I've waited a long time for this game. The world is beautiful. The art style is wonderful. The gameplay is slightly worse than Dragons Dogma:Dark Arisen due to slower traversal, but that's just my personal preference. The combat is just as engaging and the new classes add a lot of variety to the game.

My main gripe with this game is anti-cheat on a single player game. I understand banning players for modding a multiplayer game, but this has no multiplayer. You can't ruin the gameplay for others with mods on a singleplayer game. Only reason its there is so that they protect their microtransactions. In games like Monster Hunter: World, where there are microtransactions but they don't impact the game, I had no issues with them. I even purchased a few haircuts. But this game took it too far. Not that the individual microtransactions are egregious, although they don't actually add anything to the game, but the big issue is they INSTALLED ANTICHEAT ON A SINGLE PLAYER GAME.

Back to gameplay. The grey health mechanic is changed from the last game in a way that is not to my taste, I'm not a fan of only healing it at camps and inns, but again, personal preference.
My problem with it: if you die, you are loaded back to your last save. With a penalty to your MAX HP. The grey health carries over through save/load. So if you're in a spot where you're against a tough enemy and you just barely lose but saved right before it, you are at an even further disadvantage on your next attempt.
Also fall damage also adds grey health, so you get punished for trying fun parkour.

As for the length of the game, I dont mind, simply because the allure of Dragons Dogma is the open world. Which is gorgeous and has a good amount of content if you just explore.

My final verdict on this game is that its a good game handicapped by corporate greed.
If you took the time to read all of this, just know that at its core it is a good game. I just can't recommend it in good conscience due to inconveniences added to it for the benefit of the microtransactions. Its not the worst game for it, but I don't want this to become the new norm for single player games, too.

Dragon's Dogma 2 was very enjoyable as a fan of the first game. But I would highly recommend any new players educate themselves on the series or play the first one before buying this sequel. It's not a game designed to appeal to everyone.

The biggest problem with the game is the lack of any real challenge, especially the end game. I really hope they do an update to add hard mode and/or a DLC to expand the end game.

At the time of this review I found the game stable and it performed mostly fine at 1080p on a mid-range gaming laptop.

Also do NOT buy the "Deluxe Edition" under any circumstances. It's completely worthless.

A sidegrade by most measures, while I do believe that the reception this game had was an exaggeration born out of misinformation and some poor memory, it is certainly true that this game failed to evolve the series in a meaningful way, and changed Dragon's Dogma reputation from "that unfinished game with lots of potential" to "that unfinished series with lots of potential".

The game improves on a few facets of the original game, the Warrior vocation is a lot better, graphical fidelity of facial features is genuinely impressive, the map is way bigger but does not feel less dense, there's a lot more optional dungeons, I really like some balance changes like the Loss Gauge, and sidequests were all around more interesting.

But there's a few downgrades too, no Mystic Knight, a few less spells, less clothing slots (a change similar to the downgrade from Oblivion to Skyrim), and most notably, the game becomes really easy to tackle very early on compared to DD1, even if DD1 was pretty easy itself.

Most offensively to some though, and with reason, is that the game did not progress meaningfully enough for the long wait that some people went through. It feels incredibly unfinished story wise, it clearly lacks a balance pass for the amount of enemies in some areas, as their overabundance is fatiguing at times, and loot tables make exploring generic dungeons a bit anti-climatic, as all the best gear is in shops anyways.

I still recommend the game, but with a big caveat, all I wanted was more Dragon's Dogma, I like the gameplay loop, I love the pawn system and all of its quirks, I love that it feels like setting out on a genuine adventure where completely unpredictable but cool things can happen, like being flown by a griffin to the other side of the country because you grabbed on to him at the wrong time, or using a Cyclops as a bridge because you knocked him off balance at the right time. It's an unique game and I still think it's worth experiencing what it offers, it's just that unfortunately what it offers should have spent more time in the oven.

The Sphynx is hot