I’ve Never Love-Hated a Game More Than Dragon’s Dogma 2

Warning: The following article about Dragon’s Dogma 2 contains spoilers.

A massive griffon slams into an ox cart on the path in front of me, obliterating all its occupants and sending one of my hired Pawns – AI-controlled companions – reeling through the air. It takes a swipe at me, my own Pawn then drawing its attention by bashing his shield while another summons lightning magic. This is a beast we’re unmatched against, though, with the protective abilities of the Mystic Spearhand vocation I’ve assumed, we may have a chance. 

Somehow, we get the winged beast near death, but it flees before we can finish it off. Regardless, it was an exhilarating bout, and I mean to take after it after regaining my party’s strength. Two of my Pawns require reviving, and in a misguided attempt to help, the remaining Pawn picks one of his near-death companions up to carry over to me. But along the way, he manages to stumble off a sheer cliff into the raging river below, killing them both and leaving me with only one Pawn until I can find another riftstone to summon a complete party, thus ending my plans to chase the griffon.

This is Dragon’s Dogma 2, a fantasy RPG that gave me whiplash as it pulled me back and forth between exhilaration and frustration so often that I’ve never love-hated a game more.

I should’ve seen it coming, as I previously wrote about how I bounced off the original Dragon’s Dogma despite trying to play it thrice. However, I was excited to get a PlayStation 5 copy of the sequel about ten days early to help out fellow Escapist Zhiqing Wan with guides as she prioritized her review. She had a similar experience as me, citing “sheer absurdity and unintentional comedy” that left her speechless despite enjoying the game as a whole.

This was before fans began review-bombing the game on Steam for shoddy performance and scummy microtransactions. None of that particularly bothered me in my pre-release bubble, though I don’t blame those fans one bit. It did, however, take me a while to get used to a shaky 30 FPS on the PlayStation 5. At the same time, I found the game absolutely gorgeous and stopped popping open photo mode often. 

I didn’t feel that the rarity of the items sold as microtransactions was restrictive either, as the de-emphasis on fast travel allowed for more opportunities to explore and uncover the intricacies of the third-person action combat – the latter of which which is by far the highlight of Dragon’s Dogma 2 – until I tried to unlock the last few vocations.

Related: How to Cook Food in Dragon’s Dogma 2

The vocations were a strong point. They all felt distinct from one another, deep enough to carry an entire game by themselves. At the same time, Capcom hid almost half of them behind esoteric quests in remote locations. On the pre-release guideless frontier, I wasted so many hours trying to find a way to unlock the Magick Archer and Warfarer. These were hours wasted that could’ve been spent enjoying the combat or finding all the hidden locations packed into each square inch of the map.

The Warfarer opens up a staggering amount of vocation builds – and therefore great gameplay experiences – as it’s possible to combine the abilities and skills of three at once, yet the quest to unlock it is the most anticlimactic experience I’ve had in recent memory. Minor spoiler warning: to complete the quest, you have to bring a man in a late-game area his favorite alcoholic drink, though he doesn’t tell you he’ll reward you with a new vocation, so this quest seems entirely skippable as many of them are.

Yes, you do not have to slay a fearsome half-undead drake or overcome a difficult dungeon brimming with goblins to unlock the most nuanced and advanced vocation in the game. You just have to bring a man some fantasy booze.

It is not explained where to find or how to make this drink, nor does the area you find the quest giver in have a fast travel point. Of course, none of it can be found particularly close by. He requires several beverages before he’ll grant you the Warfarer vocation; however, he doesn’t tell you how many he wants. I went searching for this drink for hours, only to return to him and tell me he wanted some more. If I wasn’t told by peers that I had to do this to unlock the Warfarer vocation, I would’ve ignored him entirely, as I tend to do with tedious tasks in RPGs.

But once again, Dragon’s Dogma 2 gave me whiplash. The frustration of unlocking the Warfarer melted away as I gave the vocation a spin. I even lost a bit of sleep later that night thinking about possible combinations: Putting Magick Archer and Mystic Spearhand together seems too good to be true, and how would a Warrior, Archer, and Mage abomination work?

Despite frustration marring so much of my 50 hours exploring Vermund and Battahl, I’m drawn to starting over and replaying now that I understand the nature of them. I’ll pick up the liquor to unlock the Warfarer vocation ahead of time, for instance, and nurture my character builds with a keen sense of how to work around my Pawns failing to follow me up a tower, leaving me to be mauled by harpies alone, and maybe then the hate I have for so many of Capcom’s design decisions (and technical failings after some patches) will become only adoration for what is an incredibly rough fantasy RPG like no other.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.