Dragon's Dogma 2

What Makes DD2 Special to Me Hours Played: 60+ Arisen: eeVee — Lv. 40 Main Pawn: Darth Freya — Lv. 39 Username: Bleeksano Pawn ID: 5AM5EIVCRIT After 60+ hours, Dragon’s Dogma 2 has become one of my personal gold standards for action-RPG combat. Important qualifier: I have not finished the main story. I am currently in Bakbattahl. That is part of the endorsement. I have become so engrossed in roaming, experimenting with vocations, developing my Pawn party, and fighting monsters that advancing the main story rarely feels urgent. I want combat to feel physical and reactive. Enemies should acknowledge being hit. Spacing, terrain, and positioning should matter. Vocations should meaningfully change how I fight, gear should visibly change my character, and encounters should leave room for improvisation. DD2 does those things exceptionally well. Pros + Excellent enemy reactions: stagger, knockdown, burning, interruption + Spacing, terrain, and positioning materially affect combat + Distinct vocation identities and rewarding weak-point combat + Pawn roles create meaningful party synergy + Exploration naturally produces unscripted encounters + Deep Arisen/Pawn customization with visible gear progression + Weighty movement, attacks, and monsters + Timing, positioning, and targeting reward player skill + Excellent use of ambient sound and musical restraint + Separate voice language and UI text Possible Cons - Deliberate, weighty combat will not suit everyone - Traditional Dragon's Dogma friction remains - PC menu navigation feels controller-first and rigid - Large monsters do not always react as strongly as normal enemies - Players seeking deep numerical min-maxing may prefer other RPGs Traditional Friction Encumbrance, stamina, party preparation, resting, item management, and expedition planning still matter. Recent quality-of-life changes have removed enough administrative resistance that these systems now mostly reinforce the feeling of going on an expedition instead of getting in my way. I enjoy friction when it strengthens the fantasy, not when it becomes repetitive maintenance. PC Menu and Input Friction I prefer controller for combat; analog movement, haptics, and the physical connection to the character suit DD2 extremely well. For inventory, gear, weapons, and information-heavy menus, I prefer keyboard and mouse. DD2's interface still feels built around controller navigation, so keyboard and mouse work but are less efficient than they should be. Voice, UI, and Character Customization A huge plus for me is being able to listen to the Japanese performances while keeping menus, item descriptions, and gear information in English. I get the presentation I want without sacrificing interface clarity. Character creation for both the Arisen and Main Pawn is exceptionally deep. eeVee and Darth Freya feel like characters I created, not variations of a preset, and visible armor progression lets their appearance keep evolving alongside their abilities. Sound, Silence, and Music Much of the travel through forests and deserts is carried by environmental sound rather than constant background music. The quiet preserves tension and makes me listen for danger. Because DD2 does not score every moment, the music hits much harder when it arrives. When a giant-monster theme erupts out of that ambient quiet, the change in scale feels genuinely epic. Archer: Tactical Archer was the vocation that initially made DD2 click for me. The bow is not simply another way to deliver damage. Heavy attacks can stagger and topple enemies, elemental arrows have visible consequences, weak points matter, and terrain can alter an encounter. My Pawns provide enough breathing room that I can actually behave like a ranged specialist. Deathly Arrow and Heavenly Shot also reward execution. Their charge-and-release timing adds payoff without making a mistimed shot worthless, making me feel like I am becoming a better archer through execution rather than statistics alone. The Chimera Across the Gulf One of my favorite encounters happened while traveling back toward town. I spotted a Chimera across a gulf and opened with Heavenly Shot, taking a substantial chunk of its health. I followed with fire arrows while the terrain kept it at range. The Chimera visibly burned, staggered, and fell over under the attacks. Eventually it jumped across and my Pawns took over the frontline. I stepped back and selectively intervened with heavy shots until it went down. No scripted arena or prescribed solution. I saw an opportunity, used the terrain, and the Pawn and vocation systems allowed the encounter to develop naturally. That kind of player-authored combat is exactly what I want from an open-world RPG. Thief: Visceral I switched to Thief mainly to level augments for Archer and instead discovered a vocation that felt just as satisfying for completely different reasons. Against large monsters, I let the tank establish aggro, clear adds, climb toward weak points, and use Gut and Run. Party knockdowns become Skull Splitter openings. Ensnare controls troublesome enemies while Cutting Wind gives me rapid repositioning. Once that rhythm clicked, roaming changed. I stopped feeling like a fragile rogue navigating around danger and started feeling like a predator moving through the world. The Dog Pack A dog pack caught me off guard, dragged me across the ground, staggered me, and attacked again before I fully recovered. Instead of feeling cheap, it taught me how they behave. I realized they can pull away and tempt me into chasing, separating me from my Pawns before the pack collapses on me. So I adapted: let the tank establish aggro, stop chasing them out of formation, disrupt them with Ensnare, and use Cutting Wind to maintain space. The same packs that initially gave me trouble are now manageable. The answer was not simply better gear or higher statistics. I had to understand the enemy and change my behavior. Pawn System The Pawn system is fundamental to why these vocations can specialize. My tank can establish aggro while I position for a shot, clear adds, or climb toward a weak point. Pawns create openings and knockdowns I can capitalize on, giving each vocation room to express its own combat identity instead of forcing me to perform every role at once. Summary What makes DD2 special to me is that its depth remains present during the fight, not only on the character sheet. Its vocations are different ways of interacting with the same physical, reactive combat world. Perhaps the strongest endorsement I can give it is that after more than 60 hours, I am still only in Bakbattahl. I have delayed the story because simply being in the world and playing the game has been enough. That is what I want from an action RPG, and DD2 delivers it better than almost anything I have played. Recommended after 60+ hours. This review is bounded to my current base-game experience. I have not completed the main story, reached every endgame system, or played the upcoming Dark Arisen expansion.

THIS GAME IS GORGEOUS. Now that that's out of the way... To keep it simple, there is basically no reason to play this over just replaying the first DD, especially with Dark Arisen. Assuming you can bypass the stability and crashing issues (I was very lucky), there just isn't much here. The first couple hours of this game are cool. Nice character creator, new world, new enemies, ooooh shiny.... but once you settle in its stops being new, so it stops being fun. Just running around killing Goblins and re-skined Saurians like you did for half of the first game, except atleast it was fun it DD:DA. Open world boss encounters are probably the best part of the game, but are pretty uncommon. The old vocations have some interesting new details but all in all feel like a downgrade. The new vocations have cool concepts that just feel like they miss the mark. The world is pretty but gets repetitive when I'm just fighting 2-3 goblins every 20 feet i travel. The story is a cool concept, but the delivery just failed over and over to actually keep me invested (Could just be me). The entire game just feels like its SO CLOSE to being amazing, but falls short in almost every regard. I dont know what Capcom lost between DD:DA and DD2, but the magic isn't there in this one. I want to keep playing so bad because I want to give it the chance to get good, but every time I log off i feel like i should have just booted up the first game instead. Play DD:DA, its a better game and well worth the money. If you already have, just play it again. Save your money and don't ruin the legacy of a phenomenal game with a mediocre-at-best sequel.

Gran juego... +mods juegazo 100/10

Great graphics and fun combat

It has its problems yes, but it still might be my favorite game ever! The way how every class plays is so unique and fun, The world is a big improvement from the last game, I've had some issue with performance such as some frame drops and 1 crash, not really enough to ruin it. Though I will say the npc pop in is really bad in major cities i didn't mind it to much but i know it can really ruin immersion for some people. 1 save is pretty annoying but the workarounds are easy. And while its far from its strongest aspect I'm alot more interested in its story. I'd say its a big improvement from the first, and we have dlc on the horizon! sixty nine hours (hehe) and I've yet to beat the main story and I'm still having a blast!

Nothing else like it. Fantastic game!

Great maybe even has the best combat/gameply of any game. It had many problems yes but i hope the expansion will fix all that so thumps up.

Released over 2 years early lmao. Only now do they decide to do a performance update. Complete joke, back in my day, games like these were labelled as [Early Access] not as a v1.0. :Tomato: