The first Dark Arisen expansion for the original Dragon’s Dogma has a well-lauded place in video game history as the expansion that “fixed” the base game, sanding down the rough technical edges and tweaking things to make the notoriously obtuse RPG more approachable. It also added hours of new content, spiraling an already heady story directly into the heavens on the back of dragon wings. Dark Arisen 2 isn’t as transformational as the first one was, primarily because many of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s biggest issues have been fixed through incremental patching since it came out in 2024. But the new content here definitely flies in the same ambitious skies as its predecessor, pushing the story and world design to new heights, even if some of the new progression options get left behind.
As with Dragon’s Dogma 2’s base campaign, Dark Arisen 2’s story remixes themes from the first game without being a simple retelling. Like in the first, another Arisen has been rumored to exist, something that shouldn’t be possible and demands your immediate attention. This takes you north to the frozen mountains of Norgan, a place that is largely abandoned save for the single settlement at its border (and the steady stream of visitors coming from other lands to investigate what’s been lost under all that ice besides you).
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a strange and wonderful game that seems haunted by some of yesteryear’s bugaboos. It is a retelling and reimplementation of all of those wonderful ideas from the 2012 cult-classic, including an awesome dynamic world and some of the best combat in the genre that integrates a subtle but amazingly complex physics system.
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