Dragon’s Dogma 2 kept annoying me for 20 hours – then it suddenly became unmissable

Stumbling Into Brilliance: Living With Dragon’s Dogma 2

The first time I booted up Dragon’s Dogma 2 on my PS5, I bounced off it hard. The frame rate in the opening city felt like wading through soup, I was over-encumbered before I’d even met my main pawn, and a harpy yeeted me off a cliff because I got cocky trying to climb its legs. For the first 10 hours, this thing felt like a relic that somehow slipped out of 2012 and landed in 2024.

But then something happened around hour 20. A nighttime caravan ambush that went horribly wrong, a chimera fight on a cliff edge that lasted just long enough for dawn to break, a pawn I’d rented from a stranger casually leading me to a hidden cave that wasn’t on my map. The world stopped feeling like a set of disconnected annoyances and started to click into a single, stubbornly alive place.

By the time I’d hit 60 hours across PS5 and a chunky PC playthrough (Ryzen 7 / RTX 4070 at 1440p), Dragon’s Dogma 2 had done that rare thing: it made me forgive problems other games would get torn apart for, simply because the stuff it does well, almost no one else is doing at this scale.

The World Feels Dangerous In a Way Most Open Worlds Forgot

My first real “oh, this is different” moment wasn’t some boss fight, it was a simple decision: I had to reach a town I hadn’t been to before. No fast travel unlocked, no magic horse whistle. Just me, two pawns, a map that showed vibes instead of waypoints, and the sun already nudging toward the horizon.

The walk that followed sold me on what Capcom is doing here. I cut across a valley that looked like a shortcut and instead found a crumbling ruin crammed with goblins and a cyclops. In another game, that would be a side icon I’d cleared in 10 minutes. Here, we scrambled through the fight, burning curatives, my mage pawn screaming about magick shields, and I walked out of it limping, backpack suddenly heavier from all the loot I’d picked up without thinking.

Halfway up the next hill, over-encumbrance kicked in. My stamina bar evaporated with every sprint. I had to stop, open my inventory, and actually think: do I want to lug three great hammers I can’t even use yet, or drop one in the grass and hope I remember this spot later? It’s the kind of friction that would feel annoying in a checklist open world, but here it feeds directly into that “journey matters” feeling.

Then night fell. And Dragon’s Dogma 2 at night is borderline hostile. Your lantern carves a tiny circle of safety in thick darkness, wolves and bandits lurk just outside the glow, and every little slope suddenly feels like it might hide a fall that ends your run. I had one of those classic DD moments where a griffin swooped down on the road caravan I’d decided to tail for safety, grabbing an ox and spiraling off into the black while my pawns yelled contradictory advice.

This is where the game’s refusal to constantly fast travel you around starts to make sense. Routes become stories. You remember that sharp left turn by the broken cart because the last time you ignored it, a minotaur chased you into a ravine. You plan around dusk like you’re packing for a hike: do I push for the next settlement, or make camp and risk getting jumped at the campfire?

Combat: Clumsy, Chaotic, and Weirdly Addictive

If you’ve played the first Dragon’s Dogma, you know what to expect here: weighty, animation-heavy combat where your character sometimes feels like a drunk fridge with a sword, until something clicks and you start treating every fight like a small puzzle instead of a spam-fest.

I started as a Fighter because I’m boring like that. Early on, combat felt rough. Enemies soaked up hits, my stamina ran out constantly, and bigger monsters just swatted me aside. It wasn’t until I opened up more vocations and tried the Mystic Spearhand that it really came together. Suddenly, I had a teleport-dash, some ranged crowd control, and a ways to pin enemies in place for my pawns to dogpile.

The magic isn’t in one perfect class, though; it’s how the vocations mesh with specific monsters and terrain. Climbing a cyclops as a Thief, stabbing its neck while my warrior pawn desperately tries to keep its club away from the mages, is pure chaos in the best way. As a Magick Archer, lining up a pierce shot that threads between pawn hitboxes to detonate an explosive barrel tucked near a troll’s feet never got old.

It’s messy. Hitboxes aren’t always generous. Lock-on can be fussy. Your character will occasionally whiff a swing in a way that makes you want to snap the controller. But the trade-off is that when you do pull off something stylish, it feels fully earned, not pre-canned.

One of my favorite encounters was a chimera fight on a narrow mountain path. I’d taken the wrong route (again), it was dusk (again), and the thing ambushed us while my pawns were bickering. The first attempt ended with it punting me into the ravine. On the second, I told my pawns to hold back, used terrain to bait out its lion head lunges near the cliff edge, and timed a parry that sent it stumbling just far enough that we could swarm its snake tail. It wasn’t cinematic in that Ubisoft way; it was scrappy, ugly, and personal.

Pawns: The Best Co-op Partners You Never Actually Invited

The pawn system is still Dragon’s Dogma’s secret sauce. Your main pawn is effectively your weird AI child: you pick their vocation, gear them, and as you two adventure, they “learn” enemy behaviors and quest routes. Then other players can rent them, and they come back having picked up knowledge from those worlds too.

There was a moment about 15 hours in where I got properly lost trying to reach a quest marker tucked in some canyon. I was about to turn around when my rented pawn – someone else’s leveled-up Warrior named “Mochi” – just casually jogged off the trail and said something like, “This path should serve, Arisen.” I followed out of curiosity and sure enough, they were dragging me through a hidden shortcut I absolutely would have missed.

That kind of emergent guidance gives the game this illusion of being played alongside other real people, even when you’re stubbornly solo. Pawns will hoist you up to ledges in combat, shout actual useful hints about boss weak points, and occasionally just faceplant off a cliff because the AI had a moment. They’re not perfect, but they’re endearing.

They can also drive you up the wall. Pawn chatter rides a fine line between charming and repetitive; if I hear “wolves hunt in packs” one more time, I might start hunting them. Sometimes they’ll wander into traps you can clearly see, or unload their strongest spells on a single trash mob because the targeting logic panicked.

But compared to the sterile companion AI in most action RPGs, I’ll take loud and occasionally stupid over silent and robotic any day. Slowly shaping a pawn into the kind of teammate you want – teaching them to prioritize buffs, or to be more aggressive with crowd control – scratches an itch that normal skill trees just don’t touch.

A Story That’s More Vibe Than Epic (And That’s Mostly Fine)

Story-wise, Dragon’s Dogma 2 isn’t aiming for Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s closer to an old-school fantasy novel you found on a dusty shelf: lots of archaic phrasing, a handful of memorable weirdos, and a main plot that ambles forward in fits and starts.

The central premise – you’re the Arisen marked by a dragon, there’s political turmoil, and something is fundamentally off about the world – is enough to propel you from region to region. But the game shines more in its side stories and throwaway encounters than its big capital-L Lore moments.

One quest had me escorting a suspiciously polite stranger at night, only to realize halfway through that he was basically a serial killer baiting me into a monster-infested shortcut. Another small chain about a town’s missing children twisted into something much darker than I expected. These little arcs stick in my memory far more than most of the main story beats.

If you need fully voiced cinematics every 15 minutes, you’ll probably find the pacing glacial. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is more interested in being a weird place to exist in than an amusement park ride with perfectly timed thrills. Personally, I grew to appreciate that, even if there were stretches where I had no idea if I was “doing the story properly.”

Performance, Jank, and Those Gross Microtransactions

Let’s not pretend it’s all charm. Technically, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is rough. On PS5’s performance mode, the game targets 60 fps but rarely hits it, especially in busy cities. In the countryside, it feels better – I’d guess in the 40s most of the time – but dips into the high 20s aren’t rare when spells and particle effects go wild.

On my PC rig (5800X3D, RTX 4070, 32 GB RAM), even with DLSS at 1440p and some settings turned down, Vernworth still chugged. It was playable, but noticeably less smooth than it should be for how the game looks. The RE Engine does well with character detail and monster design – the griffins and drakes look fantastic – but foliage and distant detail can be muddy, and asset pop-in breaks immersion if you’re sensitive to that stuff.

Then there’s the save system: one main save slot, autosaves on quest beats and zone transitions, and that’s it. No manual multi-slot safety net. I had a questline go sideways because of a bad dialogue choice and realized I couldn’t roll back without losing hours. It fits the game’s “live with your decisions” philosophy, but I’d still have liked at least one backup slot.

And yes, the microtransactions suck. Selling things like in-game Rift Crystals, Wakestones, and portcrystals for real money, in a full-price single-player game, is a bad look. You absolutely don’t need to buy any of it – playing normally, I earned enough resources to do everything I wanted – but the store’s existence hovering just outside the pause menu leaves a sour taste.

None of these issues ruined the game for me, but they’re not trivial. If you’re already sensitive to uneven performance or allergic to any hint of monetization in your solo RPGs, factor that into your expectations.

Who Dragon’s Dogma 2 Is Actually For

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is not trying to be everyone’s game. It doesn’t explain itself well. It lets you walk into areas that will absolutely demolish you. It expects you to read item descriptions, experiment with vocations, and pay attention to pawn banter the way other games expect you to follow big glowing arrows.

If you love the friction and mystery of something like Elden Ring’s open world, but wish it had more AI companions and fewer grace points, this will probably hit hard. If Monster Hunter’s prep-and-plunge rhythm excites you – planning loadouts, learning monster behaviors, accepting that travel itself is part of the experience – there’s a similar DNA here.

If, on the other hand, you just want to knock out quests in 20-minute chunks after work with minimal hassle, Dragon’s Dogma 2 can feel like it’s fighting you. The encumbrance system alone will drive some players away, and I don’t blame them. Inventory Tetris after a long session isn’t for everybody.

What tipped it into “favorite of the year” territory for me is how consistently it surprised me, even 50 hours in. A random cliff slide that revealed a hidden tomb. A pawn I’d grown attached to getting snatched by a griffin mid-fight and vanishing into the sky. A storm rolling in at the worst possible time, turning a routine road brawl into a desperate slog with half my lantern oil left.

The Bottom Line: Flawed, Singular, Worth It

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the kind of game that’s easier to respect than recommend unconditionally. The jank is real. The performance issues need more than one patch. The microtransactions should never have been there. But underneath all that is a wild, stubborn, genuinely singular action RPG that trusts you to find your own fun and suffer your own disasters.

When I think back on my time with it, I don’t remember frame rates or texture quality. I remember sprinting through a forest with my last sliver of stamina as an ogre crashed through the trees behind us. I remember my mage pawn finally learning the perfect spell for a boss I’d been stuck on and absolutely erasing its health bar while I just tried to stay alive. I remember that feeling of looking at the map, picking a direction, and knowing that whatever happened on the way would be uniquely mine.

If that sounds like your kind of adventure, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is absolutely worth pushing through the rough edges for. For me, after 60-odd hours of frustration, awe, and a lot of dead pawns, it lands at a very strong:

Rating: 8.5 / 10

TL;DR – Should You Play Dragon’s Dogma 2?

• Come for: A dangerous, memorable open world where travel actually matters, weighty combat, and the wonderfully weird pawn system.
• Stay for: Emergent stories, flexible vocations that drastically change how you fight, and that constant feeling of “one more journey before bed.”
• Be ready for: Uneven performance on both console and PC, a restrictive save system, inventory friction, and gross but skippable microtransactions.
• Best for: Players who enjoy friction, experimentation, and living with their mistakes more than ticking off icons and power-fantasy smoothness.
• Avoid if: You want flawless performance, hate managing encumbrance, or prefer tightly guided RPGs where you’re rarely lost or under-leveled.