PAWN COCKTAIL

DRAGON'S DOGMA 2 is an exceptional and sometimes infuriating RPG 

- Fraser Brown

My journey through Dragon’s Dogma 2 has been a tumultuous one: glorious, thrilling, accidentally hilarious, frustrating, maddening – all the adjectives. It is one of my favourite RPGs, but also a huge pain in the arse. Whatever you feel about it by the end of your own adventure, I guarantee this is a game that will be talked about for a long time.

You are the Arisen, a soldier killed by a dragon, returned to life despite the absence of a heart. Whenever the dragon appears, a new Arisen also appears, their fates intertwined. The dragon is always destined to make an Arisen, and the Arisen is always destined to fight the dragon. Except this time there’s another claiming the title of Arisen, and with it the mantle of Sovran of Vermund – a monarch, essentially – kicking off a political conspiracy that weaves its way through countless fights with massive monsters.

Despite constantly flinging flat characters and stiff dialogue at you – everyone’s lines are laden with faux medieval affectations and po-faced seriousness – the story itself is a creative yarn that’s so much more elaborate than it needs to be, given that much of the series’ appeal comes from clambering on top of angry beasties and murdering them. While many of the main beats are predictable, the narrative is constructed in such a way that it still manages to feel incredibly novel, like a FromSoftware joint but with a story that is much more accessible and explicit.