Dragon's Dogma 2 is a Masterpiece | 9/10

[女王 [Queen]]

This to me is a brilliant game that i recommend people try out and draw their own conclusion. Alot of people seem to have gripe with the game, and where some criticism is valid, I do feel like alot of people came in expecting more from a sequel than they really should- Especially given how despite pointing out constantly the game is just '90% DD1' that people are missing the point of the story and the point overall.

I highly recommend just playing through the game yourself, its quite an enjoyable ride if you enjoy exploration and battling fantastical creatures. Don't let the negative views of others dissuade from a really good game.

[Ryan Fenton]

Cool.

I do note a lack of actual mention of what is good about the game... but just a weird scorning of those that don't like it.

That doesn't seem like a healthy expression of love for a subject.

You do know that criticism can come from those that also love a series.

In a healthy customer relationship, that's how products improve.

Making an active enemy of a large portion of folks that liked the series is a bad place to start from, woudn't you say?

Is it sensible at all to blame folks that paid for the game and find themselves unhappy with what they got?

Should they not speak up?

Do you think that would result in a better product over time if they did?

There's VERY few cases of a customer base truly ending a product - it was folks finding a better option, and going with that. It's the product not improving over time (or getting worse) that ends the product, not the customers going with what they enjoy.

Do you want companies to be protected from people's opinions?

[女王 [Queen]]

Originally posted by Ryan Fenton:

Cool.

I do note a lack of actual mention of what is good about the game... but just a weird scorning of those that don't like it.

That doesn't seem like a healthy expression of love for a subject.

You do know that criticism can come from those that also love a series.

In a healthy customer relationship, that's how products improve.

Making an active enemy of a large portion of folks that liked the series is a bad place to start from, woudn't you say?

Is it sensible at all to blame folks that paid for the game and find themselves unhappy with what they got?

Should they not speak up?

Do you think that would result in a better product over time if they did?

There's VERY few cases of a customer base truly ending a product - it was folks finding a better option, and going with that. It's the product not improving over time (or getting worse) that ends the product, not the customers going with what they enjoy.

Do you want companies to be protected from people's opinions?

i'm just avoiding mentioning spoilers <3

[Senki]

I love the game but it really didn't do enough as a sequel, it feels like a remake.

And yes I do know the idea behind it but it doesn't change that it still feels like a remake

[女王 [Queen]]

Originally posted by Senki:

I love the game but it really didn't do enough as a sequel, it feels like a remake.

And yes I do know the idea behind it but it doesn't change that it still feels like a remake

I think this is one of the cases where we have to accept art for being art- While I do agree to an extent it feels more like a remake, I am not dissatisfied with that fact given the story being told here and intentions behind it. Cuz overall, the experience of DD2 is still almost wholly unique from DD1, and VERY enjoyable imo.

[goodgame]

The game story is absurdly bad because Capcom is deciding to strip itself away from it's own japanese identity of funny / special story telling, DD1 and monster hunter world had a distinct capcom, slightly over the top anime / manga storytelling that had a lot of charm and a personnality of both characters and way of positionning cameras, exagerrating the emotions of the character, that was very typical of capcom.

Now they are trying to be overly serious and catter to western modern audience by trying to make their story more dead serious and overly (and ugly uncanny) realistic.

Not even to talk about the total half baked rushjob the story of DD2 is, completely rushed after you leave the castle for the Beastren region, lots of parts are missing, shortcuts have been made, rendering the story very compressed and rushed for the remaining 50% part of it.

Capcom has been trying to catter to the "mudern audience" of imbeciles and easily satisfied morons with low IQs by westernizing and rendering ultra smooth and basic ♥♥♥♥♥ level it's stories and characters, removing everything complicated and funny about their personnalities and relation with other npc's. It begun with resident evil 4 remake, stripping leon of most of his good comebacks, cutting an enormous amount of content, banter, sanding off the edges of his personnality to make him more sterile and unresponsive, as well as weighted as ♥♥♥♥ and unprecise when you aim with him.

This trend also exist with the way characters and storytelling was done in Dragon's dogma 1, wich was rich and fun of the japanese ways of capcom using a typical manga / anime approach to tell their stories, sprinkled with both the seriousness and the humor of a berserk manga.

I have been playing a lot of capcom games not only for their better gameplay but also for a very specific "in house" storytelling and way of crafting characters feel of their game, that is being absolutely murdered and replaced by snoozefest uninteresting and bland westernized story, i'd rather had a complete retelling of DD1 story into the first part of DD2 that is just a whole remake of the 1 without hunting boards and without the stakes and world building.

People start to heavily dislike this new approach of capcom for stories, characters, oversimplification, the fact Capcom thinks westerners are a bunch of lazy tards that have to be pointed to everything on the map with AUTO PILOT.

These two youtubers nail this feeling pretty well.

https://youtu.be/tufBGZhIz6Y

https://youtu.be/P7tc5qzgUB0

[goodgame]

As a good example for this, look at how Like a Dragon : Yakuza does it's storytelling, it is pretty close to what capcom allways used to do, and to be, in almost every single of their games they would insert some very japanese type of humor and over the top fun, awkward moments that oozed personnality and stupidity too sometimes, but with it comes also an incredibly complex game under the surface of a fun story and amusing characters, not spending as much time and nonsense on making the story overly serious and like a "moviegame" trend i hate so much in modern games.

DD2 is so serious, it didn't even generate a single meme, while DD1 had a ton of memorable memes like "they're masterworks all, you can't go wrong" , "wolves hunt in packs" , and all the character had memorable moments from julien to the count to the young princess, even the jester, i even remember the escort mission with the daughter of the baron, Grigori's speech.

I remember nothing but a very few lines from the sphynx from DD2. And that is it. That's how poor , unmemorable, washed out, bland and serious, without too much safeguards and rails the new capcom stories are.

Monster hunter wilds story is skipped by everyone too because of the exact same reason.

[女王 [Queen]]

Originally posted by goodgame:

The game story is absurdly bad because Capcom is deciding to strip itself away from it's own japanese identity of funny / special story telling, DD1 and monster hunter world had a distinct capcom, slightly over the top anime / manga storytelling that had a lot of charm and a personnality of both characters and way of positionning cameras, exagerrating the emotions of the character, that was very typical of capcom.

Now they are trying to be overly serious and catter to western modern audience by trying to make their story more dead serious and overly (and ugly uncanny) realistic.

Not even to talk about the total half baked rushjob the story of DD2 is, completely rushed after you leave the castle for the Beastren region, lots of parts are missing, shortcuts have been made, rendering the story very compressed and rushed for the remaining 50% part of it.

Capcom has been trying to catter to the "mudern audience" of imbeciles and easily satisfied morons with low IQs by westernizing and rendering ultra smooth and basic ♥♥♥♥♥ level it's stories and characters, removing everything complicated and funny about their personnalities and relation with other npc's. It begun with resident evil 4 remake, stripping leon of most of his good comebacks, cutting an enormous amount of content, banter, sanding off the edges of his personnality to make him more sterile and unresponsive, as well as weighted as ♥♥♥♥ and unprecise when you aim with him.

This trend also exist with the way characters and storytelling was done in Dragon's dogma 1, wich was rich and fun of the japanese ways of capcom using a typical manga / anime approach to tell their stories, sprinkled with both the seriousness and the humor of a berserk manga.

I have been playing a lot of capcom games not only for their better gameplay but also for a very specific "in house" storytelling and way of crafting characters feel of their game, that is being absolutely murdered and replaced by snoozefest uninteresting and bland westernized story, i'd rather had a complete retelling of DD1 story into the first part of DD2 that is just a whole remake of the 1 without hunting boards and without the stakes and world building.

People start to heavily dislike this new approach of capcom for stories, characters, oversimplification, the fact Capcom thinks westerners are a bunch of lazy tards that have to be pointed to everything on the map with AUTO PILOT.

These two youtubers nail this feeling pretty well.

https://youtu.be/tufBGZhIz6Y

https://youtu.be/P7tc5qzgUB0

'The game story is absurdly bad because Capcom is deciding to strip itself away from it's own japanese identity of funny / special story telling, DD1 and monster hunter world had a distinct capcom, slightly over the top anime / manga storytelling that had a lot of charm and a personnality of both characters and way of positionning cameras, exagerrating the emotions of the character, that was very typical of capcom.'

I am going to be so frank with you- What is 'Japanese Identity'? Lol. Westerners can be so weird I swear sometimes xD DD2 is distinctly and very much Dragon's Dogma, and hasn't lost any of its identity really at all. You mention this 'funny/special story telling' with 'over the top anime/manga storytelling', but this feels like some form of virtue signaling or even stereotyping because I don't think you even know what that means or is.

You went on this whole weird rant about MH wilds, but like- DD2 is very much.. Fine? I am so lost here...

[Night Code]

I do agree, I tried to play Dark Arisen but I couldn't get into it. DD2 is pretty damn amazing and I'll likely play it again.

[女王 [Queen]]

Originally posted by goodgame:

As a good example for this, look at how Like a Dragon : Yakuza does it's storytelling, it is pretty close to what capcom allways used to do, and to be, in almost every single of their games they would insert some very japanese type of humor and over the top fun, awkward moments that oozed personnality and stupidity too sometimes, but with it comes also an incredibly complex game under the surface of a fun story and amusing characters, not spending as much time and nonsense on making the story overly serious and like a "moviegame" trend i hate so much in modern games.

What.. What are you talking about... DD1 never had this 'insert some very japanese type of humor and over the top fun, awkward moments', it was always a rather serious competent story. Sure it has some goofy moments here and there cuz- People. However, its mostly fairly serious.... I don't know what you're talking about, but it just sounds racially charged, especially given that DD1 and DD2 aren't even movie-esque games in the slightest... There are not a lot of cutscenes, let alone cinematics, so this is a VERY weird point

[女王 [Queen]]

Originally posted by Night Code:

I do agree, I tried to play Dark Arisen but I couldn't get into it. DD2 is pretty damn amazing and I'll likely play it again.

I am on my 2nd playthrough rn! Check out my pawn when you get the chance!

[goodgame]

Originally posted by 女王 Allenby:

Originally posted by goodgame:

As a good example for this, look at how like a dragon pirate yakuza in hawaii does it's storytelling, it is pretty close to what capcom allways used to do, and to be, in almost every single of their games they would insert some very japanese type of humor and over the top fun, awkward moments that oozed personnality and stupidity too sometimes, but with it comes also an incredibly complex game under the surface of a fun story and amusing characters, not spending as much time and nonsense on making the story overly serious and like a "moviegame" trend i hate so much in modern games.

What.. What are you talking about... DD1 never had this 'insert some very japanese type of humor and over the top fun, awkward moments', it was always a rather serious competent story. Sure it has some goofy moments here and there cuz- People. However, its mostly fairly serious.... I don't know what you're talking about, but it just sounds racially charged, especially given that DD1 and DD2 aren't even movie-esque games in the slightest... There are not a lot of cutscenes, let alone cinematics, so this is a VERY weird point

You are a gaslighter and a liar, now more then ever, more and more gamers and youtubers are realizing this very thing i'm talking about, you cannot be blind to the complaints mounting against this, the fact capcom is slowly but surely getting trounced out of it's identity and made into a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sweatshop pushing out games too fast with less and less thought, rushjobs, and quality to them, cutting content, games that come out unfinished rather then being overly complete like they used to, they used to launch a full game and the updates would be the cherry on top, not emulating other live services that are uncomplete and need years to receive content so the base game has it's proper , complete experience from the get go.

you are disingenuous and a sophist in front of 20+ years gamers and youtubers that clearly see this trend. Even famous japanese devs from nintendo and squaresoft are now calling out this problem in the japanese industry to try too much to catter to western audiences and absolutely destroy their own identity and what made their game stand out, Wilds and DD2 are perfect exemples of this, revisionnist remakes like silent hill 2 and resident evil 4 remake are other "westernized" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, cut content, incomplete remakes, it goes into way too much westernized "realism" and it end up feeling very poor story and character wise.

[Ryan Fenton]

I think the word is 'campy'.

Like Troma movies (Toxic Avenger, etc.) were always 'serious' but contained absurdist elements taken completely serious, and even dramatic.

There's a lot of more recent youtube series, a lot of which take this same approach.

One of my favorites of a while back was Freeman's Mind

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PNZBb6b9LvDWpI-5CPYUxG1Rnm-vr9V

It's great - basically a playthrough of Halflife 1 and 2, but with ... somewhat grounded and nuanced take of the character going through absurd scenarios with a surprisingly good voice actor for the situation.

The problem with DD2 isn't the storytelling style, so much as a lack of quality commitment to the moment-to-moment experience.

There's just ... not much content spread across too wide an area.

My impression is that they just couldn't get it to work in the new engine, and just couldn't add much more without that engine breaking. But that's just me being charitable about the failings there.

[女王 [Queen]]

Originally posted by Ryan Fenton:

I think the word is 'campy'.

Like Troma movies (Toxic Avenger, etc.) were always 'serious' but contained absurdist elements taken completely serious, and even dramatic.

There's a lot of more recent youtube series, a lot of which take this same approach.

One of my favorites of a while back was Freeman's Mind

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PNZBb6b9LvDWpI-5CPYUxG1Rnm-vr9V

It's great - basically a playthrough of Halflife 1 and 2, but with ... somewhat grounded and nuanced take of the character going through absurd scenarios with a surprisingly good voice actor for the situation.

The problem with DD2 isn't the storytelling style, so much as a lack of quality commitment to the moment-to-moment experience.

There's just ... not much content spread across too wide an area.

My impression is that they just couldn't get it to work in the new engine, and just couldn't add much more without that engine breaking. But that's just me being charitable about the failings there.

I am going to heavily disagree, because I will DD1 and DD2 were never really story driven games in the first place. They were player experience/exploration/combat driven games. The story is like 4 hrs tops, but all the enjoyment to be had walking from place to place, discovering new things, and just fighting random creatures is where the fun is to be had so to speak. I feel those that focus on DD2's story as an issue, do truly miss the point of the game to a degree similar to those who complained about a lack of a real story in older Monster Hunter titles.

[Senki]

Originally posted by 女王 Allenby:

Originally posted by Senki:

I love the game but it really didn't do enough as a sequel, it feels like a remake.

And yes I do know the idea behind it but it doesn't change that it still feels like a remake

I think this is one of the cases where we have to accept art for being art- While I do agree to an extent it feels more like a remake, I am not dissatisfied with that fact given the story being told here and intentions behind it. Cuz overall, the experience of DD2 is still almost wholly unique from DD1, and VERY enjoyable imo.

honestly if the true ending section would've been a bigger thing then I would've liked it more as a sequel

especially with that title drop it should've been like an expansion instead of a quick event imo

But yes like I said I still enjoy the game a lot

[Migromul]

Originally posted by Ryan Fenton:

I think the word is 'campy'.

Like Troma movies (Toxic Avenger, etc.) were always 'serious' but contained absurdist elements taken completely serious, and even dramatic.

There's a lot of more recent youtube series, a lot of which take this same approach.

One of my favorites of a while back was Freeman's Mind

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PNZBb6b9LvDWpI-5CPYUxG1Rnm-vr9V

It's great - basically a playthrough of Halflife 1 and 2, but with ... somewhat grounded and nuanced take of the character going through absurd scenarios with a surprisingly good voice actor for the situation.

The problem with DD2 isn't the storytelling style, so much as a lack of quality commitment to the moment-to-moment experience.

There's just ... not much content spread across too wide an area.

My impression is that they just couldn't get it to work in the new engine, and just couldn't add much more without that engine breaking. But that's just me being charitable about the failings there.

There is A LOT of content in DD 2. The crux is: you have to FIND it!. If you don't explore, and don't talk to NPCs yourself, you might miss VERY IMPORTANT story-chains and miss qutie some content.

There aren't Blackboard-quests anymore. And even if it seems otherwise, the main plot is devided 50-50 for Vermund and Bathal. Only the Bathal-main-quests are faster solved and much more clear. And high-society-quests in Bakbathal are side-stories, not realy having anthing to do with the main plot. (They're none the less interesting imho.)