Dragon's Dogma Review

It's pretty rare that I don't know what I think about something. My thoughts are rarely concise and entirely logical, but 9 times out of 10, I know what something means to me. Dragon's Dogma, however, has left me completely confounded. Even now, days after finishing the main quest and hanging up my adventurers hat, I'm still not entirely sure what just happened and how it makes me feel. So, I'm left with a lot to talk about, but maybe no final conclusion, which is kind of a cardinal sin when it comes to reviewing. Here I am, trying to offer you a clear and concise guide to what to expect for your money, and I can hardly even tell you if it was worth my money, a rare, almost extinct species. I'm hoping that by the end of this article, after finally getting all my thoughts on page, together we can reach a conclusion. It's quite serendipitous, in a way, as this feeling of journeying without really knowing where I'm going or how I'm going to get there, almost sums up the experience of Dragon's Dogma. But the quest is given and excepted, we need only follow the marker and hope what awaits us is an answer.

I'm not usually one to judge on first impressions, as I tend to make bad ones myself. This is fortunate for Dragon's Dogma, as it's first impressions are hardly, well, impressive. After a gorgeous, if confusing, cutscene of a mighty dragon being birthed form the sky admist a sea of harpies (of all things), we are then greeted by a small seaside village (yes, it's one of those stories) and the ugliest graphics engine I've seen in a long time. Now, I'm going to make this point fast and early, becomes I'm going to talk about graphics a lot and want to make my position clear. I am not a graphics whore, I often believe that graphics are not integral to the enjoyment of a game provided they don't interfere with the mechanics. I'm wholly unaffected by the turgid graphics of such games as Deus Ex, or Duke Nukem 3D as they have nothing to do with the overall enjoyment of the piece. However, in Dragon's Dogma, my problem is not with how awful the graphics are (and trust me, they're bad. This game would've looked awful running on the last generation of consoles), but with how often they interfere with not only the enjoyment of the game itself, but with the core gameplay mechanics. But more on that later. You step out of your brown and lifeless seaside village after getting your arse handed to you and your heart ripped out by the dragon, who then brings you back to life and challenges you to seek out and destroy him. You're guided on the first part of your journey by a pawn, introducing Capcom's attempt at a unique multiplayer, perhaps in an attempt to borrow some more from the Souls series. The pawns are a mercenary race, which exist outside time, within the Rift. The Arisen, that's you, has the power to summon them, as well as create your own, who shall follow you permanently. Your main pawn levels up with you, you control their skills and class, and you create them with the same amazingly detailed character creator as your main character (seriously, the character creator is awesome. i spent the majority of my time with the demo just messing around with it. Still, I did manage to make my poor Arisen look totally drugged out). The other two pawns are drawn from the rift, and provided you're online, are the main pawns of other characters. you select the ones that suit your playstyle and current quest best, and set out into the world, returning them once you've leveled up and picking some new ones. You can often trivialize combat by picking way over leveled pawns, but this is incredibly expensive and the currency required to do so is very rare. Once your pawns are chosen, you get your first taste of the next "unique" twist of Dragon's Dogma, the giant creature battles. Remember Shadow of the Colossus? It's basically that, but thankfully just as fun. Most of the time. Scaling these beasts are the most effective ways to fight them, and often the most fun. Specific creatures, like the stone golem, can often only be killed by reaching specific spots, either by scaling or with ranged attacks. These fights are easily the best within the game, but sadly there's very few of them, and the main hordes just can't quite match the excitement.

Combat is crafted by the team behind Devil May Cry and its wicked fast and meaty, and it also ties into the one thing the Dragon's Dogma really nails - the RPG systems. Skills are weapon-based, as apposed to class-based, meaning you pick your classes less on what skills are available, and more by what weapons they can use. The rogue classes focus on bows and daggers, while fighters and warriors focus on either sword and shield, or two hand combos. Once that skill is unlocked for that weapon, it's unlocked permanently, meaning any class that uses that weapon can also use that skill. Class-specific skills, referred to as augments, remain even if you switch class, so you can easily pinch some warrior augments to boost health and strength, then mix it with some magic damage reduction mage augments and some dexterity increase rogue augments, crafting your perfect character. Change vocation is cheap and easy, but not sticking with one vocation for too long means you'll never unlock the high level skills and augments. The leveling up feels incredibly rewarding and the RPG aspects are the deepest since the D&D based games. Status ailments and buffs are the name of the game, but far less confusing than they were in the D&D games. Each status ailment has an obvious visual clue, and they all have an item or two that can combat them. Pawns warn when they are ailed, or what ailments certain enemies provide or are weak to, so if you catch one and are unprepared its your own fault. The combat itself just feels so good. Each class feels different and satisfying. Each weapon type has its own moveset and feel. Daggers are fast and brutal, while sword strikes are powerful and deliberate. The ranger's massive longbow can send enemies flying, but can be outdone by the faster short bow. No one weapon beats any other. Two handed weapons may send you flying, but they leave the user incredibly open, and often weighed down to a slower speed. The weight of what you carry, plus whatever is in your inventory, is crucial. Body shape and size affects how much you can carry, as well as your speed. Tall, heavy characters might by able to carry more, but they move slower and recover stamina at a slower rate. Small characters are light and nimble, but can't carry much at all and are more susceptible to knockdown and knockback. All of this creates fast, yet strategic combat. When the pawn AI works, which is most of the time, they work strategically, too. My rogue based character traveled with a Sorcerer main pawn as a damage dealer, a Mage as a healer and controller and a Warrior as a tank. This strategy worked for me throughout the game. How well the pawns fight is mostly based on their knowledge of a beast. The first encounters, they will experiment a lot, calling out what works and what doesn't, but by the end, they work as a tight team., which makes things all the more frustrating when the AI fails and your left basically alone. Pawns can be revived upon death, but rarely, if ever, use any curatives provided, causing you to spend most of your fights with your pawns at half health, or less, meaning you have to spend too much time reviving them, and less fighting. But Dragon's Dogma has much bigger problems. Let's talk about them.

Firstly, the map. It only fills in as you visit areas. Promotes exploration, right? Well, yes, but without much of a fast travel system, only a single item that warps you to one spot and is stupidly rare and expensive, it makes exploration kind of sucky. As does the level locked areas. Nicking another page from the Souls series, Dragon's Dogma often points you int he right direction by dropping massively overpowered monsters on your head. Throw an almost non-existent autosave system and few replayed half hour long treks later, you'll have just about had it with exploration. Also, the paths to objectives are often long a convoluted, leaving you wandering helplessly lost more than once. If you're lucky your pawns know where to go and give general, and I do mean general, directions. There's also no indication of whether you're a high enough level to take on a quest, and a lot of quests have weird time-based fails, or fails that I can't even work out why they failed. The loading screens (of which there are far, far too many and often of the over-long variety) tell you to try other quests if you're stuck, but I've had four quests fail or be rendered un-continuable because I followed other quests to level up. So there's that. Also, I hate to beat a dead horse, but I need to rag on the graphics for a bit. Firstly, the draw distance ranges from awful, to non-existent. My pawn may tell me to survey the area from a high point, but when enemies often spawn literally right in front of your face, what's the point? Honest to god, I had an ogre spawn right on top of me in a cave once. This was after I ran into its invisible form and suffered an attack or two before it spawned in. It's honestly horrifying and destroys not only emotion, but tactics. Then there's the lip syncing, or more truthfully, what lip syncing? There's been no attempt at all to sync the lips. Hell, the faces barely even move, outside of a main character or two that may widen their eyes or smile or frown. if you're lucky. Hair is atrocious block textures that would have looked out of place 10 years ago. Hell, Mount and Blade's character design looked better than this, and that was made by an indie developer. At least the monster design is interesting, and the environments are about 2008/Oblivion level nice, if completely derivative and mostly uninteresting, barring a few atmospheric, creepy areas - which are basically pinched from the Souls series again. If this was someone's first game, an indie team even, I'd be more forgiving, but this is Capcom, for Christ's sake. What are they doing with all that money they've robbed from us with DLC? Graphics this awful (and I haven't even mentioned the awful framerate throughout, the unwieldy camera that often interferes with the climbing mechanic, or the general murk and bland colours) are completely unacceptable in this day and age, when even small companies can make gorgeous games. Actually, let me rag on the camera a bit. If I'm climbing someone, don't bind my movements to the camera if its just going to swing about wildly. Either lock it in like SotC, or make my movements independent. If I'm hanging on the front of an ogre, while the cameras looking at me from above and its flinging about, which way do I press the stick to climb up? The amount of times you'll end up uselessly stabbing a cyclops in the balls is ridiculous. Not to mention the inside fights when the camera insists on clipping through everything. Alright, I'm done. And I think I'm done with the bad, too. Oh wait, no there's more.

Voice acting: Ranges from barely tolerable to awful.
Soundtrack: Some cool J-Pop songs, but mostly derivative, distracting or non-existent.
Writing: I don't want to sound racists, but English is not your first language, don't even attempt to write something in faux Ye Olde English. Aught is not a word, stop fucking saying it every fucking sentence. Just say something. Also, 'tis is short for "it is", not "is". And just because its "olden times" doesn't mean grammar didn't exist. I honestly wanted to tear my ears off listening to some of this dialogue. It renders the majority of the story, and a lot of the quest instructions, completely nonsensical, which is a big no-no in a game with as little hand-holding as Dragon's Dogma.
Story: Actually had some potential. Mostly derivative, yes, but the relationship between the Arisen and Dragon is very interesting, and the character of the Dragon is very well written, but any impact the story has is lost thanks to terrible delivery, bad cutscenes (broken, even at times, I had an entire cutscene take place without any character except my own. A crucial cutscene, too, which instead consisted of various bad camera angles and no sound for a few minutes) and a complete lack of connection to any characters, which renders the late game choices meaningless as they have no strength within the world.

There's more that's wrong, a lot more, but I'm going to stop for a few reasons. Mainly, this is getting way too long, but also because you might start to think I didn't enjoy this game. But that's the thing that's left me confused. Despite everything that is wrong with this game, I enjoyed it. Even really enjoyed it at times. I was often enthralled beyond reason. Every time I thought I'd given up, I found myself back again, soldiering on. A lot of this has to do with the inherent depth within the game, even by the end I was still discovering more intricacies to the gameplay, or the economy, or the leveling up and combat. Its incredible challenging, sadly unfairly so at times, a lot of the horde human enemies you face are the same classes as you, but aren't governed by the same stamina rules and instead just spam their overpowered attacks, making some fights very unfair. But then you'll throw someone off a cliff, or bring down a mighty griffin, and you're captured again.

And so, here we are, at the end of our journey. And I now know what to say. Buy this game. Play it. Make it through the huge learning curve and make up your own mind. There's so much potential here, marred time and time again by inexperience and a lot of great ideas that just don't mesh. With Capcom announcing their intent to make this a franchise, I am filled with hope. Hope that the team can iron out the flaws, because Dogma has the potential to far surpass even the Souls series, if - and this is a massive if - it can focus on only what makes it so deep and innovative, and forget about all the external trappings and trying to make it like everything else on the market. If Capcom has the strength and bravery to follow through, then we may be witnessing the birth of the next great RPG franchise and I for one, am very excited. Now go, buy this game. That is all.