Does Dragon’s Dogma 2’s combat suck?

A few hours into my time with Dragon’s Dogma 2, I was struck by a critical question that appeared simple, but was unusually difficult to answer. It was this: Does the combat suck?

Capcom’s latest hit is a sprawling, unruly open-world role-playing game that seems to delight in challenging players’ assumptions about genre. Whether you believe fast travel is a universal right or quest NPCs should never die, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is here to pull the rug out from under your feet. Mostly, I’m on board with this: I like games that push back sometimes (which is not the same thing as games that are just difficult). I like games that encourage the player to embrace the possibilities of failure and misadventure and just roll with it.

But one part of Hideaki Itsuno and his team’s uncompromising vision for Dragon’s Dogma 2 did give me pause, and it was the combat. To be honest, unlike with every other design choice in the game, I wondered if the way combat had turned out really was the result of the team’s uncompromising vision, or if it was just flawed in execution. It seemed kind of sloppy.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an action-RPG, which means that it’s a game in which you’ll be hammering out skills and spells in real time as you battle monsters. The surprising thing about its combat system is… that’s it, in terms of player input. There’s no dodge roll, no counter, no combos. There are no mechanics based around timing evades or attacks. Blocks and parries are available only to the fighter and thief classes, sometimes as unlockable skills. There isn’t even a lock-on for reliably focusing your attacks on a particular enemy. Instead, you choose between relying on a very loose soft lock that automatically aims weak attacks at nearby enemies, or manually aiming stronger attacks, with the risk that you’ll whiff them completely.

This runs counter to trends within the action-RPG genre, which have moved closer to the sophisticated combat mechanics of pure action games in recent years. Last year’s Final Fantasy 16, for example, with combat directed by ex-Capcom designer Ryota Suzuki (who worked on Devil May Cry 5, as well as the first Dragon’s Dogma), had a particularly crisp and fluid combo-powered combat system, fed by RPG number-crunching in the background. Games like Capcom’s own Monster Hunter Rise and Ghost of Tsushima have all adopted lock-on action combat to some degree. Above all, FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series and Elden Ring have driven the trend toward refinement in combat design; these are RPGs in which players live or die by the care with which they watch enemies’ tells and the precision with which they time their attacks.

One reason Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels so different is that it’s designed from the ground up for party combat, unlike solo combat games like Elden Ring, and to some extent unlike recent Final Fantasy games in which the party is important, but every character is a powerful multitasker who gets a chance to step up and play the hero. Itsuno’s aim with the original Dragon’s Dogma, which still holds for the sequel, was to make a single-player game that felt like playing an online RPG, with a party of players banding together to play different, complementary roles in the fight.

Image: Capcom

There are a couple of consequences of this approach that can be tough to accept in a single-player game. The first is that each class, or specialization, has a strictly limited toolkit and can’t do everything. Fighters have no self-heal option, besides dipping into their inventories; Archers have no melee attack and are quite useless in close-quarters scraps. So players have to rely on their AI companions, called pawns, to do some of the work.

And players really do have to rely on those pawns, because Itsuno has stuck to his guns in terms of simulating the online play experience of a massively multiplayer game in single-player form. Dragon’s Dogma 2 has no tactical layer to speak of, no granular control of your party members, and only the most basic commands for pawns, like “Go!” or “Help!” For the most part, you have to play to the strengths of your class, trust in your computer comrades, and accept that you don’t have total control over the situation. You might not be the hero of any given fight. This is pretty counterintuitive to the psychology of most modern single-player gaming.

But it’s also debatable as to how much playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 really feels like playing a Final Fantasy 14 or a World of Warcraft. Those MMOs are tactically deep games with huge ranges of highly specific skills designed for each class that interact with each other, both within those character classes and between them. A more streamlined, action-oriented online RPG like Guild Wars or Phantasy Star Online might be a better comparison, but there’s still a level of tactics and optimization present in those games’ combat systems that Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t really have.

Image: Capcom

Comparatively, Dragon’s Dogma 2 can feel chaotic and unfocused. Some of the skill design is cool, but your primary concern as a player isn’t in picking the right tactical moment for a particular skill. Instead, you’re worrying about just getting it to land where you want it to in the first place. Fights often play out as freewheeling, slapstick brawls between multiple unpredictable AIs on both sides, with the player caught in the middle, flailing around.

It took me a while to realize that this is on purpose. Perhaps that’s because it’s not what I expect from Capcom, which is known for its refined, technical action and fighting games, nor what I have been taught to expect from the action-RPG genre in recent years. But everything else in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is about teaching the player to expect the unexpected, so why should combat be any different? In this game, it seems important that some things should be beyond the player’s control, because that’s where the game creates a magical space where anything can happen — and it sometimes does. Things like pawns pulling off acrobatic maneuvers you’ve never seen before (and for which no player command exists), or a cyclops giving up in the middle of a fight and throwing itself off a cliff.

If the price for that is a combat system that’s technically unrefined and a bit haphazard, and which stops far short of giving the player all the tools they think they need, so be it. Let’s face it, if you met a monster in real life, you probably wouldn’t be hammering it with perfectly executed acrobatic combos. You’d be closing your eyes, swinging your sword wildly, and hoping for the best.