Capcom’s latest fantasy role-playing game, Dragon’s Dogma 2, has won tremendous plaudits for a simple feature that it offers – the grab button. The button, which is initially introduced at the start of the game to enable players to carry rocks from a mine, can be used for almost anything – rocks can be hurled at unsuspecting skeletons, for example, or used to bowl the skeleton itself into the rest of the games bony cronies in response. For the massive beasts that are beyond a player’s ability to lift, there are alternatives, such as clutching a griffin’s feathers and holding on for dear life when it takes flight, for instance.
Even non-playable characters like Pawns get in on the act, and if one of your allies is injured in battle, another character will often carry their body over to you to revive. In one instance, a newly-recruited Pawn, a large naked mage named Bob, proved his worth by charging into the heat of the fight to pin down a rampaging goblin, holding it on the ground until the player landed the finishing blow. However, the simplest pleasure in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is still throwing things from massive heights, causing the player to feel a slight dopamine rush when the enemy hits the water below.
The grab button in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is becoming somewhat of a phenomenon in the gaming world, with tales of players lobbing chickens, treating each other’s pawns as javelins, and even sadistically feeding bandits to The Brine. Part of the appeal of the game’s grab function seems to be that it allows players to indulge their imaginations and creativity, perhaps reminiscent of their youth, when everything was seemingly possible in their imagination.
The game’s grab feature is just one example of how games have begun to reward out-of-the-box thinking over their limitations. Games such as The Legend Of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Dungeons & Dragons, and Baldur’s Gate 3, among others, have all recently embraced creativity and imagination over more constricted styles of play. Many reviews of Dragon’s Dogma 2 have lauded the game as an early Game Of The Year contender, and fans are beginning to agree with them, starting a whisper of speculation that the game could well end up taking home games top honours by year’s end
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