Austin strongly recommends: 'Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen' (Review)

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Austin (1:23)

Capcom has cooked again. Alright, something you need to know about me before getting into this review is that I love Dragon's Dogma 2 Like to a degree that I think some would find unjustified, it was the escapades of the fellowship made playable. Something I resonated with so strongly that I played through this thing not once, not twice, but three times. I very rarely replay games at all, so that really says something. But I also recognize and agree that it was kind of a scuffed video game with a disappointing sequel in many regards. The writing, itemization, enemy distribution, difficulty curve, endgame, and especially performance were undoubtedly lacking. Like many then, I expected some kind of follow-up update to address these things. But as the months went by, they never came, and all hope completely evaporated when the game's director, Hideaki Itsuno, left Capcom entirely. Until suddenly, two years after the game's initial launch, our prayers have been answered. Capcom have once again reeled back in Kento Kinoshita, the director of the Dark Arisen expansion of the first game, to apply his magic touch to the sequel. And boy has he done just that, with an ambitious expansion built in response to the criticisms of the base game. Rather than doing this through a endgame mega dungeon like the Bitterblack Isle though, Dragon's Dogma 2 Dark Arisen adds an entire new region to the game, the Snowy Kingdom of Norgan. The story here is far more coherent and cohesive than that of the base game, with a smaller cast of characters that each play an important role. The region is abundant with fast travel points, but maintains the tension in the journey through its verticality and snowstorms. The spread of enemies across it, both new and old, is far more balanced here, and the difficulty of them allows you to get the most out of this fantastic combat system more regularly. A combat system that has also been expanded here through new abilities for each vocation, and modifiers on existing ones. Those modifiers appearing in a new gear system that has randomized stats and perks, gives the game a much needed extra layer of build craft and a compelling loot chase. There is one important caveat though, while Dark Arisen was built with the base game's issues in mind, that does not mean that the base game has been completely fixed. Some things have, absolutely. Things like performance have been massively improved from the disaster that was the game's initial launch. There's a hard mode now, which gives you a way to push the difficulty back up once you reach the point that it becomes trivial. The newly added Lost Rites dungeons, if tackled at the appropriate level at least, do help address some of those criticisms around unexciting rewards and lack of encounters to properly test yourself in the mid to late game. But the base game's story is still rather meek. You will still feel a lack of those more involved enemy encounters. You will still stumble your way through a maze-like cave for 15 minutes, only to open a chest at the end of it that gives you a few herbs or a piece of gear you could have bought off a vendor. So if you were hoping that Dark Arisen was going to completely uplift the base game, sadly, that isn't quite the case since many of its best features are sequestered away in that Norgan region. However, for me, Dark Arisen was exactly what I hoped for, and then some. A solid 25 to 30 hour story that further builds on the more fascinating elements of this world, a new location that feels fresh and rewarding to explore, alongside new beasts and systems that fully leverage the combat. All wrapped up in a surprisingly meaty package. I spent about 30 hours with this expansion, and there's still so much more for me to do. Dragon's Dogma is such a unique franchise when set amongst the wealth of other open world fantasy games, and Dragon's Dogma 2 Dark Arisen offers a glimpse at what it looks like when its potential is fully realised.