Dragon Dogma 2’s cursed endgame is nothing but dessert

Dragon dogma 2 is about the journey, not the destination. It’s about exploring routes you’ve never traveled before, camping in the wilderness and an unexpected encounter with a Minotaur. The objectives of the missions are also left deliberately vague, forcing you to puzzle things out and talk to as many people as possible. If you could simply fast travel to obvious mission markers, you could certainly check them off your list more efficiently, but then you’d completely miss the adventure of getting there.

(Ed. remark: This post contains spoilers for the Dragon dogma 2 endgame.)

Then you beat the game and the credits roll. However, if you don’t like that “ending”, you can start the apocalypse instead. The sky turns an ugly crimson red; the oceans are drying up; the dead rise from their old graves. Are rough outside.

Your goals will then become much easier in this Unmoored World. Just go to four points on the map and do two things:

1. Defeat a boss monster
2. Help evacuate all nearby villagers to a central city

To make this task easier, some of the mechanical friction is adjusted or completely removed. More fast travel nodes called portcrystals will appear on the map, making it much easier to fast travel to each mission marker. This wouldn’t have mattered much earlier in the game, as you have to use a rare ferry stone every time you fast travel, but now monsters drop this item regularly. Now that all the lakes, rivers and oceans have dried up, you no longer have to cross remote bridges to reach your destination.

As you save each city, you also start to put together a central hub city that makes optimizing your gear much easier. All four blacksmith types ultimately reside there, along with the Duplicator and the Dragonforged. Instead of running around the entire map crafting the best weapons, everyone you need is just a few efficient steps away. It’s also much easier to get the best enhancement materials, as high-level monsters are prowling everywhere, especially in the dried up oceans.

I didn’t go straight to the Unmoored World. Instead, I started a new game plus after beating the Dragon so I could experience some of the quests I missed earlier in the game and level up more of my callings. So after weeks of playing the game and absorbing complaints about the fast travel and game-breaking microtransactions, the Unmoored World’s design choices almost felt like a response. Here’s everything you’ve been screaming for: simple fast travel, an efficient hub world, and no-nonsense mission design!

This also ties in with the story of the game. You broke all the rules to reach this place, so the rules of the game are broken too. You’ve taken on god(?) and ushered in a new, albeit broken, world where the game won’t get in the way of you completing your tasks and doing what you want.

But once you complete the simple objectives in front of you and there’s nothing left to do, eating all this dessert becomes boring. You don’t really see the landscape anymore – you just blink from portcrystal to portcrystal. You’ll soon tire of returning the undead to their graves, because they never stop rising from the ground. You can’t even enjoy camping with your pawns anymore because of the aforementioned undead and also because time itself is a crucial resource as you rush to save everyone while resting as little as possible. Eventually the day/night cycle fades into one endless twilight and you can no longer rest at all as time figuratively stops.

You can play this way as long as you have wakestones to heal yourself, farm high level monsters to upgrade your gear, but ultimately it feels hollow without any of the Dragon Dogmas 2 strange charms. It’s fun to indulge in the excesses of the late game, but it also makes clear why the developers made the decisions they did about fast travel and mission design. When you’ve finally had enough of this broken but highly efficient world, you can end the apocalypse by starting a new game, plus, more ready than ever to just enjoy the journey.