Recent reviews by Sin Archbishop of Vainglory

If DDDA is a 9.5/10 then DD2 overall is a solid 6.5/10 ok game but sad to say the first game is better in almost every aspect besides graphics and movement. Combat is almost identical besides auto targeting being a pain in the ass sometimes and staggering being way more involved, which is good because the combat didnt need much change.

Movement was dramatically improved, it looks and feels way more natural and fluid in every possible way.
Graphics for the most part look good, i dont really care how good a game looks as long as they are coherent and fit the game. They are not really stylized and tried a more realistic approach, but it falls short because its so resource intensive and the game has really bad pop in for npcs and some objects in the game.

Traveling by foot really sucks after a while, enemies are around every corner and respawn too fast. The Cart system is ok, they get attacked way too often by boss enemies. Had minotaurs 3 times in a row attack the cart to checkpoint town to the capital back to back at the same spot, probably was a one in a million chance type thing.

The armor system was chipped away, there is no clothes or under armor like in the 1st so there is way less variety in fashion. Clipping of mismatching armors is horrendous, especially the cloth portions, there is no collision on them and no variants that are used to avoid major clipping when worn with certain items making clipping a giant flaw.

The crafting system was stripped almost bare bones and dumbed down by a large magnitude, would have been simple to just keep it the same but add new items but instead most items were removed and so far of what iv seen only curatives and a few arrow items are craftable.

The amount of items and different drops from enemies also decreased. Drops that required aiming for specific parts of creatures are all gone and replaced with generic items for example dragon alula, dragon horns, chimera snake scale, etc are replaced by dragon scale, and monster skin.

Most equipment is bought from stores which sucks while also being super expensive but also you can rush to end game areas and if you somehow have the gold are able to buy some of the best gear. In the first game a lot of a players equipment was loot found from exploration or a reward from a quest but now there is no real reason to explore most of the map as you wont find anything worthwhile 99.9% of the time.

Dragonforging equipment is handled differently and depending on the person it can either be better or worse. IMO being able to pick and choose what items get dragonforged is nice, but getting the immediate random reward after a draconic fight felt way more better as a rewards and overall is a better rpg mechanic.
The new texture on dragonforged equipment looks pretty bad on most items

Not much enemy variety which isnt that bad but it gets real old fighting different breeds of wolves and goblins for 90% of fights.

Drake fights seem easier, they use spells more often now and im unsure if there are different types of draconic creatures besides fire drakes and the dragon yet, since the 1st had ice drakes and lightning/wind wyverns n what not. The only really aggravating thing they do is once at half hp they get enraged and start doing a meteor spell that will most likely insta kill most lower level characters, but they will spam it and sometimes chain it multiple times leaving no room to attack or revive pawns for long periods of time to drag out fights longer than they need to be.

Hydras seems to have been removed, havnt seen nor heard npcs talk about one yet, only mentioned in a specific bows description.

Vocations/Classes were changed with some disapearing, merging, or splitting. Its mostly not an issue as skills were redistributed but when they also removed 90% of dark and holy magic skills as well while also locking some behind mutually exclusive quest rewards it really shows how gutted the magic system is. Instead of giving magic users 8 spells with r1 being a toggle for the extra 4 spells, its a quickening core skill to cast faster for more stamina use.

Looking into all the magic skills, both classes, mage and sorcerer were gutted to high hell and left to dry Melee classes were improved dramatically while magic was a major afterthought, sad too because ddda had the best feeling magic of any rpg.


Mystick knight was replaced with a really lame invincible class, mystick spearhand that gets a skill for invulnerability to all attacks that also gives to nearby pawns and cost little staminia while allowing staminia to recharge while under its effects, effectively making the player invincible. A whole class of weapons is gone, magical shields, which is a shame because mystick knight and magical shields had the best and badass knightly look to them.


What iv seen of the main story is nothing fantastic, somehow the non-story of the first game feels more natural and it was better at presenting the game world and its amazing locations.

Side Quests: Here is one portion of the game that was improved from the 1st, most side quests are not heavily story gated like in the 1st game. There is a point where some quests are unable to be done by progressing the story but it is millions of times more lenient. There are some timed quest and there is enough time given to complete them so its not really an issue.

The minor bulletin board quests from DDDA are not present, the escorts and culling quests that used to be on there appear randomly while traveling now. In my time iv only had 1 escort, and all the new random culling quests happen on the road and are there to protect some random npc from enemies attacking them so its no hassle. Now we just dont get special golden weapons :(


One giant + to this game over the original is that the beginning to get to the open world is way faster and isnt locked behind the slowest escort mission ever made.

Pawns are more reactive and overall are more helpful in the field when not killing stuff. Pawns no longer "learn" bad behaviors from their arisen, in the first almost all pawns become horders because everyone gathers items even in battle, now whatever mode you set them in sticks so they wont stray from a battle just to go grab a herb on the side of a cliff.


Performance is all over the place, with a oc rx7600 and a 5600x locked at 4.2ghz all cores, i had to set my resolution from 1080p to 720p to get stable framerates with most settings on the lower side in the wild ~70 fps but in cities it can sometimes drop to the high 30's with a rare dip below 30fps


If you want to play this game, id say just dont even touch the pure caster magic classes, either play melee, archer, or get a mod to unlock magick archer at the start and play that class because in capcom's vast vault of wisdom they made it where the class is only unlocked in the end game zone.

TLDR: If you have played the 1st then its not a major improvement, its a downgrade in more apsects than an upgrade, but if this is the 1st time playing Dragons Dogma then its a modern but slightly better than mid rpg experience, still better than anything bethesda has put out in 15 years.

I want to love this game so much but it falls short in too many ways, also i have not beaten it yet only have gotten as far as getting into the grandcanyon desert beastren country to learn more about the godsway

is great, improves upon the first besides the performance.

the performance is pretty bad even after 4+ years of patches, unreal 4 was not the way to go

one of the most aggravating games ever made

Game is great, solid 8/10. its a relatively short linear dark fantasy action rpg

What to expect from this game: it is a slower paced action rpg similar to Dark Souls 1 and 2, The games controls are fine now after all the patches.

Combat no longer feels clunky, and animations for bosses are all fixed for 1.5

Game visually looks fantastic, even on medium settings
Only issue is lighting in some areas is abysmally dark even with contrast and brightness set to max in game. I honestly dont know if those settings even work properly.

Armors and weapons look really good, the only gripe i have are that some armors dont modify the players undergarments when they are clearly visible so it makes the character look goofy instead of cool.

Multiplayer works better than the souls series in concept, coop is for everything and dosnt end after a boss fight or if any of the players die. Items are dropped for both players but the currency given to cooperators is way lower than the host.
The problem with it is that in most good coop sessions there is very noticeable latency, and at the worst times you are rubber banding/frozen/not able to attack enemies etc.

The game is mostly linear, you are able to chose where you wanna go after the first few early areas but are gatekept in the very beginning unless you want to shell out 18,000 vigor for a key to unlock what are scaled as later areas. So there is an intended route to take from the area scalings to get the key later for free

One major flaw in gameplay is information for weapons, the rune system is bloodborne's gem system but worse. We dont get statistical information on runes, and the weapon's information card dosnt change except for runes that give more or less scaling. For example if a weapon has C scaling in agility and at 10 agility does 100 dmg +10 scaling dmg and rune says increased agility scaling the weapon card will show a bump in rank from c to c+ but the numbers wont show the extra damage. Also radiance runes are all pretty garbage and make many sentinel weapons unfavorable to use since you basically lose 1 or 2 slots since they require a radiance rune to be in them.

Really fun and good turn based rougelike dungeon crawler, the artwork is gorgeous.

The only thing I do not like is that the wait/observe/skip a turn skill is not an inherent one so you can end up having to waste skills or supplies during certain conditions where you are forced to use skills to end your turn. And upgrades to your current skills are not automatically given, which is understandable for skills with a modifier added but normal skills should just auto upgrade when they are presented.

If it had controller support it would be my go to relax game, with software such as controller companion the mouse pointer is off only in this game and selects the wrong options constantly and clicking left mouse is an auto click instead of just 1.

Fun squad based tactical shooter. Only thing needed is prox chat for enemies and it would be perfect.

its good, fun, and awesome.

Also theres alot of porn besides that its one of the best software and a must for multiple monitors to watch amazing animations for anything on the side.

Good game all around,
Brought back Endurance scaling for stamina and equip load, best change back from DS1 :D

Poise is still somewhat odd, its not ds1 poise but its a lot better than ds3, for most purposes heavy armor will stop 1 light attack from a small weapon only, but hyperarmor activates for most weapons if your poise is high enough.

Early games is super slow, enemies give under 100 runes a kill until you are near the first main boss.
Leveling is super slow at the start, Its Faster to level from gathering runes then it is from killing enemies.
Early bosses give a really low amount of souls like 1000-3000 and its barely is enough to level.

Smithing weapons is kinda bad because it cost so much materials to level up an item its 2 to 4 to 6 so to get a +3 weapon you need 12 of the standard stones while special weapons only need 1 stone per that level

Cool new weapons such as flails and awesome move sets.

Overall its a great game so far some minor lameness but every game has that.

There are alot of reused animations and of course one of them is the slaves/thralls from ds3 that i cannot stand their spammy moveset. Another reused rig and animations that iv seen so far is of course some dragon animations/attacks which is understandable cause theyre so large and dragons are dragons. One more is the Asylum Demon/Stray Demon is rigged up to a Tree Guardian type Creature.

The Dogs DO NOT TELEPORT ANYMORE

They finally added categories in the workshop for individual weapon categories and items, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ finally.

EA dosnt support the game anymore but its still a great game to just ♥♥♥♥ around in and have fun especially if you like starwars, the maps are definitely not as good as the og battlefront 2 but its alright for the most part.

Light Saber combat sucks ass still, its way more fun to play with guns.