Dragon's Dogma 2 Review - 160 Hours Later, Here's What I Think.

Shields up iron Breakers welcome back to Dragon Dogma 2 and today I'm going to be bringing you my full-on review after having played around 160 hours of this game this title was sent to me by Capcom so that I could give it a look and tell you guys my opinions on it I've been streaming the game pretty much every single day since the game has been released so if you're curious and you want to check out some more gameplay maybe after you watch this video you're still on the fence and you just want to watch some uncut gameplay and reaction stuff like that you will find those live streams here on the channel Channel and I go over multiple vocations play several different things you can even check out some of the endgame if that is something that you're curious about there's plenty of gameplay footage to go around that you can watch but as per usual whenever it comes to my review videos I would like to start by talking about what is Dragon's Dogma 2 so you'll have to forgive me if you've been watching all of my content about this game up until this point because I will be retreading some familiar ground to make the video as friendly as possible to somebody that is coming into the channel for the first time and checking out this video just because they want to see my review on Dragon Dogma 2 so what is Dragon Dogma 2 this is a non-conventional open world action RPG and the reason I'm going to refer to it as non-conventional it is because it is doing a lot of things different and from the reaction that I've seen from within the community The Gaming Community overall that has come into my videos and had lengthy discussions about some of the things that this game is doing there's a lot of people that actually don't like some of the features that this game brings to the table and I call them features whereas these people would call them lack of features which is understanding from their uh point of view but to me these are good things and to a lot of people these are bad things and these specific features that I'm talking about is the lack of handholding what I mean by this is not every single quest in the game is going to have Quest markers you're not going to be able to Simply complete every quest in the game unless you really really take your time to explore and there's not going to be that much guidance in the way that is going to lead you you know if you're someone who is a completionist and you're like oh I want to complete every single Quest that this game has you're going to struggle with that because a lot of the quests are very organic you're going to be walking around through the world you're going to be walking through a city or something and an NPC is going to come up to you and say hey uh I I have this thing that I would like you to help me with as opposed to you just looking for markers on a app or something like that so that is the non-hand holdy part of it the other thing is the game is not necessarily afraid to kick you when you're down so say you're out and about and you're exploring and you die you get to load from your last save but the game is going to give you a hit on your maximum health and then if you die again the game is going to give you another hit on your maximum health until eventually you're going to end up at only one hit point now there are solutions for this as you can camp out in the open world so long as you have a camping kit and this will recover your health to full same thing if you happen to go to a town and you rest at an inn that is going to recover your health to full but fundamentally there is something a little bit uh let's say hostile to going out into the world now whereas I see this as a good thing because I find it to be interesting that you actually have to prepare and plan out your route when you're heading out into the world to do a quest or to make a journey to explore a certain location or whatever there are a lot of people that do not appreciate this feature which is why I'm making very clear this is where the non-conventional part comes in the other thing is it does not have uh easily accessible convenient fast travel which appears to be very much a sticking point for a lot of people they are very frustrated over the fact that the game does not have fast travel and I will talk more about that the fact of the matter is there is fast travel but it is extremely limited so keep that in mind as well harsh environment requires a decent amount of planning as you are making your outings uh out of the city as well as limited fast travel so you actually have to go out and explore and figure things out not necessarily super friendly with uh Quest markers but there are solutions around that through the pawn system so these are the unconventional parts of it and some of you will see these as negatives now on the other hand what do you get for this you get some of the best class fantasy in RPG gaming from my personal experience like for instance uh a good example that I always like to to give is the first time that I fought a cyclops I was playing a thief I basically walked up to the Cyclops climbed up on top of him because the game has a climbing system wherein you can climb up on big monsters instead of just hacking away at their tippy toes or having to wait for predetermined phases where you get to hit their heads you just climb up on the monster if you're able to read its reactions appropriately and predict its patterns and then you can you know climb all the way up to its head and hit him in a weak spot sometimes the weak spot might not be the head might be its chest might be something else but basically you get to you get to climb up on monsters and so in the first time that I fought a cyclops I climbed climbed up to its head I planted a bomb on its head because thieves have this thing where they can plant explosives and then I jumped off his head while I was in the middle of the air I detonated said bomb is there's an explosion the Cyclops basically start staggering as the Cyclops is staggering I land in the ground I throw my grappling hook using the ins snare ability and pull on its one leg as he's losing balance he falls over smashes his face on the side of a mountain which deals massive amounts of damage afterwards I run up to the cyclops's head and I do a critical Blow by stabbing him with both of my daggers so this is the type of class fantasy that you can expect in a game like this now I gave you guys the thief example there are other examples that are also extremely cool like for instance if you happen to be playing a warrior the first time that I did my critical attack as a warrior my sword got stuck in one of the monsters and then the basically that your character is going to pick up the monster as he is you know hanging on your blade and then he throws the monster against the wall dealing again massive amounts of damage this is obviously for smaller monsters you're not going to pick up something like a cyclops with your great sword because that would make no sense but you know I also as I was playing a warrior for the first time I staggered a griffin almost to death by just constantly smacking him in the head with a big sword which is also very satisfying as a fighter you get to slam monsters with your Shields and they get sent flying as a sorcerer you get to bring down the apocalypse with crazy spells uh there's all of these crazy class fantasies that exist in this game that in my opinion don't really exist anywhere else there are very few games that are able to deliver on emergent moments as well as just uh combat situations that get uh presented to you throughout the game this is one of the most unique aspects of it on top of it you have a vocation system which allows to basically play whatever class you feel like playing whenever you feel like playing set class so long as you unlock it in the game so you can go from playing a sorcerer to playing a warer to playing something a little bit more uh hybrid in the form of the Mystic experience hand the magic Archer there are all of these really cool vocations available in the game that really deliver on class fantasy that you don't really see anywhere else like in a lot of RPGs you know if you happen to be playing a sorcerer you cast a fireball you spend some mana and then you're like oh no I have to either chug a Mana potion or have this meaty cooldown system that I need to deal with whereas in this game it's like hey your stamina regenerates everything uses stamina so you're good to go so if you want to be a big Sorcerer And just cast big powerful spells all the time you can do that you just have to wait a little bit for your stamina to to refill or you don't even have to do that because there's some consumables that recover your stamina the point is it's not like Mana in a lot of RPG games where it's a very limited resource or you have only a limited number of casts like no stamina is always regenerating always fast and you're always being able to cast super powerful spells the other aspect of it is that it doesn't take the easy approach that a lot of uh RPGs have nowadays wherein everybody gets a Dodge everybody gets a Parry everybody gets like some type of evasive maneuver that they can go and do and I understand that for a lot of players this is a good thing but to me it kind of takes away from the fantasy aspect of a medieval like setting that you usually have when it comes to RPGs you used to have this thing back in the day where it was like uh Fighters can kill archers archers can kill Mages and mages can kill Warriors almost like a rock paper scissors type of thing and I understand it's not as simple as that but that's usually kind of how it goes right in in some of those older Dungeons and Dragons situations that you can kind of think of and that's one of the things that this game tries to recreate by bringing in some of the vulnerabilities so for instance if you happen to be playing a sorcerer you're going to be extremely powered as a matter of fact I would say that by the end game from my personal experience Sorcerers can pretty much delete every thing I'm not I'm not exaggerating here by the way they have a spell called uh the maom you just cast that and you will delete a a drake which is one of the strongest enemies in the game you just delete it just like its health bar just gone uh that's that's something that we'll have to talk about as well but the point is Mages are super powerful but for instance if three goblins surround you and there's nobody there to help you those three goblins are going to have their way with you because they're going to keep hitting you and staggering out staggering you out of casting spells and that is one of the aspects of the fantasy that I think is really cool because it really gives you that feeling of a party because you are going to be expected to create a party system using the pawn system in the game which I'm going to be elaborating on as well on the other hand if you're something like a fighter or a warrior you're going to be able to tackle these goblins really no problem they're not really going to be that challenging but you're not going to be dishing out the amount of damage that a sorcerer is dishing out and you have to put yourself In Harm's Way in order to be able to deal this damage so there's a a bit of a back and forth and there's some kind of like rooll setting that you're going to have on your party you're going to have your dpsers you're going to have your front line you're going to have your supports in the form of Mages and you're going to need to balance out your party to Be an Effective party out in the world so just because you're a big Mage and you can destroy everything it also means that you're sacrificing some mobility and your dodging is basically going to consist of not being there pay attention to what the monster is doing and try not to get hit as opposed to uh you know a Dodge roll like that that is essentially a get out of jail free card which is one of the things that I always see whenever a new player comes to Dragon's Dogma 2 they're like where where do I dodge and because we've all been you know it's something that is kind of like widely accepted but the payoff for the class fantasy is fantastic now like I said there is this very unique system in the game which is the pawn system and this is one of the best things about the game so fundamentally you create your character and very shortly after you create your character you're going to be asked to create your Main Pawn which essentially you create a second character you get to choose its vocation you can fully customize them almost as if you're creating a second character for yourself but you don't get to control it the second character will be completely eye controlled you can give it an inclination which kind of like sets a default pattern of things that he's going to be doing but pawns also learn so for instance uh you create your your pawn and then you go and you kill a cyclops your Pawn is now more Adept at killing cyclopses he knows where their weak spots are he knows how to maybe climb them and stab them in the eye doing all of these things the more you engage in combat with them the more powerful they become the more things they learn at a certain point pawns will even be able to guide you on quests which is one of the reasons why this game does not have a wealth of information when it comes to quests is because if you need help you can just go and you can hire a pawn that can help you finish this quest to kind of give you a more organic experience which personally I find to be very satisfying I think it's a really nice halfway point where you can try to figure things out and then if you get to a point where it's like oh I really don't know how to progress at this point you can just go and you can hire a pawn that has that information of that Quest that you are doing and they will help you out this is not going to solve every single quest in the game but it is going to give you uh additional additional knowledge of those situations and the combination of all of these things is what makes Dragon's Dogma 2 a unique game which is why I find it so important to first describe what the game is so that you know what you can expect from this game before we even talk about the specifics and why the game is good and all of that stuff right so hopefully this kind of highlights to you what makes Dragon's Dogma 2 special and whether or not this is going to be the game for you because like I said there's not a lot of handholding the outside world is going to be somewhat hostile if you go outside unprepared and there's not easy fast travel which a lot of players actually you know I I'll get into the the point of fast travel a little bit further ahead but basically that is what Dragon's Dogma 2 is so now let's talk about something that I'm not as happy about which is the launch controversy around this game for those of you that have been following the game you will be aware that there was quite a bit of backlash when this game launched for several reasons so the first reason and one of the reasons that I consider to be the most important one and one that most definitely needs to be addressed and still hasn't as of the recording of this video let's hope that Capcom doesn't put out a patch in the next couple of days because otherwise the video is going to be outdated but uh even so the video is being recorded on the 5th of April and up until this point the performance situation has still not been solved so what is the problem with performance in the game well this game uses uh it it it is a game made in the re engine which is the same game that is used for Monster Hunter rise as well as all of the Resident Evil remakes and all of that stuff it's phenomenal engine but it hasn't really been used on this scale this is a massive open world that is a very big world and on top of it it has a ton of AI computation to it in the form of every NPC has their own things that they're doing in the background to give you an idea NPCs in this game are so important that at one point I had one Quest that broke Midway through the quest because I killed a guard that was supposed to participate in Seth Quest so I had to go and resurrect the guard in order to be able to continue to do the quest because every NPC is integral integrally linked to the questing system to other systems in the game and this requires a serious amount of calculations and stuff like that and that is the reason that has been presented as to why performing is an issue because in the outside world for the most part performance is not too bad when it comes to PC most people if you have like a decent like let's say 30 series cards or uh 60 series if you're on the Nvidia on the at um on the AMD side of things so if you have like 30 cies 30 series on Nvidia 60 series on AMD you should be pretty much good on the outside world depending also on the resolution that you're playing at and all of that stuff but the game is still demanding okay and so on the outside world you should be able to get a decent frame rate the problem is when you get to towns and there's a high concentration of NPCs your CPU usage is going to go up and everything is going to go to crap your frame rate's going to be fluctuating all over the place and it's a serious problem on consoles the game is only running at 30 FPS which is also something that I'm not a big fan of I've reported on this from the moment that I did my very first preview of the game game explaining to everybody to listen the game is going to be running 30 FPS it is uncapped but it is 30 FPS so it is not a fantastic experience 60 FPS is always better particularly when you have a fastpaced action game like this the game is still very much playable at 30fps I've played a decent chunk of it on PlayStation 5 just to test it out and figure out what the game was running like as a matter of fact I would argue that the performance is more stable on PlayStation 5 because they are targeting that 30 FPS whereas on PC things are all over the place right on top of it to aggravate things uh we also have the DRM systems like denuvo and i' I've I've been told that there's another one in there as well I I don't know I usually don't check too much on those types of things but yes we do have anti-dm systems and the novo as we all know is a serious problem I wish they would just remove it but it is there so therefore it is also a consider uh something to consider when it comes to the performance as well but yes there are performance issues and if you are someone who is very sensible to uh fluctuating frame rates I would have to advise you to hold off for now until the game gets patched until they figure out this performance situation because yes performance is pretty bad now me personally I would not uh stop myself from playing the game because I do believe that there is a unique experience within Dragons Dogma 2 that it is not delivered in any other video game but you know I fully understand that that people have uh you know their certain standards when it comes to frame rates and I'm not going to tell her to deviate from those it is up to each player to decide what they want to do the performance situation is still not solved as of the recording in this video and that's all I can really say about it but moving onwards that was not the only thing that was a problem during the launch of Dragon Dogma 2 the other situation was the microtransaction situation which generated a lot of backlash from the community which I think is justifiable even if I do not think that it is justifiable to lie about the microtransactions which a lot of people have definitely done which then caused a muddying of the waters because people wanted to try to torpedo the game by lying about what each of the microtransactions did that I do not agree with but I do agree that a game that cost $70 uh base price should not have any microtransactions included in it it doesn't even matter if is a single player game or a multiplayer game it is a full-priced game and therefore microtransactions should just not be a thing that is in there having said that though the the industry has already moved in a direction where that is just going to be a thing that happens if you want to boycott the game based around the microtransactions I think you are in inside your right to do so and I think you should go ahead and do me personally I'm not going to because like I said Dragon Dogma 2 is a unique experience that I am not able to to get on any other game it is that simple and I will uh you know elaborate upon that as we talk about more different systems of the game but I'm not happy about the microtransaction situation either having said that 99% of those microtransactions are completely worthless they are not worth your money the game from the 160 hours that I have played of it does not appear to be balanced around you having those microtransactions several players have misconceptions around the selling of rist crystals which by the way is lied to 10,000 Rift crystals which is not even that much to begin with but on top of it they believe that these Rift crystals are necessary to higher higher level pawns when the reality is the way that the pawn system works if you are the same level as the pawn you are renting the pawn is free and if you are hiring a higher level Pawn you are basically just making the game easier on yourself so you know they each their own you can do what you want but fundamentally I wouldn't even recommend people hiring higher level pawns to begin with because I think it's just a waste of resources and you're going to make the game easier for yourself and the game is already easy to begin with so on the topic of the microtransactions just to kind of like wrap things up I completely disavow them I do not like them I absolutely despise them and I think they are not worth your money now there is one particular microtransaction that is a little bit more controversial now I will address it head on which is the port Crystal they are selling you a port Crystal which is a waypoint marker for f fast travel you still need to purchase uh ing game these stones called Fairy Stones inside the game using the endgame currency of gold which is the standard currency this is not something that you can buy uh for real money or anything like that so I don't like the fact that they're selling a port Crystal there's a limited amount of Port crystals that you can gain by playing the game having said that I got way more Port crystals than I needed just by playing the game and this is not even counting the port crystals that would give it to me uh by other players but just the port crystals that I encountered by playing the game W more than enough now that is like I said one of the more egregious microtransactions and I don't like it but you know it is what it is that's the microtransaction situation uh and I don't like it I don't agree with it but that's just the the reality of the industry of gaming nowadays unfortunately so now let's go real quick over the visuals so we have this performance situation do we at least get fantastic visuals to go with it in my opinion most definitely this is one of the most gorgeous games that I have played in recent memory the game looks beautiful it animates even better and it is just basically a work of art in motion as you are playing it as far as I'm concerned um on the console sometimes you will get some lower textures because that's just you know the downsides of playing games on Console you're never going to have as High Fidelity experience as you have on the PC but that's not to say that it looks bad the game looks gorgeous on all the systems that it is on as far as I'm concerned and personally I just love playing it there's really not a whole lot to say when it comes to visuals I think the game looks fantastic and if you've been seeing some of the conversations around it where there are some bad actors saying looks like a PS3 game those people have problems or they need to go see an eye doctor I really don't care but the game does not look like a PS3 game by any stretch of the imagination the game looks out absolutely gorgeous it's just that simple now when it comes to sound everything sounds fantastic I think that the weapon sounds are good I particularly love the sound of a cyclops smashing his face into the side of a mountain it is brutally satisfying whenever you break parts off of monsters like chopping off the tusks of a minotaur everything sounds good everything sounds very visceral no real complaints there however when it comes to the soundtrack I have to say that I feel these soundtrack of Dragon's Dogma one was significantly better that's not to say that the soundtrack of this game is bad it is to say that the soundtrack of the original Dragons Dogma definitely packed more of a punch and took more chances I mean the old the the real OG starter screen of Dragon's Dogma had dongan into free you guys can go look that music up on YouTube and it is absolutely awesome and I really missed that even though they eventually replaced it uh when they came out with dark ARIS which was a little bit disappointing but you know it is what it is but even then the the soundtrack The Combat music of the original in my opinion was all around better because it took more chances it was more aggressive and that's the type of stuff that I like the soundtrack on this game is not bad but it is much more let's say a safe Choice than in the first one and I like it when companies take chances but you know I'm sure there's going to be people that are going to prefer the soundtrack of Dragon Dogma 2 over the original so that's it's going to be a thing that goes back and forth in terms of voice acting I thought that the voice acting was good all around I played with English voices no real complaints there everything sounded good so it is what it is now moving on to story this is going to be something that I believe is going to divide a significant segment of the community and that is because um the story and again we're not going to go into spoiler territory here but the SPO the story in this game doesn't really take Center Stage the story is more just the plot device to keep you moving forward to advance the the events out in the world but ultimately the story is the adventure that you have for yourself whenever you are going out on to a certain location and you fight a dragon or you you know you happen to take a beating from a cyclops along the way and now your health is like at you're at half health and you can't really heal any further because your lost gauge is uh stacked up from you taking damage throughout your journey and then you pull off a clutch kill or you ended up dying and having to stop to camp at a certain location where you hadn't found a camp yet maybe one of your pawns dies and you need to recruit another Pawn along the way throughout your journey these are all things that kind of like generate your own story and your own path that you take and that is the more important story of Dragon's Dogma 2 in my opinion rather than the main story having said this I don't think the main story is back I don't think it is particularly excellent either which uh you know is going to be divisive for a lot of people the one thing that I did like is I enjoyed interacting with the characters out in the world and having quests with them like for those of you that play the game there's a character named U she is mentioned in the official material and I liked her story quite a bit I think she has a very interesting story uh it's only like a couple of quests that you do with her as the game progresses but she is very much linked to your character from the beginning and I find that that type of character progression is what I actually wanted more of in Dragon's Dogma 2 rather than uh a higher focus on the main story if that makes sense I also liked the story of some of the nobility that I interacted with in the game and some of the choices that you get to make as to how you deal with said nobility because you can just pretty much kill anyone if you want to and there will be consequences I haven't really explored that whole system you can also pretty pretty much romance anyone that you want to literally any NPC well maybe not any NPC there are some NPCs that you can't give gifts to so I guess you can't romance those but you can pretty much romance any NPC that you want now having said that there's also not really a huge payoff for Romancing NPCs and on top of it the system is still a little bit unbalanced when it comes to romance because for instance I did everything to romance or yet somehow the game ended up recognizing a black ith as my romance partner because obviously I spent an exorbitant amount of gold in a blacksmith because that makes sense it's almost like Dragon's Dogma 1 did the exact same thing their Masterworks all you can't go wrong how many of you had Mr Masterworks in your house at the end of Dragon's Dogma 1 I can't wait to read the comment section on this video and see how many people are going like guilty is charged and it's like yep damn right guilty is charged but yeah that's uh the the Rance situation still a little bit weird I wish they would have expanded on that a little bit more I wish we could have had some more romantic scenes with your chosen um with whoever you choose to romance in the game I think that would be an interesting addition and I think it would make sense but they haven't expanded on the romance system as much either which is you know inexorably linked to the story because your romantic character will have a certain presence in the story at certain points that's all I'm going to say because like I said I do not want to uh go into spoiler territory or anything like that but fundamentally the story never really takes Center Stage except like beginning and end of the game uh and the rest of it is just you going out on quests and having your own Adventures which to me is exactly what I wanted now I understand that for a lot of players they want more interaction with the story in my opinion this is not that game like the best story that I've ever experienced in any video game that was Final Fantasy 14 and that is because that is a story that spanned over like I don't know 300 400 hours something like that and it was amazing but the gameplay of Dragon's Dogma 2 is what I like and in Dragon Dogma 2 you really don't spend that much time looking at cutscenes and character development and that type of stuff character development is done through the interactions with the different characters that you encounter throughout the world and I think there are some really cool characters uh in the game but uh that is going to depend on how much people wanted to engage in the story let's just say that this is not as story driven as probably people who are really into story would like but you know it is what it is so now I want to elaborate a little bit more on the pawn system because we already talked about Pawns in the introduction of the game but I really wanted to express to you guys how this system works because it's such a cool system now naturally I would have preferred multiplayer this game does not have multiplayer because the way in which the game works is the pawn system is almost like its own form of multiplayer and so you create your character then you create your pawn and as you create your Pawn your Pawn is going to learn like I've explained to you but your party is going to be formed of four so you're going to have yourself your main pawn and you're going to be able to hire two more pawns now when you go out to hire these other pawns you can hire the main Pawns of other players as a matter of fact Yours Truly has an official Pawn which is a pawn that is on a special list that you can go and you can check out there's other people out there like fighton cowboy has an official Pawn asman gold has an official pawn and there's a bunch of other creators that also have official pawns like Super Rad bunch of more people they all have official pawns and you can grab their pawn and take them on an adventure and their Pawn will have all of the knowledge of everything that they have done in the game so my Pawn at this point will know pretty much how to fight anything in the game they will be very powerful as a matter of fact if you're just starting the game you won't be able to uh you won't be able to rent my Pawn because it's going to be too high level but regardless of that the point is you're going to be able to take pawns from other players and they're going to bring the experience that these other players have uh with them so it's almost like a synchronous multiplayer so if you have a friend you can take his pawn and then yall can go on a adventures and then when his Pawn returns to his world he will have learned from you so pawns are always learning so say for instance if I was to take your main Pawn with me and I go and I kill a cyclops and a Drake and then I send them back to you because I replace him or something like that your Pawn will now have the knowledge of how to fight cyclopses and Drakes where if I take your pawn and I do a quest your Pawn will now know the solution of that Quest and he he can guide use should you choose to do so and that is a really cool system and one of the things that I would like to add is that being a content creator one of the things that I always want is to be able to play games with my audience and this is just one of those things that it's very hard to do at scale because when you have so many people in your audience it just becomes very hard to be able to play a video game with every single person and the pawn system was actually something that kind of indirectly allowed me to do that because I created my Pawn as if it was my main character so people taking my Pawn they're almost like they're playing with me as a matter of fact my Pawn was always the first one to get every upgrade every single you know little bit of uh loot upgrades that we were get or enhancements to gear or anything like that I would always prioritize doing it to the pawn first and so that was a really cool experience just being a seeing so many people playing with my pawn it was it was cool so personally I really like the pawn system I think it's awesome and it allows you to basically customize your party in a lot of different ways because from the different inclinations that these ponds have where they can be more aggressive they can be more defensive they can be more support oriented and then you can choose their specific uh vocation which is like their class so you can have uh you know if you want to have a full party of sorcerers you can do that you can just have yourself be a sorcerer your main Pawn be a sorcerer and then hire two more Sorcerers and there's going to be four Sorcerers going out into the world and where we can Havoc the problem is it's not going to be a particularly well balanced party so sometimes some of you might end up dying when you're overwhelmed by smaller enemies because they're just going to rush you and go after you and stagger you out of casting your spells and all of that stuff but the the idea of you being able to just choose your party composition and base that around all of these different systems with uh the pawn inclination the vocation that they have and all of that and vocations also have their own customization that we're going to get into a little bit later that add an additional degree of complexity to the whole thing it's just very satisfying to me personally so that's the pawn system and then one of the things that I mentioned in the intro as well is that this has some of the best class fantasy I give you guys the examples of when I took down uh a cyclops with my Thief by blowing stuff up but there's plenty of other vocations that really allow you to just live out those crazy fantasies and the cool thing about the vocation system is like I said you can swap it around whenever you want but each vocation comes with a set of five augments and the way that this works is augments are cross vocation so you can play as a thief and that will gain you access eventually when you level up the thief all the way you will gain access to an augment called Verve which increases your strength and then you can use that in your fighter or on your Warrior or on your uh Mystic spear hand which will increase your damage so it's a really neat system for those of us that enjoy Min maxing and coming up with different builds and doing all of that because you will be expected to level up different vocations to gain access to different augments that you can then customize into your character then on top of it you can also get different sets of gear even though the reality when it comes to gear and Dragons Dogma 2 is that there are things that I would just consider to be best in slot so yeah the the diversity that you get at the end of gear is is actually not that much you're mostly going to be like oh I want this thing because this deals the most damage there is is some room for you to play around with it if you want to play for instance with elemental damage because there are some weapons that come enchanted with let's say Frost damage or fire damage and if you're fighting something that is weak to that element which there is a system of Elemental weaknesses and advantages and all of this stuff if you are fighting monsters that are weak to that element there might be an advantage to having one of those permanently enchanted weapons but fundamentally the combat of the game is absolutely fantastic the the fantasy of playing around with these vocations is absolutely awesome but there are some downsides to it now one of the downsides one of the first downsides that I would point out is there appears to be a bit of a ranged bias in the game which at the end of the day I've been thinking about this a whole lot since I finished the game and I was like would I really want them to Nerf those classes though no because the classes are so much fun that I don't know if they were to Nerf those classes they would still be as awesome but like magic Archer and sorcerer just stand out like a swore thumb they in the end game they will straight up delete enemies it is not really that challenging but the there's just a bias towards range but that's almost always the case when it comes to RPGs if you're ranged you're able to deal damage without taking damage usually those classes end up being the best but they's still like I said fantastic class fantasy even if you are playing melee so I don't think that this is a big issue now one of the systems that the game utiliz that I also mentioned previously is climbing now if you've played the original the the original Dragons Dogma climbing was a fantastic mechanic now I'm not going to say that they came up with the idea first because if you've played Shadow of the Colossus climbing feels very much inspired by Shadow of the Colossus it probably even is I'm sure that ituno at some point might have even said that he had been inspired by it wouldn't really surprise me but yeah Shadow of the Colossus is definitely I think one of the games that kind of started that trend but Dragon's Dogma really expanded on that just lets you climb up on pretty much any monster and figure out all of these different things that you can do so they improved on the climbing system from Dragon's Dogma 2 in a really cool way which is you no longer have to be grabbing the monster at all times so the idea is you jump on the monster you grab the monster and then your stamina meter starts decreasing so you can only climb for certain amount of time while you have stamina right so in the original you would climb up on something and then you would hit it as often as you possibly could and then you would have to jump out but in this one if you manage to get yourself on a position or say you're standing on the back of a cyclops you can let go of the climbing thing and your character will just stand there in the back of the Cyclops and you can recover your stamina and you can beat the crap out of the monster while standing on it now naturally the monster will have certain moves that will cause you to fall off if you are not grabbing onto it but it does give you an evolution of the climbing system however I would also like to criticize a little bit that I wish they had improved the mobility of this climbing system because sometimes it is not as accurate as you would like this was a problem in the original as well where just you hold the stick forward and you're like please move forward and your character starts going sideways and starts going in strange directions and sometimes it gets a little bit awkward with the climbing it requires a a decent amount of practice and I wish they had improved on it just a little bit but the amount of updates that they have done to the climbing system by just allowing you to let go of the monster and stand on top of the monster is enough to make me plenty happy I just wanted to point out that I really wish that they got rid of some of the Jank in there but you know it's it's some of those things that I I believe that's probably one of the hardest things to code be this is why in a lot of video games whenever you're fighting big monsters you end up hitting them in their tippy toes because you know climbing monsters and doing all these crazy things is really really hard so I'm glad that they're still doing that in this game but now the biggest criticism that I would have to the combat system and just the overall gameplay of Dragon Dogma 2 is the scaling and that is to say that monsters don't really scale so it is very easy for you to become overpowered early on in the game and then just trounce everything the game has uh so in my case for instance it took me a long time to become overpowered because I decided to just play a bunch of different vocations and because player level and vocation rank are two different things even if I'm level let's say 50 if I equip a low level like a rank two vocation I'm still going to be significantly weaker because my abilities are not going to be up to Snuff so things still stay challenging so me having played pretty much all of the vocation at some point of my playthrough made it so that I was always getting a little bit challenged in the things that I was doing because I was always playing a little bit underleveled against most things that I was fighting however if you were to focus on one vocation throughout your whole playthrough most likely you are going to become very overpowered very early on and you're going to just destroy everything in the game and it gets to a point where the challenge level is just not there so to give you an idea by the time that I got to the end game I was fighting some of the end game bosses and I was playing as um one of the vocations is called the Warfare and he has less base stats than any of the other vocations so technically speaking he's a little bit weaker and then on top of it I was playing the tanking vocation which is probably one of the ones that deals less damage the fighter well actually the one that deals the less least amount of damage would be trickster but other than trickster fighter would be one of the ones that would deal damage and I was playing Warfare with fighter and trickster and I still one shotted every well not on shoted but one did every boss in the first try every endgame boss I did it on the first try which you know is not really what you want you'd want things to scale and become more challenging and then to top it off when you jump into new game plus I've heard conflicting reports as to whether or not the game the The Monsters scale I don't don't think they scale and if they do scale they scale so little that it doesn't really seem to make a difference I'm just going through and trouncing everything so that is one of the biggest problems right if you're constantly changing vocations and experimenting with the vocation system the game feels reasonably balanced right up until you get the end game right however if you don't do that and you focus on a single vocation and you just minmax power level the crap out of that one vocation you're going to start trouncing things very very fast and the game gets very very easy which is definitely something that I wish that they would address this does not diminish how much fun I had with the game I want to make sure that I point that part out but it is definitely something that I would like to see changed so now let's talk about the fast travel situation because this is a big deal I made a video talking about this and since that video I've had a lot of interactions with a lot of people that disagree with my opinion which is fine not everybody has to agree with me but my point is is if you H if you added fast travel like traditional fast travel like you have in a you know Assassin's Creed game if you were to add fast travel to Dragon's Dogma 2 you would fundamentally ruin the core gameplay experience of this game the big draw of this game to me is going on Journeys and Adventures and just generating my own Fun by deciding I'm going to explore this part of the map now and it just so happens that there's a quest in that general direction and I'm going to go there and I'm going to go have an adventure and usually pretty much every time I did that I was rewarded whether that is rewarded by leveling up my vocations rewarded by getting new gear rewarded by you know getting to fight a really cool monster there's usually always something to discover within the world if you take the time to do it now this does involve backtracking and a certain amount of repetition which a lot of people don't like but I would also argue that the game kind of gives you plenty of Fairy Stones if you spent a decent amount of time exploring as a matter of fact I would say that pretty much every other dungeon I was given a Fairy Stone and that kind of works like a scroll of town portal almost so you can go back to the main city after you're done on your adventure and what not so there are a lot of opportunities for you the Fast Travel there's also the oxcart system which you can fast travel between uh different cities certain cities that that is a little bit more limited than the Fairy Stone and Port Crystal um but you know there are options there and I think that the addition of just like you know I'm I want to teleport here do this thing actually makes the game less fun and it takes away from the hostility of the world because traveling is in a way its own challenge because you're going to be facing off against Monsters as you are traveling there's also a day night cycle wherein if you're caught outside in the night things get dark and you're going to have to make sure that you have oil in your Lantern and your visibility is going to diminish and you're not going to be able to see all of the dangers that are in front of you which is going to make things a little bit more challenging so traveling is its own challenge not to mention that the more loot you pick up along the way is going to increase the amount of weight that you are carrying which is going to limit how fast you can move and is also going to limit how fast your St regenerates so there's a lot of things to keep in mind while you are out and traveling the world and you have to balance out your pawn team and you have to distribute your uh loot that you are acquiring throughout the throughout your adventure into your different pawns to make sure that everybody is at a reasonable weight where they can still uh be effective when they are fighting monsters and all of that would simply be gone the moment that you would add traditional fast travel so when people tell me oh you could just not use the fast travel system and those of us that want to use it uh could use it I fundamentally disagree with that and let me also say that you have probably over a th000 games that do that already and none of those 1,000 games is able to deliver the exploration experience that Dragon's Dogma 2 does it's just that simple if they were to add traditional fast travel to this game this would be a different game a game that would not be as interesting to me so if you are someone that does not like the idea of not having fast travel this is simply not the game for you the game is very rewarding if you choose to do exploration if you choose to go out on adventures with your pawns and kind of like make your own fun if however you would rather be led by the nose have your quest markers doing all of the these things you will be sacrificing immersion as well as the sense of adventure and this is just not that game this is not the game that is doing that and this is the type of game that I personally enjoy I love the experience that they are going for when it comes to traveling in Dragon's Dogma 2 I backtracked the same paths over 50 times had no problems with that as a matter of fact I played 160 hours of this game at no point that I feel like the game was not respecting my time like a lot of people like to claim now you know if some people believe that that is the case that the game is wasting their time they shouldn't play it that's just the way that I look at it there you have so much Choice nowadays when it comes to gaming that if a game comes out that I'm not interested in guess what I do I don't play it I move on I play the one game that I am interested in which just happened to be this one so you know it is what it is however now we also do have some criticism when it comes to this aspect of it in terms of exploration and all of that stuff because one of the things that was disappointing to me and this was one of the things that people kept asking me during my live streams and I wanted to make sure that I finished the game before putting out my full opinion on it one of the things that were disappointing to me was that I expected more dungeon tile sets so what does this mean every dungeon in the game pretty much looks the same there's a couple of them that are a little bit different that have uh you know one or two more different tile sets but overall most dungeons in the game are basically caves and that's it you go into the cave it's got like this Rocky texture go in there fight some random monsters in there you know explore a little bit around some of them have like mini puzzles like oh there's a locked door here and you have to figure out a way around maybe I'll have to blow up a wall or something and then you can get around it and get the so there's that type of stuff in there which is cool and you I still enjoyed exploring all those dungeons but I wanted different tile sets to the dungeons I wanted not every dungeon to just be a cave and that's pretty much what we got I feel like there was more dungeon diversity in the original Dragon Dogma and that is probably my biggest complaint when it comes to you know the joy of exploration in Dragon Dogma 2 there's too many caves we need something else you know dungeons don't have to be just caves you can I understand that they're going for a very grounded and somewhat realistic approach but that does not mean that you can't do some crazier looking Dungeons and that you can't use different tile sets that is probably my biggest thing the other one is Monster diversity this was one of the things that I was asked the most throughout my playthrough and at the time like I said I want to make sure that I finish the game so that I can actually see every single Monster that you can fight because I expected the end game to introduce a lot of new monsters unfortunately that was not the case there was not that many new monsters there isn't even a Gore Cyclops which to me was very surprising but you know they decided not to add those I'm I'm not sure if this is something that they're potentially planning on you know oh we updated the game here's a new monster almost like they do in Monster Hunter or if this is something that they're going to just do a DLC I believe there's going to be an expansion I think that's almost inevitable the game sold two and a half million copies so an expansion is kind of like to be expected in my opinion but uh I do feel like we should have had more monsters now that I finished the game and I fought every single Monster we should have had more monsters and they should have scaled higher as we became more powerful because like I said near the end game everything was very very easy speaking of endgame not getting into the specifics uh of it another thing that that I would criticize about the end game is that you only really fight the endgame bosses once there's no option to fight them again and some of those fights were actually really cool and I would have liked to be able to fight them again for some type of reward for something or even just just let me fight them again no you fight them once they're dead they're gone that was somewhat surprising for me especially taking into consideration that the game opens up a lot uh in the in the end game of Dragon Dogma 1 with the everfall and all of the things that you get by playing through the everfall uh and I'm sure that a lot of players are going to prefer that endgame and to me I'm still a little bit divided because I I like having the whole world as my playground in the end game which is one of the things that kind of happens you can go out into the world you can explore new things that you were not able to explore when you get to the end game because of reasons I'm going to be talking more about that in the spoiler section but yeah it's it's it's a bit of a mixed bag you know I like the end game there's also new rules to the end game that I feel are not properly explained but I don't know it's again it's a bit of a mixed bag I just wish there were more monsters I do agree with the criticism that we need more Monster variety now that I have finished the game yes 100% we needed more Monster variety like I would say five more monsters would be great would be really good if it was like seven it would be even better basically the more the Maria right but I think like five more Monster types and we would have not had this complaint that we don't have enough monster diversity not to mention we needed more of those evolutions of monsters in the end game as well like maybe a new type of Drake uh the Gore Cyclops you know just more stuff all around would have been very good and it wouldn't have feel felt like we needed more diversity you know is this something that I would say is a deal breaker for playing Dragons Dogma 2 no not at all but it is Def definitely a valid criticism now another thing that I would like to bring up this is again this is known this was present in the very first trailer they ever came out for the game is the Spinx uh I'm not going to be going too much in detail with the Sphinx other than to say that I personally didn't really like the Sphinx I know that a lot of players love the Sphinx they think that it's an amazing thing but fundamentally the gameplay Loop that the Sphinx provided me with and I don't want to go too much deeper into that because I want players to figure stuff out for themselves uh the gameplay Loop that the Sphinx provides is not the the gameplay Loop that I really like in Dragon's Dogma 2 but anyways fundamentally do I still recommend the game 100% I think the game is awesome I love playing the game 160 hours absolutely love it I actually want to start a fresh save but at the same time I don't want to delete my official Pawn for the people that still want to play it so I'm going to have to figure something out there but I I don't really want to do New Game Plus as much as I just want to play the game over again if that makes sense because going through a new game plus there really isn't that much challenge because I'm just deleting everything so the replayability is severely hampered over the fact that the scaling is just not there so from even for casual players I believe that you're going to reach a point where you're so powerful that it doesn't even matter like even if you're a casual player if you just get a good sorcerer on your party you don't you barely even have to play the game cuz the sorcerer will just at endgame levels if it was a sorcerer that was made by somebody who knows what they're doing the sorcerer will just destroy everything so you know I think that every player is going to get to that point where they're just deleting everything and that is one of the problems of the game I think that players are going to have to come up with their own challenges which is something that I was considering maybe playing the game just with my character and my pawn and not hiring additional pawns I don't know but yeah the replayability is uh is not as good as potentially it was in the original but you know those are my thoughts on Dragon's Dogma 2 I like it I still recommend it I think the game is absolutely awesome do keep in mind the caveats that I mentioned about performance situation and monster diversity and all of this stuff but if that is something that doesn't bother you there is something in this game that you're not going to get anywhere else now I want to jump into a spoiler section I'm going to be talking a little bit more about a couple of things it's not going to be too long but it is going to include spoilers so if you want to peace out of the video at this point feel free to leave it a like if you enjoyed it subscribe Bell notification icon all of that jazz I'll see you in the next one and that's one 2 3 let's get started so first let's talk about the story um the story in a lot of ways one of the things that I've come to realize is that this is basically almost the same story as the original uh which makes sense because this is U you know another dimension uh um of the Dragon's Dogma universe so to speak so it doesn't take place before or after the original Dragon's Dogma basically takes place at the same time but one of the things that I noticed is that the story really appears to presume that the player knows of the original Dragon's Dogma because very early on you get introduced to the concept of Pawns but only after you create your own Pawn do they explain to you what pawns are and I was I basically I was made aware of this because I was watching a brand new player play this game and I was like oh wow there's a lot of terms that are being thrown around that this person is not going to know anything about this is a little it's a little bit overwhelming and on top of it they the you know in the first game there's a certain mysticism around oh we don't know what happened the dragon removed your heart oh my God what's going on in this game your character can literally respond oh it looks like I became the Arisen it's like wait what so but then again that can also be simply because oh this world has gone through more Cycles than the previous one or something like that but yeah the dragon was also not as interested interesting as gregoryi um which again I think that there this might be something that will be expanded upon in an expansion but it doesn't change the fact that there are definitely some things there that I feel could have been handled a little bit better and I think that they could have made the um the Dragon Story more interesting and at the same time I didn't like the encounter with the Dragon for this game whereas when you fight gregoryi in Dragon's Dogma 1 is this big epic battle in this one the battle didn't feel nearly as epic personally I don't know if everybody feels like that or not I had a conversation with ratat tasar about this recently but yeah the battle with the dragon definitely didn't feel as epic as the original battle with the dragon and I feel like it could have been done better um so yeah there's there's a couple of things there now the other thing is the Sphinx why didn't I like the Sphinx because there's also a part of this that is about me live streaming the game I feel like wherein by the time I got to the Sphinx you know it's kind of a big deal everybody wants to see you do the Sphinx and so I'm like I'm doing it for the stream and I go into the the Sphinx and the Sphinx just goes oh do this thing for me then do that thing for me and it's kind of like just fast traveling all over the place and you don't have to fast travel but because I was streaming it I felt the need to do it in a fast travel way so that people could see the solutions and my guesses of the things that I was doing and whatnot and the literal moment that I just started fast traving all over the world because I had a bunch of Fairy Stones and I had my port crystals set up I could just fast travel everywhere I wanted to but I hadn't done so but the moment I started fast traveling all over the place to solve the Sphinx riddles the game became less interesting to me and this is one of the reasons why I say if you put traditional fast travel in Dragon Dogma 2 the game is not as interesting it's just straight up not as interesting because I was going on adventures I was doing all these things and then when I got to the Sphinx because I was doing it in this fast travel way I stopped having Adventures I was doing traditional questing and that was just not interesting so that was one of the things uh the other thing is some of those riddles are really weird like the parents of the Sphinx which I now know the solution to H I didn't like that one I think that one's kind of dumb but whatever it's not a big deal at the end of the day but I didn't like that one then there was another one that was really weird because I calculated all of the riddles that I had that I had solved and I had to give the answer how many riddles did you solve and I was like I know for a fact it was six I know I remember and I put the statues there and I'm not sure if the statues counted or they didn't count it was weird and then on top of it she runs away I can't fight her and I was like ah ah it so it felt very flat to me and the rewards for doing the the Sphinx riddles they were not that great I guess the most important one is the Eternal wak Stone which I'm told that you can get because that is the solution for uh what's it called the dragon plague but yeah that's the other thing the dragon plague that one got spoiled for me so many times I did not get dragon plague once but I know exactly what it does I know that you go to sleep the whole town dies I know that you didn't have to get an eternal wak Stone to resurrect the whole town and it's like I really wish that people wouldn't have just just spoiled the entire mechanic of the Dragons plague for me because I would have liked to experience but then again I never really got dragons plague anyway so it probably wouldn't have mattered but yeah dragon's plague I'm kind of like neutral on it in case people are curious it's it's a strange mechanic that I never even got to experience so yeah and finally the end game so the end game was a strange thing and un unfortunately I will never be able to give my um my first impressions on what the unored world was like because every single mechanic in the unored world got spoiled for me it's a streaming thing all of that stuff but just in case you guys are wondering why don't you talk more about the end game and it's like I just didn't feel like there was that much to it because people in chat just spoiled the whole thing for me so the idea is is when you get to the unword world which is the end game of the game there's this red fog advancing through everything and the red fog I'm going to assume destroys everything that it goes through and so people were telling me you can't sleep if you sleep the fog advances and I was like oh okay so I did all of the endgame bosses without sleeping it's not hard because you can get all heal Elixir which just recover your full health if you need to you can also die and when you die you can wake Stone back up and that also recovers your health to full so it's not even that hard to do the entirety of the end game without sleeping so that's what I did I just did the whole end game without sleeping so I never got to explore like maybe a village getting destroyed I never got to you know I didn't experience any of those things now I will say that one of the things that bothered me is I wanted to spend more time in the W world but at the same time the red Hue in the sky is like this is this is one of the most beautiful games that I've played in recent memory and in the end game I just have to look at it like the world is ending the whole time I wish there was something you can do in the end wherein oh we've done this thing now the skies are back to normal because I don't want to be looking at a Red Sky the whole time but I want to be fighting these tougher monsters right so there there's a little bit of a of a disconnect there and then and then the thing is also the Final Bosses again I wish that we could have fought them more than once and on top of it I wish that they were harder the fact that I didn't die a single to a single one of the final game bosses was it's kind of weird for me I wanted more Challenge from the end game but you know at the end of the day I still had an absolute blast playing the game I think the game is absolutely awesome it is a unique experience but it does have a couple of downsides that I've detailed uh in this video which will hopefully help you make your decision but anyways that's going to be it for now thank you all very much for watching I'll see you guys in the next one stay strong stay safe peace out

Channel: Rurikhan

Views: 45,777

Keywords: Dragon's Dogma 2, Dragon's Dogma, Action RPG, Sequel, New Combat System, Climbing, Monsters, Pawn System, Online Multiplayer, Dragon's Dogma 2 Gameplay, Dragon's Dogma 2 Review, Dragon's Dogma 2 Walkthrough, Dragon's Dogma 2 Tips, Dragon's Dogma 2 Tricks, Dragon's Dogma 2 Easter Eggs, Dragon's Dogma 2 Secrets, Dragon's Dogma 2 Lore, Dragon's Dogma 2 Community, Rurikhan, Review

Id: tWRPivERMb4

Length: 64min 43sec (3883 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024