Tokyo Game Show 2023

My Three Crazy Adventures in Dragon's Dogma 2

At Tokyo Game Show 2023, I was able to spend a full hour playing the upcoming game Dragon's Dogma 2. As I spent time playing as three different characters—an archer, a thief, and a fighter—I had some wildly different adventures.

As I haven't played the first Dragon's Dogma, I figured a ranged character would be a safe bet so I chose the archer. This was a great choice as she was by far the easiest to pick up and play. Better still, it was a good introduction to how quests work and the main plot of the game—but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I loaded in at a town gate and was sent out to find a guard who was ambushed by harpies. I went out, killed goblins on the way, and learned how combat works. While there is a stamina bar like in most Souls-like games, it only depletes when doing special moves and sprinting. Normal attacks do not deplete it. This means you can always be doing damage; you're never just stuck waiting for the bar to refill.

Being an archer, the harpies were a joke and after saving the guard, my party members suggested I go to a town up the road to regain my memories. Upon arrival, I got a series of cutscenes explaining the main plot of the game: I, a nameless soldier, died saving a beautiful female archer from a dragon. For some reason, the dragon then ate my heart—which brought me back to life and made me “Arisen.” After talking with the female archer, Ulrika, in the present, a soldier arrived in the town and asked me to go to the capital with him. This felt like a good stopping place and, feeling that I had a good handle on the basic gameplay, I loaded up a different character to try out a different job: the fighter.

Unlike the archer who was starting at Level 5, the fighter was level 15 and in a different location—namely a series of fields outside a town. Immediately after spawning in, I saw Griffon off to my left so, I ran over to attack it. I blocked its strikes and attacked its flank. The mage in my party powered up my weapons with fire to boost my damage. My party of four climbed on it when it started to fly and brought it crashing back down to earth. And after a five-minute battle, we had taken a total of 10% of its life… from its first health bar of seven. While the fight hadn't been too difficult and I had taken little in the way of damage, I decided to run away. It was obvious that this was not an enemy I was supposed to be fighting. (And I learned after the demo from the staff that this was a rare random encounter—not something that normally happens.)

After doing a few random encounters as a fighter, I decided to move on to the next class. All in all, I found the fighter to be decidedly less fun than the archer. I was slow, did little damage, and could not take down flying enemies—I just had to wait for them to land or for my party's archer to shoot them out of the sky.

The thief, like the fighter, started at level 15. Unlike the fighter, the thief's combat is super fast and fluid—able to do damage beyond even the archer with ease. This time I was determined to progress the plot. I looked at my map, chose the closest of three waypoints marked there, and set off. On my way there, we took on an ogre with two health bars—with me brutally killing him by climbing on top of his prone body and driving both of my daggers into his eye. From there, we fought lizardmen and then cleared out a bandit camp. On the other side, we found another group of adventurers being attacked by wolves and helped out. It was starting to feel like a proper adventure.

But things took a turn for the worse when we arrived at our destination: a giant hole in the ground. Stone platforms were jutting out at various depths—making an easy enough path to descend as long as you took your jumps carefully. I descended without any difficulty. My AI-controlled party members on the other hand… well, one died falling to a platform above me (meaning there was no way to climb back up and save them from perma-death), another fell to a goblin-filled level of the hole midway down, and my final party member fell straight to the very bottom. I was able to fight off hordes of goblins and save the two below me but the third (near the top) eventually died for good. At the bottom of the pit, with goblin corpses all around, I found a treasure chest and my adventures with Dragon's Dogma 2 came to a close.

I was left more than a little disheartened by how poorly things went at the end. Even now I'm plagued by questions. Was this all a bug? Are AI-party members not able to do jumping puzzles by design? Was I supposed to leave them at the top and venture alone? Was there another path into the dungeon I was supposed to take instead? Alas, these questions will have to remain unanswered until the game's full release.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is scheduled for release on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows via Steam. No release date has been announced.