Dragon’s Dogma 2 Review – Pawn Stars
Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t have a traditional fast-travel system. For most open-world games, this would be a death sentence–an affront to the player’s valuable time. Yet somehow, Capcom has turned the absence of this quality-of-life feature into a resounding strength. It’s the game’s tremendous sense of adventure and discovery that accomplishes this. Every time you leave the relative safety of a village or city, there’s no telling what will happen; you just know it has the potential to be spellbinding and will be well worth your time.
As a sequel, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an extension of everything the first game achieved 12 years ago. It’s an enchanting open-world RPG with varied, exciting combat and a player-created companion system that’s still unlike anything else. It doesn’t do much beyond what the original did, but advancements in technology have enhanced its anomalous strengths, breathing new life into its massive open world and the ways in which you and everything around you can interact with it. New ideas and innovation might not be at the forefront, but the things it does are still relatively distinct.
After a brief but intriguing prologue, your adventure begins in the country of Vermund, a land of lush green forests, alpine peaks, and the flowing currents of its many winding rivers. The royalty and noblemen of Vermund reside behind the fortified walls of its capital city, and it’s from this bustling location that you can board an oxcart to a small village in the north or a checkpoint city in the west. The latter sits on the border with Battahl, an arid land, home to the humanoid cat-like beastren, where gondolas provide an occasional route over the craggy canyons below. Beyond traveling via oxcart or climbing aboard one of these sky lifts, you’re left to explore this sprawling world on foot, traversing dense forests blanketed by canopies that blot out the sun, elven ruins carved into the sides of mountains, and shifting sands bathed in harsh sunlight and circled by deadly harpies.
There is a method of instant fast travel available, but it works in much the same way as it did in the first game. You can exhaust a costly resource known as Ferrystones to travel to any Portcrystal in the world, but these fast-travel points are few and far between–either as a permanent fixture or an item you can pick up and place anywhere you desire. You’ll use them sparingly and spend the vast majority of your time covering large swathes of land on your own two feet. Considering the 12-year gap between the original game and its sequel, this approach to fast travel and seamless exploration feels like an even bolder decision now than it did in 2012. The open-world genre has become more codified in the interim, yet Dragon’s Dogma 2 makes a concerted effort to ensure that the journey is just as important as the destination.
This is a game defined as much by the trek through an undulating gorge as it is the battle you encounter when you reach the bottom. The quests you embark on are diverse, tasking you with venturing off to rescue a boy who’s been taken by a pack of wolves or accompanying an elf on their rite of passage. These quests are sometimes generic but the way they play out is anything but. You’re never just engaging with one singular objective at a time; Dragon’s Dogma 2 is filled to the brim with emergent moments that consistently dazzle and surprise. I could regale you with myriad tales from my 40-hour adventure without even mentioning an actual scripted questline. Defined objectives might give you the impetus to head in a particular direction, but this then unravels a thread of distinct events that occur naturally, challenging you with enormous beasts to topple or piquing your curiosity with a cave tucked away to the side of the main pathway.
I once embarked on a lengthy journey that began with the usual ambushes from resourceful goblins and roadside bandits. I thought a first encounter with the three-headed, magic-wielding chimera would be the most noteworthy part of this venture, only for a monstrous griffin to swoop down and introduce an entirely new set of problems. After hacking at the chimera’s wailing goat head until it eventually collapsed in defeat, I focused all of my attention on the fearsome griffin. The immense force of this mighty creature made the nearby foliage rustle and shake every time it reared back and flapped its wings, but I managed to clamber on top of the beast and dig my sword into the back of its skull before it launched into the air and sent me spiraling to the floor.
After a time, the griffin made its escape, retreating back to the skies above, so I spent the night camping to recuperate my depleted health bar. I set out again in the morning, only to be interrupted by the same griffin, presumably with a newly formed vendetta against me. This time, after much hardship, I defeated the mythical creature before it could flee again, yet my journey was far from over. A pair of colossi sprang an unpredictable attack in the tight confines between two rocky outcrops, while the next night brought about a horde of undead skeletons whose glowing blue eyes pierced the suffocating darkness.
[Dragon’s Dogma 2 is] an enchanting open-world RPG with varied, exciting combat and a player-created companion system that’s still unlike anything else
None of these encounters related to one another or pertained to the quest I initially set out on, but that’s the magic of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s open world. You’re constantly pulled in numerous directions at once and it’s up to you to decide which avenues to pursue. It might be a quest given to you by a villager in need, an enticing structure looming on the horizon, or a locked gate and the potential to find an alternative way inside. Backtracking is fairly common, but no one journey is exactly the same as another, so it never feels like a chore when you’re retreading familiar ground.
Of course, none of this would work nearly as well if the game’s other elements weren’t up to snuff. Fortunately, combat is excellent across the board, providing you with a variety of unique vocations to choose from. These classes range from the sword and shield-wielding Fighter and long-range Archer, to new additions like the Mystic Spearhand–a melee/magic combo build–and the jack-of-all-trades Warfarer. It’s entirely viable to pick a vocation and play the entire game as that class, but you’re also rewarded for experimenting. Each vocation has special Augmentations to unlock which grant passive buffs that you can apply regardless of what class you’re currently using. This means you can make a Mage sturdier, or give a Warrior greater stamina usually reserved for the Thief.
Whichever vocation you choose, there’s a fantastic sense of impact behind your attacks. Axes and greatswords meet flesh with a glorious crunch–the game slowing down to let you bask in your most impactful strikes–while enemies burst into flames and tumble off cliffsides behind the power of a Sorcerer’s stave. There’s a hint of Devil May Cry to its most stylish and over-the-top moves, and hacking away at colossal beasts with slow but purposeful blows can’t help but bring to mind the protracted battles of Monster Hunter.
Even when you’re swirling through the air and conjuring piercing ice shards, the combat still feels grounded thanks to the world reacting realistically to everything that occurs within it. When I toppled a colossus and it stumbled towards a small chasm, it didn’t just fall down the gap, but grabbed onto the other side, creating a desperate, makeshift bridge. Only after hacking at its fingers did it lose its grip and tumble to its demise. The camera sometimes has trouble keeping up with all of this explosive action, usually because a mage has filled the screen with fire or ice. In that sense, it’s a somewhat acceptable trade-off. What’s not quite as forgivable is when the camera becomes unwieldy in tight interiors or when you’re clinging to the back of a terrifying beast, but at least these instances aren’t too frequent and are only a minor inconvenience when you consider the ensuing thrills of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s fantastic combat.
In terms of story, you’re once again cast as the Arisen, repeating a cycle that has occurred for generations. A fearsome dragon rules over the land and chooses you as a worthy challenger to its reign by plucking out your still-beating heart and consuming it. Your ultimate goal is to take up arms and slay the dragon, but before that can happen you need to build up your strength and contend with the disparate politics of both Vermund and Battahl. In Vermund, the Arisen is revered as a sovereign and champion of the people, tasked with protecting the land from the ominous shadow of the dragon. An imposter sits on your throne, however: a False Arisen, put in place by a queen who doesn’t want to lose her power. In attempting to claim what’s rightfully yours, you’ll gradually unravel a mystery that threatens to impact the fate of the whole world.
It’s a decent tale that propels your adventure forward, although it’s light on characterization, which contributes to a persistent feeling of detachment. This makes it difficult to care about the overarching narrative, aside from an interest in unraveling the core mystery. The awe-inspiring scale of its later moments somewhat makes up for its shortcomings, while exploring the differences between the cultures of Vermund and Battahl is also compelling. The beastren nation casts the Arisen as an outsider, fearful as they are of your entourage of pawns and the misfortune they portend.
Much like the first game, these user-created companions are the game’s most exceptional feature. Up to three pawns can join you on your journey, though one is a permanent fixture and your own creation. You can set their vocation and change it as you see fit, equipping skills and upgrades for them just as you would your own character. The other two members of your party are hirelings you can recruit and replace on a whim and are typically created by other players. Choosing which pawns to hire primarily comes down to a matter of party composition. Whether they’re leading from the front, imbuing your weapon with magic, or blanketing the battlefield in meteors, it’s hard not to love the impact they have on combat. But there’s also more to them than simply being hired guns.
The time a pawn spends with other players is retained in their memory. They might recall a treasure chest they opened in another Arisen’s world and then lead you to it, and they do the same when it comes to navigating quests as well. If you prioritize an objective and one of your pawns has completed it before, they’ll offer to lead you to wherever it is you need to go. Rather than being weighed down by having to constantly revisit the map, you can let a pawn naturally guide you, creating an ebb and flow to your adventure that removes the need for menu screens and waypoints. They can sometimes lose their way when you’re interrupted by combat, but I found that hitting the “Go” command would reset them back on the right path.
Pawns perform a similar function after defeating a certain number of a particular enemy type, too. If a pawn has sufficient experience beating, say, an ogre, they’ll relay pertinent information on weak points and the nature of their attacks. You can also find and then equip different specializations for your pawn, maybe granting them the ability to translate Elvish, or forage for materials so you don’t have to bother. They can still be overly loquacious at times, expressing child-like wonder at the world with a barrage of Ye Olde English dialogue. Their remarks are nowhere near as repetitive as before, though, and they’re much more personable this time around, chatting among themselves about other players they’ve traveled with and creating a palpable sense of teamwork and camaraderie.
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The most noticeable misstep derives from Dragon’s Dogma 2’s performance on PC. My current rig exceeds the recommended specifications (aside from the CPU), and the game generally runs at around 60fps using the game’s “High” preset. Sometimes it dips into the 40s and drops even lower inside villages and cities, but it’s certainly playable, if a little unstable. The problem is that this performance is consistent across all visual settings, which leads me to believe it’s a matter of poor optimization. I could’ve used the performance bump from lowering shadow quality and the like, but doing so has no effect. Ideally, this will be rectified with a day-one patch and driver updates, but it’s not ideal at the time of writing.
Even so, these performance issues did little to deter my love for this game. It’s not often that a cult classic gets the green light for a sequel, especially 12 years after the original game was released. Capcom hasn’t tried to make Dragon’s Dogma 2 more palatable to potentially attract a wider audience, either. It stuck to the first game’s core values and expanded upon them to create a bigger and better game that consistently delights in its approach to seamless exploration and the thrill of adventure. This means it feels very familiar in a lot of ways, but it’s a game for those who fell in love with the original, despite its flaws, and will hopefully find an entirely new audience who perhaps never gave the first game a chance. Even after 40 hours, my heart continues to grow fonder for this special game. It’s an exceptional achievement that’s quite unlike anything else, and I wouldn’t hesitate to place it amongst the pantheon of Capcom’s very best.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review – One In A Hundred
In the years since the explosion of game crowdfunding, a stigma has emerged surrounding these titles. Yes, there have been plenty of games that enjoyed great success after their crowdfunding campaigns, but more people remember the high-profile flops: games with big names and ambitious promises attached that, for a variety of reasons, betrayed the high hopes fans held for them. Many of these were revivals–spiritual or otherwise–of beloved series from ages past. Now we have Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a crowdfunded game designed to carry the torch of the much-beloved Suikoden series from the PS1 and PS2–and, with such a high pedigree attached, there’s understandable trepidation: Will this be a glorious return to form, or another disappointment? Fortunately, for us (and all of the backers), it turned out wonderfully.
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Eiyuden Chronicle begins when a young man named Nowa joins the Eltisweiss Watch, a small militia unit under the command of Countess Perielle of the League of Nations. On a joint mission with a military team from the Galdean Empire, the Watch discovers a powerful, ancient artifact, the Primal Lens, earning everyone involved instant renown. However, it’s not long before squabbling between the Empire and League over the device, along with internal power struggles in the Empire, erupts into an invasion of Eltisweiss and a full-blown war. As the scope of the conflict expands, so does the story: Nowa rebuilds a resistance army in an abandoned castle, Imperial military prodigy Seign struggles with his feelings of obligation, friendship, and loyalty, and a young warrior woman named Marisa finds her clan caught in the middle.
The story doesn’t shy away from its similarities to games in the Suikoden series. In several ways, it outright embraces them: a story that branches into multiple viewpoints, loyalties among friends being tested during war, internal political intrigue, powerful magic runes being a crucial plot device, and, most obviously, the conceit of building a huge band of warriors to take on an even bigger enemy. The story was helmed by Suikoden creator and writer Yoshitaka Murayama (who sadly passed away shortly before the game’s release), and it brims with the warmth, wit, and plot twists that made the early Suikoden titles so engaging and memorable.
Throughout the game, you’ll be on the lookout for more characters to bolster the ranks of the Watch and, eventually, help build a base for the Resistance army. Some characters are easy to find and recruit, but others will require some searching or additional effort: You may have to go back to a town or dungeon from much earlier in the game, locate a rare item, play a minigame, or fend off a vicious foe to get someone to join the crew. Searching for heroes is a lot of fun (and much easier once you get the fast-travel ability), and the reward of seeing your base grow and improve with the efforts of your new comrades is immensely satisfying.
But the characters themselves are often their own reward. Despite having such a large cast, Eiyuden Chronicle manages to give each character their own unique voice and personality. They don’t just fall into the background once their recruitment arc is over, either; they’ll comment on current story events while they’re in your party, chatter as you explore towns, and interact with other characters at the base and elsewhere on your travels. Sometimes they’ll show up to add extra flair when you least expect it, like when they get dragged into judging a cooking competition.
Aside from giving you a good amount of freedom to search for friends when you feel like it, Eiyuden Chronicle’s story progression is similar to the typical JRPG: mostly linear with major setpieces and battles to highlight key story points. You’ll go through the usual dungeons, deserts, tundras, forests, and mines, sometimes needing to solve puzzles to progress. While most of the puzzles are pretty simple, they can sometimes be more obnoxious than intended due to random enemy encounters interrupting things at the worst possible times. Still, the dungeon design is solid and exploration is generally rewarding.
Despite having such a large cast, Eiyuden Chronicle manages to give each character their own unique voice and personality
Combat is also heavily based on the Suikoden games: turn-based, with up to six active party members at a time, plus a seventh support member who can grant passive benefits like stat boosts or money gain. Characters can have both skills based on SP (which regenerates over time) and MP (which needs items to restore), and each be changed based on the runes that character has equipped. Placement is key: Some attacks and skills won’t reach far beyond the front row, while some less-armored characters work better in the back–and there are also skills that target entire rows. One distinct combat element carried over from Suikoden is multi-character team attacks that require two or more characters with some sort of connection to be in the party together, who can then perform a tandem specialty attack.
Not every character in your army is available to fight, but you’re still given a very wide selection of party members to pick from to fight the way you prefer. You’re probably not going to use every single character you recruit in combat, and that’s fine–seeing who you click with and building them up generally works well. And if you do need to bring a character you’ve been neglecting up to snuff, a graduated XP system works to get them to parity with your high-level warriors quickly. A bit of auto-battling and they should be set.
Boss battles are where things get interesting. Many boss fights in the game come with some sort of interactable gimmick that changes the way you approach the battle. These can be objects to hide behind to avoid damage, background objects that cause damage to either you or the opponent based on who gets to it first, or even a treasure lying just beyond a row of foes. Sometimes these gimmicks are really fun and clever, like a boss who gets knocked off-balance when one of the lackeys hoisting them on their backs is felled, leaving it defenseless. Sometimes it’s miserable, like needing to guess which side of the arena the enemy will appear on to hit a book and deal extra damage, missing entirely if you guess wrong. When the gimmicks are good, they make for very fun fights, but when they’re not, you’ll be longing for more straightforward combat. And sometimes the boss is simply a big difficulty spike in general, leaving you in a very bad situation if you come in ill-prepared.
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By far the worst combat experience, however, are the large-scale army battles. These play out like a turn-based strategy game, with your party members commanding armies and moving around a grid, but lack any of the fun and excitement you’ll find in a dedicated strategy-RPG. You spend most of the time just watching things happen, feeling like you have very little control over the proceedings as the armies you moved around, slowly engage the enemy. You’re left hoping they’ll do more damage than the opposition so you can go back to the fun parts of the game instead.
Overall, Eiyuden Chronicle hits the retro-RPG sweet spot nicely. It’s focused on delivering that warm, comforting feeling of a classic JRPG, and even all of the side distractions–the card minigame, the weird Pokemon/Beyblade hybrid top minigame, the raising/racing sim, even commodities trading–don’t distract too much from the game’s prime mission. Add some gorgeously painted and animated spritework and a stellar soundtrack into the mix, and you’ve got a delightful experience that sometimes falters, though not enough to make you put it down. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes might not be revolutionary, but it successfully delivered on its core promise–and that’s really all it needed to do.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy Review – Way Of Shadow
In what feels like a spiritual successor to 2016’s Aragami, Ereban: Shadow Legacy transforms you into a deadly shadow that can become one with the darkness–the ultimate stealth operative. The game doesn’t quite deliver the necessary challenge to make for a successful stealth game, however, as the first trick you learn will get you through the entire game without a hitch. It does far better on the platforming front, and though its cast of characters could have used some fleshing out, the futuristic sci-fi world they inhabit is cultivated with colorful sights and intriguing snippets of lore.
As its name implies, Shadow Legacy’s main gimmick is its use of shadows. You play as Ayana, the last of the titular Ereban, a people who possess the innate ability to become one with and manipulate shadows. Using her shadow merge ability, Ayana can sink into shadows to creep past enemies, slink up walls, and dispose of bodies, encouraging you to stick to the shadows where your toolbelt is at its strongest. Alongside these shadow abilities, Ayana has an assortment of advanced gadgets–some are always useful like a recon pulse that marks enemies and items through walls, while others are more situational like mines that stun targets–which work regardless of the lighting situation.
I initially thought that this would present plenty of opportunities and strategies to sneak past enemies, most of whom will take out Ayana in a single hit. There’s a healthy variety of foes who want to take her down–standard enemies don’t pose much threat beyond the flashlight they carry to take away your darkness, but the more adept snipers can spot you from afar and the stealthy droids who can go invisible can ruin your day if you’re not taking time to look for the telltale shimmer. And then there are the human enemies who present a moral quandary rather than a gameplay one–while the mechanical droid-like enemies that dominate each level can be killed with impunity, murdering the living and breathing human workers will negatively impact Ayana’s morality and others’ perception of her (which I’ll touch on a bit more later).
Unfortunately, Ayana’s natural ability to merge into the shadows and traverse unseen is very powerful–so powerful, in fact, that you don’t really need to rely on anything else. The enemies aren’t very smart either, so they’re easy to avoid even if you solely rely on shadow merge. This means that it’s actually quite easy to go through the entire game without being seen or resorting to lethally cutting down humans, making for a stealth game that doesn’t quite give you enough opposition to challenge you to think critically when it comes to circumnavigating a threat. There aren’t any difficulty settings to make the enemies smarter or more plentiful either–though you can adjust how many environmental guides show up in each level (purple lamps or purple paint that point you in the general direction you have to go, for example).
Shadow Legacy teases you with a tantalizing view of what it could be in its third chapter, briefly breaking free from its otherwise linear stealth levels to give you a playground in which you can tackle an assortment of missions in any order within an open area. Within this open space, you have more of a choice in how you approach each assignment instead of being funneled through a more linear challenge. Mistakes have a more drastic impact because you’re not moving from one area to the next–it’s all one big connected location, where your actions can snowball into unintended effects. Ayana’s assortment of abilities and gadgets also have way more utility in this level. The binoculars used for scouting and mapping enemy movements are way more valuable in a giant open space than in an enclosed laboratory or city street, for instance. The game never opts for this format again, however, and in doing so it leaves me wishing for what might have been.
To the game’s credit, the back half of Shadow Legacy has some creative set pieces from a platforming standpoint, with one section in particular that I adored for how well it challenged and encouraged me to utilize all I had learned up to that point in one fast-paced gauntlet. Shadow merge can be used to eject out of shadows to make otherwise impossible jumps or interact with the environment to solve simple riddles–skills that apply to challenges that steadily get more complex as the game goes on. Even if Shadow Legacy falls short of being a great stealth game, it’s a good platformer. The environmental elements create an assortment of shadows–some oddly shaped, others that move, and still more that can be altered–and figuring out how to reach an out-of-the-way platform is sometimes a puzzle within itself, made trickier and more rewarding to solve given the stamina meter tied to Ayana’s shadow merge. Not only do you have to figure out which shadows to move or follow or jump between, but you also usually have to do it in a timely manner.
In service of these platforming challenges, Shadow Legacy features a colorful diversity of locales, ranging from an outpost in the desert to an autonomous factory. My favorite is an urban street that hints at the human life that once populated it, now devoid of any movement save for the autonomous drones that patrol the streets and promise that this is for the best. Sporadic graffiti and text logs hint at the growing loss of autonomy among the human citizens leading up to the corporate takeover that promised everyone a better life. It’s such an eerie level, framed against the setting sun that’s causing the street to slowly be encroached by shadow. It feels fitting that Ayana uses those same shadows to sneak her way past the guards searching for her, paralleling how the oppressive regime’s efforts can’t stop the resistance–they squeezed so much life out of this one city block that now there’s no living soul to report Ayana to the authorities, just dumb, easily-fooled machines.
Guiding Ayana through these challenges is a story that never quite gets room to breathe. Initially trapped by an AI-controlled entity hellbent on using her powers for some unknown purpose, Ayana finds herself quickly working with the resistance seeking to free themselves from corporate tyranny. Ayana is hesitant to work with them, having heard they’re nothing more than terrorists but agrees to use her unique skillset to help on the condition that the group gives her everything they know about the Ereban people. There are some interesting, albeit familiar, narrative themes here, but Shadow Legacy rushes through them–Ayana buys into the resistance’s cause remarkably quickly, for example, despite being given no catalyst to do so.
In the game’s third chapter, Ayana is warned to spare humans so as to help alleviate the accusations that the members of the resistance are terrorists. This is the game’s morality system, shifting the coloring of Ayana’s design toward shining white or sinister purple depending on how bloodthirsty you play her. As far as I can tell, the ramifications of this only impact one small moment in the final level of the game–it’s not much of a narrative payoff.
At certain points in the story, Ayana can upgrade her shadow powers and you have a choice of whether to unlock new branches on one of two skill trees. One branch leans toward non-lethal abilities, like cushioning your footsteps, while the other opts for skills that make you a better killer, like making it easier to hide bodies so your deeds aren’t discovered. This creates some fun replayability as it’s impossible to fully unlock both branches in a single playthrough, but, again, shadow merge is just too strong. The new powers are cool, but I never had to use them, as shadow merge makes it fairly easy to sneak through a level without being spotted. Granted, I opted for a nonlethal run. It’s possible that if I had aimed for a playthrough where I killed everything that moved, I’d have needed to rely on more of the powers that hide bodies or kill multiple enemies at a time in order to not alert guards that something was wrong.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy sits in a weird place for me. As a stealth game, it rarely challenged me, reducing protagonist Ayana into a one-trick pony that could sneak past any target with the same shadow merge skill every time. But as a platformer, Shadow Legacy incorporates some entertaining puzzles that grow increasingly complex and rewarding to overcome. I never quite managed to connect to Ayana’s journey against the autonomous overlords planning to doom an entire civilization, but I had a lot of fun slinking up walls and exploding out of the darkness, striving to time my jumps with the movement of a windmill and the rotating shadow it was casting. Those nail-biting moments are the ones that stuck with me, not the dozenth time I slunk past an unsuspecting droid.
