Rambling About Dragon's Dogma 2

I played a fair amount of Dark Arisen a few years ago but never finished it, so while I'm not a complete newcomer to Dragon's Dogma I'm also not a diehard fan of it either. With that out of the way, let me say that Dragon's Dogma 2 was so my jam.

If my recent GOTY lists are any indication there's a specific type of open-world game that gets its hooks in me and DD2 fits right in alongside the best of those. There were moments when playing this game where I'd get the same endorphin rush as when I discovered something new in Elden Ring or Tears of the Kingdom and while its scope is different to both of those games there's something at the heart of it that they all share. Fundamentally, these are games that encourage exploration and experimentation. There are numerous quests in this game where you'll be given a task that can be solved in a number of different ways, not all of which are immediately obvious.

From here on out I'm going to talk rather candidly about some specifics (including the endgame), so if you want to stay spoiler-free I'd recommend stopping here.

A big contributor to this wide possibility space is the vendor in the checkpoint rest town who will make counterfeit objects for a small fee. At first this seems like a novelty; a way to make obvious fakes of important items for comedic effect ...

... but very quickly you'll run into a quest where two individuals want the same item and you're forced to choose which of them receives it. You can, however, create a forgery of the item so you can deliver the real one to one person and the forgery to the other and get both rewards. Much later in the game, a different character wanted a spellbook to complete a ritual and I remembered that the counterfeit vendor happened to sell that tome. However, the ritual that was being completed seemed, well, sketchy and I wasn't sure I could trust this character to complete it safely so I decided to buy the book before immediately commissioning a forgery. I gave the man the fake and yes, he was disappointed, but based on how things were going I feel like I made the right call.

Most important quest items can't be perfectly copied, but early on in the game you're given a get-out-of-jail-free key by an NPC for use during a mission. After that mission is done you're meant to give it back, but I had another idea. I decided to create a forgery of the key and, lo-and-behold, I had a second, identical key that I could keep even after giving the original back. There are almost certainly other creative outcomes to quests you could come up with thanks to this forger but these were the ones that stood out to me.

Another quest has you following a character until you find out what he's hiding, and once you've uncovered his secret you need to decide what to do with that information. Do you tell him he's been sloppy so he can cover his tracks better, or do you tell one of the people he's been deceiving? If so, which one? Despite largely being a game about fighting monsters there's a surprising amount of depth to the quests within it.

The sphinx feels like it exemplifies everything that's interesting about this game. It's a giant monster that I'm assuming you can fight, but which also has rewards for you if you're willing to entertain its riddles. These riddles range from the straightforward (find the most valuable item in this cave) to the extreme (get a specific fragile pot in front of an NPC who's incredibly far away) but nearly all of them have some sort of trick or workaround, if you're willing to exploit it.

One of its more arduous tasks is to return to the location of the first Seeker's Token you found. As I was someone who'd collected over 60 of those I had a hard time remembering where my first was, so what followed was a tense retracing-of-my-steps while I desperately tried to find a needle in a haystack before my one-week timer (given to me by the sphinx) expired. I succeeded, and the relief I felt when I found that object was incalculable. However, thanks to Mr. Counterfeit, I could have waited until one of my friends made it to this quest and asked them to duplicate the "Finder's Token" they picked up and had them send that to me.

The "riddle" of carrying a pot to Bakbattahl from very-much-not-Bakbattahl could have, apparently, been resolved by escorting the far-less useless-and-fragile person to the pot. Yet, my hours-long odyssey of slowly carrying a pot through monster-infested lands (and savescumming my way past failures) was one of the most memorable parts of the game for me. All of her riddles were enjoyable, even through the frustration, and the threat of failure due to the single save-slot made the entire thing feel, well, as significant as an encounter with the sphinx should feel.

To shift gears quite a bit, the hand-wringing around microtransactions in this game has muddied the conversation because this is a game where the friction is core to the experience.  For all my talk of quests and outcomes, the combat is the real meat-and-potatoes of this game and most of that combat is going to happen while on your way from Point-A-to-Point-B. While, yes, some encounters feel a bit trivial and the number of battles you'll get into can get annoying at times, playing without traveling on foot would be like playing a JRPG with the random encounters taken out. Fast travel is, effectively, a luxury you can earn after playing enough of the game and its limits force you to learn the ins and outs of this world before you can start skipping over parts of it.

I still enjoyed taking oxcarts however.

Sure, by the end of the game I was using the ferrystones I'd accumulated over the dozens of hours I'd been playing to jump between key points I'd highlighted, but I didn't do so casually. I was rich and could surely afford as many ferrystones as I wanted, but by attaching a cost to them I was cognizant of the fact that fast travel wasn't free. While playing the game I placed portcrystals in a few hard-to-reach locations, and I planned out when and where I'd be using my fast travel just as I'd planned the routes I'd be taking on foot.

As a bit of another tangent, the endgame here is so darn cool. Lots of games have dramatic final acts where you need to band together with everyone you've met so far, but I'm more used to that in more narrow story-driven games and not something as expansive as this. I mention it because my earlier planning paid off because the endgame requires you to make the most of your portcrystals. You have a few objectives placed at far ends of the map and a loose time limit, so if you haven't prepared for how to reach those locations you'll have a lot of walking to do. With fast travel being so necessary at the end, this final victory lap of sorts really felt like a culmination of everything that had come before.

I haven't even talked about the way pawns function in this (or the many, many well-made pawns I ran into), or the vocation system, or about how climbing on enemies is always incredibly silly and fun, or any of the other cool things this game has to offer, but I deeply enjoyed my time with it and there's a very good chance it'll be at the top of my end-of-year list. Only time will tell if another, better game can come out before 2025. 

It's been a few weeks since I read it but this post by Harper Jay was on my mind during a lot of my time with the game, so I'd recommend checking that out too if you want some more Dragon's Dogma 2 reading.