Recent reviews by Plastic

It's decent.

This game feels like the game Dragon's Dogma 1 wanted to be but couldn't.

The exploration is rewarding and fun, you can easily get sidetracked and lost as you explore the world with your chatty pawns. Despite being skeptical about the director's comments praising that the game doesn't have fast travel before release, I think it works very well for this game. I find that the camping system is a great addition to the game, making your travel from one location to the other feel like an adventure in itself.

The combat is very fun and goofy, similar to the first game but somehow feels better. Seeing your pawns being thrown around by big monsters never gets old. The vocations are varied in gameplay and I find that maxing out every vocation to unlock the augments for both your Arisen and your main pawn adds welcome variety in the combat gameplay.

Story-wise, I can't speak about the main story too much as I am not too far into it. The side-quests are what you expect from the first game, but the concept of time-sensitive quests is an interesting addition. The side-quests have different outcomes and rewards, depending on your actions.

The pawn system was improved over the first game, with the addition of pawn specialization and pawn quests, which can be a form of indirect trading between players. Setting up a reward for completing a certain goal with another player's pawn is an interesting system. One gripe that I have with the pawns is the lack of variety in voices, with only a single voice per inclination and gender (ignoring pitch adjustments), which makes different pawns sound similar to each other most of the time.

That being said, the launch state of the game is absolutely abysmal, with extremely bad performance, crashes for some players, useless MTX and lack of basic features like starting a new game.

Hopefully, these problems are quickly resolved by Capcom and the game can shine as the sequel the first game truly deserved.