There are multiple endings to Dragon’s Dogma II. Some of them end the game in sadness, others set the stage for another trip around the loop of a hardly-any-different New Game+, and others seem like the kind of elaborate joke you’d expect from a dev team that made Dragonsplague so scary. These endings almost universally left me with a feeling of fidgety dissatisfaction, like I was missing a key ingredient to make the whole game really cook.
Part of this stems from the fact that I haven’t actually completed Dragon’s Dogma, and thus didn’t recognize the Godsbane Sword for what it was or what it was supposed to do. On my first run I beat the Dragon in a bar fight fair and square and got to rule over Vermund as its rightful Sovran with Brant and Ulrika at my side. The muted way the credits rolled, the way the whole little coronation ceremony seemed unenergetic and awkward as hell, it all led to this sensation that I Was Doing Something Wrong.
That feeling carried over into my first NG+ run, where I proceeded to scour the countryside looking for secrets and trying to figure out where the seams were on this game. It was in this way that I stumbled into most of the caves, found the Sphinx entirely by accident, and traveled to Agamen Volcanic Island well before the endgame ever started. I was chilling at the hot springs a full 15 hours before I had Ambrosius make another Godsbane Sword. I was sacrificing myself to the Brine to explore the tiny bits of the Seafloor Shrine that were exposed to the air. Nothing surfaced that gave me any further clue what I was supposed to do with the Godsbane Sword, so I… looked it up. I know! I know. For shame.
But it did give me a small glimmer of excitement during an otherwise kinda dull NG+ run. All I had to do was use the Godsbane Sword at the right moment and something interesting would happen. Dragon’s Dogma II would finally open itself up to me. All the hours spent roaming the winding roads and unforgiving wildernesses of Vermund, Battahl and Agamen would amount to something. The hours spent defending the game against inane pseudoconsumer-advocate misrepresentation would be worth it. (Tbh it would’ve been worth it regardless, game rocks and I don’t give a shit who disagrees.)
What I didn’t expect to find was the Pathfinder as a stand-in for audience expectations. I didn’t expect this Gamer of a pale weirdo to get ripshit mad at me for not continuing to be the hamster in the wheel of his little medieval trope-ass diorama. I Killed the Fucking Dragon Once And For All and this asshole is running at me hollering like I just upended his whole tabletop Actual Play Podcast about the events of Dragon’s Dogma II. “Just go back to rule Vermund, surely that’s what you really want???” actually you weird bitch I wanted to find the Truth at the Heart of the World and it turns out it’s just you and your weird anime dolls.
It sounds like I’m mad, but I genuinely loved this shit. I loved dropping into the Unmoored World a full month after slaying the Dragon to find everything in utter disarray. I loved the real title card drop against the blood-red sky. I loved the fucked up vibes of the whole world. I loved fighting my way through the hordes of undead just to rescue my friends in their crumbling enclaves: Sven, Glyndwr, Ulrika and Lennart, Menella and Empress Nadinia, even that douchebag Phaesus. I had a blast fighting each of the five bastard dragons terrorizing the landscape. Do I wish this whole section was more fleshed out? Kind of. The entire Unmoored World section felt like a rushed version of Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning’s Return: similar structure, similar story beats, but quicker and less dense. But it was still satisfying as all fuck to shove the Pathfinder’s smug line about “knowing the wretchedness of a world unworthy of being chronicled” right back down his skinny throat. Unworthy my ass. Fuck off.
But still, his whole deal is fascinating. I genuinely interpret the Pathfinder as being a stand-in for audience expectations: “This is what Dragon’s Dogma NEEDS to be.” I wonder how much of the Pathfinder was written after the announcement of Dragon’s Dogma II, in response to the speculation and rumors about what the game was going to be like, or even to the way players responded to DD, Dark Arisen and DD Online. How much should we expect to be in “control” of a game’s narrative? By demanding that games adhere to our staid and stagnant desires, might we be strangling the fun out of them? Are we the ones judging which worlds are “unworthy of being chronicled?”
I wish Dragon’s Dogma II would have gone even harder in on these investigation paths, but ultimately I found myself enjoying being swept up in the wild ride.
What do y’all think? Is the Pathfinder an audience expectation stand-in? Is Dragon’s Dogma II actually interrogating whether or not players should have any say in the way a game is shaped? Or am I full of shit (yes but anyway)?