A personal favorite finally gets a long awaited sequel

The first Dragon’s Dogma was one of my all-time favorite RPGs, especially for its engaging combat and unique mechanics. So when the second game was announced, I was beyond excited, pre-ordering it without hesitation - a very rare move for me. But unfortunately, my excitement quickly turned to disappointment due to VERY severe optimization issues that made it nearly unplayable. Even after upgrading my aging CPU, FPS drops and frame spikes persisted, forcing me to set the game aside about halfway through the story. The game was shelved for MONTHS. I tried multiple times to return, even resorting to mods like Frame Gen to improve performance, but the mod was crashing until recently, when I finally managed to get a somewhat steady 100+ FPS with minor drops, allowing a smoother experience overall without crashing. So now, here comes the game.

Pros

• Unique mechanics including the pawn system, allowing creation of a secondary character called a pawn
• Ability to recruit pawns from other players, offering a form of asynchronous multiplayer
• Lively companion chatter with dialogue for every occasion, making companions feel alive
• Satisfying combat featuring monster-climbing mechanics and visually striking animations
• Diverse combat skills spanning across 10 classes, each fun to play
• Quest setup encourages player independence and creative problem solving

Cons

• Rushed plot with disjointed pacing, underdeveloped characters, and incoherent story arcs
• Major characters and locations felt underutilized and forgotten mid-story
• Performance issues with frame drops, clunky animations, and screen-door visual effects
• Poor shadowing and lighting quality highlight RE Engine limitations in open worlds
• Hardcore fast travel and checkpoint mechanics causing frustrating progress loss
• Heavy reliance on mods for improved performance and quality-of-life improvements

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Combat is largely satisfying and is probably the best part of this game, with monster-climbing mechanics that add a lot of epicness into the equation, along with intense and visually striking animations and skills that span across 10 classes. Like in Dragon’s Dogma 1, each class is fun to play, even magic and archery combat are done right and feels fun to play.

The quest setup, too, is refreshingly hands-off, giving players a sense of independence as they figure out solutions or navigate the map on their own terms. Whether it’s handling an NPC or finding a new route, the game offers a lot of room for improvisation, which is a really great feeling that gives the players a sense of independence --- being able to think a solution for themselves. How you are given multiple possible paths to solve quests, coming up with a weird workaround to a quest and being genuinely surprised that its actually an option were nice aspects that carried over from the first game.

The plot eventually becomes more interesting towards last third of the narrative, but it never quite reaches that level of memorability or impact that I was expecting. At a surface level --- especially once you beat it -- the whole narrative gives the impression of being heartfelt, dramatic, profound, and deep, with a really fantastic soundtrack that will invoke these emotions. But the story never really felt that way to me. The game seemed rushed and unfinished, with some things missing that I can't quite put yet. This was also an issue with the first game, which I’d hoped would be addressed this time around by giving it the time and budget it deserved to avoid a similar fate. There were many signs that this game was building up to something bigger in terms of plot, characters, and locations but it never materialized. Be it due to lack of budget, time, or whatever, we will probably never know. Also the game is a little bit too hardcore when it comes to fast travel and navigation options, even for places that you’ve already visited. Especially when this game involves a lot of back and forth-ing between cities/settlements. At some point of the game, I’ve also found 'checkpoints upon dying' a bit too hardcore. I've lost hours of progress in this game, as an intended part of the game’s mechanics (you’ll know it when you experience it).

I ended up relying on various mods to ease the experience: one for fast travel, another for balancing the store and armor systems (a huge step down from the first game which I didn’t even talk about), and several quality-of-life improvements. But even then I still lost hours of progress due to the mentioned game mechanic above. The aforementioned frame generation mod was also essential. In fact I would say REQUIRED instead of just being a nice bonus performance like in other games.

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