Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen – A Wonderfully Imbalanced Mess I Couldn’t Stop Playing

I write this with nothing but affection: Capcom’s two Dragon’s Dogma games are wonderful, unbalanced messes. They’re action RPGs filled with some of the best combat the genre has to offer but paired with some of the most wonky progression and pacing. They take unique, exhilarating mechanics like latching onto huge griffons and cyclops to hack away at with awkward inventory management and traversal. You might unlock one advanced vocation in the first five hours but completely miss another tucked away in the corner of the map after dozens and dozens of hours played, and so on.

And both the original Dragon’s Dogma and Dragon’s Dogma 2 are all the better for these odd design choices.

That’s not to say either game had no legitimate issues. Dragon’s Dogma 2 was anticipated as a kind of soft reboot to fix everything wrong with the flawed-but-beloved original; however, it launched with atrocious performance, an oppressively bland story, and a shallow bestiary.

Thankfully, its expansion, Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, improves upon the base game in almost every single way – though, true to the series, it’s still a flawed experience.

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You’ll fight familiar foes in Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen.

Arisen This, Arisen That

If you’re anything like me, you love fantasy RPGs for their narratives and worldbuilding. I mean, I’m someone who has fallen asleep reading The Elder Scrolls lore. Unfortunately, Dragon’s Dogma 2 languished with a droll plot that I completely forgot about until booting up the game for this review, and lore so shallow I couldn’t drown in it if I tried.

The setup for the base game was simple if a little nonsensical: a dragon stole your player character’s heart, which turned them into an Arisen, a kind of hero king/queen that commands a party of subservient NPCs called Pawns in a quest to slay said dragon. Along the way, you toppled an Arisen pretender and Lord Phaesus, a paper-thin villain out to control the dragon for himself.

Thankfully, Dragon’s Dogma isn’t one of those games you play for story or deep lore. Still, I hoped Dark Arisen would introduce at the very least something intriguing to chew on, but instead it offers more of the same: another Arisen was spotted in the wintry region of Norgan, and it’s your job to leave the base game regions of Vermund and Battahl behind to investigate.

There’s a nice little twist with the doe-eyed spotlight character Eir here, but the writing stays true-to-form as an excuse for the Arisen and their Pawn allies to run around slaying hobgoblins and not much more.

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Eir provides some interesting story moments.

Icy Progression

While the story and lore moved laterally, progression has improved so much Dark Arisen that I’d have a hard time going back to the base game. Before, you levelled up and acquired skill points to unlock new abilities from your chosen vocation and eventually moved onto a different one, mixing together passive buffs from each for your build. That’s still the same with a new unlockable weapon skill for each of the vocations as cherries on top.

Equipment, on the other hand, works completely differently in Dark Arisen. Instead of finding some pants out in some far-flung corner that is objectively worse than the pair you bought from a shop, each enemy you defeat or pile of rubble you rummage through has a chance to drop spoils.

You then appraise these spoils back in the hub to roll weapons and armor. This effectively introduces a Diablo-like loot system that incentivizes you to explore every nook of a cave for sweet, sweet spoils, giving a shot of dopamine each time you appraise them and get a better magical bow or two-handed sword that just wasn’t present before.

While I often couldn’t wait to haul the spoils that my Pawns and I gathered back to the hub for appraisal, progression sometimes abruptly – and frustratingly – halts, interrupting the gameplay loop. In fact, the very first fight after reaching Norgan – no matter if you’re on New Game Plus with a level 100+ character or heading in at the recommended level of 40 – will completely trounce you until you scrounge up some Norgan-based gear.

Similarly, when reaching an area where level one spoils just don’t cut it, and you need some level two weapons, you’ll bounce off a hard wall and likely have to retreat because basic enemies like bandits might suddenly take next to no damage from your attacks, even though moments before you took down a massive griffon with ease.

This keeps you out of areas you shouldn’t head into until much later in the story while maintaining that odd imbalance that runs throughout everything Dragon’s Dogma 2 does, as you might expect a more natural curve instead of running into a steep wall of ice.

It confounded me more than once and I can see both new and returning players getting really frustrated that they can’t take down basic enemies despite reaching the recommended level for the DLC or having played for over a hundred hours and maxed out every vocation.

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The whiteouts in Norgan provide some fun challenges.

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Norgan is both beautiful and deadly, while being far more open than the other regions in the game.

Reduce, Reuse, Reskin

That said, it’s worth it to push through these steep curves as Dragon’s Dogma 2 has one of the best action RPG combat systems, and Dark Arisen only improves upon it with the new loot system. Latching onto a griffon as it soars through the air and your Pawns rain down lightning on it is as exhilarating as ever. Throwing goblins into one another or off of cliffs is still hilarious and charging up a massive block of ice to launch at the face of a giant, tree-wielding monstrosity is as satisfying as ever.

And as I said before, each vocation gets a fun new weapon skill to play with; more importantly, your weapons and armor in Norgan sometimes come paired with buffs to any one of your existing weapon skills. So, while combat in Dark Arisen is functionally the same as the base game – after a bunch of patches that hammered out quirks and added more skill slots – it gives you more than enough to experiment with while taking out harpies and giant lizards through a region roughly the size of Vermund or Battahl individually.

The presence of these harpies and giant lizards might sound familiar to you because outside of a handful of great boss fights, there aren’t many new enemies to encounter. Capcom recycled almost every creature you’ve seen in Vermund or Battahl and plopped them into Norgan. Goblins? Now they’re white and jump around a bit. Wolves? They’re bigger direwolves now and have a bandit or two tagging along with them. Norgan Giants? They’re just hairy cyclops trying to whack you with a tree. Don’t get me started on the saurians/asps/rattlers/serpents and their new snow-clad variant.

By the end of the main story quest that took me around 15 to 20 hours to reach, I was tired of going up against most of the bestiary just like I was in the base game. They have their elemental weaknesses as you’d expect, so it turned into a game of using fire skills on this one and using lightning on that one when I wasn’t experimenting with vocations. Still, the drive to find more spoils to turn into better equipment brought me back again and again.

And then there’s a healthy dose of grinding for post-game content for those that want it, new challenge dungeons spread throughout Vermund and Battahl, and a new hard mode, making Dark Arisen one of the most complete, content-rich action RPGs out there, despite the disappointing enemy variety.

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The gameplay loop of finding spoils is an engaging one.

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Coming back to appraise them after an adventure never gets old.

Stabilized Sightseeing

It helps that Norgan is also absolutely gorgeous to explore, with snow-covered mountain peaks in the distance promising caves full of spoils and frozen rivers threatening to crumble beneath the Arisen’s step.

Dark Arisen also introduces snowstorms as a new mechanic that impede exploration, as you’ll lose access to your map and have your stamina drained when they come swirling in. This seems like a response to the now-broken Portcrystal and cart system in the base game, which relied on rare, consumable items for fast travel. Capcom simply patched in a permanent item to allow you to fast travel at any time, making the world much smaller but more convenient.

These snowstorms aren’t too difficult to deal with mechanically, as your Pawn can lead you to shelter if it has the new Orienteer Specialization and some items negate the negative effects, but they give Norgan a life of its own and make it seem much larger and more dangerous in a way no longer present in Vermund and Battahl.

When a snowstorm swirls in as you make your way toward a quest marker and you have to divert into a cave system filled with treasure and skeletons instead, and then when the storm abates and you catch sight of a ruined castle with a griffon circling it in the distance, you’ll know what I mean.

And, after all the performance updates Dragon’s Dogma 2 has gone through, my 3060ti and Ryzen 7 5700X – which I played the base game on back in 2024 – Vermund, Battahl, and Norgan all hold up much better with a framerate that doesn’t drop too harshly at 1440p with DLSS set to quality.

That said, when my Sorcerer Pawn rained down lightning over an entire area while I pinned candescent orbs of fire on direwolves the resolution would degrade to quite ugly levels, even with Resource-Intensive Effects Quality set to low in the settings and ray-tracing switched off, but never to the point where I couldn’t tell what was going on.

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The lack of enemy variety remains a problem throughout Dark Arisen.

Even then, for all my qualms about the narrative, enemy variety, and resolution drops, Dark Arisen has revived my interest in the entire game, not just this expansion. I honestly can’t wait to re-explore Vermund, Battahl, and Norgan on the new harder difficulty, taking my time to master the new weapon skills now that I have a handle on them, before delving deep into the post-game content.

I mean, Capcom may not have improved upon the base game in all the areas I wanted them to, but if they did, Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen might not be that wonderfully unbalanced mess that made the series stand out in the first place, right?