The game's title screen reads as Dragon's Dogma instead of Dragon's Dogma II. Why is that? Well, considering the first game wasn’t as true to Itsuno's vision as he would’ve liked, this game is more or less what Dragon's Dogma was always meant to be from the very start. It's not until the Arisen deviates from the script of the first game by killing themself instead of the Dragon that the "II" is added. This is when the endgame begins.
In the quest "Short-Sighted Ambition", if you decide to give Isaac the book "On the Transference of Souls II" that he asks for, his spell goes horribly awry and his wife and daughter become piles of sand. However as Waldhar explained if you ask him, it exchanges matter, it does not transmute it. This means somewhere in another dimension, Isaac's wife and daughter are now at best stranded in a barren alien wasteland somewhere, and at worst, buried alive in sand.
