Directly in front of me was Battahl’s main gate, my path into the open world.
To my right, there was an NPC who wished to give me a quest.
Behind me there was a looming, conspicuous looking temple.
My choices were clear.
It wouldn’t take too long for me to be humbled.
After easily dispatching some Saurians, I was naturally set upon by a Griffin.
It looked oddly deserted.
Perhaps I should have known better.
Halfway up the extremely narrow, fun-sized path, a flock of Harpies suddenly attacked my party.
The fall damage cut my maximum health to less than a quarter of what I had originally started with.
Several Harpies circled above me, and Mally was nowhere to be seen.
I turned on my lantern.
I was surrounded by goblins.
With 40 health points and a bow, fighting them in such an enclosed space felt impossible.
Even though I managed to kill 20 of them, there seemed to be no end to their numbers.
“Goblins ill like fire, Arisen!”
Our victory prompted Mally to run up to me and offer a high five.
A few goblins laid in ambush outside, but the open landscape allowed me to dispatch them with ease.
Mally commended me on a job well done.
I was starting to feel extremely guilty for abandoning her less than 20 minutes prior.
Itsuno-san’s explanation of how he designed Dragon’s Dogma 2’s map made this sound intentional.
Mally motioned toward a campsite in the distance, and I could spy a small village just beyond it.
One of the pawns I enlisted, a Thief named Rose, was rather brash and obnoxious.
She was immediately critical, admonishing me for having low health.
Upon speaking to Rose, she offered to show me where I could find it.
I followed her through its maze-like walls and into a small opening in its centre.
The fall damage from dropping through it immediately killed me.
The loot here was, just as Rose had promised, quite incredible.
As soon as we emerged from the underground, our old friend the jet black wyvern ambushed us.
“There’s 10 vocations in the game, the 10 out there we’ve made public.”
Yet when I spoke to several of the NPCs in Vermund, I was treated as a mere commoner.
Some treated me as a nuisance.
One even implied that he didn’t believe I was the Arisen entirely.
Whoever this king is, he and I were clearly not the same person.
I asked Itsuno-san about the title screen, and what it was trying to imply.
His cryptic response left me with more questions than answers.
That said, I do have a theory.
But what if Itsuno-san meant it in a literal sense?
