Keyrock

I'm really liking the mystic spearhand vocation in DD2. It's my favorite vocation so far, though I'm eager to try out the trickster.

I decide to take an ox cart from Melve to Vernworth. I hit the doze off button, but about a third of the way through the trip I get woken up by an attack. Saurians, not a big deal, I hop out of the cart and help kill the Saurians. No sooner do I get back in the cart than I see goblins up the road. Gotta kill them too. While I'm fighting the goblins a griffon decides to join the party, absolutely massacres the ox cart, then goes to work on my party and what's left of the ox cart's security detail. I had a long, thrilling, and challenging fight with the griffon and then had to hoof it the rest of the way to Vernworth. So much for fast travel.

Happy Easter

Mutant (1982) - More commonly known as Forbidden World, this is a Roger Corman Alien ripoff. A mercenary type and his robot sidekick get sent to a research facility on a remote planet. Before they arrive they get into a space battle that's stitched together from likely entirely reused footage, I'm certain I recognized some Battle Beyond the Stars in there. It wouldn't be a Roger Corman movie without recycled footage. Anyway, at the facility genetic scientists are doing genetic scientist stuff and wouldn't you know it things go horribly wrong. It's basically Alien from the moment our merc arrives at the facility. Instead of a xenomorph it's a metamorph, a being that's constantly mutating. It's actually awesomely gross looking when it's in its, shall we say, larval state, once its fully formed it looks like they ordered the xenomorph from Wish. It's a movie co-written by Jim Wynorski and you know if Jim Wynorski is involved you're getting nudity and ol' Jim does not disappoint, there is a more than ample amount of boobs and butts. There is some really awesome and truly disgusting gore in this movie and some fun deaths. It's a Roger Corman movie, you know what you're getting, a cheap but sufficient movie. I'd say this movie is even a little above sufficient, it's an entertaining sleazy horror movie. Also, what I watched was not the theatrical Forbidden World version. After a test screening when the movie was still called Mutant that had the audience laughing several times, Roger Corman cut roughly 5 minutes of mostly comedic bits out of the movie because he didn't want the movie to be funny at all. Director Allan Holzman hung on to a copy of the original cut and many years later the folks at Shout! Factory released The Holzman Cut . My blu-ray copy has both the theatrical Forbidden World and the director's cut, if you will, Mutant. It's a good Alien ripoff and it you want to see some awesomely gross gore then this movie has got your hook up. Having seen both versions of this movie I do believe Holzman's original Mutant is better. The comedy bits weirdly work with the horror. The movie gets really dark at times but the comedy bits never undercut the tension. I like the Mutant version better, but either one is worth watching if you're into a sleazy and gory but entertaining Alien ripoff.

I'm of the same mind as @the_dog_daysabout the online shop. I'm not as far into DD2 because I'm a slow gamer, I'm only about 24 hours in, but the thought of needing, or wanting, for that matter, anything in the online shop has never crossed my mind. Who is this for? I suppose if someone really really really sucks at the game they could hire pawns significantly higher level and let them do all the fighting. Pawns are cheap to hire so long as they are fairly close to your level, once you go a few levels above your own the price rises very quickly; I guess that's the one scenario I can think of where someone would be inclined to use the online shop. Personally, I like to hire pawns 1 or 2 levels above mine and then I keep them until I'm a couple levels higher then they are, that way I can keep them for 3 or 4 levels rather than swap them out all the time. Side-note: Hired pawns do not gain levels, only you and your main pawn do.

There is a trait pawns can have that will allow them to translate for you. None of my hired pawns currently has the trait and my main pawn hasn't learned it yet.

I really appreciate how dark night is in DD2, it's significantly darker than in most games. This makes your lantern extremely important because without it you can't see $#+! at night. Of course, you can always adjust how dark a game is with brightness settings and such, but that only goes so far. I'm really happy to have truly dark night out of the box, I think it looks great , they used just the right amount of bloom to make the glow of the lanterns look really fantastic. Anyway, I found an elvish town, too bad I don't speak any elvish.I wasn't planning to go there, I just discovered it while exploring. At least I know where it is now, I guess.

I'm enjoying playing warrior, it's very different from thief, obviously, much slower but with the ability to charge up for some insanely powerful blows. The hammer, in particular, has a particularly high knockdown rating making it stagger even large enemies. It's fun jumping onto an ogre and stabbing it in the head as a thief and you can climb onto the ogre as a warrior too, though thieves are better at it, but there's something to be said about hitting the ogre with a giant hammer so hard that it gets knocked off balance and with a successive blow it falls over. This is why I gravitate toward hammer in Monster Hunter. I can't wait to unlock some hybrid vocations.

In Dragon's Dogma 2 I am currently making the journey from Vernworth, which is more or less the starting area, to Battahl. If you could go as the bird flies, it wouldn't be that long a trip, but my party can't go as the bird flies and Dragon's Dogma 2, while open world, still funnels you down paths with cliffs and ravines often, which I'm totally fine with. I made it to a town called, I kid you not, Checkpoint Rest Town (on the nose award winning town name), it's close to the border of Battahl. While there I decided to change vocations for both my character and main pawn, in hindsight doing both at once was a less than stellar idea. Main char thief to warrior and pawn mage to sorcerer. When first acquiring a new vocation you are given a set of starter gear. I unlocked both vocations but didn't switch right away and I wound up selling the starter gear off because I figure I was just going to get much better gear anyway and this junk was just weighing me down, literally, weight is quite important in this game. The problem is that when I made that decision to sell off the starter gear I was in Vernworth where the prices are significantly lower than in Checkpoint Rest Town. On the bright side, CRT has better gear for sale, but that coming at the literal cost of even their "cheaper" stuff still costing a pretty penny. Long story short, I was unable to fully equip my 2 characters. I probably should just have switched back to my old vocations and gone out to farm some loot to get gear for the new vocations, but I'm stubborn. Anyway, it was at precisely this time that a local merchant heard his boy had been dragged off by wolves, because of course it was. So here I am poorly equipped and I have half a mind to pretend I didn't hear about the kid and moving on with my life, but I decided to try to find him. I asked around town and found out he liked to plant flowers some ways outside town. I'm sure he's a precious kid and they're lovely flowers, but maybe don't do that by yourself, that's a recipe for getting dragged off by wolves. With a last known location in hand, I journeyed outside the town to the location. I found precious little at the scene except some scraps so I decided to search the area and try to find where the wolves had taken him. I searched high and low the entire day, got into quite a few scraps with harpies along the way, but no wolves. As the day turned into night the living dead emerged from their slumber, mainly in the form of skeletons, with a few spirits. I continued to look for the kid as I found a weird small cellar with seemingly endless skeletons spawning in it and a treasure chest. As a warrior with a giant hammer I'm well equipped to fight skeletons, even if my armor leaves a bit to be desired, I don't even have a helm. Anyway, I smashed up a bunch of skeletons and once I figured out that they would just keep spawning, I quickly looted the chest and hightailed it out of there. At this point my party was weary and battered and I decided to start heading back toward town, it would have me go past the last know location one last time as I was further from the town when fighting in the skeleton cellar. I Slowly made the journey while still keeping an eye out for any sign of wolves or the kid. Nothing. About halfway back to town I found a campsite and made the call to camp till morning. At dawn we go back to town to sell off all the loot gathered and get better gear. And the kid... Well that kid is dead, he's been eaten. I tried, I really did, but thus ends the tale of the foolish adventurers and the precious kid who was eaten by wolves.

Typical, standard, run-of-the-mill, garden variety DD2 action:

Shepherd's pie.

My CPU is a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, for what it's worth. I've seen FPS dip into the 30s, though rarely, in cities, mostly I'm at 40-50 in cities, which is not ideal, but at least there's no combat in cities, or there hasn't been so far. I get 70 - 90 FPS in the outdoors.

What if the Goblin Wars had begun and that was an unrelated group of goblins pulled by the ox cart?

PC and controller. The game does have some technical issues. I got lucky and it was smooth sailing for me for the first 5 hours, then I started getting graphical glitches here and there and had it CTD once. For the last few hours I've been on a good streak again and it's ran smoothly. /knocks on wood The game could certainly stand to be better optimized, in the outdoors the frame rate, while it could be better, is acceptable, but in cities the frame rate tanks. I'm on a fairly high-end PC so I can still get OK FPS in cities just via brute power, but the drop is noticeable. Still, I'm willing to put up with the issues because the game is incredible. This is the most an action combat system has clicked with me since... Maybe ever. Bayonetta is the only other game I can think of where the combat felt this good, very different combat system in Bayonetta but it succeeds in making you feel like a total badass which is something Dragon's Dogma 2 also does really well. I mean, I jumped off a cliff onto a dragon then hung on for dear life while it took off flying. That particular adventure didn't go well for me (I've fought a dragon twice in this game so far, three if you count the cutscene at the beginning of the game, but have yet to defeat or even survive a dragon) but it was super thrilling nonetheless.

After roughly 10 hours of Dragon's Dogma 2 I can easily proclaim it the new standard. While they are different games, DD2 shares a bond with the Souls games; they are both Japanese takes on distinctly western action RPGs. The main difference being that the Souls games focus on single player while DD focuses on a party. I've long wondered why more RPG developers don't rip off Monster Hunter more often, it's IMHO far and away the best combat system for fighting giant monsters. When the Souls games caught on every developer under the sun tried to copy the combat system, and rightly so, why not Monster Hunter? Monster Hunter is made for scaling giant creatures dynamically to get to vital areas, it would seem perfectly fit for RPGs where you may face giants, hydras, dragons, etc... Dragon's Dogma was the game that finally answered that question and it was made, unsurprisingly, by some former MH devs, but it was kinda jank, forever destined to be a cult classic, nothing more. DD2 not only refines but also upgrades the systems that made DD a cult classic. Beyond that, the combat is so visceral, responsive, engaging, and thrilling that it raises the bar. Dragon's Dogma 2 is the new standard for video games. It's not the new standard for (just) action RPGs or even (just) RPGs, it's the new standard for video games. I consider the OG Basil Poledouris Conan the Barbarian (1982) theme to be the GoaT. I played the $#!+ out of Conan Exiles, it's a really really good game. Conan Exiles does not have the Basil Poledouris theme, nor should it; it's a very good game, but Conan Exiles is not epic enough to deserve a theme that awesome. Dragon's Dogma 2 is not even a Conan game but it's awesome enough to deserve the Basil Poledouris theme:

This was my most heroic act yet. I climbed up the back of this ogre when it suddenly leapt away, mother****er jumped like 50 yards and clung onto a cliff wall. In the picture above I'm desperately holding on with one hand and stabbing him with the other while he's on the side of a cliff. This game is intense.

7.5 hours in I can confidently say that Dragon's Dogma 2 is the current front runner for GotY, I don't even need to wait to find out if they stick the landing. It's been 7.5 hours of pure, unadulterated, military grade bliss. I can't get over how ****ing awesome the combat is and how great the pawn system is. The thing is, this game breaks no new ground, the original Dragon's Dogma is the game that broke the ground, all the systems were put in place in that game, but they were kinda jank. In this game all that stuff is refined and upgraded. I mean, I was walking along a path following a hired pawn that was leading me to a quest location. I was a little tense but still feeling good as I was fairly weighed down (weight is VERY important in this game) and beat up and I was out of camping kits, but the 3rd and final objective for a quest was nearby, so rather than head back to the city I decided to press on. I ran into a small group of saurians, under ideal circumstances this would be easy peasy, but when sorta beat up it makes the battle more tense. Just as our party was dispatching the last saurian I heard and felt the sound of rumbling rapidly approaching. I turn and a freakin' ogre is charging me! Ogres in this game are not slow and lumbering, they are VERY fast and explosive. My desperate bid to outrun the ogre failed and it snatched me up and carried me off to create distance between myself and my companions. The ogre then began slobbering on me as it prepared to presumably eat me. What other game can this happen in? I'm not talking about a cutscene, everything I described was emergent dynamic gameplay. That $#!+ was wild! I was panicking as this ogre was running off with me then preparing to bite my head off. Stuff like this just happens in this game. It's not scripted, it just happens dynamically. I'll be fighting some goblins when a griffon happens to fly by and think to itself "you know, I could go for a snack" and suddenly the battle turns into something else entirely.

That's not entirely true. In order to change your appearance or that of your main pawn you need an item called the Art of Metamorphosis and you need to visit a barber. While you can buy the Art of Metamorphosis for real money, I don't know why you would when you can also get the item in the game with in-game currency. RC is the currency you use to summon pawns but it's also used in shops, mostly for items related to the pawn system. 500 RC is no problem to get, you won't need to do much grinding, if any. This vendor that sells the Art of Metamorphosis is next to a rift stone in a city. I don't know how many other vendors sell the item.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is ****ING AWESOME. The combat feels so good; it's chaotic, visceral, has great feedback, plus nothing says badass like climbing up the back of a cyclops and stabbing it in the neck while it's trying to fling you off and a mage is blasting it with fire. Then to top it off, after a thrilling 10 minute long battle with a cyclops your pawns will high five or fist bump you, it's the best. I also like that there are climbing and platforming puzzles to get to hidden treasure chests, those are fun. For anyone picking this game up, keep in mind that this game has timed quests. Not all of them, mind you, but there are timed quests. It's pretty obvious which quests are timed. For example, if a guard tells you that one of the rookies is out on patrol and they just got word of harpy activity in that area but he can't abandon his post to aid the rookie and you accept going to find the rookie and helping him out, if you instead go do something else for half the day you may find a dead body when you finally find the rookie. It's probably not a good idea to just pick up every single quest in a town all at once, that's a recipe for failing some of them.

Dragon's Dogma 2 This mother****er sneaking a peek at my cleavage:

Dragon's Dogma 2 That was dishonest and downright shameful of Capcom to have the online shop conspicuous in its absence in review copies only to release the game with an online shop. They are not the first to do so, I'm sure they won't be the last, but it needs to be called out when it happens, that's for sure. I'm not a lawyer so I have no idea if there's any sort of legal recourse that can be taken, but from a moral standpoint that's blatant purposeful dishonesty and should be punishable in some way. Anyway, controversy aside, the game is a freakin' blast so far. The combat is great and the pawns have some of the best companion AI I have ever seen. You have 4 commands you can issue them: Go, wait, to me, and help. The pawns have personalities, albeit ones that fall neatly into a small number of categories, and thus they will respond differently to your commands, so the first thing you should do after hiring pawns is to learn how they react. They'll point stuff out to you "look, a treasure chest, we should figure out how to get up there", they'll lead you to locations if they know where it is, it's a really great system. I just started so I obviously can't tell you yet whether the game is purposely made to entice players to buy items with real money. I mean, you don't put in a monetization system without also taking steps to steer the player toward said monetization system. Time will tell how pressured I wind up feeling to spend money in the online shop (I won't), I'll report back once I'm much deeper into the game.

Tim Burton hasn't made a good movie in nearly 30 years so I'm assuming that Beetlejuice 2 will suck. I'll be quite happy to be proven wrong, but I probably won't.