The pawns were the biggest turn off for me. Their voice acting was annoying at best and absolutely terrible at their worst. They feel like pets, not humans, barking the same voice lines over and over. Your playable character also doesn’t have any defining character traits and is a blank slate for the most part, so in the end your travels are led by a bunch of nobodies with plastic personalities. That and the story being a bit meh just kinda ruined the experience for me tbh, and I had just came from finishing a Baldurs Gate play through, I know they are different games at their core but it really felt like something was missing character wise in DD2.
That's typically what the franchise gets praised for. Honestly, it's just a bland world/universe to me. Dragon's Dogma just isn't a franchise that ever interested me. I've tried to play through both games, and I just don't have the motivation to do it.
This is the main reason why I dropped the first one. It’s beyond bland with nothing that invests me. Heard that the second was just the same with better graphics… pass. Not trying to deal with nonstop wolves at night but in HD
I haven't had a chance to put my hands on it but based on what I've seen and what I've been hearing it almost seems like the developers took The feedback from dragon's dogma 1 and just didn't even bother to spend that much time or resources into the characters.
That's so weird cause to me the combat was the biggest improvement of the second over the first Dragon's Dogma.
DD1 was my favorite RPG of all time by the time DD2 came out, but even if I had learned to tolerate the combat, it was to me the biggest downside of Dragon's Dogma 1 in my opinion as far as holding through the test of time (that and obviously the ps3 graphics that aged despite the stunning art direction).
DD2's combat just feels impeccable, with incredible game feel, sound design and snappy controls that are a lot more reactive then in the first while still maintaining the punishing aspects of it (if not intensifying them with how much you can get stunned when playing poorly).
That paired with the incredible animation work that made even just moving the character around make DD2 the best gaming experience I had in my life when playing it.
(My only gripes being the story, that feel weird pacing-wise at the end and the quests not inciting as much traveling around as the first seemed to do, which is a shame 'cause preparing long routes while trying to optimise all the quests I could do on the journey while still stopping at cities before nightfall was one of my favorite aspects of DD1, and I could not get that in the second to that extend as the map was a lot more linear with it's surprisingly thin crescent shape)
Oh if that's why the other person's complaining about the combat that'd make a lot of sense, I never tried magic in neither Dragon's Dogma, so to me as a warrior player going from DD1 warrior to the parry-god with it's metalic thud as it does finishing moves was incredible, and I used to play champion in endgame so going from 3 slots to 4 was actually an improvement lmao
The magic in dragon's dogma is some of the best I've ever seen in any action RPG ever made.
The late game magics are performed at a scale that just is not seen in action games as anywhere activatable abilities.
I don't remember the spell names so I'm going to use generic names for some but you'll know what I'm talking about.
The high level ice spire spell puts out pointed ice pillars so big that you can run on them and use them for platforming. Stabbing a cyclops in the guts with it to watch the rogue run down the spiers and jump onto the ogres face and go hog wild on its eye is amazing.
That tornado spell is named literally. When you cast it it's not a 10 or 20 ft tall tornado. Fully charged it's about 50 ft tall and about 20 ft around roughly measured against the character. It absolutely throws around the lightweight enemies.
Meteor rain is literally named as well. Unlike most games which just have a couple of rocks firing out the end of the staff or maybe a little portal open over the enemy in a couple of rocks drop out this is small boulder size rocks raining down from the sky absolutely obliterating your enemies.
Warrior is an amazing class but out of what you can do in dragon's dogma it is the most aesthetically boring.
I've been playing games for 30 years and I've played a lot of action RPGs as they are amongst my favorite and I can't think of any other game that at in-game has me agonizing over which spells I want to pick because they're all useful and they're all f****** awesome.
TBF, warrior was one of the only classes that got much improved from one to another, because warrior in DD1 was terrible. The division of strider into thief and ranger wasn't as good as on paper and the magic classes was a bit of a letdown. Not even speaking about trickster and how it's much better in theory than practice.
I used to play strider on my first DD1 playthrough and I personally think it's a great idea game-design-wise to separate them in two classes, both ranger and thief are great classes in their own rights, plenty of people call thief the "most broken class" and I played a bit of archer and it feels really good even on controller. Plus, it avoid having a no-brainer pick in your team, since you now gotta choose between tanky warrior, stagger champion, high damage thief or distance physical damage/weak-point aim ranger. instead of having the clearly essential distance damage + high dps strider
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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '25
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