Dragon's Dogma 2

Two hours from the nearest town, at night, out of curatives, with a pawn shouting that wolves hunt in packs for the ninetieth time — this is where Dragon's Dogma 2 either wins you over completely or loses you for good. There is not much middle ground and the game does not want there to be.

The travel is the game

Fast travel is deliberately scarce and expensive. Everything you do therefore has a return journey attached, and that single decision reshapes the whole experience. A quest is not a marker, it is an expedition: you check the time of day, you decide what to carry, and you accept that something will go wrong on the way back.

When it works, nothing else feels like it. My best hours here were entirely unscripted — an ox cart ambushed on a mountain road, a griffin that carried me across half a region because I would not let go of it, a night walk where I ran out of lantern oil and had to feel my way along a cliff.

Longest walk, one way

Roughly 40 minutes

Times carried by a griffin

3

Main pawn vocation

Thief

The pawns are still strange and still great

Your hired companions are other players' characters, and they arrive with knowledge from those players' worlds. A pawn who has done a quest before will physically lead you to the answer. It is a genuinely original idea, it was original in 2012, and nobody else has copied it, which remains baffling.

They also will not stop talking. Both things are true.

Where it slips

The main story is thin to the point of transparency and ends abruptly enough that the post-game feels like an apology. Several quests fail silently if you sleep at the wrong time, with no warning and no way back — that is intentional design, and it is also just annoying when the quest in question was the one you had been building toward.

Performance in the largest city was poor at launch and is merely acceptable now.

The vocations are the strongest part nobody talks about

Ten classes, switchable at any inn, each with a genuinely distinct fantasy rather than a stat spread. The Thief is a knife fighter who climbs. The Trickster has no attack at all and fights by producing an illusory copy of you that monsters chase off cliffs. The Warfarer can equip anything and is deliberately worse at all of it.

That the Trickster exists at all is remarkable. It is a full vocation, viable through the entire game, whose entire kit is manipulation and misdirection, and no other action game of this size would greenlight a class that cannot deal damage. It is also very funny.

The catch is that switching resets your vocation rank, which discourages the experimentation the design is built for. I spent forty hours as a Thief before trying anything else and regret it.

The verdict

I would recommend this to maybe one in four people, and to those four I would recommend it strongly. It is a genuine, uncompromised vision, and the things that make it great are inseparable from the things that make it exhausting. Sixty-three hours and I never quite relaxed.