Gwen

Gwen

@Gwen

Dumbass in a dumb land

  • She/Her

I was born in the late Holocene and I've seen some shit

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Gwen
@Gwen
austin
@austin
bruno
@bruno

The conclusion I'm tacking towards with Dragon's Dogma 2 is that like... it is well and good to make one for the sickos. I appreciate and love all sickos and I believe in the realness of sicko love or whatever. I would say I am a sicko and I feel my sicko credentials are very, very well established.

But you gotta give me more than that. There's gotta be more to it than just being a sicko. I need to get something more than just capital-S Systems awkwardly making out with one another.

I just keep thinking about Tears of the Kingdom – a sicko game if ever there was one – and how yeah, sure, all the resources and enemy behavior and the contraptions and the physics and the layered map and everything, all that made for an incredible experience. But the memorable moment in that game, the thing that really stays with me, is the moment you figure out (to avoid spoilers) what's going on with the light dragon. It's the character designs. It's getting to meet all the characters and places from Breath of the Wild again. It's seeing Tarrytown again.

Right? I think DD2 feels a lot like all crunchy exterior and no creamy center.

austin
@austin

Having wrapped it recently (though I think I'm going to start a new game, because the moment-to-moment (especailly in the first 3/4ths of the game) is just an absolute blanket for me in a time when I am fucking freezing), I have to say it is it is the most I've felt like playing an overambitious PS1 game in years.

Without getting into it, the post-game and final moments give you a sort of classic opportunity to go 'hey, remember these folks!' (in a way that, frankly, I wish BotW and TotK did!) but the people they are giving you a chance to remember are very thinly drawn!

And so it's a little like seeing a Soul Blade ending--hell yeah, Mitsurugi is getting revenge on that dude whose name I couldn't possibly know because he isn't even a character in this game, he's just mentioned in the instruction manual.

(It's SO easy to imagine DD2 PS1-era instruction manual. Little entries for characters like Brant (THE NOBLE KNIGHT) and Hugo (THE GOOD-HEARTED BANDIT), strangely localized lore making its way into a page 3 summary that has vague spoilers in it (ARISEN: CHAMPION OF THE WILL), little vocation summaries, a whole page on Melve even though basically 1/50th of the game takes place there.)

Of course, because this is the type of Sicko I Am, that basically still works for me, especially in relation to the game's metatextual swing at "the reader" who is squeezing content out of their toys. But even if you can slurp up that stuff like me, it is very clunky in comparison to the first game's deft and surprising back act.

In fact, I've been wondering if DD2's final act even hits on the story front if you were not recite-the-inner-workings-of-the-cosmology familiar with DD1. There's big spectacle here, I love how the gameplay shifts, but does any of what happens (and where it happens) even land if you aren't specifcally a Dragon's Dogma Sicko? Because I can't imagine anyone getting chills in the places I got chills unless they have some things etched into them coming into this experience.

That raises some interesting questions re: who games (especially big games) are best aimed at, how to onramp new players to complex setting elements without retreading old beats, etc.

Because narratively, DD2 is not just "in conversation" with DD1 in the way that the Zelda games all bounce around some core ideas that can link up, or in the way that Dark Souls 1-3 are presenting, echoing, twisting, and returning (sometimes flatly) to the same elements. DD2 is in conversation with DD1 the way the second act is in conversation with the first act of a play, or the way the Fool is in conversation with Lear.

"All thy other titles thou hast given away," he tells the not-yet-mad king. Which is relevant here, truly, except if you haven't played the first game, you might not know that.

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in reply to @bruno's post:

nex3
@nex3

I'm not that far in DD2 but this is definitely the sense I got from DD1. Very interesting systems with a lot of potential (that weren't realized in that game but that's a different rant) but a plot and world that were totally forgettable. The core premise was compelling but everything outside of that just felt kinda like generic fantasy whatever

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bravemule
@bravemule

yeah it def has a weak story, characters, and setting. even the side quests are paper thin, despite the nice quest design with being directed to general areas and asking around for more information

I don't think this is mutually exclusive with the dynamic systems or the meta nature of the premise either. yeah you aren't going to get character arcs out of pawns without doing stuff that's only been done in games with wildly different accordances, but Patho had characters with depth and motivations even with the game space as theatre stage, player as performer, and developer as director framing.

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in reply to @austin's post:

Sol
@Sol

That’s a bit of a bummer to hear! I’d bounced off the first one, but the concept hit so hard for me on paper that i really wanted to give the second one a try and have been enjoying it so far. I guess I’ll see how going from 2 to 1 feels?

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Vulpes
@Vulpes

It's interesting as someone that liked the first one but thought it was at the end of the the day a C plus game with a twist that I could, kindly call bold in attempt, but not all that actually well executed, to see people take issue with the overall narrative in this one as I'm just over here like "Ahh there's that feeling of staying up too late reading an anime wiki" that the first one left me with. Which however much it may or may not have worked in the first one (I would say it didn't honestly a cool ending only goes so far in a 50 hour game) here it just feels slapdash and like they forgot to actually make a story that exists beyond the very start and the very end. It ends up feeling less finished than the first one and that's saying something. Doesn't help that the game is also just, way too easy. I look at a dragon and think "Do I have 5 minutes to fight that? It's not going to do anything for me so I guess I'll just run by" in a way that doesn't speak to having to make choices in how I traverse the world but instead to the fact that by just being somewhat thorough I have wildly outpaced the games systems in a way that even more than most games makes me wonder why they have levels to start with as it seems to just be undermining everything else the game is doing.

It's weird, and mostly fine, but it feels a little We Have Elden Ring At Home when all is said and done

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bruno
@bruno

Unless it somehow all comes together in the very final bits – fighting the dragon, the exhausting-sounding True Ending that the game apparently has, etc – which I haven't played yet, I can say that the last act is not working for me at all. I didn't play DD1 and nothing that has happened in Dragon's Dogma 2 has made an emotional impression on me.

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austin
@austin

I do not have a doubt in my mind that it will not come together for you.

You're past all the stuff that hit for me on a first impression, new experience way, and generally I think I'm just higher on that than you are. I loved finding out what the deal with Wilhemina was, liked extracting Hugo from his bad circumstances, was tickled by Melve's tiny rebellion, and felt kinship with Beren. There's a directness to all of this that felt uncomplicated and committed to simply Playing the Notes unflinchingly, which is so rare in this space right now. (And of course, all of that works because its in a loop of level and combat design that is just perfectly salted to my tastes. If it wasn't, I'd probably be annoyed by Brant instead of feeling like he's my guy).

But what follows for you is going to be flat. Brief spectacle, but nothing to read into it past that. Without the DD1 background, the postgame is like walking through a haunted house in traveling carnival. With the DD1 sicko disease, it is like walking through the haunted house of your childhood home. (And in that way I'm grateful but also sad! This meal was made for me! But it is that much harder to share it with those who I'd hoped would be able to (finally) feast at this table with me.)

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bruno
@bruno

See, Hugo kind of exemplifies the ways in which the vagueness and the friction get in the way of even letting these characters take the stage for me. I have no idea how to progress his quest and I'm uncertain if progression on it is bugged or not; I have an inkling that maybe I could progress it by simply unlocking the door to his cell and staging a jail break? But I don't feel like wading through a river of blood for the guy. I've bribed the warden twice but the warden seems to either be stuck not progressing his schedule or the intent of the story is that he's giving me the runaround and will never release Hugo – I can't tell. A couple days ago another guard told me they caught another one of the bandits and that maybe this guy can help me get Hugo to talk or whatever; fucked if I can find this new guy or talk to him though.

This game seems designed around this beautiful pristine idea of how the player would engage with it, where you're truly figuring things out on your own and exploring the systems while also living with the consequences of your actions; where the world feels very alive and very fleshed out by virtue of how everything has all these intentions behind it... but it does so little to actually meet the actual real player half way that I don't think it works. There are so few guardrails to everything it's doing. So often the game just does not function at a basic level.

Another example is the quest 'Short-Sighted Ambition'. Like, before the end of this quest, I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to go counterfeit the evil grimoire, give the merchant the fake version, and dissuade him from messing with evil magic. But like... I did not at that point either trust the game to actually reward my realization here (or the quest to even function as it seemed intended to, because many things in this game do not function to the extent of their intent!). I also didn't really feel like schlepping all the way to the border then wait two days for this one guy. The game was asking me a level of commitment and emotional investment that just wasn't there. So I just let the quest reach the bad ending then and there.

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austin
@austin

Yeah. I think I just had enough good luck to where these things DID function and it DID build trust for me. With Short-Sighted Ambition I did the thing you knew you should do, and was rewarded aptly for it.

With Hugo, I got the info about the second guy in the prison because I had made a habit of buying everyone a round of drinks every few hours early on, and either it raised the affinity of a guy in the bar enough for him to tell me or it pulled him close enough in to me to trigger that conversation. (I suspect both). The prisoner in question was just down the hall from Hugo's cell, gave him a small bribe, got the info, gave it to Hugo, and the rest played out from there, intersecting with a different quest I completed down along the way, back in Vermund.

The great strength of this narrative system that is both fiddly and opaque is that when it works it genuinely feels like looping thread into a tight bow--oh if I could only give you the feeling I got when the guard came to me to tell me about the other Coral Snake!

But fiddly and opaque cut both ways--and again, I really think require that the player just fully buy into the foundation they're deployed ontop of. In this case you say you didn't want to schlep back, which I fully believe. I never felt that in the 100 hours of playing, because I was always working on raising some vocation or other, or choosing some part of the map I'd only ox-carted through before, or had built up enough ferrystone capital to hurry back to one of the hubs when I was short on time but wanted to wrap a quest quickly.

At the heart of it, Dragon's Dogma 2 is a "I can't wait to try out this new Thief Counter-attack build," but unlike every other game I've played that scratches that itch, it also makes me say "And I wonder what happens if I forge that grimoire." That meal just doesn't exist elsewhere for me. And I wish DD1 had mixed the two better, because that game's take on the opaque sidequest is even less guided and even more rarely gave me the a-ha moments I consistently got here, whether through disguises, forgeries, ability-based exploration, affinity manipulation, or other tools.

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