Dragon's Dogma 2 Critique - An Overrated Disappointment

Dragon's Dogma 1 was never finished around half of the game's content ended up being cut due to a lack of budget Dragon's Dogma 2 was the director's second chance to fully realize his original Creative Vision with an increased budget and he failed Dragon's Dogma 2 repeats The Originals mistakes and feels equally unfinished now that I've beaten Dragon's Dogma 2 I feel a bit betrayed by all the YouTubers and game critics who were so positive about it because I thought we were all on the same page about what made the first game good the hook of Dragon's Dogma is that you can climb on top of giant monsters to hit their weak points in Epic Battles unfortunately the first game was rushed to release and only had around 10 bosses the sequel's main focus should be remedying this issue but there's still only a little over 10 bosses and the majority of this game's bosses were from the last game instead the main focus of this game is on boring fetch quests and what I now consider to be the worst main story in any RPG I've ever played I would normally put a spoiler warning around here but there's so little content in this game to spoil that I don't think it really matters if you want to avoid major endgame spoilers I'll give you a second warning later in the video but the story is so bad I don't think it matters before we get into the meat of this video I want to talk about the elephant in the room microtransactions although I think the critical reception to this game is vastly overrated the the community reception has been mixed to say the least however it's more than just microtransactions blatant greed and stupidity shows up in many of the game systems resulting in some of the worst design decisions of any game I've ever played I genuinely don't know how humans with working brains could have okayed any of these decisions first of all the game only keeps track of two save files your last autosave and your last rest at an in you can also rest at house which counts as an in saave but if you rest at a camp and load the in saave then it doesn't count now that last part isn't too bad in and of itself except for the fact that when you load an ins saave the game wipes your autosave data what the Capcom I lost an hour of progress to this and one of the negative reviews on Steam is from a player who never slept at the ends to save money and ended up losing all of his progress in the entire game to loading an ins saave the system makes me so angry I don't even know what to say why does loading the last in rest wipe the autosave and why is the manual save and autosave shared I can save before a large enemy then reach them and the auto save will occur right as combat starts to lock me into the encounter and somehow it gets worse every time you die and load your save you lose a percent of your max HP and this keeps lowering until you have have below a quarter Health even Dark Souls 2 has the decency to stop at half HP the only way to regain Max HP is to use a rest or use a Revival wake Stone so you can get locked into an encounter because the autosave starts as combat begins where every death causes you to lose Max HP my only question to Capcom is what the actual is wrong with you the only logical explanation I have to this is that they want to force players who get stuck to buy microtransactions why else do you think they're selling five wake stones in the shop as DLC now there is a workaround to this problem every time you die you can quit to the main menu and then load your save and you won't lose Max HP so now every death sends you to two extremely long loading screens instead of one great Capcom is literally trying to trick players who can't find this workaround into buying microtransactions and it makes me sick another issue with this game is performance I played this game on an SSD on low settings which made it somewhat playable but it was still rough I think I crashed anywhere between 20 to 30 times in cities NPCs load in as you walk to them and the frame rate is inconsistent also some of the side quests can get bugged if you do certain things which is a really fun feature in a game with two safe slots also at launch you couldn't start a new game with a new character all you get is your two saves and new game game plus my only explanation for this is that Capcom was trying to see if they could get away with forcing you to spend $70 more to make a second character and they'll probably change it after all of the backlash and despite all of this blatant greed and brain dead decisions somehow none of this is the worst part of Dragon Dogma 2 there's something the YouTuber Joseph Anderson once said that perfectly describes my experience with Dragon's Dogma 2 this game is a disappointment sandwich the first third start off bad enough that I wanted to quit then the game picks up around the halfway point when the middle starts getting good only for the final third of the game to be a series of disappointments followed up by an Abrupt ending right now there is a narrative being pushed that Dragon's Dogma 2 is an amazing game that is weighed down by performance issues a terrible save system and microtransactions and I couldn't disagree more not because that stuff isn't terrible it is terrible but because the worst part about Dragon's Dogma 2 is the awful writing that takes Center Stage throughout most of the game I heard someone once say that every NPC in Skyrim is the most boring NPC in Skyrim and I think this applies to many things in Dragon's Dogma too every character is the most boring character in Dragon's Dogma 2 every side quest is the most boring side quest every main quest is the most boring main quest and every cave I found while exploring was the most boring cave in the game but I'm getting ahead of myself we're just talking about the writing right now and it's not good something I've heard the fantasy authors Brandon Sanderson and George RR Martin say is that it's important to make every character in a story have a unique voice based on their personality background and social class in one of his lectures Sanderson even challenged his students to try writing without tags indicating who's talking because each of your main characters should sound distinct enough to tell them apart through dialogue alone Dragon's Dogma 2 would thoroughly fail the Sanderson writing challenge it doesn't matter if you're talking to nobility Knights or a slave they all have the same voice there's two types of bland characters in the game people who speak formal Old English and Kookie old people who speak formal Old English this doesn't feel like a world with hundreds of people it feels like I'm talking to the same character hundreds of times wearing different skins when the chat GPT sounding spawns have more personality than most of the NPCs that's an issue in addition to this every Quest is so damn boring some critics have praised this game saying the quests are good because they don't hold your hand and hey I think Mor wind is bethesda's best game I should love the lack of handholding the only issue is that quests being obtuse in and of itself doesn't make them good most quests are just you finding an item to give to someone delivering a letter or some item or finding a missing person it's as generic as generic can be so the writing and quests are boring but how is this more problematic than the microtransactions and safe system I said earlier that I like mowind and I consider a lot of quests in that game to be very boring in their writing so why is the writing such a large issue in Dragon's Dogma 2 well to explain that I'm going to talk about Starfield again on this channel since the quest design of both games are very similar in Starfield exploration sucks and the Developers know it so the vast majority of side quests you obtain in cities don't push you out to explore but have you trapped inside of the city doing fetch quests some games like The Witcher 3 can pull off interesting side quests in a city because the writing is just that good the writing in Dragon Dogma 2 is not good and most quests are fetch quests which make a lot of this game feel like Starfield the quests don't hold your hand but that just means it's harder to find the NPCs you're looking for this is made worse by how largely populated the cities are if I'm asking for information I have to talk to 10 to 20 people to find the three people with the information think of it like this if side quests in Dragon's Dogma 2 were completed with a compass that tells you where to go how many of them would just be you walking from point A to point B in a city with no challenge or gameplay so side quests are terrible but so what you can just ignore them and explore my first issue with this notion is that ignoring side quests in a Fantasy game feels wrong it's sacrilege but even if I did Skip every side quest the required main story quests are more plentiful and more boring than the side quests at least a small amount of the side quests send you out to explore the world the main story is just a series of fetch quests you go to the castle walk around talk to people run back to brt to get more quests walk back to the castle talk to more people and my God are the characters boring this is is all made worse by the Limited fast travel for most of the main story quests you are walking you're walking and running and walking and walking and running and you never stop it's so absurdly boring no combat just running and walking limited fast travel does benefit open world exploration as I'll explain later but it's terrible for all these fetch quests I mentioned at the beginning of this video that I dislike the first and last third of Dragon's Dogma 2 and and this is mostly due to the many awful fetch quests I was forced to do I think the core problem of this game's Quest design is the same as starfields the writers don't realize that they lack talent and skill if most quests are fetch Quest then the only joy to be had is in the writing and it isn't good it's bad balers Gate 3 manages to have good side quest writing that also encourages exploration and has a good amount of combat Dragon's Dogma 2 does none of that the weird thing about all of this is that unlike Starfield Dragon's Dogma 2 is actually somewhat fun to explore if every Quest was boring but sent you into the world with some loose directions on where to go then it would be a lot like morrowwind the best Bethesda game instead of recapturing the magic of morrowwind Dragon's Dogma 2 takes the Starfield route of quest design and It suffers for it another issue with the Bland writing is that it makes the restrictive nature of this game's World annoying rather than immersive in Dragon's Dogma 2 you use a rare item called A Fairy Stone to fast travel and you can also fast travel the cities with an ox cart the main benefit of restrictive fast travel in an open world Fantasy game is to immerse the player in the game World the reason why someone might play Fallout in survival mode is to feel like a person inside of the game World rather than a person just playing a video game the issue is that I only want to do this if the game world is remotely interesting I found the writing in lore fall New Vegas interesting so I wanted the hardcore mode restrictions to immerse myself in the world where I have to scavenge for food and water I do not find the world of Dragons Dogma 2 at all interesting Intrigue in a fantasy world is based off of the characters plot and World building and Dragon's Dogma 2 fails in every domain this is coming from a guy whose favorite genre is fantasy I'm biased in favor of the game setting and I'm telling you it's not good further furthermore restrictions that immerse me in a world can only work if the world's logic is at least somewhat believable and Dragon's Dogma 2 is not believable in the slightest how are people in this world surviving at all when you take two steps away from the castle and you are attacked by the entire Army of Mordor the game also allows you to steal from people in front of them without ever getting punished there's nothing to immerse myself in so the fast travel restrictions just add bloat to the game's many fetch quests there are advantages is to the restricted fast travel for open world exploration but overall it did more harm than good for my playthrough the restrictive fast travel caused me to explore Less in the early to mid game because returning to a City cost a Fairy Stone and I was afraid of running out if only they sold the bundle of fairy stones' DLC then the game would be perfect on the topic of exploration let's talk about that before I bought Dragon's Dogma 2 I heard the YouTuber Luke Stevens compare exploration and Dragon's Dogma to to Elden ring where he said that it gave him similar feelings to Elden ring and he's wrong no opinions are wrong every opinion is beautiful and perfect but but this this opinion is wrong in Dragon's Dogma 2 the best thing you can find while exploring is one of the 10 Overworld bosses which is usually a reskin or you can find a cave with mostly one enemy type while in Elden ring the absolute worst thing you can find while exploring is a reskinned boss boss or a cave with a reskinned boss and even at its worst points Elden ring is still better than the best parts of Dragon's Dogma 2 exploration because the boss variety and cave design is better in Elden ring in Elden ring some small dungeons were boring but others would have creative puzzles like with the teleporting treasure chests or they'd have interesting imp ambushes you'd have to think your way through and every cave had a boss in Dragon's Dogma 2 caves are linear poorly designed Thoughtless and usually don't have a boss as I said earlier in the video every cave in Dragon Dogma 2 is the most boring cave in Dragon's Dogma 2 there were countless moments in Elden ring where exploration was rewarded with a giant Legacy dungeon or even an entire New World in Dragon's Dogma 2 there are no real dungeons in the entire game there's zero there's just these little linear caves there there are no dungeons genuinely I think there were only three unique Encounters in Dragon's Dogma 2 that are even remotely worth mentioning which were the Sphinx Medusa and elf Village and I dislike all of them the Sphinx just sends you on more fetch quests before you fight her the elf Village just has some more side quests that I didn't bother to do because I was far enough in the game to know that these writers aren't worth giving my time and by the time I found the only Medusa boss it was in the end game and I'd become too strong for her to provide any chance challenge also on the topic of Medusa I find it extremely weird how Medusa is the first boss you fight in the tutorial and then she only shows up one more time in an endgame area the boss variety is already terrible and they shouldn't be hiding a boss you already fought in the tutorial the only way Dragon's Dogma 2 exploration compares to Elden ring is in how infinitely worse it is by comparison a game with only 12 bosses can't compare to Elden ring if you ever complained about how Elden ring reuses bosses too much but you enjoy Dragon's Dogma 2 then I want a formal apology written to Miyazaki in Dragon's Dogma Old English dialogue another thing that hurts exploration in Dragon's Dogma 2 is the awful enemy variety I don't think I found any new normal enemies after about 5 to 8 hours of gameplay there were goblins Saran Bandits wolves harpies and little else I can think of this may be bad but like with everything in Dragon's Dogma 2 it only gets worse as I mentioned in the intro the hook of this game is that you can climb bosses in Epic Battles but there's only 12 bosses but there aren't really 12 bosses the guardian gigantis is a late game Boss who has no attacks and all you do is hit his weak points in my opinion this doesn't count as a boss since he can't attack and is more of a set piece so by my definition there's only 11 bosses but there aren't 11 good bosses the Cyclops is so easy that he seems more like a training dummy for new players than a good fight I'm not saying that there shouldn't be an easy boss for new players but I am saying that this mediocre fight takes up one of the 11 boss slots also I dislike the Golem fight it's way too simple you hit the weak point while easily dodging his non-threatening attacks then at low Health he turns red so you run away until he freezes up then you kill him it's too simple oddly enough the only other boss who I thought wasn't at all good was the final boss but since that's an endgame spoiler I won't explain why or show any footage until the spoiler section of the video I'm So respectful okay so there's 11 bosses and I only like eight of them well not really because many of these bosses are too rare for a game with only eight fights I straight up didn't find the Sphinx so I can't comment on that fight and I only found Medusa when I was so strong that I bar saw her move set I also only found the White Once at random on the road after a dragon also came down to attack me although it would have been fun to fight the White and the dragon at the same time I couldn't do it because the game disables your autosave in the end game and I didn't want to lose progress which is a whole different issue that I'll explain later but all you need to know right now is real brain damage went into this game's design in other words when when it comes to every rare boss encounter whether I found them or not I didn't have an enjoyable experience with any of them okay so the game doesn't actually have eight enjoyable bosses it has five five and even if I loved the Sphinx and white bosses that I didn't do if I fought these two bosses once in a 30 to 40 hour RPG that wouldn't make my opinion any more positive the five enjoyable bosses that aren't extremely rare are the ogre minur Chimera Griffin and lesser Dragon most of these bosses have variants which have the exact same mov sets but with some stat differences if there are any differences in these boss move sets they aren't impactful enough for me to have noticed of these five bosses that I enjoyed fighting only the Minotaur is new to this game the rest were in the original Dragon's Dogma 1 after around 15 to 20 hours I had killed my first Griffin and my first dragon and I thoroughly enjoyed those fights I was looking forward to seeing what new fun fights would await me in the end game unfortunately there is no end game just reskinned bosses and fetch quests so the enemy and boss variety is terrible in a game all about combat with bad writing unfortunately I'm not done complaining about the combat because there's still more wrong with this game in more ways than one the combat balancing is bad firstly some skills like the thief Sonic ball of death are way too strong the thief's ball of death gives you a jump so you can easily hit many enemy weak points like their heads with tons of damage and you don't have to waste time climbing realistically a lot of the time I was climbing the enemies and hitting their weak points it was just because it was fun not because it was efficient this game becomes absurdly easy around the late mid game I say late mid game and not end game because there isn't enough content for me to consider this game to have an end game basically you become so strong that the only thing that can kill you is a lesser Dragon because of their one-hot meteor attacks this game doesn't have a hard mode so there's no way to increase difficulty there is a new game plus that I won't bother to play but I've heard that it doesn't seem to increase enemy difficulty in a meaningful way to challenge your midgame level and Equipment which I also heard was a problem in the original Dragon's Dogma also Dragon's Dogma 2 has unlimited pause menu healing like in the first game this is bad for an action combat game and turns it into more of a stats game wow with this many complaints it must seem like I really hate Dragon's Dogma 2 or something and I I think I do hate it but that's not to say there isn't anything special in this game many beloved games are either mediocre and bad in almost every area but exceptional in one facet which is enough for people to love it and for a community to be made Dragon's Dogma 2 is precisely one of those games that does one thing exceptionally well while scuffing everything else at first I thought the thing I enjoyed about this game was obvious it's combat against giant bosses in the early to mid game before you get too overpowered and yeah that is fun but it isn't actually the true strength of Dragon's Dogma 2 when it comes to combat mechanics this is all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff the most mechanically complex boss in the game is the Lesser dragon and even then he's really only as complic ated as a Dark Souls 1 boss with big explosion attacks you have to run away from and some simple claw swipes and ground pounds that you have to run away from even the five bosses that I liked aren't going to blow your mind away with their mechanics but despite that there's still something Dragon's Dogma 2 does exceptionally well unlike any other game I've ever played the systems in Dragon Dogma 2 are amazing at telling stories through game play which is especially good since the developers can't tell a story with writing to save their lives let me give you an example of what I mean which is also where Dragon's Dogma 2 clicked for me around 13 hours in I was exploring the desert to reach the city of batal and Griffin came down to attack me I'd seen Griffins before this point and they'd always kick my ass so I was a little scared but I stood my ground and fought eventually the Griffin flew away but then a few hours later he came back and I realized that he was still missing Health from our first fight for the next several hours the Griffin Would interrupt my fights to torment me and I'd slowly Whittle down his health after about an in-game week I had almost reached my destination of batal and the Griffin knew he had one last chance to best me he flew down for another battle and this time he wouldn't be running away I had a long epic battle where the Griffin murdered all of my pawns multiple times only for me to revive them and keep the fight going after over 10 minutes of straight battle I jumped onto the creature's back and lit him on fire with my flaming dagger attack so I could stick my blade through his skull in one final blow although we were victorious the battle went on for so long it had become nighttime meaning that ghosts were wandering about and our Max HP had lowered from taking so much damage during the fight the only way for me and all my pawns to heal Max HP is to rest at a camp so I set out to find the nearest Campsite in the dark only to be attacked by a horde of goblins while we were still weak so did we give up and run away of course not we stood our ground and we fought I killed every last one of them and after the chaos had ended I looked around to see that the pawn I had journeyed with for the longest had died Clare cross had been killed in the attack a terrible tragedy I made it to the camp and killed the Griffin but at what cost although I think there's more negatives than positives to how fast fast travel works I will admit that if you could fast travel with no cost it would lessen the feeling of desperation felt when you're caught in a bad situation while exploring the open world and that would cheapen the story that the game play tells of course I'd also say that pause menu healing and wake Stones also cheapen the story that the gaml Tells because you can just live forever if you feel like it i' to be on board with the limited fast travel system if more of the game was just exploration and combat and less of the game was boring fetch quests I also wish there were more flying enemies like the Griffin that could escape and reenter battle because it results in the most fun stories dragons can fly but they don't ever try to escape or come back another story worth sharing was the time the game autosave locked me into a fight against a lesser Dragon when I was underleveled now it is annoying that the game has a terrible save system but did I run away come on you you already know the answer to that I spent the next hour trying to murder the thing for fun okay and it was fun I developed a strategy where I'd order my pawns to run away from the dragon when he'd summon his meteor one-hot attacks so it' be easier to revive them after spending 17 minutes on a single attempt I landed on the dragon's head with my spin attack and I used the opportunity to grab onto him and hit his weak point only for him to start summoning his magical One-Shot attack again and he was going to kill me it was going to be over all of the time that I invested but I was tired of running I spammed my highest stamina attack and I ripped out the dragon's Brain before he could send us all to our early Graves this story is cheapened by the fact that I could have just used a wake Stone if I died so yeah healing does kind of ruin the thrill if you think about it but it's still a fun memory if I'm being honest these stories of my encounters with giant bosses in the early to mid game are the only parts of Dragon's Dogma 2 that I thoroughly enjoyed and although they were shortlived they did leave a real lasting impact on me by the end game these stories can't happen because you're too strong for the enemies to be able to kill you or be a threat and if the giant evil monster isn't a threat and you just look at them like a normal enemy then there is no exciting story because conflict is necessary for the story to be exciting to make this video reflect my experience with Dragon's Dogma 2 I decide to structure it just like the game I start off negative then I get a little positive it really seems like maybe it's turning around and now we're going to go full on into the negative because all we have left to talk about is the main story and the ending and yeah it's going to get bad guys typically I try to understand and analyze stories in depth to see if they have any large problems like plot holes I did this with God of War Ragnarok and there's a lot of problems and plot holes and disappointments in that game I even paid enough attention to starfields terrible main story to talk about the Game's plot holes but I'm not going to do that here it was so boring that I can't be bothered to analyze it instead I'm just going to make fun of it it's meaningless politics and fantasy driil delivered through a ton of fetch quests I'm certain the story would have had a ton of plot holes if I analyzed it but it's so boring it's not worth understanding so instead of an in-depth analysis here's a brief summary to get to the ending the game starts with a Cuts scene where the King's Guard brand introduces a person who isn't shown as the new king of vermund after this the real game starts and you're a slave the slave Camp gets attacked by monsters you run away and a ghost man sends a griffin to save you and you fly away on it you get back to the castle talk to brand and as it turns out your character has Amnesia and has forgotten that he is the chosen one of course you are during a battle with the true Dragon before the game started he stole your heart and marked you as the Arisen now you have to seek out the true dragon and reclaim your heart the Arisen alone has the power to control pawns which are the magical companions who accompany you in every fight the Arisen is always crowned King of the land but the queen doesn't want to lose power so she finds some criminal and gives him an amulet that lets him control pawns since only the Arisen should be able to control pawns this makes people think that he's the chosen one and not you so you can't claim your throne after this I'm going to be honest I tuned out you do a [ __ ] ton of fetch quests in the castle and then you do more fetch Quest quest in batal the story is extremely awkwardly designed with almost no combat and really nothing of interest you literally spend hours doing nothing there is no midpoint climax or cool story boss battle or even one dungeon in the entire game it was around here writing this script that I realized overall this is the worst main story of any RPG I've ever played before that title went to Starfield and while overall Dragon's Dogma 2 is a better game than Starfield because I like the combat more I think Starfield has a better story oh people are going to really get upset over that hot take I somewhat liked a few story missions in starfields not most of them but a couple one such mission was when you visit neon and get attacked by some rich [ __ ] then you escape the planet with the artifact only to get attacked by the mysterious starborn spaceship even Starfield managed to have this Quest as a midpoint climax meanwhile Dragon's Dogma 2 is just aw awful I don't even have much memory of what happened it's like I repressed The Experience oh yeah I remember one part you do something and this epic looking underwater Castle arises from the ocean that was so cool I thought it would be like a medieval Bioshock dungeon where you explore a castle and look out the windows and see some fish and maybe there's a few traps and a boss and some enemies that would be epic instead you go through a linear cave that you already went through earlier in the main story that has a new passageway open up that sends you through more of a linear cave until you get straight into the heart of the castle and then you talk to a ghost and he gives you a sword that's it that that is the biggest tease in any game I've played underwater dungeon there's nothing it's just straight linear path in Saran this game is a joke on the topic of disappointing dungeons there is nothing that I'd consider to be a dungeon in Dragon's dog 2 there's linear caves with one enemy type and that's it the world design is okay and sometimes creative but the level design is some of the worst I've ever seen it might be worse than Starfield Jesus Christ I don't in Elden ring you have these sprawling Legacy dungeons where you explore entire cities with multiple optional and required bosses that never happens in this game once part of the reason why this main story is so terrible is because not only is is it terribly written but the gameplay side of it is non-existent well now that we're getting to the end of the story here's your second spoiler warning but I will say that if you were enjoying this video and you leave now just to avoid spoilers then you probably care about this game's story more than the writers do anyways after you get the sword from the ghost in the underwater Castle you bring it to this wizard looking guy and he tells you it doesn't have enough power so you kill some dragons and use their scales to power up the sword this sword SW allows you to open a door to reach the last section of the map I have no idea why you need this sword to open the door because I didn't pay attention after walking through the door the guardian gigantis attacks and you do a setpiece boss battle thingy while you fight the boss the false Arisen and The Wizard guy run ahead into a tower you beat the boss and proceed to the final slave Camp from the beginning of the game the game encourages you to rest at the Inn in the camp before running up the tower so that you can heal and for some reason the wizard is still waiting for you like no time has passed the mean wizard man plays with his staff the mean wizard man plays with his staff while you fight some guards the false Arisen isn't here anymore I don't know why he just disappears maybe he was killed by the evil wizard I don't care to check because ultimately none of the castle politics or any characters matter at all the only exceptions is the dragon The Ghost and maybe the wizard man everything else is just fluff anyways the wizard casts a spell to stop the dragon or something and it doesn't work so the dragon comes down anyways and he's holding whatever character you did the most Quests for which for me was the prince Fen you can either run away and let the character die or fight the dragon which is such a stupid non-choice because of course everyone's going to fight but whatever you climb up the dragon's back and he flies you to your final Battleground it's this moment where probably the first thing in the story that I enjoyed happens you walk around the dragon's back as he he flies around the Overworld which is kind of a pretty sight and he talks about how you're both stuck in a meaningless cycle of life and death and how it's impossible to truly change the world I still think the story is meaningless driil but this dragon is cool as hell I love the voice actor he really sells it with a great performance I kind of wish this Dragon was inside of my character's head the whole game or maybe he could have shown up a few more times because honestly this dragon is the only character I like I never beat the first Dragons Dogma but if there's more of this Dragon then automatically it has a better main story I don't care about anything else once you get to your Arena you guys do battle and as I stated earlier this boss is one of the worst ones in the game he's too big to reliably hit his head when you're on the ground so you have to climb him and then he has no shake-off attacks or attacks of any kind when you're on his head so you just kind of stay there as long as you like until you run out of stamina or if you're like me you use items in the pause menu to stay up there to finish the boring boss quicker it's more of a setpiece than a boss and honestly you can kind of knock the boss countdown on this one I don't even know if this counts also if the dragon could shake you off it would still suck because he's too big and takes too long to climb to fix the fight they should increase climbing movement speed in this battle only then have him attack you with spells while you're on top of his back so that you have to run away from him in between attacks I heard this fight has multiple phases in the original dragon dogma and was better but I don't know never beat that game either way you easily murder the dragon and return to vermund as its rightful ruler and the game ends the way it began with Brandt introducing you as its king what poetry ending like the beginning but wait there's more the ghost man who saved you in the slave Camp is sitting at a table and if you talk to him twice he sends you back in time to refight the dragon somehow I refought this boring boss three times to figure out what to do and then looked it up on the internet you're supposed to use the sword that opened the door earlier to kill yourself of course that's obvious why wouldn't I think of that after doing this you fall into the ocean and get swallowed up by some tentacles these Japanese people and they weird fetishes am I right guys when you wake up all the water in the world has drained and a month has passed how people have been surviving without water all this time I have no idea the sky is red and the world has changed into some sort of hellscape this is called the unored world the world changing like this is the second and last cool moment in the entire story it was so cool that it tricked me into thinking that there might be some new interesting content in the changed World immediately I went to explore where the oceans used to be and you know what I found you already know what I found it was more reskinned enemies copy pasted this place reminds me of demon ruins from Dark Souls 1 you know one of the worst levels in the Dark Souls series uninspired reskinned boss spam and so after killing a few bosses I already killed like 10 15 times I went to batal and saw a red Beacon I interacted with it and was forced to follow the mean wizard man from earlier who is now less mean and the game forced me to fight more reskinned enemies that i' had already been fighting since the beginning of the game as I ran through a city that I've already run through dozens of times near the end of this boredom I got hit by AAR and despite having around 80% of my health I died I didn't want to waste a wake Stone since you know I just saved a little bit ago and guess what happened the game deleted my save and only let me start from the very beginning of the unored world before I killed any of the bosses you Capcom like who like what's wrong with you once you enter the unored world hellscape they delete your autosave whenever you die and only let you start when you last woke up from a bed or from the very beginning of the unored world I doubt any of the Japanese developers are watching this but if they are I have a question who hurt you what's wrong with you why would you delete Autos saves that used to work upon death why wouldn't you at least notify the player that that would happen I'm past the point of anger now I'm confused like I know how to program it's pretty hard to code and requires a certain level of intelligence so I know at least some people who don't have severe brain damage were involved in making this game so how could a human with a working brain Design This oh wait no I just figured it out while writing this script the only way to not lose your progress is to use a wake Stone when you die so they delete your autosave so that you'll buy microtransactions that's the only reason I can think that they would do this anyways after restarting from the beginning of this hellscape I did the main story and went back to the underwater Castle from earlier that is no longer underwater for some reason I'm still an idiot and for I thought there'd be like a dungeon or like a boss or something you know maybe like maybe I'd have fun again you're not having fun again once you entered the unor World the game stopped being fun like 10 hours ago if you think you were going to have fun you're you're a idiot there's no fun to be had instead you know what you find an NPC who talks to you with bad dialogue and tells you that the world's ending so you need to convince the world leaders to gather at this Castle so that they don't die you know what that means we're going to end the story off with the bang moreing fetch quests oh my God a lot of people gave this game like a nine out of 10 right now the critic score in Metacritic is 87 okay like this this is not an 87 this is not what an 87 is like if this is an 87 then I don't like video games okay so you do several more hours of fetch quests while avoiding all combat which is the only part of the game I like because if you do combat then your autosave gets deleted and you lose all progress until the last time you rested and you can't just Spam your rests because if you rest too many times the world will end and everyone dies there's no way I would have beaten this game if I wasn't making a YouTube video I'm I'm doing this for you guys okay I'm not doing this for me so you do a bunch of fetch quests running around City ities and convince the people of vermund batal and the elves to seek refuge in a ruined Castle remember when I said that this game basically doesn't have an end game well I sort of lied it this is the end game after many hours of boredom I got all the world leaders to come to the castle and then I spammed my sleep and wasted the rest of the days until a red Beacon formed in the ruined Castle camp for me to interact with and I was able to finish the game game and still still I was hopeful I thought maybe they're saving the only dungeon in the game for the end I don't know why I thought that I thought there might be a dungeon they they're saving it for the end guys the there there will be one dungeon and and I thought okay there probably won't be a dungeon right I don't need to get my Ops up but like maybe a boss maybe there'll be a boss like I I was thinking maybe maybe there'll be some underworld dungeon like like when I got by those tentacle monsters where we're going to fight some cthulu like monster get the out of here there there's there's no there's none of that there's no you don't have joy when playing this game past like the 20 25 hour mark there's none of that it's a cut scene it's a long cut scene the true ending all the fetch Quest you do it to do a long cut scene all right like are are you watching this YouTube video that's what it is that's the ending of the game you walk on the dragon's back again and you watch a cut scene there is no final boss for the true ending in this cut scene stab the dragon's heart and the ghost man from earlier maybe dies I think during the credits new cut scenes play which seemed to say that you broke the cycle of the dragon and saved everyone and now the oceans are back and people can drink water but I guess they never needed water anyways cuz they lived a month without water like I don't know my interpretation of the ending is that usually the Arisen either becomes a dragon or a god of the new world or at least when I looked it up that that's what people said the ending of Dragon's Dogma 1 was but I think here I broke the cycle by killing myself twice and now I'm dead the ghost Man's dead and the dragon's dead like the three people in the cycle pretty sure the ghost man was a God don't really know I don't think they really explain it if they did I tuned it out but now we're all dead so here's some questions why didn't I die the first time I stabbed myself why did stabbing the dragon at the end break the cycle if killing him before continued the cycle it's like violence is the answer or either way why is it a different outcome honestly I don't know and I don't really think I care this is the worst main story of any RPG I've ever played Starfield was better the only fun I had in this game was when I ignored the main story and side quests and just explored and fought monsters unironically my favorite part of the ending was when my game crashed during the end credits I could not stop laughing it was so funny this game is so intensive so Advanced so next generation that even the credit slide can crash that is a perfect ending to Dragon's Dogma 2 and of course it didn't save my progress and I had to redo it of course it did right like cuz the safe system doesn't work why would it why would the safe system work when the game crashes constantly oh my god when the game crashes in the ending credits I don't think it's my computer is the problem all right so closing thoughts on Dragon's Dogma 2 I'm angry I'm livid honestly recording this script I just think it's funny how bad it is but I'm also angry I'm angry that they tried to trick players into buying microtransactions in a $70 game I'm a little angry that brain damage went into the save system I'm also a little angry that so many YouTubers hype this game up but it's just a disappointment but more than anything what makes me the most angry is that a game with so much potential is this bad as I explained in the middle of the video video some parts in the middle of Dragon's Dogma 2 gave me a fun unique experience unlike any other game I've ever played the stories that you create from some monster fights and exploration can be really cool I might recommend this game to an action RPG Enthusiast on a steep discount to experience the cool Overworld bosses but I'd recommend skipping the boring side quests and the awful true ending in fact don't even beat it just you know fight some lesser dragons fight the Griffin fight the bosses and this just stop it's not worth it or just kill the true dragon and then just end the game I think the reason why this game is so bad is because of bad priorities I think most of this game's budget was spent on making good graphics character models and the giant cities when it should have been spent on the best part of the game which are the boss monsters and the stories you make with them a ton of the game is devoted to the terrible writing just to Pat out its length I'm going to propose how Dragon's Dogma 3 could change to highlight this game's strengths while covering up its weaknesses it may seem stupid for a YouTuber to think he can do better than actual game developers and maybe I am stupid but this is so bad I really think I could do better if I had a team of hundreds working on a game for 5 years firstly they need to take out all of those boring fetch quests and have Quest design more like morrowwind that's about using loose directions to find objectives in the open world even if you get lost you'll get lost while exploring and just like with morrowwind that can be part of the fun next there needs to be more normal enemies and they need to be more aggressive and even more importantly than that there needs to be way more bosses for most of this game you're fighting the same seven Overworld bosses over and over again and I only like five of them there should be at least 20 maybe 30 Overworld bosses and even then it wouldn't compare to Elden ring that's the funny part the world should have actual dungeons especially in the main story they should spend some time actually making some interconnected levels instead of these crappy lineer caves they shouldn't spend so much time making cities the cities are bloated bad for performance and all the NPCs are boring they should only have one city as a hub in a ruined world where you kill monsters and explore the ruins and for performance they should probably have an option to reduce the amount of useless NPCs in the city that would be nice they need to do something differently with enemy scaling to make the end game not so easy More Than This a ton of the damage balancing for the skills just needs to be fine-tuned I'd also like a potential sequel to have multiplayer especially if it's focused on combat instead of the crappy writing but that might be Beyond these developers ability if this is all they can do after 5 years and two game releases lastly let's talk about the main story if you had good writers you can make an engaging story and make something like The Witcher 3 or balers Gate 3 but with the terrible writing of this this game you'd be better off copying Dark Souls and just making the players have to kill a few required bosses in different dungeons on the map to open a door that leads to the end I know it's beyond generic to just kind of rip off what Dark Souls has been doing for many years but at least a simple story wouldn't get in the way of the fun combat against giant enemies it wouldn't be a negative it would be like a neutral the way I see it right now the Dragon's Dogma Community is in the same place that they were when the game first released this is a cool idea idea for a game that has potential but it's unfinished and unpolished if the first game had half its content cut and this was the developers chance for Redemption well frankly I'm embarrassed for them this game is so similar to the original that it's more like a remake but it has all of the original same problems this would be the equivalent to from software doing a full remake of Dark Souls 1 where they leave lost isoli and Demon ruins untouched if reception to this video is anything like the Zelda video there will be a bunch of people telling me I'm grifting for views and that all my opinions are fake and hey if you think I'm grifting and that it's impossible for people to disagree with your objectively correct opinion that Dragon's Dogma 2 is a masterpiece just think about how alienating it is to be me and play such a disappointing bad game that so many other people have hyped up beyond belief however I will say that I've been too negative on this channel especially recently it's not really a part of any intentional narrative strategy I just think that every major game release I've played in the last year has been bad except for balers Gate 3 which is one of the greatest games of all time I regret getting so addicted to balers Gate 3 that I rushed the video out so that I could start on the Starfield video sooner because that was my last opportunity to make a mostly positive video and in the video I talked about all my negatives but I did not at all talk about all the positives of that game which are many one thing that annoys me about both Gamers and critics is that I feel like they have amnesia a game with exceptional exploration and enemy variety like Elden ring or balers Gate 3 will come out and be a 10 out of 10 everyone's playing it then a game with chat GPT copy pasted exploration and terrible enemy variety like tears of the Kingdom or Dragon's Dogma 2 will release and a ton of people will praise it anyways and although opinions are subjective something like enemy variety is an objective numeric value the quality of the enemies is subjective but the amount is objective so I don't know how so many people can't understand why the game with hundreds of enemies and bosses like Elden ring is better than the game with 12 bosses and like five enemy types if you hate every boss in Elden ring then maybe you disagree based on that but if you like most of the bosses in both games then objectively Elden ring is better same with exploration what's better the game that has large Legacy dungeons like elen ring or a game with tiny micr penis dungeons like tears of the Kingdom or a game with no dungeons think just just think about it all I'm trying to say at this point is please guys just think a little bit more before you call me a grifter I don't think I should be a contrarian I genuinely think that people are either lying to themselves or intentionally to get review codes or they're just unable to compare objective measurements between games again the opinion is subjective but numerical measurements on the amount of content is objective data and when so many opinions spit in the face of the data I just get confused at how I'm the odd one out and also if I was a Critic for a different industry like the music industry or film I wouldn't even be an odd one out it's just games where people are so positive probably because you kind of got to get review codes to be a part of the main players in this industry that's how it is so that's why they do it the point of what I'm trying to say is don't say Dragon's Dogma 2 is like Elden ring it's not it's objectively less than Elden ring and in my subjective opinion it's a hell of a lot worse than Elden ring Dragon's Dogma 2 is pretty bad Elden ring is a masterpiece and as a concluding statement to this video let's all be excited that we're going to get more Elden ring when the DLC comes out in a few months so you you know that's one way to end it on a positive so the video was supposed to end just there but I'm still talking because I got some things wrong in the video and I want to add on to some points that I made earlier to correct a mistake made in the video there aren't 12 bosses there's more like 14 or 15 or 16 maybe I don't know now that I've been doing YouTube for a while I try to do more research before uploading a video but Dragon's Dogma 2 has some bosses that are so hidden they weren't mentioned in any of the boss guides I looked over a week after the game's launch when I wrote the script one boss only appears at night in specific locations and I rarely explored at night and two are found in the unored world which I also barely explored because it would delete my autosave upon death so of course I didn't explore it's unclear to me if one of the unored world bosses the dragon perer is different enough from lesser dragons to be considered a fully unique 15th boss but the worm perer boss is a completely unique endgame boss I also found a Reddit post that talked about a nighttime boss called the skeleton Lords but this looks to be less of a boss and more of a strong small enemy type so I don't think it counts as a 16th boss but I could be wrong cuz I never had an experience fighting him the fact that a game where you fight seven bosses the entire time six of which are reskinned from the original Dragon's Dogma is hiding anywhere between five to seven unique encounters so well that neither me nor the guides I used found four of them makes me so unbelievably angry and dumbfounded I don't even know what to say you have to earn the right to hide bosses by having good enemy variety you can't be Avent guard like dark souls and hide content in secret Areas when you've barely made any content to begin with on the topic of exploration I think most of it's mediocre due to the bad Dungeons and enemy variety but if you found more hidden bosses than me you might think it's a tad bit better than is represented in this video still not even 10% as amazing as Elden ring but a bit better to expand upon an idea I brought up earlier I think the main reason why Gamers and game critics are so obnoxiously positive is because Gamers spend so much time and money on games that they want to block out all all criticism since they're too deeply invested consumers spend next to nothing on music so it's not a big deal when someone trashes an album but you spend a lot of time and money on games so it hurts more when someone trashes the thing you've hyped up in your mind for years to finally end this video I want to clarify my stance on what my actual opinion of Dragon Dogma 2 is partially because it changed a lot while playing the game during the middle of the game I quite liked it I thought it was a a good game held back by a lot of stupidity and by the end of the game I was seething with anger so I'm going to commit the cardinal sin of long form video game essays and actually write the Game the way I see it this game's combat has potential but is held back mostly by terrible enemy variety and boring main inside quests overall I'd give it a five out of 10 that rises to a six if you ignore the boring side quests but I can't really give it that rating because the game only has two saves and the game autosave locks me into combat and loading in rests delete my autosave and loading a save lowers Max HP unless you sit through two loading screens and they try to trick you into buying microtransactions by lowering your max HP and you can't start a new character file upon release and the final boss sucks and dying in the unmo world deletes my autosave and the end game is Just fetch quests with no combat and most of the early game is fetch quests with no combat and I didn't like a single main story quest in the entire game I at least liked a few quests from Starfield not most of them but a couple there were zero I liked in this game and after you do all of the fetch quests in the unmo world there's no final boss for the true ending and there's probably more [ __ ] that I could add on right here that I can't think of right now the point is so much of this game is brain dead it's mindboggling so I'm going to lock this game at a very generous four out of 10 I'm giving it above a three because I liked some of the memorable stories that combat created but every decision in this game feels handcrafted to piss me off if they change some of the easier to fix issues with the save system and whatnot maybe the game can rise to a five or a six but it is not that right now I will say one more thing as a final final closing statement to this video the feeling I felt most while playing dragon's dog 2 was boredom while the feeling I felt most while writing and thinking about Dragon's Dogma 2 was pure [Music] rage

Channel: Feeble King

Views: 24,125

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Id: Mdt1PYpT6dA

Length: 56min 15sec (3375 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024