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I treat each visit to a riftstone as a health assessment. By this point in my Dragon's Dogma 2 journey, I've peered into the eyes of numerous Beastren and human Pawns, most of them misted over with love for their would-be Master. But I'm not looking for allegiance right now: I'm looking for glowing red irises, a bad attitude, and perhaps a little twitchiness.
My intentions might seem obvious to anyone who knows how to spot Dragonsplague in Dragon's Dogma 2, but what if I told you that I am actively seeking infected Pawns rather than screening them out? It might sound bizarre, but attempting to destroy my game with a bit of mass murder is the only thing that's keeping me entertained now that I'm somehow nearing the last story missions. My inspiration? The desire to replicate the gnarliest consequences of playing Baldur's Gate 3's Dark Urge as a bloodthirsty maniac.
Style over substance
It sucks to hit a wall in a game you'd been enjoying a lot. This has unfortunately happened to me in Dragon's Dogma 2 now that my first playthrough is almost over, which is a shame because it's been such a blast getting here. I killed my first Lesser Dragon at Level 38, maxed out the Mystic Spearhand vocation, fully upgraded all of my gear and that of my Main Pawn, and even accepted DD2's bland storytelling as the tradeoff for some of the best third-person combat I've ever experienced in an action game. But as my Arisen wields the reforged Godsbane in a moment that should feel awe-inspiring, ushering me to the point-of-no-return mission that demarcates the story's goalpost, I feel nothing.
There's no excitement for the big finale, no feeling of satisfaction in my journey so far. I don't feel inclined to clean up my sidequests, or pay a visit to a favorite NPC – mainly because I don't have a favorite NPC, given that they're all rather dull. I hadn't minded that Dragon's Dogma 2's story is largely nonsensical because there was always something else to explore, but when presented with the prospect of the tale coming to a close, I had to face facts. I didn't care about finishing the game because nothing had happened to make me intrigued enough to see it through.
The fact is that Dragon's Dogma 2 lacks a key element that makes the best RPGs worth your time in the first place: a dense, gripping narrative. Initially, I'd been happy to treat this experience as more of an action-RPG in the vein of Elden Ring. It puts combat center stage in a world teeming with lore, environmental storytelling, and intricate combat systems to offset the lack of narrative meat, but the fact that the game thinks there is meat to chew on in the first place is letting it down. Sure, I could grind through each of the vocations to explore the depth of combat even further, but that's not how I roll. I shouldn't have to fight with a game to keep myself hooked on it, so instead, I've decided to kill everyone in Battahl and Vermund to exact some vengeance.
Dark (Urge) Arisen
The chaos sown by Dragonsplague will all be an illusion.
I've gotten used to standing by my choices in games, from The Witcher 3's bleak Whispering Hillock quest to Baldur's Gate 3 in general – and the latter has certainly taught me the value of effing around and finding out. In fact, playing as the Dark Urge was such a memorable experience that I'm still chasing its sense of action and consequence in Dragon's Dogma 2.
There are very few important consequences of your actions in Capcom's latest, but a major one is what happens when your Arisen accidentally lets a bout of Dragonsplague decimate an entire town because you never caught the signs of its presence among your Pawns. The plague turns the infected Pawn into a homicidal maniac for one night only, slaughtering every NPC in whichever town you've hunkered down in for the night before being sent back into the rift to be hired by yet another unassuming player. Think of it as a large-scale version of what happens to Alfira when the Dark Urge takes a long rest after the events at Emerald Grove.
As much as I want the Bhaalspawn to live on in my Arisen, the Dragon's Dogma 2 community has come up with clever ways of warning their fellow players that a pawn is infected. A Pawn returning from the rift with rotten food or dried up herbs and flowers is one indication. Another general rule of thumb for the wary is to not hire Pawns whose eyes are obscured by helmets or masks, and it's a definite no to Pawns with red eyes – even if it's possibly a cosmetic touch. Dragonsplague also seems to be most commonly contracted while hiring Pawns of a much higher level, encouraging players to stick with Pawns whose skill matches their own. So of course, I am refuting all of the above in search of my Plague Mary. I've been spending silly amounts of rift crystals on Level 55 Pawns while I myself am Level 42, and so far, no cigar.
Mass murder might sound like a dramatic way to get my own back, but death in Dragon's Dogma 2 doesn't spell the end. I've never wasted a wakestone on an accidental NPC casualty (re-read the fourth paragraph above for a reminder as to why), and cool as it is that NPCs aren't magically impervious to death and damage in this game, the resurrection mechanic has always felt a bit of a cop-out.
It would definitely be nasty to come across unawares, but contracting Dragonsplague is not the doomed Game Over screen many of us thought it would be. Key quest-givers automatically resurrect themselves within a matter of in-game weeks after being wiped out by Dragonsplague, and with the help of the Sphinx's Eternal Wakestone, I'd be able to get the whole of Vermund back on its feet pretty quickly. All this is to say: even when I eventually find my walking nuclear bomb, I know that the chaos sown by Dragonsplague will all be an illusion.
Part of me is bummed about its lack of permanence, the almost lazy way you can simply undo something that should be catastrophic. But at the end of the day, this is Dragon's Dogma 2, and the beauty lies in how you play it rather than the story you're playing out.
The RPG might be light on the romance, but we turned Dragon's Dogma 2 into a dating sim anyway.
