GamesRPGDragon’s Dogma 26 months after getting sick of the RPG, I’m finally going to finish Dragon’s Dogma 2 in time for 2025When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesRPGDragon’s Dogma 26 months after getting sick of the RPG, I’m finally going to finish Dragon’s Dogma 2 in time for 2025When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Capcom)
I have a love-hate relationship with Dragon’s Dogma 2. It was one of the first new games of 2024 that fully caught my attention – for a solid 9 days, anyway, over which I invested just shy of 100 hours intoCapcom’s sweeping monster-infested lands between Vermund and Battahl. I initially loved the combat-focused slant on the genre that the game angles for, putting it more in line with action-RPGs rather than honing in on the roleplaying or super involved storytelling I’d been experiencing elsewhere.
Once more unto the breach, dear fiends
(Image credit: Capcom)
Now you see me…(Image credit: Capcom)After 77 hours in Dragon’s Dogma 2, I swapped to the least RPG-sounding class ever to grace an RPG and it was super weird
Now you see me…
(Image credit: Capcom)After 77 hours in Dragon’s Dogma 2, I swapped to the least RPG-sounding class ever to grace an RPG and it was super weird
(Image credit: Capcom)
After 77 hours in Dragon’s Dogma 2, I swapped to the least RPG-sounding class ever to grace an RPG and it was super weird
Loading back into my save file dated May 15, 2024, I feel a strange combination of trepidation and determination. I have absolutely zero recollection of where I’d left off those six months ago; would I spawn in to find myself planted at the foot of a fearsome dragon with eight health bars to blast through? In the midst of a harpy ambush on the perilously close, rickety confines of a manual cable car en route to Bakbattahl?
This is surprisingly not as difficult as relearning the map itself. I have a vague memory of where my lodgings are in Vernworth – because who on Earth would want to fork out for an inn every night? – but aside from that, my mind draws a blank. So begins a whistlestop tour down memory lane, brushing away the cobwebs to reacquaint myself with the absolute basics as well as my poor forgotten main Pawn, Arryn, who much like a kicked puppy, seems to forgive me everything. It’s kind of annoying, but I’m not here to respec him from Kindhearted to Simple; I’m here to get this Dragonsbane sword to the almostcertainlyevil Lord Phaesus, who awaits my delivery all the way across the map in a highlighted spot to the southeast of Bakbattahl. Conveniently, I open my inventory to a sight that makes me groan.
My past self, in her infinite wisdom, had decided to pick up the Portcrystal I’d originally dropped in the city and neglected to put it back for mindboggling reasons unknown. Oxcart it is, then.
Home sweet desert
(Image credit: Capcom)
The whole thing feels unnecessarily chaotic, the open world leaving it far too easy to stray off the beaten path.
The whole thing feels unnecessarily chaotic, the open world leaving it far too easy to stray off the beaten path.
Multiple monster ambushes and congratulatory fist bumps later, I reach the arid dustbowl of Bakbattahl. My jaw twinges painfully as I realize that it’s been clenched for quite some time. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is far from bad, but the sheer slog of it all – while true to the infrastructure of its medieval fantasy setting – has summoned a familiar sensation. It’s my resolve, withering fast in my chest. Time to get to Lord Phaesus on the double. A brief cutscene plays out as I start down the path: a man I no longer recognize, assumedly the Lord himself, is opening the Spellseal Door. Whatever that is. I proceed to run very fast and exhaust myself on the way to stare uselessly as a colossal stone statue throws boulders around and smashes up a bridge in the distance.
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Dragon’s Dogma 2 has helped me tackle my anxiety in a way few RPGs have managed to, and it was completely unexpected
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1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
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Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
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Arcs review: “A whole lot of game in a small package”
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4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien”
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