Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen Is Great, But At a Cost

The same goes for changes to its save system. By letting you roll back to a manual “Interim Save” at any time, there’s no longer any risk involved in your decision-making. You won’t have to live with the consequences of accidentally angering a bunch of guards in Battahl’s jail or fret over when to use the Unmaking Arrow. This one-hit-kill item still triggers an autosave as soon as it’s fired, creating tension the moment you decide to draw back the bowstring, but the ability to select an earlier save robs it of its finality. If these changes were strictly tied to Dark Arisen, they wouldn’t be quite as detrimental. Yet this sanding down of its intentional friction affects the base game, too.

By changing these systems, Capcom has fundamentally altered what made Dragon’s Dogma 2 so fantastic. The emergent moments that happened on the road, the interplay between its systems and physics engine, and the need to deal with the consequences of your actions–all of this combined to make the base game an unpredictable and powerful adventure that stood apart from other similar games. I enjoyed its resolute design because it forced me to tackle the world on its own terms, providing a challenge that captured a rousing sense of adventure. I still thoroughly enjoyed Dark Arisen, despite these changes, but there’s also this nagging feeling that something’s missing.  

Norgan, for its part, has moments where that classic Dragon’s Dogma abrasiveness returns. The frigid region offers a nice change of pace from the verdant forests and arid deserts explored previously, with jagged, snow-capped cliffs; frozen rivers; icy tundras; and dilapidated, long-abandoned castles. 

The hyperboreal climate doesn’t just provide a visual shift, either; the weather can be both an ally and a foe. Sudden blizzards blanket the screen in heavy snowfall, obscuring your view within a few feet and taking the mini-map out of action. You also can’t fast travel during these intense whiteouts, which restores the feeling that you’re battling the elements just as much as the ghouls and monsters waiting to ambush you.

On the flip side, you can also use the environment to your advantage, knocking down giant overhead icicles to crush your foes, throwing and skewering them on pointy shards of ice, and rolling boulders downhill that grow larger as they pick up more and more snow. You’ll appreciate the extra help when facing down demonic goatmen and abominable snowman-esque monstrosities with gnarly mouths that cover their entire torsos.   

At first glance, Norgan’s map might seem fairly small, but there’s a sprawling verticality both above and below the surface that hides its true density. New climbing hooks and grapple points have been introduced to help you tackle the elevation changes, while interconnected dungeons and caves reveal shortcuts amid expansive ancient ruins and the piles of loot therein. 

Speaking of which, Dark Arisen entirely reworks the game’s loot system with the addition of Relics. You’ll unearth this generic gear in chests and on the bodies of defeated enemies, and can then take it to one of the new vendor characters for appraisal, revealing what kind of equipment you’ve found, its raw stats, and, on occasion, whether it has any special attributes that enhance weapon skills or grant passive abilities. 

This creates a Monster Hunter-esque loop as you explore and defeat powerful foes to gather more Relics, before returning to the appraiser to reveal what you’ve found and upgrade your character. An unseen dice roll determines the type and quality, and no single piece of gear will remain in use for too long before you’ll invariably find something better, but this is still a marked improvement over the base game’s uninspired loot system–where I think I purchased more usable weapons and armor than I actually found. 

The base game’s map has also received a similar gameplay loop of its own, with the addition of 12 repeatable dungeons known as the Lost Rite Trials. While you can easily travel back and forth between Norgan and Vermund/Battahl, these new dungeons are designed to be tackled before venturing into the snowy north, setting you up with more powerful gear to make the transition easier, with repeat visits netting more and more loot. 

Some of these dungeons are fairly straightforward (reach the end and kill everything along the way), while others rely on different mechanics or require prerequisites before you can enter. One such trial, which asks you to enter as either an Archer or Magick Archer, features rooms filled with support pillars you can shoot down to topple the terrain and wipe out groups of enemies. 

Aside from better gear, completing each Lost Rite Trial nets you an Offering Flame. These can be used at various Obelisks scattered across the frigid Norgan landscape to unlock new vocation skills and stat buffs that boost health, damage, and so on. 

The new skills are welcome, though bumping up the amount of skills you can equip at one time from four to six is a more notable improvement. Having more options at your disposal opens up the game’s combat a tad more, and somewhat makes up for the lack of new vocations. As someone who’s already maxed out most of the game’s classes, though, I realize I might notice the dearth of new ones more than most.

One of the more surprising things about Dark Arisen is how much I enjoyed its self-contained story. Okay, maybe “enjoyed” is the wrong word, but I was definitely more invested in seeing how things would unfold than I was in the base game. It’s a solid-enough vehicle for getting you from point A to B, even if it’s still just remixing themes from the first game. More characters are involved, and you spend significant time with them, so there’s at least something to latch onto. The writing still has little time for subtlety or nuance, but it’s appropriately broody, and the story eventually leads you to some fantastic set pieces and locations. 

At over 20 hours long, Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is the kind of hefty expansion we don’t see very often. I might like this softened version of the game a little less than I did before, but even if some of its prickly nature has been smoothed over, Dark Arisen still offers a whole bunch more of what I loved about Dragon’s Dogma 2 in the first place. For first-time players, and those returning with new hopes, it’s a more approachable game, and I hope this helps it reach a broader audience. Whichever side of the divide you fall on, there’s something here for both. That might sound blasphemous to some, and its vision isn’t as unflinching as it was once before, but Dark Arisen–and Dragon’s Dogma 2 on the whole–are still well worth your time and attention.