Detailed Character Creators Like Dragon’s Dogma 2 Are My Worst Nightmare

Highlights

Building your protagonist in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a mammoth task with endless possibilities for customization.
Tweaking every detail from hip width to nose curvature can quickly become obsessive in the character creator.
Choosing a name for your Arisen can be a struggle after hours of customization, leading to underwhelming results.

The hook of a brand-new RPG is the meaty character creator rolled out like a welcome mat to bring your protagonist to life. The thought of adjusting bone structure, skin pigmentation, and iris color to build a hero worthy of saving the world is a mammoth but exciting task, and regarding the customization options in Dragon’s Dogma 2, the possibilities are endless. Equipped with tools to create homebrewed pop culture characters, like Paul Atreides from Dune or Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher, I thought Capcom’s character creator was the best thing since sliced bread until it wasn’t.

To build your Arisen from the ground up, there’s a wealth of customizable face and body features to put our creator to shame, but there’s also a catalog of handy presets to get you started. It’s no exaggeration, you can build a Human or Beastren from scratch, either designed to look exactly like yourself, a fictional character, or a fabrication of your imagination. Hip width, thigh girth, brow density, and nose curvature are pebbles in an ocean of choices, as every Dragon’s Dogma 2 player will know, and while this depth of character crafting is exciting on paper, the process is a very different experience – especially for a neurospicy gamer like myself.

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Choosing A Hairstyle Is Light Work, Brow Depth Is Not

My plight in crafting a respectable Arisen began with a preset, but the collection of foundations wasn’t particularly impressive, so I slowly warped that poor, bland dude’s entire being into oblivion. Selecting a basic body type and even sculpting the jaw structure was light work in the beginning, but as with any character creator, I quickly became obsessive and tailored each asset to what I deemed passable without considering how each component appeared cohesively. A chiseled face is not a good look for broad shoulders, for example, which is why presets are generally sound foundations constructed by professionals with an eye for proportion, i.e. not myself.

By the time I escaped the 7th circle of Hell, tweaking nostril width, chin dimples, and pupil sizes, the initial novelty of this endeavor had well and truly died. Once I arrived at the easier options like hairstyles and scar additions, the care and attention to detail towards my Arisen’s mold went out the window and I couldn’t help but wish the whole process was over. The worst part was I had no choice but to continue for fear of having a lop-sided, half-finished character to tolerate through the entire prologue and beyond. Therefore, I persevered and somehow managed to chisel out a heroic, uncanny valley version of myself that nearly left me blind from squinting at sliders for so long.

Once I arrived at the easier options like hairstyle and scar additions, the care and attention to detail towards my Arisen’s craft went out the window and I couldn’t help but wish it was over.

After nearly three hours of morphing my character, I arrived at the walk and voice customization. I nervously remembered reading about another player’s mishap after mistakenly choosing the wrong walking style for their character, resulting in their hero waddling around the kingdom instead of swaggering. I carefully selected a reasonable strut that negated any hunchback comparisons or mimicked Fall Guys sprints. The voice options were slim pickings, so I selected one that didn’t resemble a demon or anime character. Unfortunately, there was one more hurdle: choosing a name for my Arisen, which inevitably took me into my fourth hour of this trap.

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Choosing A Fantasy Name Quickly Is A Skill I Need To Sharpen

I often create fictional character names that are subtle expansions of my name, adapted to fit the fantasy, magical, or cyberpunk realms. However, staring at the blank name box, I couldn’t muster one shred of creativity since the character creator had left me depleted and defeated. Borrowing a name I used in Hogwart’s Legacy, I finally completed the painstaking activity and cursed the day I ever bought Capcom’s sequel – I didn’t even have the energy to play for long afterward. You can imagine my upset when I realized I could put the same level of customization into my first Pawn, whom I met in the first camp – safe to say, she got a swift preset.

You can imagine my upset when I realized you could put the same level of customization into your first Pawn…safe to say she got a swift preset.

The irony of this experience is my Arisen’s final appearance was extremely underwhelming. My head was too small for my shoulders, my walk was too fluid, and customizing my character to look even remotely like me was a mistake because it resulted in a dreadful Deepfake creation. Despite the frustration I experienced during the game’s tedious customization process, I’m confident I’ll pour my time and dedication into creating another character when the next RPG comes around, or when I finally sit down with Baldur’s Gate 3. On that day, however, I’ll make sure my hero doesn’t look like my creepy doppelgänger.