I love the first Dragon's Dogma. Its ongoing cult popularity-turned-decade-late success is a testament to its plucky spirit, energetic combat, and captivating oddness. The game blends classic Capcom combat with a sprawling fantasy world, and a bunch of goofy decisions that other games just don't make.

Dragon's Dogma 2 picks up those decisions and runs with them right off the cliff of madness. The game boldly starts out with the title "Dragon's Dogma," implying that it's the real Dragon's Dogma experience, and that the earlier game was just a prototype. The first friendly pawn you meet is the same guy with a bowl cut and beard as in the 2012 original, Rook — but then a few moments later he's unceremoniously dumped into the death water that's filled with evil red tentacles.

This is a sign of things to come. Everything in this new Dogma is pulled off to greater effect than in the original, but with a tiny hint of evil attached. The combat is now fully physics-entwined, allowing for remarkable-looking sword combos and wonderfully realistic dynamically animated reactions…but cliffs and bumps in the ground can now spell disaster for your balance.

The vast world of the game is open to you right from the start, offering quests to find and dungeons to explore…but time is even more of a factor than in the first game, with stark consequences for taking too long on important missions. The game prominently features a morgue where dead NPCs can be revived. You might be visiting it more often than you think.

Pawns are still super helpful and chatty, even if they aren't quite as funny as they were in the original. However, they can now carry a terrifying disease known as the "Dragonsplague." If left unchecked, or if you happen not to notice it among the bedlam of all the other mechanics, it has devastating consequences that once again might prompt a trip to that morgue and the spending of precious resources.

The first game encouraged you to travel the roads rather than teleport, making fast travel stones a limited resource. That was okay though, because through your journeys you'd learn both the land and the mechanics, and it was a big portion of the fun the game had to offer. The second game also wants you to run everywhere — but the enemy encounter rate is now hilariously high. It's very hard to complete more than one length of road without running into a pack of enemies, and oftentimes they are huge giant monsters that you might not be ready to fight.

I've seen many comparisons to Elden Ring out there online, but I think Dragon's Dogma 2 is more chaotic than From Software's opus. The Souls games thrive on specificity. These are the challenges, can you overcome them? The challenges might have different solutions, but they are always there and always function in a similar way, allowing growth and progress. Dragon's Dogma 2 will happily mess up your day with a giant monster or an unexpected twist. It feels more "real," but if that's not the sort of thing you're looking for, it might be severely off-putting.

The visuals and the feel of the gameplay are so captivating that I'm willing to put up with all of Dogma 2's other weirdness. I haven't seen such a firm commitment to beautiful character animation outside of a Rockstar title, and the near NPC draw distance is worth it for how well everyone moves around. And the ray traced lighting makes every single place look completely gorgeous…even as a griffin swoops down to murder you for the third time this play session. You do eventually level up, of course, but then new challenges stride out to find you.

The crusty and dumb save system from the original returns, so you can only have one save file and one character. That's right, if you want to try a new character build, you can't. Want to play on one save with your girlfriend and try out other stuff on your own? Too bad! This made some amount of sense in 2012 considering the janky nature of the game's optional asynchronous multiplayer mechanics, but seeing all that stuff return in 2024 is really frustrating. There's nothing here so precious that it would be ruined by having different character slots available. Even Elden Ring does this.

I appreciate the commitment to the bit here, so to speak, but the lack of a difficulty setting and the arcane nature of the lore and the mechanics make this less accessible in many ways than the original game. You'll probably need to seek out tips videos to do your best, and also be sure to avoid the greedy microtransactions. The game is totally lacking in even the basic accessibility toggles offered by other modern Capcom games. It feels like a pretentious art piece that escaped from a corporate void, and I think its stunning fantasy world is going to draw a lot of unsuspecting players in before they realize what kind of game this is.

So yes, Dragon's Dogma 2 is kinda mean. It's relentlessly dedicated to being itself, and while I'm having a good time with it, it's more of a modern remake than the iterative sequel I was hoping it would be.

I wasn't paid or asked by Capcom to write this. I bought two copies of this game with my own money, one on Xbox and one on PS5. I did this both because I'm a fan of the first game, and because the stupid save system meant I couldn't easily try two different character builds without owning two copies of the game.