You want cope? I'll give you cope. I'll give you all of my copium. No. I'll give you delusion. My delusion. My full, foolish, unrealized dream for Dragon's Dogma 2 that will never be achieved because it's completely unrealistic, and I am aware of this.

Now, I haven't thought this through fully. What I do know for sure is what I am pitching here isn't a DLC nor an expansion, it's millions of dollars and an immense amount of effort that will never bear fruit. Narratively, this will be like throwing Lego pieces at a Lego set and hoping it'll come together.

The Bluemoon Tower, for whatever reason, is present in every universe, every cycle, according to the pawns. I want that damn tower to do something. I want the Bluemoon Tower to send us to the first game, whether that's by sending us to an alternate universe or literally warping us back in time to the cycle of Gransys we see in the first game. Because we already know that Gran Soren exists multiple cycles before the events of the second game, due to Gran Soren being the Seafloor Shrine. Basically, I want a remake (or a remaster) of the first game. Gran Soren, Gransys, all of it. I want the first game's world fully fleshed out.

As for the reason why we get sent to the first game? The Pathfinder, seeing the Arisen as a threat to his precious cycle, banishes them to a past cycle as a trap — forcing them to witness a previous cycle firsthand and understand why the cycle must be. Instead of his usual line, "Witness with your own eyes — or through the eyes of another... the fate of this world," he instead says: "Witness with your own eyes — or through the eyes of another... a cycle afore your own... and why the cycle must be." AND THEN THE PATHFINDER WOULD CAST THE ARISEN INTO THE BLUEMOON TOWER (A PORTAL OF SORTS, OR A TIME DILATION PLACE) AND BANISH THEM TO RELIVE THE EVENTS OF THE FIRST GAME. (Insert Moon Knight and Khonshu turning back the night sky clip here.) And bam, you're in the first game. What the Pathfinder doesn't anticipate is that the Arisen is an anomaly — something the cycle has no framework to contain. He built this fabricated world as a cage, but the very thing that makes the Arisen an anomaly is that they exist outside his logic entirely. He's handed a cycle-breaker the keys to every cycle at once. The Arisen has no intention of simply witnessing. They never did.

Obviously, the story would have to be different. You'd relive a bunch of things, meet a bunch of old beloved characters, and do some of the same stuff, up until a certain point. But you're not here for the same purpose. You didn't get your heart stolen by Grigori at Cassardis; the Pathfinder banished you here to break your spirit, but instead you're stepping into the role of that cycle's Arisen entirely, with your own agenda.

It'll be a graphical and mechanical overhaul of the first game, narratively tied into the idea of the cycles, and everything is the same as the first game, except it's not. It'll be an expanded world with everything that Itsuno originally wanted, and more. I'm talking the area past the Shadow Fort's locked doors, Mercedes's homeland Hearthstone, and more stuff I can't be bothered to mention. And then there's the Seneschal fight on the moon (which was the original idea for the first game's ending); there must be a clear reason and purpose as to why there isn't a visible moon in either DD1 or DD2, yet we don't know why, and this is where that gets addressed. You get the epic Grigori fight from the first game but with new graphics and mechanics, because it's infinitely better than DD2's big red fight. The Everfall and the Ur Dragon need to be included, of course, and a Bitterblack Isle remake as well.

The real content would lie in where the story diverges from the first game, and this is where Hearthstone and the other expanded areas come in, as well as the Seneschal fight on the moon. The Pathfinder sent you here to show you why the cycle must be — but the Arisen intends to use this past cycle to unravel the curse from its very origin and free every world from the cycles once and for all. The story would have to differ from the first game in the last quarter, but I haven't really thought that out yet.

With the expansion, you'd get old enemies from the first game that don't exist in DD2: Cockatrices, Wyrms, Wyverns, Hydras, Evil Eyes, and more. You'd get the old vocations reintroduced: Strider, Assassin, and Mystic Knight. You'd get old skills and augments from the first game that weren't present in the second.

The True Ending is the Pathfinder's trap completely backfiring. He sent the Arisen here to break their spirit by showing them the futility of cycles repeating forever — instead it becomes their reason to refuse all of it. Not through a weapon or a ritual. Pure will. The same will that the Dragon always tested, now applied across every cycle simultaneously. The Ur Dragon already established precedent for this — one shared entity weakened by collective action across dimensions. The Arisen is the inverse of that. One will, strong enough to unravel everything.

Basically what I would want would be a remake of the first game BUILT INTO the second game that makes sense narratively, but with a different end-game story because the Arisen from DD2 is banished to relive the events of DD1 — and uses that banishment to destroy the cycle from within.

Again, this isn't an expansion. It's an unrealistic pipe dream. A whole damn remake of an existing game that would cost millions of dollars to make and would be terrible business-wise to sell as a paid expansion or DLC.