YMMV / Dragon's Dogma II

• Annoying Video Game Helper: As it was in the first, pawns are extremely good at fighting, but they are also good at getting on your nerves just as much. These include constantly pointing out ladders whenever you pass by one, or pointing out you have no advantage against the enemy even as you one shot them, or traveling pawns interrupting you in the open world to get you to hire them.
• Cliché Storm: The game's political plot is standard fare, and characterization is so sparse that most of the cast stand on their stereotypes. That said, effort is made in the endgame to subvert certain typical tropes, particularly with Lord Phaesus.
• Common Knowledge: Because of the series' esoteric mechanics and previous obscurity, there's a lot of misinformation being spread around online, moreso when the game released on March 2024:
  • There exists some confusion among the gaming public as to what exactly the game's notorious Microtransactions do, and it isn't uncommon to see videos or comments claiming that core features such as fast travel, pawn customization, or respawning after death must be purchased with real money. In reality, like most Capcom games since Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition, almost all of the things available to buy as DLC are early-game items easily obtained after a few hours of play, or currency which can be naturally earned in abundance just by playing the game. In fact, the only content exclusive to real cash purchase are a unique camping kit (which offers no advantage over the others found in-game besides being slightly lighter), and a pendant which immediately maxes out a character's affinity when gifted to them (which can also be easily accomplished by gifting them common in-game items like flowers or gemstones).
  • There was an early confusion on how a certain fast travel system works, as it's easily assumed that one would just need either a Ferrystone or a Portcrystal, when in fact, both are needed just like in the first game; a Portcrystal is like a waypoint marker which becomes useless if the player doesn't have any Ferrystone to warp towards it. It's also been widely assumed that Ferrystones "can be bought via DLC or real money" when they're really not (the "fast travel" item that's being sold as a DLC is a Portcrystal).
  • Dragon's Dogma II launched without an in-game option to restart to a new game or save file from scratch, but there's misinformation claiming that the feature is already locked behind a paywall, or that the Art of Metamorphosis item allows you to do it (when in fact, the latter simply allows you to edit the appearance of your Arisen or Pawn).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: There are a total of four gear enhancement paths available to you in game: Vermundian, Battahli, Elven and Dwarven. While the game encourages you to experiment and see what works well for you, most players have opted to prioritize Dwarven across the board for endgame and post game activities. Dwarven becomes important because the boosts to knockdown power allows for better access to weak spots and critical hits, while preventing you from being smacked around by basic enemies like Goblins and Harpies with its boosts to knockdown resistance and even allowing you to keep attacking through the bigger boss monsters attacks. Most players and their pawns you find at higher levels will be decked out in Dwarven enhanced gear, with some niche use in Battahli and Elven depending on the vocations. ^ExplanationWarrior players might opt for Battahli for more power as the vocation can already hit the softcaps for knockdown power/res on its own, and Sorcerer's might go for Elvish for stronger spell damage.
• Demonic Spiders: Harpies return from the first game as annoying as ever, especially for fighters and warriors who lack ranged options against them. The first variant can put you to sleep while staying out of range, but the game comes with two more variants that are just as annoying; the Gore Harpies and Succubi. These variants can respectively knock you unconscious or freeze you solid before proceeding to carry you off to faceplant you into a wall for some damage or worse, off a cliff for a one hit kill for the unaware player. Most of the Harpies found in the latter portions of the game are always positioned near steep cliffs or inclines, making this very easy to happen.
• Friendly Fandoms: Aside from fans of fellow Capcom franchises like Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, this game has also drawn in fans of other fantasy works (medieval fantasy, high fantasy, etc.) like Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Baldur's Gate III and Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, or a Hack and Slash like God of War simply because of its in-depth character customization allowing the players to create Arisens and Pawns in the likeness of their preferred characters from these works.
• Funny Moments:
  • Just like the World Tour mode of Street Fighter 6, there can be a tonal conflict and hilarity that won't match the game's setting and cutscenes depending on how you customize your playable Arisen and/or main Pawn.
    • Dragon's Dogma II features hairstyles and traits that make them resemble other Capcom characters with little tweaking, most notably Leon S. Kennedy from Resident Evil or Nero's appearance in Devil May Cry 5 due to their hairstyles being some of the obvious Company Cross References. These just add creativity for "cosplay runs" and there's likewise the greater freedom of making your characters resemble other third-party characters such as Kratos or even real-life celebrities. On the extreme end, you can make your Arisen and/or Pawn look like hilarious abominations.
    • Aside from appearances, you can also customize aspects of your character's animations (specifically their standing posture or how they walk) to the point where they can be hard to take seriously while exploring.
  • Just like in the first game, you can grab and throw virtually any non-giant creature as you wish. Furthermore, throwing it at a Pawn who looks at you, especially one with a Simple inclination, causes them to catch it and throw it back at you, potentially turning it into an amusing game of catch that causes the more serious Pawns to call you out.
  • The game begins with Rook, the first pawn to join the Arisen, being nonchalantly consumed by the Brine. One would have to wonder if Capcom knew how many people threw Rook off cliffs and into the sea in the first game.
  • While somewhat hard to do, you can get a brawl started in your own house if two characters you maxed affinity for are there. Its funny to see two characters have a duel to the death over your love and affection. There's even an achievement tied to it!
  • The way the player faceplants the ground when taking fall damage looks surprisingly comical. The waiting until the character gets back up even looks like a Beat.
  • While terrifying in its own way, the Brine can lead to many hilariously anticlimatic moments when a large boss monster steps into even just ankle-deep water and is instantly consumed. Especially prone to this are Griffins, which tend to divebomb the player from above and, if they are next to water, essentially crash-land into the water and die instantly.
  • On a similar note, the ability to petrify any enemy with the Medusa Head is equally funny as well, with the sheer sudden anticlimax of it. You can petrify Grigori and end the final battle instantly, or petrify the Sphinx before she can even give out her riddles. The latter especially comes off as especially hilariously spiteful with how the Sphinx is a Non-Malicious Monster who only wants to match wits with the player and stoning her comes off as a massive "I have no time for you" attitude.
  • The player can grab onto the Sphinx's breasts. She is clearly not pleased with this.
  • If you hire a party of all-male pawns while also playing a male Arisen, the pawns will sometimes quip "It appears all of us pawns are men! I wonder if it speaks of the Arisen's preferences?"
    • Spend too much at the shops and the pawns will complain that you spend too much. "Have we any gold left after that extravagance?" Conversely, if you window-shop without actually buying anything, the pawns say "The Arisen is ever prudent in his application of coin", which just comes off as them making fun of you for being broke.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Thief class seems made for almost any situation to make up for a lack of ranged options (split from the Strider class in the original), but one augment in particularly can trivialize the combat for you: Formless Feint. Though it's supposed to be an auto-dodge that activates before you're hit and slowly drains your stamina, it does have a few notable quirks. It will always teleport you horizontally, it is automatically active once you turn it on and it will still activate while you are attacking. The teleport itself doesn't drain your stamina any more than the augment already does. Having it on essentially turns a majority of the combat into a button masher as no attacks can actually hit you, and the only thing you need to do to keep it going is either turn it off and let it recharge once in a while or just consume stamina recovery items. It's not just combat either; Because it essentially keeps you from ever having to worry about losing your max health, you can intermittently throw it on while exploring to travel far further in a single sitting than the game expects, allowing you to theoretically encounter and kill threats you normally should be one-shot by.
  • The "fake" thief maister skill Blades of the Pyre seems at first like a useless useful skill: enchanting your weapons with fire and causing a massive explosion that can send small enemies flying, knock big enemies off balance, and eat a huge chunk out of any non-fire-resistant enemy, but also seriously damaging the user as well. Most players will try it once and abandon it after nearly killing themselves. However, the above-mentioned Formless Feint skill protects the player from any damage: including damage they cause themselves. Using the two skills together turns you into an invulnerable flame-wielding explosion-spewing death machine who can wipe out bosses in seconds without taking a scratch, so long as you remember to keep an eye on your stamina.
  • The Mystic Spearhand's shield spell gives you essentially 5 seconds of invincibility to you and any nearby allies. This is already very powerful on it's own, but the spell costs very little stamina to cast (if it's all you use, you should always have stamina available to use it) and it has a very fast cast time. As long as you continue to recast it as needed, you are essentially invincible.
  • Freezing is a particularly powerful debilitation that can be inflicted on everything, up to and including bosses. Using ice enchantments or magic will cause the afflicted to become frozen solid and incapable of moving, and because of how it works, it can be rapidly re-applied over and over to essentially stunlock enemies to death.
  • Magick Archer's Martyr's Bolt is a supreme boss nuke. What it does is sacrifice your HP to deal a massive amount of damage in an AoE around a target. This would normally be very dangerous, if not for the simple fact that Allheal Elixir's exist and you can buy and forge them to make more if the need arises. You can charge it from a safe distance and kill bosses before they even notice your presence.
• Goddamned Bats: The Rattlers are a rocky variant of Saurians who trade away spears in exchange for a Rolling Attack that they will use when on high grounds. They are not too threatening by themselves, but if their tough skins do not make them annoying to fight against, their tendency to blend into the mountainous landscapes of West Vermund and Agumen Volcanic Island means the player will often find themselves knocked down by a rolling Rattler before they can see them approaching.
• Good Bad Bugs: Sometimes when you get struck by an attack from a large monster, it sends your Arisen ragdolling across the place you were fighting it in. However, there are few clips such as this Reddit post where the Arisen's body ends up flying upwards into the sky and across both Battahl and Vermund at high speed. Jokes have spawned from this glitch about it being another form of fast travel, how the Arisen is flying all the way back to Gran Soren from the first game, and the comparisons with the Nordic Space Program.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of the criticisms leveraged at the game is how similar it is to the first game and not evolving the formula enough aside from having a bigger map. The game still features mostly the same enemy roster with few additions, using the same attack patterns and mechanics they had in the first game; There aren't many new vocations and the previous one didn't have big changes; The beloved system still being the same, including the awkward gift system and players accidentally romancing NPCs (including children) they didn't mean to. The game still features the same biomes from the first game (with the canyon area being greatly expanded), and the story itself retreads many of the same plot points from the first game, to the point the game itself calls it ''Dragon's Dogma" in the menu, with the 2 only being added in the endgame.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Out of all the vocations, many have found themselves disliking the Trickster vocation. A pure Support Party Member vocation focused on support and tanking, it relies heavily on the inconsistent pawn AI to get anything done. The illusions the Trickster can create can be dispelled in a few hits if you aren't careful, and while watching enemies throw themselves off cliffs or kill each other can be funny at first, it can quickly lose its luster after a while when there's nothing else you can do. As a result, Trickster feels out of place in an action RPG, or would have been better as a pawn exclusive vocation instead of being locked to the player. The one benefit it does have, however, is tied to a weapon from the Sphinx sidequest that makes enemies drop gold on hit, and enemies have been reported to drop as much as 50k gold, but that is only a band aid to the ill-fitting nature of the vocation.
  • For players who play Mages/Sorcerers offensively, the changes made to Focused Bolt made it so unreliable that they might as well just spam weapon skills instead to deal damage, since they can no longer move while charging it. While the change can be somewhat justified since the holy-enchanted Focused Bolt in the previous game is so busted that it can quickly kill that game's Superboss in offline mode, many players agreed that removing movement made the attack less fun to use.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Look, Master! A Ladder!", "A ladder, Arisen!" ^ExplanationPawn chatter once again tends to lampshade things or repeatedly mention points-of-interest. Ladders immediately became the one memetic subject associated with pawns, and veteran Dragon's Dogma fans also joke it will be on par with the first game's "Wolves hunt in packs!" meme.
  • "Itsuno's Vision". ^ExplanationThe game's director Hideaki Itsuno considers Dragon's Dogma 2 a passion project and an idealized version of what he thinks a Dragon's Dogma game is. So whenever someone questions an odd design choice or oddity in the game (such as it having only one save file or the limitations of the fast travel system) fans tend to explain it by it simply being "Itsuno's Vision".
  • Look at that meat! ^ExplanationRather than use CGI or in-game graphics for their cooking scenes, the developers went out and bought expensive portions of meat, and filmed them cooking in live-action before placing said footage in-game. As such, a player's typical first reaction when cooking is exclamations of surprise and/or shock at how good they look.
  • "Did you know that different materials result in different creations?" ^ExplanationMuch like the ladder mentioned above, pawns seem to love pointing out how you can combine materials to create other items whenever you pick one up.
  • Do your part, wash your Pawns ^ExplanationDragonsplague, one of the new mechanics introduced in the game, is a disease that only Pawns can catch, and is infamous among the playerbase for killing off many NPCs including important ones should they rest at the inn or house while at least one of them is infected. The only way to cure this is to either dismiss the Pawn or (if the infected is the Main Pawn) toss them into the Brine. Comparisons have been humorously made to the measures taken during the COVID-19 Pandemic and one Reddit user went so far as to draw up this PSA poster to help other players with spotting symptoms of Dragonsplague.
• Moment of Awesome: Dragon's Dogma II retains most of the gameplay complexity from its predecessor, if not adding more. A mage can shatter their own ice magick blocks then pick up and throw the individual pieces, a cyclops can be lured to specific spots and be turned into a makeshift bridge (this is likewise one of the highlights in the pre-release gameplay videos) then fall to its own death, you can still grab onto a harpy, etc.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Upon meeting the Sphinx, you can choose to take part in her riddles for a chance at the sealed chests behind her. When you return with your answer(s), she'll get right in your Arison's face with an extremely unnerving, almost Slasher Smile grin, and during this close-up can twist her head nearly 90 degrees without moving her body. Combined with other subtler details, such as her face briefly taking on more scales and her pupils expanding into almost Black Eyes of Evil before shrinking again, people are lucky this being chooses to be peaceful.
  • The Gorechimera returns from the previous game, but appearing far more unsettling◊and even appearing to be undead. The goat has a disturbingly ghostly appearance with white wispy fur, glowing red eyes and a "crown" of small tumorous growths instead of horns, and most tellingly, the Gorechimera starts the battle with the lion and snake heads literally dead and trailing limply requiring the goat head to cast necromancy spells to reanimate them individually. They also reappear postgame replacing standard Chimeras that are previously killed, implying that these are the same Chimeras your party has previously slain, now returned from the dead.
  • Rest in an inn or your house while your Pawn is at the last stage of Dragonsplague, and you'll be treated to a special cutscene where said Pawn grunts in pain as pitch-black darkness envelops their body except their red, glowing eyes, and turns them into an ink-like dragon that lets out a high-pitched roar as it takes flight, ending with a fade to black along with screams of people that can be faintly heard. What it does is not shown, but upon waking up, you will see a lot of NPCs lying dead on the streets of the city or town you slept in, but not before a message shows, telling you what happened while you were asleep:
    Dragonsplague has struck, leaving a trail of innocent lives in its wake.
    The Pawns who brought the illness to the world have now been returned beyond the rift. If only you had been more observant, perhaps this tragedy could have been prevented.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Early pre-release trailers featured a Medusa and a Sphinx, which seemed to be surprise additions at first glance, though it's eventually brought up that these creatures made their first appearance in Dragon's Dogma Online, a a now-defunct online game spin-off.
  • As soon as the game launched on late March 2024 and the review embargo has been lifted, it has been criticized for having technically just one save slot and the inability to create separate character playthroughs on their own slots. Some of those who've played the first Dragon's Dogma game would then remind the newcomers that the first game technically had a "one save slot" system as well (albeit the main menu there still lets you restart a playthrough, unlike this game at launch). The autosave feature of the first game had its flaws as well, which were somehow retained here. It eventually caused the first game's saving system to be retroactively labeled as a Scrappy Mechanic too.
  • This isn't even the first modern Capcom game that released with Microtransactions as DLC, even if that criticism is one of the factors for the game getting review bombed upon release. This caused Capcom fans to repeatedly point out that several older Capcom games like Devil May Cry 5 and Resident Evil 4 (Remake) had DLC microtransactions too, and got their share of (albeit smaller) backlash within their own fandoms.
• Paranoia Fuel: Once the dangers of the Dragonsplague became known, some people started throwing their pawns into the brine for the smallest indications they might be infected with it. Straightforward pawns are often the first to be thrown into the brine due to their Sarcastic personality, with people confusing their snark for a sign of infection with the plague (it manifests in them commenting about power surging through them or telling you off when you order them around), and pawns with red eyes not getting hired at all (the sign is glowing red eyes, with this becoming increasingly obvious over time).
• Popular with Furries: With the reveal that not only are there Beastren, which are anthropomorphic lions, but that you can play as one and/or create a Pawn that's Beastren, it was no surprise that furries became very invested in the game.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The save systems still have a similar complexity as the first game, which can be confusing for those who haven't played the latter. It got to the point where there's even a post-launch in-depth video by IGN explaining how this game's save systems work for the uninitiated. Given the pre-release hype and influx of series newcomers to Dragon's Dogma II though, the comparisons from gamers who prefer the simpler multiple save slots and auto-save of Dark Souls were inevitable.
    • There's still technically just one save slot that gets repeatedly updated as you play the game. Unfortunately, Dragon's Dogma II at launch didn't come with the option to start a new playthrough (or restart all over) after you already had a save file; you'd eventually be left with just the options to "Load from Last Save" or "Load from Last Inn Rest". A New Game option was added in the game's first patch, but it is still in contrast to how the first game had the option by default.
    • The autosave feature can still have the risk of accidentally making you lose progress upon death or putting you in a bind if you haven't been regularly resting at inns. A tutorial prompt in this game outright admits that its autosave system can be unreliable and thus recommends the player to at least regularly rest at inns to ensure the reliability of their saved data.^note Inn saves are more reliable than autosaves in both Dragon's Dogma 1 and 2 because aside from placing you on safe zones where your meters are refilled, there's an option to load "checkpoint saves" specifically (which this game calls "Last Inn Rest")
  • The Loss Gauge mechanic reduces max health as you take damage. This essentially makes venturing out for longer periods of time increasingly dangerous and encourages you to find safety, whether through inns or camp fires, to continue your adventures. It also makes it so you cannot just load up on healing items then brute force your way through encounters against more dangerous monsters as you could in the first game with enough patience. The catch is that this reduced health carries over when you reload a save after dying. So if you save before a fight with 75% maximum health and then end up dying in the fight with your max health reduced to 50%, when you reload, your maximum health will now be 50%. It makes it so it becomes increasingly more difficult to win a fight you are struggling with, particularly if said fight is one you MIGHT be able to win with some proper strategy but is still dangerous.
  • The first time you gain a Pawn infected with Dragonsplague, it notably warns you about the fact that they are stronger but also a disobedient Jerkass that may invite calamity. If you don't heed the warning thinking it's just a plot point later on, resting at an inn or house in a town when the Dragonsplague is at its later stages will treat you to a pretty cutscene where the infected Pawn transforms into a Brine-like dragon that lays waste to the town you're resting in, leaving only you, children and other Pawns alive. This includes not only vendors and the Vocation changers, but plot-and-quest-important characters, too, effectively destroying any quest progression you may have been doing and killing your game for anyone not interested in just speeding to the end. The only way to know this will happen is by having heard of it from other players, and because resting replaces your inn save file, this is essentially a permanent consequence unless you either make a new save, have enough Wakestones to spend on important characters, or manage to get the hard-to-obtain Eternal Wakestone to undo all the damages manually, but only once.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Almost similar to how they did it in Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, YouTuber Biscuit Sticks finished a "Fist Only" run where they'd avoid using weapons in favor of relying only on punches, kicks and grabs.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • Eyebrows were already raised on 2023 when Capcom President Harushiro Tsujimoto once said "Game Prices Are Too Low", implying the need to increase it. Fans (especially the non-US players with no regional pricing) feared that the company would follow the $70 USD price tag that's becoming a standard in the gaming industry, and that Dragon's Dogma II would be implemented with it as the early example. Discussions arose on whether the game would be worth the new price, especially when compared to most of Capcom's prior flagship franchise releases that were at $60. The new pricing was eventually confirmed, leading to some potential buyers holding off their day one purchase until the price can be justified, or are simply waiting for a sale.
  • Dragon's Dogma II has been receiving its early criticisms en-masse only after the review embargo was lifted. Aside from performance and optimization issues (especially on PC), this is mostly due to the inability to restart to a new game after having a save, the general "one save slot" limitation, and a list of questionable DLC Microtransactions (as an alternative to the exact same in-game purchases that players can get). All of these caught many gamers by surprise and caused them to hold off on purchasing the game just yet. However, older Capcom and Dragon's Dogma 1 fans argue otherwise that the latter two "issues" have always been Older Than They Think.
• That One Sidequest: The Sphinx's A Game of Wits sidequest. The sidequest is a series of Guide Dang It! riddles, ten in total, that give some good rewards when solved correctly. The issue being how obtuse some of them are, such as:
  • Riddle of Rumination: You must find the first Seeker's Token you found in the game (among the over 200 of them scattered about the world) while only giving you seven in-game days to find it. Hope you remember or had enough foresight to take a picture of the location you got your first.
  • Riddle of Wisdom: Bring the Sphinx her parent, which requires the player to hunt down a pawn called SphinxFather, SphinxMother or SphinxParent. This can be either an official Capcom pawn or a player owned one with the moniker. However if you've never interacted with the Riftstone of Fellowship^NoteLocated right next to Harve Village, this is easier said than done.
  • Riddle of Futility: Bring an incredibly fragile vase to a specific NPC in Bakbattahl. The intended solution is to use a Ferrystone while carrying the vase to skip walking across Battahl^NoteWhich is a bad idea if you forego using a Ferrystone as the region is filled with a myriad of monsters that can break the vase, or bring the NPC to the vase, but if for some reason you don't have a Portcrystal at either the Frontier Shrine or Bakbattahl, you're out of luck.
  • Riddle of Differentiation: Similarly, the riddle that involves you bringing one of two NPCs to the Sphinx that look alike at first glance. If you didn't take a screenshot of the one that Sphinx wants you to bring, its easy to bring the wrong one by mistake.
  • Killing the Sphinx in itself is a hurdle. She is incredibly finnicky about how she fights and will abandon the battle and disappear from the current playthrough forever if you do something as simple as hit her front half too much because the whole fight is a riddle in itself, playing on the classical Riddle of the Sphinx, which can be very easily missed. The game nudges you to use the Unmaking Arrow on her, but the window to do so is strangely specific as well, constricts you into being an Archer, and doing it doesn't even give you the satisfaction of a boss fight. To make matters worse, killing her is necessary for 100% Completion; an achievement is locked behind the item she is protecting, and there is a Pawn Badge for her (which counts up to 5, and given the fact she doesn't respawn, it means you either need to wait until NG+5 or get seriously lucky with Pawn Quests to see it completed).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Most players have taken note of the two characters featured on the box art, Empress Nadinia and Ulrika, and how wasted they both are.
  • Empress Nadinia gets hit hardest with this. She is an Advertised Extra who barely has a role in the plot. She can even die before the player even gets the chance to formally meet her, and most of her appearances after the fact are entirely optional. Her Praetorian Guard, Menella, arguably has more of a spotlight than Nadinia does.
  • While Ulrika is the one responsible for nursing the Arisen back to health twice, directly causing the events of the game to happen, and has a fairly in-depth questline that leads to her being one of the first characters you can romance, her impact on the overall plot afterwards is fairly minimal.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The threat of the Dragon pretty much ceases to loom after the Arisen's recollection of themselves at Melve, which is within an hour's playtime. While Grigori was an Orcus on His Throne as well, his presence was felt through the Salvation, an Apocalypse Cult that is galvanized by his appearance and what it portends; 2's denizens seem Fantastically Indifferent.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Considering the Sequel Gap between games, Dragon's Dogma 2 is leaps and bounds a better looking game than its predecessor. Spell and weapon skill effects are well animated and rendered just as they were in the first, and performance hiccups aside, the look and scale of the world itself is impressive.

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