Recent reviews by Daymyx

Good game. Load your save game when it tells you that you can

Wonderful game. Thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish

If you haven't played the first game yet, play that one instead. (Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen)
If you have played the first game already, then this is a mixed bag of more content that is different in good and bad ways. I personally think that the first game does a lot of things better and has much more interesting exploration/collection, postgame, and endgame content. I don't know if they'd ever end up doing a Dark Arisen style expansion for this game, but I found myself yearning for content like that in this game.

Cute little metroidvania that doesn't take itself too seriously. Good difficulty, and provides three options if things are too hard or easy. The game is on the shorter side (9 hours for all pickups) but I'd say it's still worth it.

Incredible remake of an incredible game.

tl;dr: Recommended on sale BUT don't expect much. The game is filled with many things that feel pointless and the story is very short and mediocre at best.

Hoo boy where do I even start with this. The game feels like it tried to be more than it is early on in development and just ran out of time or resources. And what's left is a game with the shortest story I've seen in years, a crafting system that could have just not been there with how shallow it is and how little impact it has, very little enemy variety, and an open world that feels the same everywhere you go.

Opinions based on 100% achievement completion on hard difficulty

Combat
The combat is probably the most redeeming system in this game. It's not very deep, it's not very challenging, and it takes a while to unlock any variety. But it ends up feeling just.. nice... most of the time. Some enemies have very irritating attack patterns. You end up with four spellbooks that all feel unique and good to use in their own ways. Even though you'll probably end up only using one of the offensive spells per set, it is very much a preference thing and I could see different players using different spells more often just because they like them and not because it is better.
As for difficulty of the combat, even the bosses never really put up any challenge. And this is from the perspective of playing on the "hard" difficulty. This is at least partially because the game makes it VERY difficult to die. If you hold the flow button, you will automatically dodge all attacks. You can carry up to 20 healing potions that instantly heal you for around 75% of your health. You have a persistent "second chance" mechanic that recharges relatively quickly even in combat. (What I mean by "second chance" is if you take a hit that would deal fatal damage, the game will save you at one health and give you a few seconds to heal. It recharges in something like 45 seconds.) It all adds up to combat where the odds feel significantly stacked in your favor.

Exploration
The open world will probably end up being the thing that looks the most appealing when you start the game. You have powerful parkour abilities that make it feel like if you can see it, you can go there. Of course, at the start, that's not necessarily true. Once you unlock more abilities that enhance your movement abilities, it does end up that way. The problems with the open world end up being the lack of variety. Their are only a few different types of landmarks and they unfortunately end up looking and feeling practically the same in all of the game's regions. So while it may be interesting in the first or second region you go to, it ends up feeling stale by even the third.
Unfortunately for the open world, it also has one of the most annoying gameplay mechanics I've seen in an open world game. Breakstorms. Under normal circumstances you can fast travel to any belfry or refuge you've previously visited and explore landmarks whenever you want. But sometimes while exploring, the game will completely randomly start a breakstorm. Which means that you can no longer explore landmarks. The only way to get rid of breakstorms is to rest at a refuge. The kicker? Breakstorms disable fast traveling. So you can be exploring a far corner of the map and finally arrive only for the game to disable exploring that landmark and force you to run all the way to back to a refuge. Really not fun.
The rewards for exploring the open world boil to down to four different rewards. Stat boosts, gear, experience, and lore. Looking at it from the surface their shouldn't be a problem with these rewards, but I'm going to get in to my problems with these now.

Gear/Stats/Crafting
I personally think that the gear and crafting systems could be absent from the game and it would be better for it. From the start of the game enemies will drop crafting materials (breakshards) that, from their description, lay the premise of using them for crafting powerful equipment. So you continue the early story eventually unlocking crafting. You open the two menus (craft and upgrade) and find that these materials you've been finding aren't used for the few options you have available to you. So you continue the story thinking "surely these will be useful later." Except they just don't end up being useful. Odds are you'll finish the story and move on from the game before you ever end up using them which makes one half of the reason to do combat pointless.
And then their is the other half of the reason to do combat. Experience points. You would think that leveling up in an rpg would be an exciting thing and would boost the power of your character. Except for some reason in this game all it does is give you mana (The resource used to unlock more spells.) That doesn't sound too bad, but the problem is you find more mana literally on the floor while exploring the world than you ever get from leveling up. So the experience you get from defeating enemies ends up being a pointless number that appears on your screen after combat.
And finally for this section, the gear. The gear is divided in to four different wearable pieces that appear on your character and provide various advantages. A cloak, a necklace, and two different finger nail styles. You find all of these by exploring the open world. Cloaks and necklaces provide passive stat boosts and have extra slots for conditional combat boosts. Finger nails provide a much smaller passive boost (or decrease in stats for some reason) and a conditional stat boost. Most cloaks and necklaces have unique traits that you would think provide incentive to use them. But instead, the game lets put those traits on any other necklace/cloak you find after bringing it to a crafting table. This combined with the fact that the game lets you upgrade the passive stats on every cloak/necklace equally makes it so their is very little incentive to switch pieces of gear. In fact it almost discourages it since their is no way to refund the materials you used to upgrade the passives of your gear.
Another problem with those conditional combat boosts I talked about is that the large majority of them are too vague or conditional that they would never be practical to use. Things along the lines of "Cuff counters boost surge magic recharge rate" are way too vague and conditional to be practically considered over thing like "Immune to poison." Which is another problem with the game. You are never told how much these boosts actually do for you. Instead of being told "Your magic damage is increased by x%", you're told "Magic +1." Or defense +5 or Healing effects +15. Or "Critical rate boosted based on the number of spells learned." The lack of information makes it difficult to be excited about the majority of upgrades.

I'm gonna keep try to keep this one short (just like the story haha....) and vague. Basically, the story is slow, predictable, and over just as soon as it begins. The first four hours of the story feels aimless and is obviously setting up the lore and background knowledge you need. The problem with that is those 4 hours is around 40% of the stories runtime. Frey (The main character) complains the entire time and constantly protests the events that eventually end up happening anyway over the next 50% of the game. Until the last 10% where things finally get a little interesting. But then you realize that it's the ending sprint of the story and wonder how it could possibly be over already.

It's okay. Nothing grand or memorable which I feel is out of the ordinary for a Square Enix game. Or rpgs in general nowadays.

The graphics are great and look like they were made for the next gen. The spells in particular look beautiful and have a very unique art style.
Performance would vary wildly depending on the area you were in, the weather, and how many enemies were present.