Dragon's Dogma 2 Review - A Modern Masterpiece

every now and again you start playing a game and you can tell it's going to be fun even within the opening hours it's when you're 70 plus hours in and having just as much fun as you were at the start that you know you have something truly special on your hands what is happening y'all Cowboy here and this is my review of Dragon stma 2 so as I said uh I am over 70 hours played at this point this is the start of new game Plus+ so very early uh very minor spoilers but let's talk about this game because man I'm GNA be honest with y'all I have not had as much fun with an action RPG as I have with this since probably elen ring uh the combat in this game is absolutely top-notch it's probably my new all-time favorite combat in an RPG the world is great to explore the vocational differences are awesome and I'm just having a blast with this so let's dive on in talk about the game uh my thoughts on it and and everything and you know kind of what makes it as as it is and to start I want to talk about the combat now combat in this game is dependent on the vocation you pick which is this game's version of classes and each plays incredibly different so each class has a class action so this one I have redoubted bolt which I can shoot out this little bolt to stagger enemies I can also charge it on up and toss out a heavier bolt which will put enemies into a stasis I have a number of basic attacks but if I end up tapping the button I go into a spin to win which I can do that much longer too and just hold it down and jump on top of something and just absolutely shred its wings and then on top of that each class gets access to four abilities so right now I have a dashing thrust on with the uh with the the twin spear here and this is also this just has great exploration potential like you know Cliffs that you wouldn't be able to to reach or if I wanted to cross this water I could just whoop and eat my way across uh I'm playing right now is Mystic Wayfair which allows me to switch weapons but so if I were to switch over to a you know a heavy weapon like this very different gameplay I have very heavy swings I can actually time these to swing a little bit faster or I can charge them on up which I'll get Poise during we even have timed releases so you can notice how I have kind of like a gold Aura as I release that if I basically overcharge it I don't get that aura I have shoulder checks when I hit the left bumper on it kind of the class action with this um and then you know some abilities with that but you know Warriors all about timed attacks getting Poise hit and heavy stuff uh if I switch over to Magic Archer I have two different types of shot with my bow I have rivet shot which will rapidly lock on and shoot out multiple arrows and then I have pinpoint volley which is going to be great because it'll lock on to multiple enemies so I have one that's more for AOE I have one that's for multiple enemies and then I have variety of abilities with that but so each here plays incredibly different and you end up with a gameplay Loop that ends up being just incredibly satisfying cuz every time you want to switch vocation up you go to something else and all of a sudden your combat style is completely changed from what it previously was and that's something that I found incredibly enjoyable I started off as fighter and fighter felt pretty vanilla I was kind of like H you know I don't know about this got enough levels to get a perk that I wanted out of it and then ended up switching over did a Mystic spear hand I absolutely love it switch to Warrior absolutely loved it switch to Warfare absolutely loved it trickstar I didn't Vibe with all that much uh but it's just that freedom to be able to switch between vocations that made this game so incredibly appealing and this is a big big thing coming from the first dragon stma CU in the first game your stats were largely based on what you were playing as whereas in here your stats just kind of move around so if I decide to play as a warrior my leveled up stats are going to allocate more towards strength if I switch to sorcerer those stats are suddenly going to shift into magic so a way to think of it would be like if you were playing Elden ring and you took off your two-handed Greatsword and decided to put on a Stave all of a sudden your strength turned into int it would be like that and so it allows you to just freely swap between classes and just have an absolute blast just a super fun experience um even though I'm playing as Warfare right now cuz I really like that flexibility when I was playing as individual classes I had just some insane potential like playing as uh Magic Archer for example because that's what I have on right now I have my my one Arrow the the Avalanche which there should be a cyclops coming up that I can use that on and show you what it looks like I had a Ricochet shot that I could fire into caves and it would bounce arrows off of walls and kill everything in sight I had a directable arrow that I could you know direct where it's going to go in the air and use that as kind of an AM tactic I had an arrow that I could shoot at pawns if they went down to resurrect them I had the ultimate skill which was just an absolute shredding boss killer where I sacrificed my own health to do a ton of damage like and that's all just in one class but if I want to do Warfare hey I still have access to that bow I can have one or two abilities on and then be able to swap to other other weapons and the combat just ends up being incredibly satisfying because of all this Freedom you have and on top of that there's a lot of interworld activity with the combat uh so after you stagger enemies you can you know run up grab the enemy pin it down while someone else comes over and stab it you can run up grab them pick them up Chuck them off a cliff Chuck them in the water Chuck them into each other uh if you see the boulders and stuff you can push the boulders down and Crush enemies you can throw fire barrels or poison barrels or things you see in the environment and you know the game really promotes creativity especially with something like the trickster class you know with the the the uh are these guys dead already yeah they are with the trickster class I can create uh I can basically create illusion platforms and then put a little spe over them swing my thing around which will aggro enemies and then enemies are going to run towards that spirit and run off a cliff like you just have this insane level of Freedom so right now you're kind of seeing how that works if I uh they're going to probably kill it before I can switch yeah um I'm going to go over to uh rivet shots you can see how that looks where it's like a rapid lock on but you end up just having a level of Freedom that is relatively unmatched on an RPG like this you know I would expect Freedom like that in in something like balder's gate so you can see that's like a rapid lock on if I go to the other one it's going to be much slower lock on but this one I can you know everything's dying instantly cuz early game anyway point is uh there's just like the freedom you have here is is basically unmatched so here we go here's a good example then my arrows are going to go and hit the harpies which in terms of scaling uh enemy scaling is largely based on the Zone you're at so even though this is new game Plus+ you know a basic Goblin and a basic Harpy is still a basic Goblin and a basic Harpy um don't expect your early game enemies to be harder in New Game Plus the late game enemies yes they're going to be just as hard if not harder uh but early game is early game it's just how it is uh moving on from the combat though to talk a little bit about kind of the world design and exploration I really love the world here uh there's a lot of a lot of exploration to do just running around the world and finding chests and as your pawns explore the game they'll also gain experience so you could be running somewhere and your Pawn will be like master I know about a chest here and you could tell them to go and your palm will guide you on over to that chest or guide you to a quest location um you know we have we don't have like breath of the wild style climbing but we do have clambering so anything that you can get your hands on you can get up so there's quite a lot of freedom and exploration running around the world uh there were times where I'd come across Gates that were locked and basically like found somewhere to Hardcore Parkour my way to behind the gate to shoot the latch to get it open to go where I wanted to go uh caves and stuff and tombs that'll pop up on the map that you can go into some of them are short and sweet some of them are more in depth and they might have like a boss at the end of them I did one early on that was like I went in was going all over the place ended up fighting a chimera found a cursed treasure the cursed treasure summoned up a lich like just wild wild encounters uh and then on top of that there's also like random calling requests that'll pop up so as you're exploring the road and and going it'll be like somebody under attack by some enemies you kill those enemies they're going to thank you probably give you a couple heals and some gold so World feels very alive lots of interactive elements as you're going about and exploring lots to do um and especially with the environmental manipulation you know crashing enemies into two Boulders and having the boulders roll down on top of them you know here's here's a good example this is obviously very early at the start but so there's a cyclops that's going to pop up out of the Rocks he's taking a nap and I can run on over here and obviously I know this this is all here already but take this and then I'll oh God did I drop it no pick it up no oh well rip I might be able to get this with my hammer let me try yep so bust that on open all that that water is coming rushing through that's going to clear the path uh deal damage to the Cyclops like dude that that like the only other games that I I get vibes like this are like balers Gate 3 and you know that is a crpg it's not this isn't the type of interaction I would expect in like a third person open world action RPG and it it makes it just incredibly delightful like I have I have so much fun just exploring the world and like I said this is new game Plus+ I I know of some quests I haven't done from talking to other people that I've been reviewing on my new game plus playthrough there was new stuff that I was uncovering as I played throughout the world uh to talk about health in World EXP exporation so the green bar you see at the bottom of the screen is my health and I have healable health and non- healable health and what I mean by this is if I jump far enough that I take damage you can see how I have like gray and then like a black portion of the health bar that black portion of the health bar that is now just gone until I rest and what I mean by resting is either using a campsite or going to an in a town and resting up the rest of the health though that is healable so whether I'm using healing or use a mage to top me on off I can get that Health back but you can see there's a little chunk that's missing and that will come back when I rest so there's almost a a fatigue type system in the game where you know you're seeing how far you can go before you need to rest uh there's also hidden Rift stones in the game like this one that you can find these are usually unique so if I pop into this one riftstone of robustness this is going to find pawns with a bronie build and obviously you have the general Rift stones in town but these are all over the world so if you want like if I wanted to replace this Rogue or this thief with somebody else I could hop in there and find something else to to swap him out with um the one downside I'll say is while the exploration is incredibly rewarding and the game does give you unrivaled Freedom you can ere explore and end up triggering stuff that you shouldn't and I guess a good example of this uh just looking at the map obviously this is probably one of the only spoilery things I have in this this review but over here at Mel there is an event that happens early on at Mel involv in like a Drake and I decided to shoot all the way over towards one of the final zones in the game to get some mats that I had missed on my playthrough that I wanted and ended up fighting Drakes over there which then caused the Drake and M to not spawn but because the Drake and M didn't spawn I couldn't continue a certain person's quest line and M because it involved that Drake so there there are pros and cons to it because we have literally unrivaled Freedom like there's there's a border and as you play through the First Act you'll get a quest line or eventually you'll get a border pit and you can cross the border but there's also Caverns I could go through to sneak through the Border or I could climb onto a cart and smuggle myself through the border and so there is all of this Freedom that you have available and I don't want to say too much freedom because you know I I like the freedom the Freedom's great but it can end up punishing you if you end up uh you know overe exploring at times so you need to always be be cautious about the world uh on top of that death is is very serious you know I had a quest line where a guy was mouthing off so I threw him off a cliff because I threw him off the cliff I couldn't continue the quest line and I had to go to the tomb where his body was and use a wake Stone to bring him back to then be able to trigger the dialogue I needed to do the quest line so it's you know the game gives you a lot of freedom but you know that freedom can be punishing at times which you know it it's not not anything to to be scared of same thing in Elden ring uh so I ended up obviously enjoying that a lot but I think it's something that more casual players definitely need to be aware of uh talking about the story I I absolutely love the story of the game uh I will say that there is a a ending and then a true ending and the true ending was insane uh and what I find funny is I kind of stumbled into the true ending just because of experiences I had in the first Dragon Dogma so in New Game Plus I went back and I did the other ending and what's funny is like the the uh the vanilla ending I guess we could call it I didn't like nearly as much I was kind of like wow that's it I think if that was my first ending experience I probably would have been disappointed but having experienced the true ending and seeing how things go down and and things in the world that change uh really really enrich the experience and that's actually something I'm really curious about with reviews cuz I wonder how many people reviewing the game only get to the vanilla ending and then they're like yeah it was okay not realizing that there's so much more to the game when you discover the true ending and I know I'm sounding rather vague and that's on purpose I don't want to you know spoil anything here but I will say that there there is a a true path in the game where achieving that is going to open up things in a big way and I guess the best example I can give is you know when you're playing seiro if you decide to side with owl that's it you fight Asian game's over if you decide to you Trey owl all of a sudden there's new zones that open up and there's new fights that open up and there's you know a whole extra chunk of the game and we have a very similar approach here where if you get one ending you know it's hunky dory everything's good and if you discover the true ending hits the fan and it's a whole new game uh so story big big A+ uh we don't see that a lot from devs in fact I think you fromsoft is one of the only other devs I can think of that that does that with games uh but I'm a really big fan of that uh in terms of the visuals I think the world here looks absolutely beautiful especially considering the amount of interactivity and the physics and the destructibility that happens in the world I think they did just just a top notch here you know looking at the environment especially the variety in the environment you know we have like wild flowers all over we have the Tall Weeds we have the bushes we have the trees we have the tall trees there's a lot here to really enrich the environment and make it look varied uh which is something that I'm a big fan of I think that's that's not done too often in games I think we end up seeing you know the same grass pallet the same tree over and over and they did a really good job of adding variability like you know we got like a skinny tree that's like kind of breaking apart over here we have some richer fully trees over here this one we got a little bit breaking apart but the Top's still healthy and I think that really makes the world just feel more alive you know when everything isn't uniform I think that really adds to the overall experience um I will say in terms of visuals because we have custom characters where we can create their proportions there are some cutcenes that get a little bit goofy depending on how you make your character like the start of the game my character's knee looked like it was poing out popping out of a joint and I had a a scene in the brothel where it looked like my traps were going to eat my character cuz of how big they were but but you know I think that's that that comes with the territory of of making custom characters so I can't really fault the Dez for that it's kind of you know if you make your character look a little goofy you you can expect some cutcenes to be a little bit goofy uh in terms of audio design I I love the audio design in the game especially when we're fighting big stuff we have the the iconic the the the Dragon Dogma uh the song that kicks off during big fights you have a lot of ambient music that plays sound effects in particular weapon sound effects are very good for example just listen to how beefy this thing sounds as I swing it just sounds heavy right I like that I like a heavy sounding two-hander but by the same if I switch to something like this very Swift sounding uh so I think they just did a great job on sound effects uh environmental sounds the one area that I would have liked to see improved would be more Pawn voices so there are essentially eight Pawn voices and each of those voices has five different tonalities so from like High to deep I would have liked to have a couple more only cuz after a while you you start hearing the the same pwns over and over you know there's like Liliana I love her voice um even though my my official Pawn isn't like out yet I already don't like his voice CU I found pawns that have the same voice as him and it's very I want to say almost whiny he's like Arisen you should follow me and I'm like oh God I got to change that voice now it's the first thing I had to do with launch is change his voice uh but overall I thought I thought audio was was phenomenal in the game like I said very very minor complaints here it's you know I want more voices for my my characters um o all right um so with all that out of the way the game isn't flawless I will say my my one and probably my biggest concern with the game is going to be performance now obviously I am playing on a 4090 my my PC is an absolute monster of a rig uh and with dlss on I average between 60 and 90 FPS and that's with every setting maxed now when I first started playing the game without dlss the 490 was barely keeping up at 30 frames now given we don't have the drivers for the game yet and I'm sure you know I know I don't have the day one patch so I know there's still more optimization coming initially that gave me some very heavy concerns about performance and as time went on playing with dlss in quality I did have any big performance issues but given I have the type of PC that typically just Brute Forces stuff and so I don't know how well this is going to work on lower-end rigs with settings turned down but that would be my one major concern with the game and you know it's it's always something that I think is worth mentioning in reviews even if it gets patched up like right now the game is running fine it looks great but like I said I am playing on a monster PC and I'll be really curious to see what reviews look like for like medium or low-end rigs because if they don't patch stuff up I'd imagine it it could be rough and it it would be a damn shame because you know you have what I think is an easy easy choice for game of the year uh if not incredibly strong Contender and if it ends up not really getting its time to shine because of performance issues that would be an incredible shame uh besides that there are a couple areas that I think could have been improved I don't think these are are necessarily negatives but for example running around in the Overworld here you do use stamina when sprinting this is like your default movement speed which definitely isn't slow but if you're sprinting you're going to blow through your stamina very fast and you don't use stamina in town but I kind of wish we could just full on Sprint while we're exploring the world uh we also have if I go to history and Adventure book and enemies if I go over here I have a full la of all the enemies I fought but it's just a list I've killed this many goblins this many wolves and I feel like this definitely could have been expanded upon if we go to NPCs uh or if we go where they at NPCs is it where is it oh we have this NPC log book it says you know their gender their race their residence what they like I would have really liked to see something like that here like show me a picture of a goblin show me what they're weak to what their reason distance to and what locals they're typically found in um because you know a big part of late game is hunting down enemies for their parts and I've been looking for a gor Chimera for about 10 hours and I have one in my log so I know I have found one before and killed it but I don't know where the hell the thing is at uh so definitely an area that could have been improved uh in terms of the pawns the pawn AI is significantly better I would have liked even more uh dialogue for them after a while you know and I think this is this the case of any game where you're going to have NPC companions but some of the dialogue choices end up starting to get kind of syy uh a couple of them I still enjoy but like occasionally I'll get a pawn that's like must you sprint everywhere is and then Liliana has to tell them off like you know we follow the pawn not the other way around shut up and get over it but I I would have liked even more Pawn dialogue especially because you know that's such a huge part of this game but I will say in general Pawn AI is significantly better than it was in the first game it is it is a night day difference between the first game and now uh in terms of how Adept the pawns are so to wrap things up uh performance concerns asides this is right now this is my choice for Game of the Year there is an incredibly deep RPG here with combat that is absolutely top-notch a world that is an absolute Delight to explore and enough activities to keep you busy for an easy hundred hours uh in terms of getting your money worth in terms of typical playthrough if you're just trying to get through the story and do a little bit of side quests here and there you can probably knock it out in 20 to 30 hours but if you want to explore the world and do all the Dungeons and fight all the things you're looking at a easy potential 50 to 100 hours depending on how in-depth you're going to be I know I'm already planning on starting over on stream and doing everything and it's rare that I will play a game this in depth and then still be looking forward to a subsequent play through and I think that that really speaks to what they've gone ahead and crafted here you know when I think of the original Dragon stma I think it was mostly known as as kind of a cult hit I don't think it really got the the popularity that other RPGs did at the time and I think people are going to be blown away by this uh you know this like I said this has been just an absolute phenomenal Journey for me and the last time I had Adventure Vibes like this was Elden ring so I'm gonna close things out on that note um we will have a let's play at two episodes per day I also plan on streaming the game in entirety going to be doing a thief into Ranger playthrough for my next character which should be a lot of fun but either way that is going to wrap things up here for now so thanks for coming on by checking it out let me know if y'all are looking forward to Dragon Dogma 2 down in the comments below and I'll catch you next time

Channel: FightinCowboy

Views: 426,612

Keywords: dragons dogma 2, dragons dogma 2 vocations, dragons dogma 2 gameplay, dragons dogma, dragons dogma 2 classes, dragons dogma ii, dragons dogma 2 character creation, dragon dogma 2, dragons dogma 2 character creator, dragons dogma 2 review, character creation, dragons dogma 2 new gameplay, dragons dogma 2 preview, dragons dogma fightincowboy, dragons dogma best pawn build, dragons dogma 2 pawn, dragons dogma 2 pawn creation, dragons dogma 2 pawns

Id: Qm-UG5j_LZ8

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2024