Is Dragon's Dogma 2 Worth It
Dragon's Dogma 2 is a highly anticipated title released in March 2024 - let's see if it's worth the price!
Check out all Dragon's Dogma 2 Vocations here!
With Dragon's Dogma 2 making big waves with its release, players have been very excited to get stuck in and discover everything there is to find. With video games today being priced high and requiring a lot of time investment to complete, the big question, then, is "is this game worth it". Let's take a look at what you can expect.
The Story: 8/10
Dragon's Dogma 2 has an engaging main storyline that will have the player embark on a journey to prove their right to the title of Sovran, while doing battle with the denizens of the world to work towards their ultimate opponent and regain what they have lost. It's a compelling story; one which has been seen time and time again in video games of the same and similar genres.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's one of many tried and true approaches to a really immersive storyline, and Dragon's Dogma 2 does it well. The NPCs that you will interact with feel interesting and unique without too much copy-and-paste, and there is a whole host of side quests available, ranging from the mundane find-and-fetch quests to genuinely challenging and engaging tangents that will keep you interested until the end.
The Combat: 8/10
One of the main things to enjoy about Dragon's Dogma 2 is its unique approach to combat, which takes many of the best bits of other games and combines them into a really fun and challenging way to deal with enemies. While you will of course have to deal with a myriad of minor enemies along your travels that serve as experience fodder, you will also have to contend with colossal beasts that require wits and strength to put down. Each creature has weaknesses and weak points that you can take advantage of, and your team's composition will either make this a breeze for a certain enemy type, or a lot more challenging if you aren't optimised.
The most enjoyable part of the combat mechanics in this game is the ability to grapple onto large opponents, allowing for heavy strikes against their weak points while you hold on for dear life. Being able to interact with enemies in such a unique way right in the middle of combat is a great feature that really adds to the game's immersive feeling.
And, of course, as Dragon's Dogma's developers stated from the beginning, flexibility is a bit part of this game. When you create your character, you will choose a Vocation, which is the title's version of your Class or Occupation. This will determine what weapons you may use, what skills you can unlock, and how you approach combat. Unlike many games, however, you can unlock every other Vocation in the game as you progress, and by using the NPCs found at Inns, you can change your Vocation and skills as needed. This allows you to try any approach you like to any scenario, meaning you will never get bored!
And, of course, your beloved Pawns will be there to assist you. As an Arisen, you have the ability to summon Pawns from the rift, and these Pawns will provide you valuable information, point out important points of interest around the world, and allow you to slay your enemies. You have one Main Pawn who will join you, and you can hire two others from the Rift, but this may come at a cost, which we will discuss later.
World Design: 5/10
Now, don't get me wrong here - the level of effort that has gone into the beautiful artwork and design of the world that you will be playing in is truly excellent. It's a beautiful environment that will take you through interesting areas, up mountain paths, delving into forests and exploring dark caves. That part is all great, and if exploration is what you like, then you will be spoiled here with lots to choose from.
However, when it comes to world design, looking pretty isn't always enough, and Capcom have taken on some questionable approaches here. At face value, these approaches are interesting and immersive - going out in the dark will have you contend with powerful enemies with incredibly low visibility, and you could very well end up walking off a cliff to your death in the process. If you like the added challenge, the higher enemy density for more experience gain, or just like to punish yourself, then that's great. Otherwise, you will have to find a chair to sit in or an inn to sleep in before you can get on your way with your journey.
The rough part is travel. The developers stated that fast travel options would be sparse, forcing the player to adventure through the wilderness and enjoy the many encounters they will experience along the way, with the claim that the only games that make players bored during long distance travel are boring games. That's big talk, and I was excited to see this in action. I can confirm that the travel is genuinely enjoyable, but there's a couple of big problems here.
The first is your health. As you take damage, you of course lose health - but also max health, meaning you can only then heal back up to the new, lower cap. This lower cap will continue lowering as you take damage, to the point where you cannot heal beyond the point that a slight tickle would kill you. The only way to reset your max health is by sleeping, either at a campsite or an inn. Your campsitecan get ransacked, and potentially even destroyed, which could potentially leave you stranded out in the wilderness with no health, attempting to struggle through enemies until you get to your next town. Brutal.
That is, of course, unless you pay up real money for fast-travel items. That's right; Dragon's Dogma 2, despite being a solo game, has microtransactions that are designed to take advantage of this painfully brutal overland design by making you pay to get back to civilisation. That doesn't really fit with Capcom's big talk about interesting games not needing fast travel - apparently they either didn't feel confident enough about that claim to avoid giving fast travel items, or this was a ploy to soften the questionable blow of microtransactions in this kind of game. Either way, this is a bit dodgy.
This doesn't really gel well with the game's autosave feature. You can only have one save file for your character, and while you can save at any point, the game will also overwrite that save with an autosave that it will generate at seemingly random points. I found myself in a scenario where I was stranded out in the middle of nowhere with no health, pawns all dead, standing in front of a group of bandits. When I died, I had a choice - reset to my autosave, which placed me in front of those bandits to instantly die again, or reset to my last Inn visit, which, due to the lack of fast travel options, would cause me to lose a ton of progress. It seems like this wasn't thought through so well.
Character Design - 10/10
One thing that must be applauded, potentially more than any other aspect of the game, is character creation. The level of detail you can make use of in adjusting your character's face and body in Dragon's Dogma 2 is second to none, and allows for some incredibly unique and interesting character designs.
Players have made some really cool characters using these excellent features, ranging from unique creations from their own imagination, to carefully crafting some really cool characters from their favourite tv shows, movies and other games. If you've ever wanted to lay waste to the undead denizens of the night as Gandalf or want a new environment and game style for Kratos, you can craft that here
