In Dragon’s Dogma 2, You’re a Stumbling Meat Puppet in a World That Hates You (And That’s a Good Thing)

Dragon’s Dogma 2 begins with a coronation. You are the Arisen, the chosen enemy of the Dragon who, by virtue of having their heart scooped out by this beast, claims the right to the throne of Vermund (this doesn’t sound like the best system of governance to me, but what can you do). However, as adoring subjects serenade this ascension, something unexpected happens. A voice rings out. You collapse.

The camera cuts away to a gaol in a distant land, perhaps in the past. There’s a struggle, and the Arisen escapes into the wider world, setting out on a journey to claim their “rightful” spot at the top of Vermund, a quest aided by numerous loyal underlings. They’ll charge into battle for you, plan political machinations in your stead, and generally fall over themselves to fawn over your divine presence. In-universe, many of them are literally referred to as Pawns, undying beings whose sole purpose in life is to serve the Arisen. After all you’re the Sovran, their promised leader reborn.

However, although Dragon’s Dogma 2 casts the player as a fated king who commands a legion of peons, the definition of a power fantasy, ironically, almost every other layer of this experience reinforces an absence of control. You may be destined for the highest station in all the land, but the wilds of Vermund and Battahl truly do not give a shit. This space is vast, dense, and full of things that want to kill you.

Here, many of the trappings of modern open world games are intentionally thrown in the dumpster. While you can technically fast travel by using an item called a ferrystone, they are fairly scarce and expensive (at least in the early game), meaning spending one is always a genuine choice. They can’t teleport you just anywhere, and you can only warp to magical obelisks called portcrystals, which are similarly uncommon. The other main way to get around “quickly” is via Ox Cart, but these are also restrictive, as they only travel between major cities and can come under attack. Oh, and as far as I can tell, horses don’t exist in this setting, meaning most travel happens on foot.

Because of these limitations on moving through the world, you’re forced to fully engage with the contours of this sizeable backdrop, battling goblins, harpies, and eventually far more intimidating creatures as you cut a swathe to your destination. Due to the scope of battles and the lack of a universal dodge, even the most skilled warrior will take dings and scrapes along the way. Sure, there are plenty of healing tools at your disposal: you can carry medicines in your pack and assuming you have a Pawn in your party dedicated to healing (which you probably should), they’ll do their best to keep your HP topped off. But every time you get hit, you lose a bit of your max health that can’t be healed in the field, the wear and tear of the road slowly accumulating until you are so fragile a goblin’s sneeze will bowl you over. This grants each expedition a tangible sense of attrition as your constitution is whittled down by scrapes and bruises. Crushing blows carry over from one scuffle to the next, imbuing each battle with additional consequence.

Thankfully, this damage isn’t permanent— things aren’t that cruel. You can recover by getting some rest. But, in the open world, this can only be done at campfires spread out at set locations. Taking a nap also requires having a tent, which is single-use, costs money, and takes up a lot of inventory space. And if you hit the hay before clearing out the area, you can expect your beauty sleep to be interrupted by an ambush. As a trek goes on for an extended period, there is a palpable sense of fatigue, creating constant small moments of joy when you finally see a trail of smoke rising in the skyline, a diegetic way to let you know where you can find your next respite.

And the only thing that will have you sprinting to the next campsite faster than your dwindling hit points is the setting sun. Being out at night in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a bad time. Even with your lantern on (which, of course, also consumes a resource), it’s almost impossible to make out what’s beyond its dim glow, making it easy to take a wrong step off a cliff. Worse, nocturnal creepy crawlies will emerge from the gloom, including zombies, skeletons, will-o-wisps, and other spectral monstrosities I haven’t dared approach. Unless you’re enjoying a brew at the local inn, nighttime is for sleeping, adding yet another factor you need to plan around while exploring the wilds.

All of these elements add up. While many games treat their open worlds like a playground where getting from one place to the next is virtually frictionless, here, getting from point A to point B is a genuinely enticing, dangerous trek that requires sound decision-making lest you get slowly worn down until you’re stumbling through the pitch-black dark. If you’re of a certain persuasion (aka, a sicko), it deeply rules to have a game that pushes back this hard, forcing you to engage with each of its systems by planning your path so you don’t hit a wall. It all grants even seemingly inconsequential trips a degree of gravitas.

But those aren’t the only ways this space wants to grind you into dust. At a micro level, you play as a stumbling, bumbling little guy. To be clear, the game feels responsive: the skills you unlock are gratifying, especially from the boilerplate Soldier class, and in many ways, you’re still a superpowered videogame protagonist who flies around the screen demolishing monsters. But just because you’re formidable with a sword doesn’t mean you can circumvent the laws of physics.

As for traversal, there is an almost Death Stranding-like attention to how your body interacts with slopes and gravity. When moving up steep inclines, you are slower, spend more stamina, and are very susceptible to losing your footing. You can’t easily jank your way up cliffsides and instead need to find genuine human-climbable routes for your flailing protagonist, which grants moving through the space a heft. For instance, at one point, I assumed I could scale rooftops to quickly get around town, like in most videogames. This theory was debunked after I lost my footing on slippery shingles and went flying face-first into squelching mud. Not exactly a regal maneuver.

The weight of movement and flesh becomes most apparent when fighting massive creatures, whose hulking forms will send your character ragdolling into the sunset. Scaling these beasts is a must, as it lets you strike at their weak points, but this leaves you vulnerable to getting manhandled. And if you find yourself on the receiving end of a heavy blow, you’ll end up defenseless on hands and knees, susceptible to increased damage as you pray a nearby Pawn lifts you to your feet before another wallop connects.

Beyond these adversaries, the elements are similarly cruel, and I’ve been crushed by torrents of water, lit on fire, frozen, and doused in poison. Steep falls have claimed as many of my lives as rampaging monsters. But this lack of control, over the untamable wilds or even over your own body, is what makes this setting so fundamentally interesting, as this aversion to player-centricity leaves room for incredible emergent moments.

As I make my way to a distant village, I come across Vermundian soldiers fending off a pack of wolves. My pawns and I reinforce our compatriots, and we quickly cut down the beasts. But then we hear a roar. On a looming cliffside, an ogre is waging its own battle against a detachment of goblins. Together, we storm the hill, joining the melee as combatants on both sides are sent careening off the precipice by the massive creature’s blows.

As if that confluence of bloodletting wasn’t enough, almost comedically, another foe enters the fray, one far more imposing than the rest, a griffin. It’s an enemy that’s previously rent me in half, knocked me off cliffs, and generally ruined my day. I sigh. While I’ve beaten these other adversaries plenty of times, I have no idea how to counter this one. But then, in the chaotic scrum, a flaming arrow finds its mark. I have no idea who shot it; it could have been the elven markswoman Legolass (I wish I thought of this pun, but other players create and name the secondary Pawns you meet like this one), one of the nameless guardsmen who joined our retinue, or even a goblin, but the camera cuts to the reeling monster as it crashes through the canopy, our blades eager to meet it. We hack and slash, finally dealing real damage to an opponent that seemed like a near-impossible, late-game challenge. In the end, it retreated before we could best it, but I’ve learned it’s weakness, fire.

All of the previously mentioned hardships and fussy details — the limitations on fast travel, physics-bound movement, destructible environments — are geared towards creating these kinds of unscripted collisions, systems crashing into each other until something weird and unique and memorable pops out. You can even channel the chaos yourself, using a shield bash to knock an adversary off balance until they stumble backward over a ledge or orchestrating attackers to go after one another, resulting in golems crushing parties of would-be bandits underfoot.

Although this story centers on a monarch trying to reclaim their crown and all the power that comes with it, Dragon’s Dogma 2’s greatest delights come from accepting you can’t control everything. You can’t influence inclement weather or the sun disappearing over the horizon as unsettling monstrosities burst from subterranean layers. You can’t blink across the world without paying for it, and instead, must take long journeys where the only cure for dwindling strength is rest. Sometimes, you can’t even get up a particular cliffside, its steep terrain forcing a different path. And most of all, you can’t always control who lives and dies (although there is a hilariously arcane process to resurrect the dead, for a price, of course).

It’s not challenging in quite the same way as FromSoftware’s output, like Dark Souls and Sekiro, although I can see why those comparisons are made. Here, the toughness is less about learning to dodge-roll at the right time and more related to preparation and countering weaknesses. The experience also isn’t some entirely avant-garde, player-hating thing that rejects “fun” outright. It feels really good when you shield bash a guy, weaponizing the same inertia that’s sent you slipping down slopes to make a foe do the same. After hitting an off-balance enemy with a follow-up attack (aptly named “Empale”), the immaculate thud of the ensuing audio cue is music to my ears. It’s damn satisfying whenever things line up perfectly, like cutting a bridge out from under a charging Cyclops or sending a boulder ripping through an army of Saurians. But what makes these moments truly pop is that you don’t have fine control over when they arrive.

I haven’t reached credits yet, so I’m not sure where this story about a chosen one claiming their “destined” station of ultimate control goes. Based on the weird turns of the previous entry, there may be some curve balls in store that subvert expectations. But what I do know is that in every disastrous detour, climbing accident, and encounter with a Drake that fries you alive, the game uses its mechanics to reject the idea that one person can control everything. In a medium where the player is often the center of the universe, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a much-needed reality check.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.