Dragon’s Dogma 2 review: Capcom’s latest RPG doesn’t hold your hand

Dragon's Dogma 2 MSRP $70.00 Score Details DT Recommended Product Pros

Full of exciting emergent moments
Tense open-world exploration
Vocation and Pawn systems
Encourages player creativity

Cons

Slow start
Frequent frame rate issues
Poor save system

Last week, a Dungeons & Dragons adventure I took part in with some friends went terribly wrong. Our DM created a small encounter with some mummies in a graveyard as a fun side excursion during a larger quest, but a series of bad rolls turned it into a bloodbath. Players were nearly killed, my health was permanently debuffed, and an encounter that should have been over in a turn or two took the whole session to beat, escape, and recover from. Emergent moments like that are what draw people to RPGs, and it’s a style of video game design that’s only getting more popular with the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Helldivers 2.

Dragon’s Dogma 2: release date speculation, trailers, gameplay, and more
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Dragon’s Dogma 2 is in development at Capcom

Dragon’s Dogma 2 from Capcom is the latest in this wave of “emergent games,” and it’s one tailored to the most hardcore of players, for better and for worse. I’ll never forget the moment when I was riding in a wooden gondola above the desert of Battahl, only for a boss-level creature to appear out of nowhere and fly into the gondola, destroying it and causing me to fall to my death. I also won’t soon forget the game’s poor save system, which sent me back to replay over 30 minutes of gameplay after it did that.

This is one of Capcom’s most ambitious games ever. Dragon’s Dogma 2 sports a large open world, 10 varied vocations for players to master, deep character creators upholding a pawn-sharing system, and towns full of NPCs that operate on schedules and can permanently die. It’s also one of the worst-looking and worst-running games on the RE Engine, its game design