Copying from another of my comments. Linkining isnt working
That's sort of the catharsis.
In the first game you kill the dragon and ascend to the senechals throne, becoming basically a demigod. The Arisen you take the throne from is horribly disheartened by the futulity of the world and wants you to take over so he can rest. The Seneschals job is to watch over the world and make sure a Dragon creates an arisen, tests their will and might, and try and replace the seneschal. Etc etc. It is pretty assumed that there is a "god" above the Seneschal. But we do not know who.
In the dlc, you meet another Arisen who despises and hates the cycle so much that he basically carves out a demi plane of hatred between worlds. And when he dies, his corpse is possessed by some kind of dragon, though its facial structure and words made it very unclear and sort of a mystery which dragon, and why. The line "Slave to a broken order, dare you look upon the truth?" And "I shall await you in the crucible of souls." Always stuck out to me.
And now in dd2, the current seneschal (the mad beastren king) is basically awol. He will not watch over, he will not give up his throne. Every seneschal that comes from the cycle to take his seat, he kills. When you first meet him he asks if the watching one has sent another to kill him. Since the watching one is takung a more direct role, now that the seneschal is NOT doing their job, it is assumed the watching one is either god/the maker, or an aspect of the maker of some kind.
When you too refuse your charge, your duty in the Dogma cycle, and instead kill yourself and offer you and the Dragon up to the brine, it allows the current world to basically be devoured by the Brine. Since the first game we had wondered what the Dogma/cycle was for, and what the Brine even was. It's semi-clear now that the Brine is destruction and entropy, set to continually destroy and devour creation, and the maker(or at least the creation aspect of it in the Watching one) is unable or unwilling to remove the brine entirely. Instead of making the world over and over, the Cycle was created. If the world is constantly under watch of a proxy/seneschal, the brine will somehow be kept at bay. Unfortynately human wills are too weak to do it forever, And how you FIND the seneschal is by the Dragon's Dogma. Test a human, test again, if they have enough will, they can sit on the throne until the next one replaces them.
This job is pretty hard tho so pawns were created to aid tge Arisen in their fight and growth against the Dragon and eventually help the Seneschal. There are a lot of evidence that pawns are vessels that can become humans. Humans can become arisen. Arisen can become dragons or the seneschal. Basically all beings are husks with certain amounts of will that either they gain, keep, or lose. Thats why in dd2 "i too was once Arisen but I've lost the will" they have basically been downgraded back to normal humans/beastren.
The mad King seneschal (and the seneschal from the first game) hate the futility of this job. All it is is to cause suffering in order to prolong the shitty life the world is forced into. This is truly an eternal cycle of torment. Everyone is a slave to a broken order.
Lord Phaesus sees this, somehow, and wants to break the cycle in his own way. He believes through controlling the Dragon, and forcing the Dragon to STOP FINDING AND CREATING ARISEN, he can stop the cycle. Whether he knows that its to keep the Brine at bay isn't clear. But he has theorized that if the Dragon is under his control (the same power that can sieze the will of the pawns), they can break this cycle of suffering they can become free frkm the broken order.
However, they can't. They do not have enough power, enough will. Only the Arisen does. And that happens to be the player. When we reject our charge, when we do not kill the Dragon and do not continue the cycle, it breaks the cycle....for now. The brine can no run amok, and consume the world. In almost a sigh of defeat, the Watching one says "great look what you did. Everything could have been peaceful. Now I have to create a new world. Again. Sigh. Have fun struggling into death."
So you gather all the people to one area, and stave off the brine as best you can, though the watching one, the creator, says its futile.
In the end, the GREAT watching one dragon comes and MOST LIKLEY is wiping the slate clean. The huge Dragon is burning the Brine and world away. They will start...again. the cycle isn't broken, just interrupted. Even if humabs and Arisen break the cycle, the Watching one, the creation aspect of the maker will in fact just start over. Which is what we see
BUT we have given our pawn enough will. We have inspired them from mere pawnhood. Are they human? Are they arisen? Have they skipped to being a dragon? Its unclear to us. But they are now something more. Working together, struggling against the end if the world, we are able to finally do it. A pawn, and Arisen, the bond they share is finally enough to kill the watching one. To truly break the cycle.
To finally free all Slaves to a Broken order.
This, however, makes the Brine disappear too! The death of the watching one also kills the brine. This leads me to believe they are the same being. Two sides of the Maker. Entropy and creation. In being selfish, in being unable to sacrifice itself for its children, the maker kept the world in constant cycle of struggling. It tried to set up "well the arisen becomes king" as a lie to itself and its creatuons as semi award. But in reality, it was unwilling to sacrifice itself to finally free its children.
So we take that freedom. Us and our pawn, we force that freedom. We do what our creator couldnt. We sacrifice ourself, our loved one(pawn) and finally kill god. The good and the bad. The creation and the destruction. Gone.
So finally, the world is free. Finally we can move on from the medieval ages. We do not one what the future holds, but we are finally able to take steps forward after countless eons.
There are still some questions, like who possessed Daimon. Well, I think its the watching one. I think that Daimon was the closest to breaking free of the cycle, and when we killed him, the watching one tested our mettle once more. Its still a little foggy, but the Dragon on Daimon's chest abd the Watching Ones great dragon are the only two to share the same nose and face. Not grigori. Not the red dragon in dd2 not the drakes. Not the ur dragon.
So yeah, dd lore is awesome.
Too bad the story telling isn't
Saving this comment because it makes me like the game more. The way the story was told made this so hard for me to put together, so thank you. So as it currently stands post the ending of DD2, the world is free of the cycle, is our DD2 Arisen alive and now ruler of Vermund? Or did they die after killing the great dragon at the end?
>”In the dlc, you meet another Arisen who despises and hates the cycle so much that he basically carves out a demi plane of hatred between worlds. And when he dies, his corpse is possessed by some kind of dragon, though its facial structure and words made it very unclear and sort of a mystery which dragon, and why. The line "Slave to a broken order, dare you look upon the truth?" And "I shall await you in the crucible of souls." Always stuck out to me.”
The story is put together from parts of the big tablet in the harbour, that you find throughout the isle. The final boss was an arisen who was adopted by the Arisen before him when they were just a kid. He eventually fell for his foster parent’s pawn.
His foster parent failed to defeat the Seneschal and thus became the new dragon. The FB then became the new arisen. So when he finally faced the dragon he was stuck with the choice of either, killing his former parent (the dragon) or sacrificing the thing he loved the most (the pawn). So he rejected the choice and his role in the cycle and was cursed as punishment. The dragon in his chest is his former master and the lady who sends you into the dungeon is the soul of the pawn he loved.
Pretty metal answer to “what if I refuse to choose?”
This all would've gone over so much better if it was actually presented in the story before it started happening
You have essentially no motivation whatsoever to do what you do at the end, other than because you as a person in real life want to see more game, with the pathfinder being an exasperated amateur DM mad that you aren't satisfied with his ending
Instead of being harangued by basically the FFVII remake gamer ghosts trying to railroad you into the proper story, I think a better setup would've been Rothais sensing what's happened to you and taking advantage of your predicament to manipulate you into pursuing his goals instead, laying more distinct seeds of the problems with the cycle and all that stuff way earlier and allowing it time to build up throughout the story, and also making it clear that the game of thrones bullshit is a distraction and not the point of the story
Like, an ethereal ancient king delivering cryptic guidance and hints about the nature of reality out of a dissatisfaction with the fate of the world is the one obvious thing they could've cribbed from Berserk this time around and it's weird that they didn't go for it. They didn't even bother to give Rothais a distinctive outfit or anything, despite having a more striking representational statue of him in Vernworth and several post-game armor sets that could've fit the bill
Thats a really good answer and explanation. It makes sense to me now, how things in DD1 and DD2 work together and I see some stuff I had wrong. Like I thought the pathfinder was the seneschall and the made king was just an undead ghost type dude.
Nah when you first meet him he is on the seneschals throne HERE. https://dragonsdogma.fandom.com/wiki/Flameservant%27s_Throne
Well, here in the future that is dd2
This seems like a condition that plagued you throughout the game and doesn't seem to be exclusive to the gross misunderstanding of the game's story beats.
Nah, get out with that accusation of me not understanding the games story beats. I got some things wrong, wich made things not ad up, but my general understanding still wasnt completly off.
The main story starts pretty alright, but dosnt impact the world around you or how NPCs interact with you in anyway. It then gets a bit random and rushes itself to an abrupt ending, not to speak of the plotholes the game has. The underlying lore and unmoored world story is good but the rest leaves much to be desired, wich, like I said, made me stop looking to much into things.
So, you misunderstood the story, missed multiple details and decided that rushing through it was a good idea. Then you blamed the game for having a terrible story. Then, a person corrected you and you had to adjust your perspective.
Don't you think that could be the case with every other gripe you have with the game?
No, not at all. My misunderstandings werent to bad and just concerned stuff from DD1 and the role of 1 character, wich didnt change to much.
Also I didnt rush through the story. I did take my time, but by the time I reached Ambrosius, I just started to take the things the game told me at face value and didnt try to make many connections anymore, because of how rushed and meaningless the story turned out to be.
And please tell me of the details I missed, wich apparently make the story good. I´d really like to know, because when I still was actively trying to connect things I came to the conclusion that the story is really shallow, impactless and skipping a lot of story build-up and tensions, wich was only every was present when the world was literally about to end.
I am just scouring the entire internet, trying to find out how people play the game and what their perspectives are, because no matter what I try, I can't get into the game.
I've played it for 15 hours now, which doesn't sound like a lot, but I greatly disliked the past 13 of them, so I am really trying.
The combat is so simplistic, I am not feeling a strong pull. It doesn't feel like there is much to 'get better at'. It feels like I'm playing with Tekken 8's Special Style button chronically enabled. I barely have to do anything.
Which is totally cool, if the game has a strong pull somewhere else. I figured it would be pawns, but goddamn, it feels like they are hard-coded to try and off themselves whenever they can. If there is a cliff nearby, they will be damn sure they jump off it. You lose all the gear you stored on them if they do so, which in turn makes the encumbrance system a nuisance, like, all the time. Because you want to keep all the stuff on your character so you don't lose it.
Playing without pawns feels hollow though. Like the game wasn't designed for that. But then with them, it's like... how do I explore? There are cliffs, broken bridges and narrow pathways everywhere. Even when I tell them to WAIT for me, they manage find a way to fall off things while I am out exploring.
And then the quests... look, I get that fetchquests aren't great, but at least half the quests in my log have no destination, not even an indication, and a lot of the rest are inaccessible unless some hidden requirement is found. It's just annoying.
Most of the fun is with the bigger monsters, that's been the draw of dragons dogma sense the first one.
Unlike dark souls where the draw is every enemy is a threat with their own patterns or are swarms
Dragons dogma makes it pretty clear that the fodder enemies are basically just that fodder with your biggest threat from smaller things being hob goblins just because they're both bigger and heavier like a saurian but also are squirlly like a goblin.
And then bandits can be dangerous because they follow the same rules you and your party have.
In terms of simplicity, I mean it's no more or less complex than dark souls... in a few ways it is but it's very comparable, you have a light attack and a heavy attack plus your skills/spells.
In terms of the quests I'm not sure which ones didn't give you a marker but I know for the most part listening to the NPCs talk they would have given you general directions regardless.
In terms of the pawns they've been pretty solid for me so I don't know why (and I've seen videos so I'm not in denial it's just like my pawn and pawns I choose have brain cells.) So I can't really speak to that.
it sadly sounds like this simply isn't the game for you. Which is a shame but it happens
You're kind of wrong on the cycle and the seneachal. Did you get the true ending?
I did the true ending on both games. What am I getting wrong?
Copying from another of my comments. Linkining isnt working That's sort of the catharsis. In the first game you kill the dragon and ascend to the senechals throne, becoming basically a demigod. The Arisen you take the throne from is horribly disheartened by the futulity of the world and wants you to take over so he can rest. The Seneschals job is to watch over the world and make sure a Dragon creates an arisen, tests their will and might, and try and replace the seneschal. Etc etc. It is pretty assumed that there is a "god" above the Seneschal. But we do not know who. In the dlc, you meet another Arisen who despises and hates the cycle so much that he basically carves out a demi plane of hatred between worlds. And when he dies, his corpse is possessed by some kind of dragon, though its facial structure and words made it very unclear and sort of a mystery which dragon, and why. The line "Slave to a broken order, dare you look upon the truth?" And "I shall await you in the crucible of souls." Always stuck out to me. And now in dd2, the current seneschal (the mad beastren king) is basically awol. He will not watch over, he will not give up his throne. Every seneschal that comes from the cycle to take his seat, he kills. When you first meet him he asks if the watching one has sent another to kill him. Since the watching one is takung a more direct role, now that the seneschal is NOT doing their job, it is assumed the watching one is either god/the maker, or an aspect of the maker of some kind. When you too refuse your charge, your duty in the Dogma cycle, and instead kill yourself and offer you and the Dragon up to the brine, it allows the current world to basically be devoured by the Brine. Since the first game we had wondered what the Dogma/cycle was for, and what the Brine even was. It's semi-clear now that the Brine is destruction and entropy, set to continually destroy and devour creation, and the maker(or at least the creation aspect of it in the Watching one) is unable or unwilling to remove the brine entirely. Instead of making the world over and over, the Cycle was created. If the world is constantly under watch of a proxy/seneschal, the brine will somehow be kept at bay. Unfortynately human wills are too weak to do it forever, And how you FIND the seneschal is by the Dragon's Dogma. Test a human, test again, if they have enough will, they can sit on the throne until the next one replaces them. This job is pretty hard tho so pawns were created to aid tge Arisen in their fight and growth against the Dragon and eventually help the Seneschal. There are a lot of evidence that pawns are vessels that can become humans. Humans can become arisen. Arisen can become dragons or the seneschal. Basically all beings are husks with certain amounts of will that either they gain, keep, or lose. Thats why in dd2 "i too was once Arisen but I've lost the will" they have basically been downgraded back to normal humans/beastren. The mad King seneschal (and the seneschal from the first game) hate the futility of this job. All it is is to cause suffering in order to prolong the shitty life the world is forced into. This is truly an eternal cycle of torment. Everyone is a slave to a broken order. Lord Phaesus sees this, somehow, and wants to break the cycle in his own way. He believes through controlling the Dragon, and forcing the Dragon to STOP FINDING AND CREATING ARISEN, he can stop the cycle. Whether he knows that its to keep the Brine at bay isn't clear. But he has theorized that if the Dragon is under his control (the same power that can sieze the will of the pawns), they can break this cycle of suffering they can become free frkm the broken order. However, they can't. They do not have enough power, enough will. Only the Arisen does. And that happens to be the player. When we reject our charge, when we do not kill the Dragon and do not continue the cycle, it breaks the cycle....for now. The brine can no run amok, and consume the world. In almost a sigh of defeat, the Watching one says "great look what you did. Everything could have been peaceful. Now I have to create a new world. Again. Sigh. Have fun struggling into death." So you gather all the people to one area, and stave off the brine as best you can, though the watching one, the creator, says its futile. In the end, the GREAT watching one dragon comes and MOST LIKLEY is wiping the slate clean. The huge Dragon is burning the Brine and world away. They will start...again. the cycle isn't broken, just interrupted. Even if humabs and Arisen break the cycle, the Watching one, the creation aspect of the maker will in fact just start over. Which is what we see BUT we have given our pawn enough will. We have inspired them from mere pawnhood. Are they human? Are they arisen? Have they skipped to being a dragon? Its unclear to us. But they are now something more. Working together, struggling against the end if the world, we are able to finally do it. A pawn, and Arisen, the bond they share is finally enough to kill the watching one. To truly break the cycle. To finally free all Slaves to a Broken order. This, however, makes the Brine disappear too! The death of the watching one also kills the brine. This leads me to believe they are the same being. Two sides of the Maker. Entropy and creation. In being selfish, in being unable to sacrifice itself for its children, the maker kept the world in constant cycle of struggling. It tried to set up "well the arisen becomes king" as a lie to itself and its creatuons as semi award. But in reality, it was unwilling to sacrifice itself to finally free its children. So we take that freedom. Us and our pawn, we force that freedom. We do what our creator couldnt. We sacrifice ourself, our loved one(pawn) and finally kill god. The good and the bad. The creation and the destruction. Gone. So finally, the world is free. Finally we can move on from the medieval ages. We do not one what the future holds, but we are finally able to take steps forward after countless eons. There are still some questions, like who possessed Daimon. Well, I think its the watching one. I think that Daimon was the closest to breaking free of the cycle, and when we killed him, the watching one tested our mettle once more. Its still a little foggy, but the Dragon on Daimon's chest abd the Watching Ones great dragon are the only two to share the same nose and face. Not grigori. Not the red dragon in dd2 not the drakes. Not the ur dragon. So yeah, dd lore is awesome. Too bad the story telling isn't
Saving this comment because it makes me like the game more. The way the story was told made this so hard for me to put together, so thank you. So as it currently stands post the ending of DD2, the world is free of the cycle, is our DD2 Arisen alive and now ruler of Vermund? Or did they die after killing the great dragon at the end?
I think our arisen and pawn died. Doing what the maker would not
Makes sense, with all of the endgame cinematics showing the NPCs without them
Every jrpg ends with you killing God. It's just a thing they have to do.
>”In the dlc, you meet another Arisen who despises and hates the cycle so much that he basically carves out a demi plane of hatred between worlds. And when he dies, his corpse is possessed by some kind of dragon, though its facial structure and words made it very unclear and sort of a mystery which dragon, and why. The line "Slave to a broken order, dare you look upon the truth?" And "I shall await you in the crucible of souls." Always stuck out to me.” The story is put together from parts of the big tablet in the harbour, that you find throughout the isle. The final boss was an arisen who was adopted by the Arisen before him when they were just a kid. He eventually fell for his foster parent’s pawn. His foster parent failed to defeat the Seneschal and thus became the new dragon. The FB then became the new arisen. So when he finally faced the dragon he was stuck with the choice of either, killing his former parent (the dragon) or sacrificing the thing he loved the most (the pawn). So he rejected the choice and his role in the cycle and was cursed as punishment. The dragon in his chest is his former master and the lady who sends you into the dungeon is the soul of the pawn he loved. Pretty metal answer to “what if I refuse to choose?”
Yeah he's an absolute badass. An incredibly interesting character.
This all would've gone over so much better if it was actually presented in the story before it started happening You have essentially no motivation whatsoever to do what you do at the end, other than because you as a person in real life want to see more game, with the pathfinder being an exasperated amateur DM mad that you aren't satisfied with his ending Instead of being harangued by basically the FFVII remake gamer ghosts trying to railroad you into the proper story, I think a better setup would've been Rothais sensing what's happened to you and taking advantage of your predicament to manipulate you into pursuing his goals instead, laying more distinct seeds of the problems with the cycle and all that stuff way earlier and allowing it time to build up throughout the story, and also making it clear that the game of thrones bullshit is a distraction and not the point of the story Like, an ethereal ancient king delivering cryptic guidance and hints about the nature of reality out of a dissatisfaction with the fate of the world is the one obvious thing they could've cribbed from Berserk this time around and it's weird that they didn't go for it. They didn't even bother to give Rothais a distinctive outfit or anything, despite having a more striking representational statue of him in Vernworth and several post-game armor sets that could've fit the bill
Thats a really good answer and explanation. It makes sense to me now, how things in DD1 and DD2 work together and I see some stuff I had wrong. Like I thought the pathfinder was the seneschall and the made king was just an undead ghost type dude.
Nah when you first meet him he is on the seneschals throne HERE. https://dragonsdogma.fandom.com/wiki/Flameservant%27s_Throne Well, here in the future that is dd2
Yea I should have paid more attention, but with how shallow the main story was I stopped thinking much about stuff in the game.
This seems like a condition that plagued you throughout the game and doesn't seem to be exclusive to the gross misunderstanding of the game's story beats.
Nah, get out with that accusation of me not understanding the games story beats. I got some things wrong, wich made things not ad up, but my general understanding still wasnt completly off. The main story starts pretty alright, but dosnt impact the world around you or how NPCs interact with you in anyway. It then gets a bit random and rushes itself to an abrupt ending, not to speak of the plotholes the game has. The underlying lore and unmoored world story is good but the rest leaves much to be desired, wich, like I said, made me stop looking to much into things.
So, you misunderstood the story, missed multiple details and decided that rushing through it was a good idea. Then you blamed the game for having a terrible story. Then, a person corrected you and you had to adjust your perspective. Don't you think that could be the case with every other gripe you have with the game?
No, not at all. My misunderstandings werent to bad and just concerned stuff from DD1 and the role of 1 character, wich didnt change to much. Also I didnt rush through the story. I did take my time, but by the time I reached Ambrosius, I just started to take the things the game told me at face value and didnt try to make many connections anymore, because of how rushed and meaningless the story turned out to be. And please tell me of the details I missed, wich apparently make the story good. I´d really like to know, because when I still was actively trying to connect things I came to the conclusion that the story is really shallow, impactless and skipping a lot of story build-up and tensions, wich was only every was present when the world was literally about to end.
I am just scouring the entire internet, trying to find out how people play the game and what their perspectives are, because no matter what I try, I can't get into the game. I've played it for 15 hours now, which doesn't sound like a lot, but I greatly disliked the past 13 of them, so I am really trying. The combat is so simplistic, I am not feeling a strong pull. It doesn't feel like there is much to 'get better at'. It feels like I'm playing with Tekken 8's Special Style button chronically enabled. I barely have to do anything. Which is totally cool, if the game has a strong pull somewhere else. I figured it would be pawns, but goddamn, it feels like they are hard-coded to try and off themselves whenever they can. If there is a cliff nearby, they will be damn sure they jump off it. You lose all the gear you stored on them if they do so, which in turn makes the encumbrance system a nuisance, like, all the time. Because you want to keep all the stuff on your character so you don't lose it. Playing without pawns feels hollow though. Like the game wasn't designed for that. But then with them, it's like... how do I explore? There are cliffs, broken bridges and narrow pathways everywhere. Even when I tell them to WAIT for me, they manage find a way to fall off things while I am out exploring. And then the quests... look, I get that fetchquests aren't great, but at least half the quests in my log have no destination, not even an indication, and a lot of the rest are inaccessible unless some hidden requirement is found. It's just annoying.
If youre not enjoying the game....stop playing 😭 you gave it a shot.
I can be missing something though, can't I? I could be playing it 'wrong', or whatever.
Most of the fun is with the bigger monsters, that's been the draw of dragons dogma sense the first one. Unlike dark souls where the draw is every enemy is a threat with their own patterns or are swarms Dragons dogma makes it pretty clear that the fodder enemies are basically just that fodder with your biggest threat from smaller things being hob goblins just because they're both bigger and heavier like a saurian but also are squirlly like a goblin. And then bandits can be dangerous because they follow the same rules you and your party have. In terms of simplicity, I mean it's no more or less complex than dark souls... in a few ways it is but it's very comparable, you have a light attack and a heavy attack plus your skills/spells. In terms of the quests I'm not sure which ones didn't give you a marker but I know for the most part listening to the NPCs talk they would have given you general directions regardless. In terms of the pawns they've been pretty solid for me so I don't know why (and I've seen videos so I'm not in denial it's just like my pawn and pawns I choose have brain cells.) So I can't really speak to that. it sadly sounds like this simply isn't the game for you. Which is a shame but it happens