and dropped frames. This might get better with patches and feedback, but waiting to hear that it definitely improved might be a smart move. Also, please do not try to run this game natively on Steam Deck—not now and probably never in the future.

Capcom also did itself zero favors by releasing a page of micro-transaction-like DLC for its $70 PC game. As such, the game is hovering around "Mixed" reviews today. Nearly all of the in-game items I see are things you can get through in-game play (and Capcom has said so), and there are limits to how many you can buy of most items. But for something like the teleporting Portcrystal, which takes a long time to obtain early in the game, seeing it as a $3 purchase is sure to irk some players.

Dragon's Dogma 2 doesn't always feel like a modern, polished open-world game, but it has all the weight of one. If, like me, you're okay with some bugs, some goofs, and some randomly punishing difficulty in service of a big, impressive adventure, I think it's worth the pain. Destiny calls you toward the dragon, but the real victories are the goblins we toss along the way.

Listing image by Capcom