When I booted up Dragon’s Dogma 2 again to play a bit of New Game+ in preparation for the Dark Arisen DLC, I was initially feeling a bit humdrum about the whole thing. My Arisen was at a very high level, I’d seen everything I’d wanted to see in the base game, and as much as I had loved that adventure, I wasn’t super stoked to be back. The clips I’d seen of Norgan, the new region introduced in the DLC, had not convinced me there was anything sufficiently new or exciting about it that would hook me. More of the same monsters, just in the snow this time. Sure.
But then I went to Norgan, where Dark Arisen reminded me that I freakin’ love Dragon’s Dogma 2. I love that it’s weird, and harsh, and sometimes even silly. I love being a little guy running around the big ol’ feet of a big guy and trying to bring that big guy down. I love reaching a dialogue choice that seems extremely straightforward and panicking for several minutes because I think the game might be trying to trick me. I love (hate) every time my Pawn invites me to take things out of her pack anytime I like (I do not want your rotten harpsbud, November).
With Dark Arisen come 12 new dungeons added to the existing world. Personally, playing on New Game+ with a character starting at around level 70 and climbing into the hundreds throughout the expansion, I found these dungeons to be relatively nothing. I even forgot they were in the DLC for a while after I was introduced to them, because everything else is so much more interesting. These dungeons are largely just a series of combat trials at a level that makes sense for a character finding them in their place in the original world for the first time, which means I blasted through them and anyone else who’s already finished the game once probably will too. There are some neat new monster variants, and the weapon rewards look pretty cool; I just had no use for them. If you’re playing for the first time, though, it seems like these will blend in pretty seamlessly with the rest of the adventure, so it’s nice to have them.
The new region, Norgan, is the star here, and where I spent almost all my time. Norgan is a snowy tundra of a region north of the existing map, and you’re sent there both to track down rumors of a second Arisen and to find a resolution to your own terrifying, seemingly prophetic dream. Norgan is harsh, with little sign of civilization, lots of ruins buried in the snow, and a single settlement of friendly people trying to carve out an existence up here against the onslaught of threats from monsters, raiders, wolves, gryphons, giant stompy troll-like creatures, and now suddenly also a plague of weirdly fast zombies.
I am willing to eat crow on some (not all!) of my past complaints that the updates and DLC would make Dragon’s Dogma 2 far too easy. I still think those Dragonsplague curatives are way too easy to make and a terrible idea conceptually—when my pawn caught this flu early on in my DLC playthrough I recognized it right away (instead of spending several agonizing days wondering if I was imagining things) and then shoved her off a bridge as the good Lord intended. But it’s the fast-travel stuff I’m no longer upset about. In the main game of Dragon’s Dogma 2, a major update giving players effectively an infinite number of fast travels and a pile of portcrystals to place wherever they like trivializes the pacing of the adventure. Without these things, you have to be thoughtful about where and when you camp, and the routes you take to and fro. You can’t just blaze through dungeons, port back to town, heal up, then pop back into the action. It takes time to get places, and you might be waylaid by monsters that will fully wreck your shit, even if you travel via oxcart. I love that aspect of Dragon’s Dogma, the increasing fear as my health sinks lower and the sky grows dark and I have no idea where the nearest campsite is and no way to get back to Vermund. The addition of free fast travel pretty much nullifies it all…
…in the main game, anyway. In Dark Arisen’s Norgan region, I kinda get it. There’s only one town in Norgan, at the far south end, and very, very few campsites, many of which are tricky to find without a Pawn that knows where they’re going. Points of interest where plot happens are very far apart, as are most dungeons. However, there are portcrystals outside most major milestone spots, and most objectives are increasingly far north the deeper you get into the DLC. The rhythm of play, in this case, is to fight long and hard to get to a rare rest spot with a portcrystal, warp back to town, rest, appraise all your artifacts (basically the Norgan system of getting weapon upgrades that’s weirdly gacha-like for a non-gacha game), and prepare, and then warp back to where you just were and start another long trek even farther north. Annoyed as I am about the change to the main game, I think this system is entirely fine up here. It’s more like climbing a dangerous mountain a little bit at a time, and less like planning a road trip through Death Valley.
Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen
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Back-of-the-box-quote
"I've just had a thought: if we roll a boulder through the snow, might it not gather snow and grow in size?"
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Developer
Capcom
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Type of game
Action RPG
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Liked
New region is big and full of interesting stuff to do, several cool new bosses, intriguing story, same harsh Dragon's Dogma 2 gameplay.
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Disliked
Not a ton of monster variety, 12 new dungeons in the old world are whatever for experienced players.
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Platforms
Xbox Series X/S (played on S), PlayStation 5, PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch 2.
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Release date
October 9, 2026
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Played
Roughly 20 hours to an ending (may be multiple?) still got a few side quests to wrap up.
Norgan has way, way more to it than I expected coming in. Looking at it in the trailers, or even in the first few hours of the DLC, it’s easy to be fooled into thinking this is just a big, snowy waste with a few mountains and caves and a quick jaunt to a castle to fight a zombie dragon. Not so! The main story quest just keeps going—at times in a tedious way, such as when I need to go somewhere but I need to run, like, my fifth stupid errand for the soldiers so they’ll open up a cave for me. But at other times in a rather exciting one: I really like the new character, Eir, and some of my favorite moments in this DLC were when I thought I had finally solved a problem only for Eir to present a new, weird wrinkle that would take several hours more exploring to sort out.
There are also a surprising number of sidequests offered by the tiny cast of characters hanging out up in the mountains. Most of them aren’t super interesting on their own, but they’ll make sure you explore every inch of Norgan, not just the landmarks on the main roads. Sure, a lot of my time running through Norgan was spent just looking at fairly mundane snowy terrain dotted with evergreens and tundra brush while listening to my Pawns chatter (they do have a lot of nice, new, hilariously vacant dialogue). But just often enough, I’d turn a corner or emerge from a cave to find that some clever designer had placed some dazzling surprise in my way: a gorgeous frozen lake, a chimera silhouette looming in the fog, or sunlight filtering down onto buried ruins. This DLC keeps with a good Dragon’s Dogma tradition of making risky curiosity rewarding, whether that reward is treasure, a hidden dungeon, a monster that will completely decimate your unprepared party, or just a cool vista. I had to keep busting out this game’s (still clunky) photo mode to capture it all.
On the subject of variety, though, there’s been some concern that Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen will mostly just recycle the same monsters from the base game. And yeah. Mostly it does. They’re all variations, of course: you will fight so many saurians blasting ice at you, and plenty of big yeti guys that are basically Ogres and Cyclops 2. I thought I would be more annoyed by this than I was. Familiar as most of these encounters are, there were enough little touches of change to keep me on my frozen toes: icicles can be knocked down from above on enemies and allies alike. You can, with some precision, roll snowballs down hills and watch them grow in size until they smack into your foe. Frozen lakes can crack under your feet if you’re too rough on them. Blizzards and whiteouts will come and go, obscuring visibility and sapping your stamina if you’re not careful and don’t occasionally stop to warm yourself. Plus, some of the variations are genuinely pretty cool: I’m a big fan of the griffin using lightning attacks and flailing around far more than I ever remember a griffin in the base game doing.
And of course, there are a few new monsters that are genuinely pretty sick. Most of these are boss encounters required to finish the story. I won’t spoil them here, but one of my favorites did some pretty cool things with fire attacks that I hadn’t seen in a Dragon’s Dogma before, and my partner kept looking over at my screen and pointing out how Capcom had clearly infused Dark Arisen with a bit of Monster Hunter juice.
Dark Arisen doesn’t dramatically change anything about Dragon’s Dogma 2, but it’s also not just more of the exact same Dragon’s Dogma 2 stapled on. It just feels…natural, in the same way it feels natural to psyche yourself up and eventually cross the border into Bakbattahl. With the exception of the absurd way you actually arrive in Norgan at the very start, if you had told me this whole campaign was just part of the original game, I’d fully believe you. It’s challenging in different ways, but spiritually in line with the delightful friction of Dragon’s Dogma 2, and its story even introduces some new twists with interesting implications for the greater lore of the Dragon’s Dogma universe. Having beat Dragon’s Dogma 2 two whole years ago, I was not expecting such a late DLC to suck me back in as completely as Dark Arisen has. But Capcom properly cooked (and not just raw meat on an open fire) with this one, and it’s broken through the clouds of my cynicism and fear around longtime Dragon’s Dogma shepherd Hideaki Itsuno leaving back in 2024. The dragons, and their dogma, seem to be in good hands.
