The No Escape review of the Jimquisition review of Dragon’s Dogma 2

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game I’ve put a lot of time into over the past week, playing marathon sessions of it last weekend and defeating the titular Dragon for the first time after what felt like shockingly little time at all. (I just looked and it turns out I’ve played about 87 hours of the game, which, lmao.) I’m now neck-deep in the middle of a no-loaned-pawns New Game Plus run, taking more time to explore and let the game happen to me. I’ve got an actual review-in-progress of the game in the works that I’ll have up sometime next week. But right now, I guess I’m starting Internet beef for no reason.

Stephanie Sterling is a critic and consumer advocate whose work I’ve been following since well before I got notions to write about video games. Their Jimquisition weekly opinion show on YouTube (and before that, the Escapist) was part of my ritual screen-time through the 2010s. I have been watching her content (Sterling uses she/they pronouns interchangeably) for so long that I have seen each of her signature topics and bits spin up from scratch, from FucKonami News to Commentocracy with Duke Amiel H’ardcore. I’ve always been, at base, entertained by their work, which isn’t to say I’ve always agreed with it – but for a while I could agree to thank god for “Jim.” For all the Jimquisition‘s excess at times, for its tendency toward outrage (that Sterling herself has lamented on occasion), it could never be denied that Sterling was fighting at least one or two unequivocally good fights, even while she was largely doing it alone.

If nothing else, we can say up-front: Sterling has a clear, if often too rigid, critical eye, built from years of experience with the worst the video game industry has had to offer. Nothing I write here is meant to disrespect or dismiss that. Instead, the purpose of this piece is to explore the points of departure and disagreement that I have with elements of Sterling’s review of Dragon’s Dogma 2, and to determine the limits of said rigid critical perspective.

TL;DR I thought Sterling’s review of Dragon’s Dogma 2 was WRONG and now I’m gonna FIGHT THEM (or something).

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Sterling starts off their 1800-word review by staking a claim: Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a “shockingly unimproved sequel to a game that felt archaic in 2012,” with “unresponsive controls,” “inefficient menus,” and an “endless obsession with trolling players.” In a nutshell, she says, “Dragon’s Dogma 2 is just a waste of fucking time.”

Much of her argument in this regard relies on the “21 in-app purchases including microtransactions” that she claims “speed up an excruciatingly slow experience,” but the thing is, with opinions like this: you can’t really argue against it. Who am I to say that what Sterling experienced amounted to “a waste of fucking time” or not? But there are some parts to her claim that I can contest, like “unresponsive controls.”

Before Dragon’s Dogma 2 came out, I decided to pick up Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen on Steam during one of Capcom’s “we’re literally throwing this game at you Jesus Christ just buy it” sales. I got it for like $5 on my Steam Deck, and I furtively stuck my toe in the water at some point last year. It wasn’t until this winter that I fully dived in head-first, but when I did I found a deeply weird and enthralling experience that, strangely, helped me connect better with my FromSoft sicko friends—both Dragon’s Dogma and the Souls games are, to my mind, exceptionally experimental games that ask for the player’s full trust and the leeway to let the devs cook, so to speak. The rewards for giving that trust over would be immeasurable. In this regard I’ve been influenced by the criticism of folks like Austin Walker and Dia Lacina, whose words on Dragon’s Dogma and similar games must have rewritten some of the neural pathways in my brain after reading them or something.

But what I didn’t find in the original Dragon’s Dogma was a truly fantastic combat system. I thought it was clunky, a bit too loose, and kind of one-note. I played as a Ranger, and then once it unlocked, a Magick Archer, and with both classes I felt like the combat was just about one step from being pretty good for me. I haven’t bothered with the other classes, and I admit I’ve been spoiled by games like Nier Automata and Final Fantasy XV, so mostly I’ve just chalked it up to “old game rubbing up against my modern expectations.”

With Dragon’s Dogma 2, I’ve found that combat and controls vary depending on your Arisen’s vocation, physical size, encumbrance, and stamina level, but in almost all regards they’re still way better than the combat and movement in Dragon’s Dogma by a country mile. The Thief vocation, for example, is so much better than Ranger that there’s almost no use in a comparison. On paper the two jobs have the same melee moveset, but Thief expands on and deepens what you can do and just how much control over the battlefield you can have – on the ground, at least. Since it’s been decoupled from Archer, you still need someone who can take care of airborne enemies. But with ground adversaries I can eliminate whole swathes of foes without taking basically any damage on my own as long as I have the stamina for it, thanks to a “Maister’s” ability called Formless Feint.

I don’t know what Sterling’s starting Vocation was – they never mention it and it’s possible it wouldn’t matter – but there are several vocations whose moveset all but requires you to stand still on the battlefield and wait for things to happen: the casting of a spell, the conjuring of a decoy, and so on. This kind of play is definitely not fun for me, so if that’s what they primarily dealt with, I can understand the criticism.

When it comes to “inefficient menus,” I can’t really speak to this experience. When I press select on my controller I get the map, which I can manually add and remove waypoints to, and when I press start I get the pause menu, which shows me a zoomed out version of the map, a ring along the outside that shows me time of day, what quest I’m on, what item I just collected, and how much money I have in addition to some basic status info on my Arisen and Pawn(s) down in the bottom left corner. I can mess with items in the Items menu; change equipment in the Equipment menu; and choose which quest I’m paying attention to in the Quests menu. If Sterling wants to elaborate on the issues they have with the menus I’d be happy to listen.

Finally, there’s the alleged “endless obsession with trolling players.” If I hadn’t just spent nearly 90 hours in DD2, or something like 50 hours in the original, I would wonder about this: is Dragon’s Dogma and its sequel unduly mean to players? Is it so unforgiving that a newcomer can’t even pierce the veil of its insistent weirdness? But since I have played a bunch of both games, I can confidently state that the game isn’t really intentionally fucking with you – at least not in the way this is meant to be interpreted, with giant fuck-off monsters showing up to crush your dreams while you’re doing normal fights. Like yes, that happens: I have been owned by sudden Griffins and Ogres and Minotaurs in this fashion on occasion. But more often than not, my faux pas in this game have been because I wasn’t prepared enough: didn’t bring enough healing or stamina items, didn’t spec my Pawn party properly, was too weak to go charging into an area without some light grinding first, traveled at night with all of the above hanging over my head like a fool. Maybe I’m just boring, but not once have I been yeeted across the map by an Ogre’s swinging fists, and so I can’t even give you a funny clip of me dying.

There’s meta shit happening in the story, of course, and it takes the shape of the previous Dragon’s Dogma‘s meta-fuckery. But I don’t know!

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I suppose we need to talk about the microtransactions in Dragon’s Dogma 2, because Sterling will bring it up repeatedly.

Once again, I’m playing on Xbox. Here is how you get to the Dragon’s Dogma 2 microtransactions on Xbox:

1. Open the game.
2. Choose “Microsoft Store” from the main menu.
3. Choose “Yes” on the “Connect to the Microsoft Store?” prompt.
4. Game closes out and goes to the Microsoft Store page.

So what can you get for that trouble? Here’s the list of 22 items:

1. Explorer’s Camping Kit – a lightweight camping kit. $2.99
2. Dragon’s Dogma Music and Sound Collection – change the soundtrack. $2.99
3. Harpysnare Smoke Beacons (3-count). $.99
4. Heartfelt Pendant – a gift for a character you love. $1.99
5. Ambivalent Rift Incense – change pawn inclinations. $1.99
6. Makeshift Gaol Key (one-time use). $.99
7. Art of Metamorphosis – Character Editor. $1.99
8. Portcrystal – item to set up a single Ferrystone point. $2.99
9. Wakestone – revive a character (5x) $.99
10. 500 Rift Crystals (3x) $.99
11. 1500 Rift Crystals (4x) $2.99
12. 2500 Rift Crystals (1x) $4.99
13. A Boon for Adventurers – New Journey Pack. $14.99

This is a list of mostly useless items, not even notable for aesthetic purposes. It’s not defensible as a list of microtransactions by any means, but we should be clear about what we’re talking about here. The most useful thing on this list is the Wakestone item, which can restore any character in the game back to life, including the player-character. The second-most useful item is the camping kit. The third is the Portcrystal: an item you can use to set up fast-travel spots at will. It’s this item that is the crux of Sterling’s material argument that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is not just a game they didn’t like, but a game that is actively, maliciously bad. It is this single Portcrystal that sits at the center of their argument that the game is, without it, an “excruciatingly slow” experience.

It doesn’t matter that you can purchase Ferrystones in the game for in-game money, nor does it matter that you can find multiple Portcrystals to pick up throughout the world as well as the permanent ones installed in Vernworth and Harve Village. It also doesn’t matter to Sterling that there is a completely separate, cheap and effective method of fast travel – the oxcart system – that connects the major cities with smaller settlements. You can literally instantly travel by cart to just about every town in the game. What matters is that there is one item on the microtransaction storefront that could help the player theoretically save time somewhere by giving them an additional teleport spot to place at their leisure, and that counts as Capcom “[openly admitting] it made a game so fucking miserable to play it can slap a price on playing less of it.” This is the running theme through the rest of this review.

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Good lord, I’ve spent Sterling’s entire review’s word count on her first four paragraphs. In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.

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Moving on: the next item that Sterling brings up as an issue they had with Dragon’s Dogma 2 is “pitiful encumbrance limits.” The game doesn’t give you a limited number of item slots; instead, every single item in the game has a weight, and when you hit a certain weight threshold you can find yourself running slower and jumping less high. Stamina will also run out faster and take longer to regenerate the more weighed down you are, and if you become “overencumbered” you can no longer run and will lose stamina even with walking in areas outside of settlements.

The thing about Dragon’s Dogma 2 that I will at least partially agree with Sterling here on is, a lot of the game is wrapped up in you picking up random shit you found, materials from monsters and defeated enemies, an assortment of plants, and so on. It’s true, there are items out there that will increase your stamina, especially with regards to carrying items, and you can assign your Pawn the “Logistician” specialization which will have them faithfully sorting your party’s packs to lessen the load, but even with those slight affordances you do often find yourself huffing and puffing up hills and waiting extra long to regenerate your stamina from sprinting or doing Vocation actions. What I have come to rely on is the interconnected item chest system, which you can access at any inn as well as your purchased residences in Bakbattahl and Vernworth. Ever so often I will stop off in a town, go to the inn, and do a whole dump of my and my Pawn’s inventory—I’ll sort through the mess later. This is only ever temporarily effective.

So yeah, I do wish the encumbrance system was a bit more forgiving, but this hasn’t been a game-breaking experience for me. What I won’t discard is the possibility that it could be the last straw for someone. But does all of this add up to, as Sterling states, a game that “is antithetical to the notion of convenience?” Is Dragon’s Dogma 2 really just Capcom “selling a con along with weaponizing the worst elements for financial gain?” So far I’m not convinced.

Speeding things up a bit: Sterling compares the game to Monster Hunter and Shenmue, but doesn’t flesh out either the “belabored aspects” of the former or “every bad thing” the latter ever did as a means of understanding the comparison. The closest we get is that they describe the essence of the game as “snailish adventuring and doing fuckall that has been deliberately set up to screw players over at any given opportunity.” We get another description of the fast travel system that again doesn’t mention oxcart travel at all, a declaration of the indignity of having to travel back and forth to locations to fulfill quest requirements, and a lamentation of the difficulty of finding permanent portcrystals. (There are two of them; one in Vernworth, and one in Harve Village.) This is followed by a torturous description of on-foot travel that describes the impact of stamina on combat and non-combat rather poorly.

Again, I just want to be clear: the problem here isn’t that Sterling didn’t like the game! They don’t have to like the game and I’m not out here advocating for them to go back to a thing they clearly bounced off of. But accuracy is important, especially when you have an audience of roughly a million people across all social platforms.

Sterling takes a moment to describe her experience in Rise of the Ronin, Koei Tecmo’s latest game from the Team NINJA group. She says, “Rise of Ronin (sic) was developed with the thought that people playing it shouldn’t have their time treated as valueless.” Directly preceding this statement, she wrote, “I once found myself hesitant to pick up a crafting material, then remembered I wasn’t playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 where you can become too heavy if you pick up enough feathers.” What I pick up from these statements is the sentiment that games that make you consider what you’re doing are the problem here, and not Dragon’s Dogma 2 specifically. That you should be able to just kind of slip-n-slide through a game’s world and story with about as much friction as a lubed-up salmon in a fish tube. Quick hits is all we’re after.

As we hit the midpoint of the review, we’ve arrived at quests. They’re “vaguely described,” “border on misleading,” “things simply aren’t marked on the map,” while at the same time “some obsolete markers will remain on the minimap indefinitely” (I genuinely think these are manually-added waypoints she forgot to remove). Just about every quest I’ve encountered has clearly told me what to do, put that information in the quest menu, and then updated with clear language about what to do next when I fulfilled a given step. I genuinely do not know what to say to this description of the quest system. There are fail states for sure, and you can lose a quest by letting certain required NPCs die or get killed, but I’ve never sat there wondering what to do or where to go. Additionally, Pawns literally cannot shut the fuck up about knowing how to finish whatever quest you have selected as your priority task. They will literally jump around and wave their arms to get your attention so that they can hold your hand to the next step.

We get another Shenmue comparison, this time comparing-and-complaining about Dragon’s Dogma 2‘s persistent day/night cycle. “There is no real reason for NPCs to make you wait several days before allowing you to complete a task for them,” they write. “But anything to falsely drag the experience out even just a minute or so longer, right?” She mentions one specific sidequest that involves you tailing a person and waiting for them to do stuff, but the number of quests of this nature I’ve come across in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is… I think this is the only one exactly like it? Most of the other quests I’ve done that come close involve sneaking into palace offices and trailing phantom oxcarts, and don’t really involve a lot of waiting.

We get another Rise of the Ronin comparison, where they inform us that that game gives players a watch “that can change between day and night without having to find a bed, pay an inn, or sit on a bench multiple times.” Cool!

This is followed by another description of the combat, which Sterling did not enjoy. I’ve already talked about my experiences with the combat and this is nearing 3000 words, so just go back up and read what I said about my experiences with the combat. In this section, Sterling talks about big monsters stunlocking the player as a frustrating commonality between Dragon’s Dogma, Monster Hunter and Lost Planet, and like, sure. That shit sucks when it happens, absolutely. But also, I hate to say it: git… gud?

Anyway, that brings us to the end.

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Dragon’s Dogma 2 is outwardly hostile to its audience, embracing everything that made the original such a hassle to enjoy. A game designed with the purpose of wasting a player’s time, which makes Capcom’s “time saver” microtransactions all the more sickening. It’s a glorified xerox that you will adore if you believe Dragon’s Dogma was literally perfect when it released in 2012 and absolutely none of the progress within games development in the past twelve years meant one fucking thing. Indeed, if your idea of a good time is having a terrible time, you’ll love this malignant resurrection of ideas and implementations that should have stayed long dead.

At the beginning of this post, started several hours ago at this point, I wrote, “the purpose of this piece is to explore the points of departure and disagreement that I have with elements of Sterling’s review of Dragon’s Dogma 2, and to determine the limits of said rigid critical perspective.” I want to try and keep that in mind, because otherwise the impulse is to react, well, reactively. Messy as it is, dotted with misrepresentations as it is, Sterling’s review is representative of a critical perspective. It’s 15 or so years of them railing against microtransactions in the industry writ large, it’s 15 years of getting in protracted fights with lazy asset-flip developers who tried to sue to bring her down, and a litany of other things. Stephanie Sterling can only bring what she’s carrying to a given review, just like anyone who does this for fun or for a living.

But at the same time, that learned/earned perspective can be self-limiting; what one carries can make a given experience interminable. It is the job of the critic to understand that while not sacrificing that perspective for some false notion of objectivity. And what I’ve come to understand about Sterling’s position is that microtransactions anywhere, for any reason, even if they don’t impact the game at all, are unacceptable; and that’s a legitimate position to hold. I would say “I believe that means you’re missing out on good experiences because the publisher put in some extra hokey bullshit,” but I’ve been on the same side of the fence as Sterling for other games, like Genshin Impact.

I also understand that Sterling’s position seems to lead them to believe that any “time wasting” function of a game, whether or not it’s actually wasting time, if it causes “friction” for the player, is bullshit. I don’t think this means they don’t want challenging experiences in games at all. I think they’re, in this case, simply misidentifying developer intent for publisher malice. I think they’re simply wrong about their portrayal of the combat, the quest system, and a number of other systems (including fast travel), but that doesn’t mean I think the game is flawless or above reproach. Something my group chat was talking about just today is how narratively thin the Battahl section feels compared to the quest-dense Vermund section. I mentioned how surprisingly quick it felt to reach the Dragon on my first playthrough; what I didn’t say was that it felt entirely too sudden and almost unearned, to say nothing of the fact that I didn’t feel I had a viable means to go back and do anything I wanted to catch up on. I don’t think these things are meaningless or minor issues. But these are not what Sterling focused on.

What I’m reminded of (and what I hinted at with the admittedly-snide git-gud up above) is the neverending discourse around difficulty in soulslike games. The push and pull between people who think there should be more guardrails or affordances given to players who don’t want to sit there bashing their heads against a wall trying to contend with fast and punishing bosses, vs. players who like having that undiluted challenge and want everyone else to “respect the developers’ vision.” I’m a firm proponent of the idea that games shouldn’t waste your time, and I’ve bounced off every single Dark Souls game I’ve ever tried, including Elden Ring, arguably the easiest of them all. I know that I personally do not like the feeling of taking one step forward and then two steps back with each boss in a Souls game. It makes me feel like shit! And so, I don’t play them.

But I also believe that “time-wasting” is not a universal ideal, especially not when it comes to video games. People are aghast when I tell them how much time I’ve spent in Destiny 2 or Final Fantasy XIV. I wouldn’t even want to show you the combined time I’ve put into Jupiter’s Picross S series. I don’t consider any of that “wasted” time, though, because it’s all been time I’ve enjoyed, or learned something from, or gotten some other intangible thing out of. And all I can say about my time in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is that none of it has been wasted. I genuinely don’t believe any of the systems are so insurmountable that the game can’t be played, especially without spending money on microtransactions. I’ve got 90 hours to prove it! But also, I’m not really interested in trying to convince you. Because the thing is, Sterling is right: the game isn’t for everybody. It was always a gamble bringing a sickos game like Dragon’s Dogma back for a sequel, just like it was when Armored Core VI came out last year. It’s for me; it wasn’t for Sterling; maybe it’ll be for you, if you give it a try.