Dragon's Dogma 2 speedrunner proves the game's most powerful strat is cardio by sprinting through the game in under 2 hours wearing just his undies

pcgamer.com:

The pen is mightier than the sword, but it turns out that good cardio blows them both out of the water—as proven by Infected Durian, who beat Dragon's Dogma 2 with nothing but his bare hands, a crew of elite nudist supporters, and endurance running.

«Today I thought we'd do something a little bit different and do a fists-only, no armour speedrun of Dragon's Dogma 2,» announces streamer Infected Durian, before embarking on a shockingly short journey in his skivvies through the lands of Vernworth and beyond (thanks, GamesRadar).

There's a few reasons why he's able to pull this off. First up, while Dragon's Dogma 2 has a NG+ system, monsters won't actually scale with your level. Despite having zero protection from the elements or axes flung his way, turns out that the laws of physics in DD2 are stats-driven: If you die when you're stabbed, you just didn't get on that grindset enough.

I say «mostly», because even so much as a stiff breeze sends his buck-naked adventurer staggering, which is where his pawns come in. The Pawns you can recruit scale off your character's level, too, so Infected Durian spends most of the run protected by a band of summoned adventurers who're contractually obligated to engage in the world's strangest game of Protect the President.

The last reason this works is because, as I found during my playthrough, the meat of DD2 comes not from a lengthy main quest, but the fact that you'll get distracted by neat little caves and monster attacks. Or, as was in my case, harpies and griffins hurling you off those useless Battahli ski lifts—something that happens to him at around 1:14:00 in the vod. See? It's not just me! I'm feeling very vindicated right now.

Dragon's Dogma 2 has a pseudo-Breath of the Wild structure where (aside from a few main story quests) the game is mostly about running from place to place, meaning you can sprint through most of it with no repercussions. And because of that aforementioned lack of scaling, NG+ is especially vulnerable