Pushing Buttons: What makes Dragon’s Dogma 2 a fiery breath of fresh air

In this week's newsletter: Casting away all the tropes of today's open world games, Capcom's unforgiving, unpredictable RPG is a sequel unlike anything else

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I love when a game properly captures me, to the extent that I'm thinking about it throughout the day while going about my real life. It doesn't happen very often these days, because I have played too many games in the past 30 years and am becoming immune to their most common spells. When it does happen, it's usually because a game does something I haven't seen before - like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom last year, with its madcap contraptions. Or sometimes - as with Dragon's Dogma 2, which I am very much still playing after reviewing it last week - it's because it does something I have seen before but not for a very long time.

In the 12 years between the original Dragon's Dogma and this sequel, the only game that has come close to recapturing its chaotic and stubbornly idiosyncratic brand of fantasy action role-playing was Elden Ring. This is a game in which you can screw up quests by faffing about for too long before pursuing your next objective, where a griffin can show up in the middle of an otherwise unexceptional journey through the countryside and claw you near-instantly to death, where the interdimensional being who serves as your travelling companion can contract a mysterious illness and unleash the apocalypse on your game save. There's only one save slot, so every decision you make matters. Makethe wrong one, and you have to live with it.