Capcom had plenty of cool titles on offer when I was finalizing my appointment details with them at Tokyo Game Show 2026. I guess I could’ve gone hands-on with the new Monster Hunter Wilds expansion. People are crazy about that game, right? But instead, I decided to spend my precious 30 minutes on Dragon’s Dogma II. With how little love that game got at launch and in the weeks after, I was most excited to see how Dark Arisen would improve on its foundations. It did not disappoint.
For this demo, I got to explore a little of the snowy Norgan region as the Fighter Vocation. Dark Arisen introduces a bunch of new skills for each Vocation, and the Fighter definitely felt much speedier and more powerful. The Fighter is now able to buff up with fire-based attacks — pretty much a must-have for the Norgan region — and also perform finishers that are both quick and strong.
The highlight of the demo was getting to face off against what I assume is the first boss of Dragon’s Dogma II: Dark Arisen, a scary-looking with dragon that pukes up blue goo and hordes of undead. The fight played out like your typical dragon encounter in the base game, but being able to climb up on its back and beat away at its weak points is a feature that never gets old. The new vocation skills also helped to make combat feel just that bit more varied, and I’m looking forward to see what else this expansion does to power up the various vocations.
The battle ended once I got the dragon down to about half health, as a cutscene played and I was introduced to newcomer Eir. It’s worth noting that I had to play this demo in Japanese so I didn’t entirely understand what Eir was saying, but basically, she vanquished the dragon, opened up a portal to some other dimension and beckoned me to follow. One of the complaints I had about the base game was that the NPCs were pretty lackluster and boring, and just from her brief introduction alone, Eir seems like she has the potential to become a badass companion and I’m all about having more bad bitches in video games.
I also got to play around with the new and improved Rogue in the demo. Not that the Rogue needed all that much improvement to be honest, since it was already pretty strong in the base game. Still, the new Rogue skills are exactly what you’d expect: speedier and flashier moves, with aerial spins and insane dashes that let you zip across large distances quickly. I’ve never been much of a Rogue fan, but the difference in speed from the Fighter was night and day, and I might honestly consider switching over to the Rogue vocation for this upcoming expansion.
Overall, I don’t think Dark Arisen necessarily does anything groundbreakingly new that we haven’t already seen in the original game, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing either. From what I’ve played at least, it seems like Capcom is simply focused on building on its foundations, while also introducing new areas and storylines that will hopefully be more nuanced and interesting than what we got the first time around. I have pretty high hopes for Dark Arisen, and I’ll definitely be looking to check it out on day one.
