We’re Absolute Sickos For Dragon’s Dogma 2

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game of beguiling quests and zero safety nets. It’s as smart in its design as it is dumb in its goofy physics-based humor. It feels like it hails from a different time – like somebody just finished Morrowind, got frozen in a block of ice, and then, decades later, emerged and was allowed to direct a video game production. Frankly, it’s a miracle that something like this got made at a triple-A scale. We love it. What more is there even to say? 

A lot, it turns out. Gita, Chris, and Nathan had a long, enthusiastic chat about why Dragon’s Dogma 2 is so good. 

Gita: Hello pals! We are all gathered here together to talk about the game that is currently preventing my husband from hanging out with me: Dragon's Dogma 2. I never played the first one and wasn't initially sold on this one until after I saw the freak shit people were getting up to with the game, and now I am literally so obsessed with it I cannot stop thinking about it. What about you guys? What's your relationship to Dragon's Dogma?

Nathan: The other day, a griffin that I was about to finish off suddenly launched into the sky and carried me halfway across the map, at which point it dropped me on a dragon, killing me instantly. It's the greatest game of all time.

Chris: I played the original and really wanted to love it but couldn't. There were just too many things about it that rubbed me the wrong way, but I have wanted the sequel for years and it's out and they did everything I want so I'm loving it.

Gita: One of the things I really love about the game, as Nathan mentioned, is that it truly feels like anything could happen. I've reached the first main city and unlocked some story quests, but I'm honestly having a lot more fun not doing them, and instead just wandering around in the wilderness looking for caves. Found a chimera the other day! It kicked my ass!

Chris: It's really a game about wandering. The main quest is not very long if you make a beeline but you are not supposed to by design. Like it's really about finding things in the world and letting them happen. It's also an incredible engine for the most Looney Tunes physics gags you've ever seen. 

Nathan: It absolutely is. During my aforementioned griffin encounter, one of my pawns tried to spawn in on top of me while the griffin was spiriting me away to lands unknown. He immediately plummeted 1,000 feet to his death, like Wile E. Coyote falling into the Grand Canyon. Usually I scramble to rescue my pawns at all costs, but I was like "Damn, RIP."

Gita: So the main gameplay loop for me so far is like, get back to town after an adventure, sleep in the house I just bought and organize my storage, dismiss my pawns that have become too underleveled for me, hire new pawns, and then head out again to meet some goal I've imposed on myself. I love the pawn system a LOT. It's hard to describe: The AI is good enough that you can really rely on them to have your back in combat, but it's not so good that they feel "human." It's more like you have a bunch of toddlers that can explode things with their minds following you around, and they're obsessed with you. I love when they high five you! One of my recent pawns, Galahad, prompted me to high five literally every time we had a fight. Unfortunately he fell off the edge of a cliff and into the brine, killing him. RIP baby.

Chris: The in-game lore of the pawns does a lot to give you the benefit of the doubt. It's a really smart way of having a justification for NPCs doing NPC stuff. Pawns don't actually die, they're just interdimensional angel friends.

Nathan: But they also serve you unfalteringly, putting their lives on the line without a second thought. And there's a supposed evil plague, the only symptom of which is that they... develop free will.

Gita: The game's relationship to the idea of free will is fascinating. Of the side quests I've completed, a lot of them are about characters being put in situations where they no longer have control over their fates. I just finished one up in Harve that ends with some Beastren -- basically, giant cat people -- being banished from the village despite doing nothing wrong. Even my pawns were like "Hey, this sucks!"

Chris: There is actually some fantastic scenario writing in there, there's complexity in the world building, particularly when you get into the Beastren areas. And much of this is tied directly into the role of the Arisen, what their role in the universe is, the morality of that, and the idea that there are multiple universes all in the same cyclical loop cycle.

Gita: Sidebar: What do your Arisen look like? I made a Beastren and gave her calico colors and named her Ella, after my cat.

Chris: Large bald nonbinary lady. And then I started them off as a thief because I thought the idea of a 7 foot tall person being a pickpocket was funny. 

Gita: NICE.

Nathan: I also made a Beastren. He's massively muscular and yellow with black stripes on his back. I named him Pikachu. My main pawn is squat and blue. His name is Squirtle. They are the ultimate team. This was all inspired by the fact that it's possible to give a Beastren this sweet, sad little face. I was like "That's a Pikachu."

Chris: I keep thinking about how there are games where the strength in the writing is focused in a specific place,  a place that only games can do. Nier and From Software games are obviously like this, like those games are well-written but it appears a lot in the characters and lore, even hidden in items. And Dragon's Dogma has always been in that category, even in the first game, because even though the writing has a campy, old PC RPG style, the overarching plot that buttresses it is really fascinating.

Nathan: It also conveys this sense of game-y-ness that strikes me as intentionally unnerving. The world feels artificial in all these slight ways. Like you're walking down a path to nowhere, and you encounter somebody else taking a stroll. You walk up to greet them, thinking maybe they'll be full of interesting dialogue or offer some sort of side quest. Of course they are a pawn, and they immediately pledge fealty to you. When I first noticed this pattern, I was like "Ugh, these aren't characters at all. It's hard to fully immerse myself in this." But now I'm like "Man, this whole place is so weird, so consistently off," and I really enjoy that feeling. I don't think another medium could get that emotion across in quite the same way.

Chris: Yes! It's doing that on purpose!

If you try to attack a dragon, it goes basically "show me what you got" and then when you kill it, it's like "Nicely done, that's the way." It's not just a game about playing the game, it's an entire cosmology around playing the game. Like dragons are morally neutral, they destroy but they are part of the world. The entire cosmology is like a synthesis of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. 

Gita: When you go deep on this game you start sounding like the guy who used to sell you weed before weed was legalized in New York.

Chris: Dragon's Dogma logo but in the Coexist typeface.

Gita: But in the margins, there's all this fucking weird shit! I met an old man in a shack who is definitely someone who used to be an Arisen that has centuries of memories that they can't forget. and i'm supposed to just... absorb that as part of the vast tapestry of this game's narrative.

Weirdly enough it reminds me of Adventure Time's worldbuilding where you can tell that the people who made this game mostly know what the world is like, but they sure as hell aren't going to make it easy to figure out why and how things happen.

Chris: Yeah, that's a very good comparison – like everything is idyllic on the surface but then there's unknowable and older forces at work. You actually meet a few former Arisen, and they all tried and failed and now have to live with it!

Nathan: Damn, I haven't met any of those yet, but I don't mind the spoiler. Just another cool thing to look out for in a world that feels vast and rich with interesting nuggets to come across. It really feels like a game that seeks to reward you for just encountering things at your own pace. Speaking of, another detail I appreciate: No exclamation points over quest givers' heads! And a lot of quests with no objective markers. Just a directive to Figure It Out.

Gita: GOD I love that. I am an absolute sicko for that shit.

Chris: It's so good. If you want a quest, you gotta talk to people like in real life.

I do love how they managed the scale of the game. It's not terribly big but I also don't need it to be. The forced transit is very smart because games have gotten bigger and bigger with asset bloat but Dragon’s Dogma 2 opts to make a slightly smaller scale game with its team and makes you enjoy every single inch of it. I am just thinking about the countless grueling man hours that went into building the worlds of Ubisoft games only for them to melt like cotton candy in the mouths of gamers. How much of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey do I remember? How much of Dragon's Dogma 2 do I remember? Which is a better way to design a world? What is a better way to spend your time?

Nathan: Yeah, Dragon's Dogma really emphasizes that sense of adventure. I always look forward to setting off on a new adventure with my little crew of pals, even if we're gonna be wandering some of the same paths as before – at least, at first. Revisiting places doesn't have to be boring, especially when – and I know I keep harping on this – a griffin can pick you up and deposit you somewhere else entirely when you were trying to backtrack to a little town you'd rescued from lizards a couple hours prior. Suddenly, boom, totally unexpected, unplanned-for adventure. Way better than any scripted, frictionless Assassin’s Creed quest could be. The game regularly forces you to ask the question "Oh jeez, how am I gonna get out of this one?" That's one of gaming's most interesting questions! You're not fucked, but you feel fucked at first, and then you claw your way back. What a great feeling.

Chris: Oh I gotta ask, what class are you playing?

Nathan: Thief!

Gita: I maxed out Thief, but now I'm playing Mystic Spearhand, which is kind of weird. Not sure how I feel about it yet. But the augments you get for maxing out the class are bonkers.

And Nathan, to your point about how varied the world can be even if you're exploring the same areas: yesterday I ended up back at Harve, which is a long walk from Vermund. I figured why not take an ox cart. Ten minutes into the journey, the cart is attacked by goblins and then by saurians, the big lizard dudes. Cart gets destroyed. Now I have to walk. Can't get around it!

Chris: Ox carts rule. The hardest working public service workers in the kingdoms.

I also went Thief to Mystic Spearhand and it's one of the best vocations in the game. The bolt, the dash, the shield. As the game scales though you can basically play every vocation, and without getting into it, the endgame vocation is sort of leading you there.

Gita: The combat in this game really hits. It took a minute for me to click because so many people call it a Soulslike, but beyond asking you to commit to button presses, it's totally different. Way more varied.

Chris: Yeah it is absolutely not a Soulslike. I am fine with a lot of Souls comparisons, but Dragon's Dogma combat has always been singular, and it comes from it being a CAPCOM game. It's way closer to Monster Hunter.

Nathan: I just love being able to cling onto guys and climb them. More games should let me climb guys! If you're gonna make them that big, may as well.

Chris: It's funny to look at Hideaki Itsuno's work and being able to parse out the Devil May Cry in it. Particularly when you get into how the vocation skills interact with each other. 

And yeah! Climbing rocks. I love when you see two big guys fight. Like you are on a stroll, and it's just a kaiju battle.

Gita: I have a love-hate relationship with the way aggro-ing enemies work. Sometimes those pawns on the road will just try to solo a minotaur, and I have the choice of either running away or walking into the fight and for whatever reason I always try to help. I've got, like, a 50% win rate on that.

There's no signal to how hard a fight will be, and the enemy AI seems to anticipate my strategies. It feels like the game learns from how you play it. I know that pawns definitely learn from their Arisen. My pawn, a beautiful Indian woman named Priya, has started harvesting enemy bodies for me after fights after watching me do that for the last fifteen hours or something.

Chris: I love the little pawn abilities you can get, like there's one that makes a pawn sort through the party's stuff and evenly distribute the weight. Some pawns will speak Elvish. Some will put resource markers up on your UI. There's one inclination that just makes your pawn kill the weakest enemies first.

Nathan: They're just helpful little guys, which is why, to your point, Gita, I always feel like I need to go assist wayward pawns that have decided to solo giants. Gotta reciprocate the generosity somehow.

Gita: In a way this game is teaching me a lot about myself and what my priorities are. Which is the kind of game I really gravitate towards: The Sims, Dwarf Fortress, etc. These are games about what it means to be a human who is a part of a real society. The illusion isn't 100% convincing, but it provides the player with a lot of open-ended questions and then asks them how they, the person, would resolve them.

Nathan: I, a hulking cat man named Pikachu, would simply throw the lizards into the all-consuming squid water.

Chris: Dragon's Dogma 2: simultaneously a mediation on the very nature of play and also the funniest shit I have ever seen in my life.