Dragon's Dogma 2 Review

Capcom's 2024 sequel arrived twelve years after a cult original and is unapologetically the same strange game with more of it. You are the Arisen, and your party is filled by Pawns - AI companions created by you and by other players, who learn from what they see, offer directions to quests they have completed in someone else's world, and are lent out across the internet. Combat is physical rather than statistical: you climb large monsters, grapple smaller ones, and a Sorcerer's high-level spells take so long to cast that the fight has to be managed around them. The world deliberately refuses convenience - fast travel is scarce, night is genuinely dangerous, and an escort quest can fail because you slept. Its most notorious feature is that a lost NPC stays lost, with a costly resurrection as the only recourse. The vocation system is the deepest in the series. It divided reviewers on quality-of-life grounds, and its defenders regard the friction as the design rather than a shortfall.