Wrapped this up after around 130 hours. It was not a playthrough set upon with the explicit goal of "I'll do everything", but rather a naturalistic result of being so engaged with the presented material that it just happened to turn out that way; I only stopped playing the game when it stopped playing with me.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is among the best open world games I've played because it's antithetical to many of their common tenets, or at least slanted in an unconventional direction as it navigates them. You do still have fast travel options, but they're either resource-dependent, manually placed, or contextualized through the mundane services of the world via the oxcarts, and limited in their destinations. You can "go anywhere" but the nature of the world's level design in its topography eschews wide-open expanses, and instead thrives on narrow bottlenecks and serially tiered elevation differences, which along with the deadliness of bodies of water place strict physical limitations on where travel is possible or reasonably safe even absent of live threats. A simple crossing of borders between national lines is framed and feels like a monumental achievement, both because of the trek required to reach the checkpoint, and how you choose to gain that passage and permission (the routes and methods number several). So much of the game is defined by its unwillingness and disinterest in worshipping at the altar of player convenience if the sacrifice at stake happens to be verisimilitude of the world in context of one's interactions with it, and because of that restraint it places itself in an almost singularly unique position of managing to captivate through the most nominally standard of means, since every present element enjoys elevated import in the absence of expediting shortcuts.
In so doing, the game is generally at its best in the wilderness it has dedicated so much of itself to conceptualizing. This is a virtual hiker's dream, in the same way I imagine and assume something like Death Stranding is--the difference is just that while I may not want to suffer the Kojima-isms to get at that experience, I am willing to engage with the Itsuno-isms here; in the hilariously frequent scuffles against the game's admittedly narrow scope of standard foes. I do not consider these bouts intrusive no matter their frequency, because every one of them is manually placed in their location, and so they can be internalized over time, avoided if possible, and similar configurations of enemies can play out as completely different encounters if the environment around them differs. It's a gorgeous world to look at--likely the first time a game's utilization of ray-tracing to amplify lighting has stood out to me--but the way it worms its way into your recollection as distinct locales, paths, regions and even individual confrontations endows it with a thoroughly bespoke sensation as a play experience despite so much of the aesthetic footprint avoiding a theme park-esque cacophony of individual landmarks, and primarily remixes its fundamentals in various configurations to define its landscape with. One of the game's sidequest types is people who are fond of you showing up at your home's doorstep asking to accompany them for a walk in the wilderness to a set destination; these quests are not complicated or flashy, and their material rewards are miniscule. Most of the time, I accepted the invitations--not because I was trying to game or grind out the simple affinity system, but because going for a walk in the game's world sounded like what I wanted to do anyway.
There's much in the game that communicates a simpatico wavelength to Monster Hunter, though I am far from an expert. Obviously, you take on large monsters in group-preferred play scenarios, but the heft and inertia common to both is highly influential to the overall gamefeel. Even compared to the first Dragon's Dogma, 2 has rendered the physicality of movement into a more committed direction, with the hand-animated character rigs having given way to motion-captured animation; the snappiness that connected the game to its fighting game lineage has mostly diminished here in ways that are likely to put off players that prefer precision and response in how a character feels to control. From my perspective the shift is an extension and indication of the game's material differences even compared to its very similar predecessor--differences that are echoed in the rest of the game's design and so do not feel out of place in its nature. For Monster Hunter, the world exists for the monsters, to house and contextualize them--they are the main event in the spotlight. Dragon's Dogma 2, in its presentation of its creatures, storytelling, play mechanics, and quest structures, does nearly everything for the sake of its world, to sell its scale and tactile reality of inhabiting it, sometimes at the cost and tradeoff of what you "shouldn't do" according to convention and expectation. It's full of memorable oddities that exist thanks to the number of influencing systems running in the background at all times, resulting in the clashing friction that creates emergent moments out of baseline materials time and time again, and it signals toward a simulation of its genre trappings, as both a fantasy genre work and its adaptation into a video game framework, through dedicated depiction of all of its facets, including the downtime, the long hours on the road, and the sheer, unmitigated and occasionally clumsy roteness of it all.
Because the game features the star director it does and what its own precedent encompasses, it's likely that an expectation exists for Dragon's Dogma 2 to be a hardcore action game; something adjacent to the sweaty combo-fiend games it derives from and shares lineage with. That is not the case from any perspective I could glean--rather, the game embraces its nature as the extended camper-hiker travelogue it's structured around, where it only impresses resistance upon the player through sustained effects instead of singular, highly demanding roadblocks. According to my end-game tally, I died once and used a Wakestone on myself 17 times; the lone death was entirely by choice as I wanted to see how the game would handle it, and of the demises I reverted with resources, I would wager more than half were the result of falls from too great a height instead of combat. The game is simply not interested in threatening the player through the customs of the genre: healing is functionally limitless at all times; several vocations possess "let's not take damage anymore" skills that are effortless to reapply as needed; other such amenities abound in nearly any situation the player is thrust into.
The yet again unique proposition the game lands on is that none of this actually tracks as a problem: fighting remains fun and interesting because it's never really about the challenge, but about playing around with your options and observing the reactions of the opposition as you do. Like Monster Hunter, the advantage of the presentation sought out and realized here over almost anything else is that the things you fight possess an inimitable physicality to them that does not evaporate even upon death as their carcasses continue to command the space they took in life. The weight of the giants fought and the physics-informed clashes of their bulk against that employed by the player is what propels the fantasy of RPG combat to heights nothing else is even trying to capture in the same way, and it never needs to resort to or chase the same "let's see you dodge this ten-hit string with delayed mix-ups" meta-trends that much of the rest of the genre is preoccupied with. You don't exact a surgical precision on an enemy's animation routines to build up a stagger gauge that opens them up for Real Damage, but rather exploit the weak points of their anatomy, literally knock them over through sufficient impact, and deal damage as fast as you have the means to absent of artificial pacemakers informing the offense's efficacy. It is, through invoking a more basic standard of design, looping back and coming off as novel and fresh because its subscription to genre and industry convention stands at a minimum.
In this game, you can encounter the Sphinx. It inhabits a remote location where nothing mandates your approach; you may never discover it. It will pose riddles to you, and they will take you hours to solve even if you aren't stymied by many. They may vex and frustrate you; you may be aggravated of what is being asked of you... or delighted by the answers and problem-solving methods that are deemed satisfactory. You can "fail" these interactions through myriad means, and even when you're acing them, the pressure imposed upon you by the Sphinx's words, its overwhelming gaze and the sheer otherworldly presence it exudes may leave you to second-guess yourself and your choices. Many things can happen, many places will be visited, and many emotions may be felt along the way, wondering if you didn't already stray irrerversibly off the beaten path at some point. Whatever the outcome, that was Dragon's Dogma 2 to me.