Looking back twelve years later, it's clear that the original Dragon's Dogma earned its well-deserved cult following not only for what it had to offer, but for what it could have been. The clear signs of cut or unfinished content became obvious to anyone who spent enough time with the game, and series creator Hideaki Itsuno's 2013 GDC presentation touting the finished product as being only half of what they had envisioned for the game only helped to fan those flames. It was not uncommon to see the game described as "the best 7/10 game ever made", or "an unfinished gem". In my review of the game, I made the bold claim that while Dragon's Dogma was not the greatest ARPG ever created, it was the tech demo for it.

Fast-forward a decade, and against all odds, Capcom was actually convinced to take a risk on greenlighting a sequel. While initially cautiously optimistic, further trailers and presentations only increased enthusiasm of many long-time fans of the series, helmed by Itsuno's claims that the sequel's design philosophy was to be a faithful as possible to the original. As it turns out, this claim was painfully accurate.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is a game that performs worse in as many categories as it improves on Dragon's Dogma 1. To give a small sample:

• The artstyle was perfectly translated to the new engine and the increased graphical fidelity that came with it.
  
• Character creator is more robust, adding new customization options that make character designs more unique (even though everyone still only makes waifu pawns.)
  
• Combat movement/positioning (standing on top of monsters, more verticality via moves and nearby terrain)
  
• Enemies will fight each other, call reinforcements, and multiple boss monsters can appear at once.
  
• Pawn dialogue (pawns will respond to each other, talk about contextual topics like their vocations, etc.)
  
• A larger, more fleshed-out (yet still unfinished and somewhat underutilized) world that facilitates the sense of adventure that the game strives for.
  
• A near complete lack of loading screens also greatly helps this sense of adventure and immersion.
  
• Emphasis on foot travel, planning out your party composition and equipment, requiring the use of hub areas for rest and restocking.
  
• Superior (yet clearly unfinished) endgame.
  
• The endgame expands on the overarching lore of the world and the cycle that binds it.

• Combat movement (Arguably. Some players dislike the added weight and delay compared to the snappy movement of DD1. I disagree in most scenarios, except for how monster parkour is not nearly as viable anymore.)
  
• You can pinpoint the coronation cutscene as the exact moment the main questline begins to absolutely fall apart. The entire Battahl arc is a clearly unfinished, disjointed string of quests that are confusing either for your character's motives, or how they are meant to weave into anything else going on around you.
  
• Most NPCs are completely uninteresting and little more than set pieces. Dragon's Dogma 1 had tons of NPCs with important dialogue relating to the world, quests, and other characters, which would update with new dialogue the further you progressed the main story. This is almost completely absent in DD2.
  
• The heavy emphasis on NPC interactivity, not only with the player, but with other NPCs is allegedly the main cause of the performance issues that still plague this game for many people with even mid-range setups. This feature ends up being barely noticeable, and is absolutely not worth the cost to CPU performance.
  
• The loss of the gauntlet, boot, and underclothes slots makes fashion much less varied, especially with how class-restricted much of the armor is.
  
• Not enough context-based core skills to warrant the loss of 2 skill slots compared to DD1.
  
• Less skills to choose from compared to DD1, especially for mages/sorcs.
  
• Severe lack of David Lodge voicing the Dragon (although the new VA did a pretty decent job.)

From my perspective, very few of the issues that I have with this game boil down to it's actual design philosophy. Many people do not like the constant walking, or how it does not hold you hand, with many quests and mechanics being left up to the player to discover. This game is not going to appeal to everyone, and that is fine. They doubled down on many aspects of the philosophy from the first game, and I am happy that they did.

In reality, the most damning problem that this game has it that it has managed to fall into nearly every single development-related pitfall that befell Dragon's Dogma 1. Most of my gripes about this game are not about what they did , but what they did not or could not do.

Was it rushed out the door to increase quarterly profits? Was it never given the budget, time, and development team size that it needed in the first place? Did it suffer from complications due to work-at-home restrictions during the pandemic, or because of issues that needed to be resolved while translating the RE Engine to an open world setting? Was it mismanaged by directors and producers, and doomed to fail regardless of any other problems that may or may not have occurred during development? I don't know. I don't think we'll ever know.

If you are confused as to why this is marked as a positive review, I do not blame you. The easy answer is that Steam's rating system, just like every other modern platform's binary "like/dislike" system, is stupid.

The more nuanced answer is that I have been harsh on this game only because it feels like it could be so much more than what it is, and after now experiencing this feeling for two games in a row, I have much less sympathy to offer. I am disappointed in the final product, and yet at the same time, Dragon's Dogma offers so many things that cannot be found in any other game. It is a rollercoaster of quality, but its peaks stand high above most other games. At the end of the day I still enjoyed my time with Dragon's Dogma 2.

Regardless of what happened to this game, there is a faint glimmer of hope, as Capcom executives seem to have realized the potential this series has, claiming it to be among their "core franchises". Whether it be updates to the base game, expansions, or an eventual sequel, only time will tell whether they will keep their word and finally give us a fully realized product, or if we are doomed to repeat this cycle of wondering what could have been.