Dragons Dogma 2 - A Review

Dragon's Dogma 2 is an 2024 action RPG from Capcom with an emphasis on exploration, combat, and playin' dress-m'-up. A play-through takes around 60 hours, then editing the review video takes around 30.

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Played on PS5. Platinum Trophy obtained.

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Some other things I had to cut for time:

There's a system of 'shallow' debilitations like 'Tarred' and 'Drenched' that don't do much on their own but amplify the more serious effects, which is an interesting interpretation of debuffs and allows for some tricky party compositions.

"Materials, eh? I shan't deny they have their uses" is my favorite Pawn line, and I swear my Pawn said it every ten minutes. And yet I could not find a single instance of her saying it in my ~13 hours of recording.

The bizarre early-modern-English dialogue in the game is bewildering at first but I did quite like it by the end.

I didn't really touch the romance/influence mechanics of this game, but it seemed incredibly shallow - NPCs only seem to have about ten dialogue lines a piece, and sometimes they seem to switch voice actors between lines.

I locked myself out of several quest-lines by proceeding with the "Coronation" event too early. I figured the warning meant it would expire any 'timed' quests I had in my log, didn't think it would completely remove the prompts for some undiscovered quests. Oh well.

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Timestamps

Intro 00:00
Graphics 01:46
The Importance of Cinematography 03:26
Exploration 06:04
Combat 09:00
Tedium 12:49
Story (spoilers) 14:12
World Lore (spoilers) 15:55
Story Analysis (spoilers) 19:05
Conclusion 21:31