Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen - Review
Originally published September 2015Since Capcom recently announced they were going to release a PC port of their fantasy RPG Dragon's Dogma, the time seemed right to finally release this review. I'd been meaning to do a video review, but screw it, I don't think I could contain everything I have to say about this game within a reasonable amount of time. Instead, here is my lengthy Late Bird Review.
I'm sure I've made it quite clear how much I enjoy Dark Souls and any games that dare to mimic its style. So when Capcom first announced Dragon's Dogma a few years ago, it grabbed my attention for a number of reasons:
It claimed to be difficult
It claimed to have epic monsters for you to hunt down and kill
It was set in a vast land you could freely explore
You could play the game with a variety of classes and strategies
And you could level your character to suit whatever style you pleased.
The original game came and went, then Capcom re-released it under the new subtitle of Dark Arisen, claiming that the experience was more balanced and that new content had been added. I have eventually found the time to play through it from beginning to end over the course of a year. Now that I've finally finished the game, I can say that, while all of the claims the initial game made were true to an extent, none of the claims lived up to my expectations.
It's a shame, really. I actually still kind of enjoy Dragon's Dogma, because the core combat gameplay can be quite fun, in doses. But a majority of the game is riddled with strange design choices, a lack of direction, and a disjointed pace that either led me to be extremely disappointed, or extremely confused. I don't think that Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is a bad game. I don't think it's a good game, either. It's somewhere between the limbo realm of "meh," and the purgatory realm of "wtf is going on?" I still have a desire to go back and play more of it, even though I would get extremely irritated for all the wrong reasons.
Games like Dark Souls have the capacity to irritate me with their difficulty and unforgiving nature, which I can certainly accept. That's why, when you overcome the adversity of the challenge, it's so satisfying. However, when Dragon's Dogmadecides that the party members should talk over and over again about completely irrelevant things that don't help me, but only mention once that I could have used an item to fast travel the entire map (instead of just two places so I didn't have to keep making the long trek over and over again for 40 hours), I get irritated in a way that cannot be quelled very easily. If I were to summarize my experience with Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, I would say look no further than the image below.
Image: Capcom | If you can't tell, its a person with the option to stab themselves in the gut with a blade
If you wish to know why I feel this way, read on.
Story
What story? There's no real method of storytelling here. I suddenly started a quick intro level for the game using a powered-up character (which I didn't create) to fight a chimera with the soldier's troops. Then, I jumped to a cut scene of an enormous dragon falling out of a portal in the sky. After that, I created a character and customized her physical appearance. Another cut-scene played and the dragon stormed the beaches of a small town where my character lived. The dragon caused some destruction, stole my heart (not romantically speaking), and left. Yet, the protagonist was miraculously still alive. So some Dragonheart shit is going on, but without Sean Connery, my character is, of course, the chosen one or something, and I have to go out to the world and become strong enough to kill the dragon and reclaim my heart.
Image: Capcom
I'll be honest. I played this game over the course of a year, which means: I played this game for a week or so, got busy, and didn't touch it again for a few months. So my recollection of the story is a bit fragmented as anyone's might be. However, I can do the same to other games and still remember a slew of details to help me understand the big picture. I took a big break from playing extremely long JRPGs like Eternal Sonata and Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, and I had no trouble remembering where I left off. Both of those games were heavily focused on their story and frequently stopped in the middle of the journey to focus on the story. So, it makes sense for the details to be easier to remember. Dragon's Dogma's story-telling is so fragmented on its own that I feel like it wouldn't have made a difference if I had just played the game straight through, and the Dragon's Dogma's story is significantly shorter in comparison.
Unlike the other games, Dragon's Dogma takes the approach to telling its story by limiting it to specific quests you get throughout the journey. These quests are treated with the same level of focus as the countless other side quests you get from visiting the bounty board. This is similar to how games like Skyrim handle their stories, except that when you were doing a story quest in Skyrim, you knew it because you were talking to a bunch of important characters, who acted important, were giving you numerous helpful details, and reminding you why it was all so important before some epic shit hit the fan.
In Dragon's Dogma, I'd look at my quest log, and not know if the fetch quest where I had to bring some ingredients to a person was any more important than the quest to kill 20 crows for no reason. You have to talk to some (somewhat) iconic and important characters who give you quests, but what they say is vague or unmemorable. Plus, some of the quests that they give are as mundane as the random busy-work quests on the local notice board. Over the course of the entire game, there were only about 5 moments that really stood out in my mind as something important or of a large enough scale for me to notice and remember--mostly due to the cut scene that came along with it. Even those moments, however, never led me to believe that anything important was really taking place.
Image: Capcom
Then the endgame started. A catastrophe occurred for seemingly no reason and it suddenly felt like I was playing a different game. I had already heard how Dragon's Dogma ended prior to playing it, and I was legitimately excited to see it before I began playing the game. I won't spoil it here, but I thought it was a really complex, interesting, and bleak concept to use as a finale to that game that could have really grabbed players if executed properly.
However, nowhere in this game did I feel like I was headed in this direction, which may be why I thought I had so much left to go in it. When the actual revelation occurs, it's so out of nowhere that it has no impact. It's like the last episode of an anime series (like Evangelion, for instance) that makes no sense in relation to how the rest of the series looked or felt; it needed to be made for some arbitrary reasons and they just slapped a "finale" together that doesn't fit with anything else they've done. In Dragon's Dogma's case, the finale's message is pretty cool, except with everything else behind it, it doesn't make sense or feel like it matters.
The World
So much of my experience felt like busy work, and so many of the "story" quests that I finished fell so flat, that I honestly thought that I was barely 50% of the way done with the game. Instead, I was blindsided by the endgame. With only two locations in the game that would count as civilized settlements with a functioning economy and residency, and half the map left to be uncovered, I thought I had a long way to go. Except those are the only towns/cities in the whole game, and the unexplored sections of the map are not even playable zones. Plus, there are probably less than two dozen dungeons in the whole game. This wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that the game presents itself like some grand adventure through a vast land with endless variety and numerous dungeons to explore. Dragon's Dogma is, simply put, stretched too thin across the free-roaming experience it tried to create.
Image: Capcom | Look at all the space in the lower left that is unused!
I enjoy free-roaming fantasy games because I enjoy the aspect of journeying across the land and discovering new sights and challenges. Except, Dragon's Dogma's world feels small in comparison to so many other games, for better or worse, considering the fact you have to spend so much time traveling it. The fast-travel mechanic is restricted to using expensive crystals to jump immediately to a short list of specific checkpoints. You can find particular items that you can place elsewhere on the map so that you get more options for your fast travel over time, but you have to find the items first, and then you have to find the location in which you want to place them. You also have to remember this mechanic, because I completely missed this detail (or forgot about it in between the times I played the game) and my chatterbox party members never mentioned it again. So I spent the majority of my time in Dragon's Dogma just walking through the entire map. Had I remembered about the fast travel mechanic, I probably would have finished the game in half the time and with less of a grimace on my face. Nonetheless, this allowed me to see just how empty the game actually was in comparison to its competition.
Dragon's Dogma is a victim of bloat in-game design. When people pay the full price for a video game, there is an expectation of how much entertainment value the player will get out of it and the time it takes to complete the game is a key variable in the equation. When people buy an RPG, there is an expectation for time to be an even bigger variable, as these tend to be the longest games. Usually, it's due to a lengthy and complicated story, but as we discussed, Dragon's Dogma doesn't really have that. Instead, it tries to fill itself up on gameplay, which wouldn't be a bad thing if there were more to it.
Image: Capcom
Perhaps you're noticing the pattern here. Not to sound like a greedy little child, but I want more, more, more! More monster variety. More towns and people to interact with. More interesting quests. More dungeons with thoughtful design. More methods of getting from point A to point B. More maps to explore. That is what Dragon's Dogma is missing. The core gameplay and combat involved with the various classes you can choose are actually pretty satisfying. The problem is that you spend so much of your time wandering and killing weak enemies that even the best part of DD becomes boring. If this is too much to ask Capcom to accomplish, I have an alternative design method for the next Dragon's Dogma so it doesn't run into the same issue.
Cut the fat and trim the game down to a linear experience. Get rid of the free-roaming part because you didn't have enough content to fill the sandbox you gave us. Get rid of the unnecessary quests, the fetching, and the stupid "kill x amount of animal" quests, and just make it a linear experience with some optional dungeons on the side. You end up with a game that is significantly smaller in scope, but much more focused. That way, your players only have to put up with killing weak harpies and wolves a few times in between the big epic fights against griffins, chimeras, and cyclops. While the game may end up not meeting the "length standards" of an RPG, it at least is quality from start to finish because, if the game was 12 hours of combat with Dragon's Dogma's mechanics, I'd be perfectly happy with it.
Mechanics
This is Dragon's Dogma's saving grace, well, the combat anyway. The constant backtracking across the map, over-abundance of cheap crappy items to use in a crafting system that didn't really yield any results of interest, and the bizarrely over-priced economy only added to my confusion and frustration as I played DD. I suppose I'll address the other issues I had before moving on to the good part of the game.
Image: Capcom
Why was everything so damn expensive in that game? Seriously. I had to do dozens of quests and sell off countless, useless items in order to make purchases and upgrades. At some point, I finally had enough to make constant upgrades and improvements to my equipment, but it was still at the cost of 30,000 gold a pop. Near the end of the game, I purchased a weapon for 800,000. Such high-priced items aren't uncommon in RPGs, certainly toward the end of the game, but to have your entire game's economy so inflated made the resource curve rather steep in the beginning.
I already complained enough about how lame it was traveling all over that map over and over without realizing I could have saved some (certainly not all) of my woes by using port crystals. So let's briefly touch on the crafting/item system. I may have sold off thousands of items I found, but there were still hundreds of thousands of items in my storage at the end of the game. I had so many simply because my companions kept picking up crap, I kept putting it in storage, and I never got around to organizing it and selling it off.
Image: Capcom
There is just so much crap to collect in Dragon's Dogma, and most of it is completely worthless. You can combine thousands of items with one another to make more items that will fill up space in your storage. You find so many different items that do the same thing. There are dozens of different types of meat flanks you can pick up from killing beasts. There are dozens of variations of herbs that can heal you, buff you, or can be combined with other herbs that do the exact same thing. There are countless items that do nothing useful. It's like collecting all the garbage in Skyrim, except for the fact that items in Dragon's Dogma have no real physical presence except in an item bank or on the ground. What is the point of so many different items that do the same thing? Not to mention, as I said in my Rage review, just because you can have a crafting system, doesn't mean you should have one, especially if it doesn't yield anything of value. What's the point of combining two mundane items to make more mundane items that don't do jack shit? It all comes back to the main issue of DD: Cut the vapid fluff and refine your game!
Combat
Alright, I don't want to oversell this part of the game--though I likely have already--but it's pretty fun... to an extent. First of all, you have the option to play as 9 different classes, each with some shared, as well as some unique abilities and play styles. There are 3 basic classes (Strider, Fighter, and Mage), there are 3 advanced classes (Rogue, Warrior, and Sorcerer), and there are 3 mixed classes where the weapons and techniques of the different classes blend together (don't remember the names other than assassin).
Image: Capcom
I never played as a magic character, because so much of the combat demanded fast action and involved combat; it didn't make sense to use magic and blast away from afar, even if the spells were impressive, powerful, and probably the most damaging attacks in the game. I instead focused on the Fighter and Warrior for the beginning part of the game. Considering how the combat wanted you up in the face of an enemy all the time, it seemed like the most logical choice. The Fighter had a sword and a shield, which I was used to in my Dark Souls experience. The best thing about the class was that you could have abilities based around your sword and your shield that were dramatic and fun to use. There was even a shield ability that allowed you to launch a companion into the air. It was cool, even though it never proved useful.
The Fighter, I found to be pretty weak and I was getting beat up a lot of the time. Thankfully DD allows you to just walk up to a person and say "I want to be this now!" and they'll change your class for you, unlocking new weapons and abilities for you to use. While the weapons wouldn't carry over into classes most of the time, any buffs and traits you gained from one class stayed with the character, regardless of the current class. So after I maxed out my abilities with the Fighter, I moved on to Warrior, the brutal tank class that wielded massive weapons and could take multiple hits while delivering a devastating blow. It was a lot of fun just taking hit after hit as I would wind up and slam my sword down, crushing anyone underneath. The warrior had the fewest abilities of any class, but it was still one of the most satisfying just being able to take out so many enemies at once. Except, I discovered an issue as I played these slower melee character classes: my companions were inept.
The companions are called Pawns. As the name suggests, they are emotionless babble fish who wander the world--and the internet--looking to help the player. Every person who creates their own character in Dragon's Dogma creates their own pawn. The player's custom pawn can be 6 out of the 9 classes and can switch on the fly as well. When a pawn falls in battle, you have a limited amount of time to run over and revive them before you have to return to a special stone and conjure up another. While you have your one pawn with you, you can have up to 2 more accompany you. So you can recruit other pawns players have made with all their own gear, skills, classes, and weapons. While they're with you, they will never level up, so you'll be constantly swapping out old pawns for new ones. This could cause issues based on the fact that you may have wanted a Sorcerer in your group with a particular set of skills, but none are available at your level. It all gets a lot more complicated, but the point is: it doesn't matter how strong your companions are, they are dumber than the rocks you find on the ground.
Image: Capcom
It was fun playing as a warrior. I felt powerful. Yet I had a great deal of difficulty against flying enemies. I didn't really have a method of bringing the fight to them. I had no ranged weaponry or magic to bring them down, so I had to rely on my pawns. They, however, decided to buff each other or imbue my weapons (which were impotent against enemies if they couldn't reach them) rather than blasting the things with arrows and magic.
Once I got what I wanted out of the Warrior class, I switched to one with a bow and never looked back. The Rouge classes ended up being the most fun, in the long run. I could take out the most enemies without being limited to the ground, and I had some fast moves to make me a real threat. I came to terms with the fact that I couldn't expect my pawns to do anything other than drool most of the time, so I always made sure whoever was with me was either a magic user or a warrior, that way I could get used to relying on myself to take care of everyone. Occasionally, when their AI would kick in, they'd do something other than stick their head between their legs and deliver a devastating attack to help chip away at the enemies, but it might as well have been a solo experience.
Image: Capcom
I realize that I'm still selling the best part of the game short, but I genuinely enjoyed the combat with the variety of moves at my disposal and the different methods of taking out enemies I could use in conjunction with my party, it could be immensely satisfying to take out a large beast like a griffon or a chimera. You just had to get used to the Benny Hill antics of your "special" pawn friends and accept the fact that you were going to run out of interesting things to fight eventually.
Despite all the fun the combat was, it still ran out of steam by the end. Dragon's Dogma had a huge issue with its difficulty curve, as the curve was more of a spike. There are plenty of instances early in the game where the enemies outnumber and out-level you by a large value, making it seem like a huge roadblock much of the time. The Dark Souls fan in me enjoyed the challenge of taking on tougher enemies whenever I wanted, even if the battles usually ended in my swift defeat. When I took out the horde of bandits, a thuggish cyclops, or a wild chimera and lived to tell the tale, even with a battered and near-dead party, it was exhilaratingly fun.
Too bad the enemies don't scale to your level, or change as you get stronger. By the time the game was done, most of the enemies roaming the world were pushovers and inconveniences, shadows of their former intimidating glory. I could count on a Cyclops likely being in the same place the hundredth time I ran through the area on another menial quest, and it became more and more boring each time I put him down. It's too bad because the ability to climb the bigger creatures like in Shadow of the Colossus--one of my favorite games--was part of what made the combat so enjoyable, but even that gets tedious if no new enemies or challenges are introduced. By the time griffins were finally a regular thing, they were too weak to pose a threat. Still, even with all my complaints, the combat was satisfying enough I still have a small desire to go back and play it some more, even with nothing left to accomplish.
Final Thoughts
I could go on and on about the nitpicky problems I have with Dragon's Dogma, or the countless other design choices that make this just a bizarre and confusing game. I certainly have plenty of questions, like what the hell is up with the Duke throughout the game? Where did this romance come from? Or, where did the crazy spoiler I learned that got me into the game come from, for that matter? Why have such inept and bland people accompany you instead of interesting characters that could level up with you over time?
Image: Capcom
We'll cut the review here, as it's gone on long enough. The point is: Dragon's Dogma is a weird game. It's a confusing, directionless game. It's a frustrating game that doesn't even really attempt to do too much. It just dabbles enough to say it tried, but doesn't accomplish anything of interest or value, except for the combat, which is good so long as you can tolerate the terrible travel buddies you have. When the game serves up a genuine challenge, the combat is immensely satisfying, but those moments are drenched in an ocean of tedium and bloated content. If there had been more direction and focus on its development, it could have been a real contender, rather than just a bizarre RPG that couldn't figure out what the hell it wanted to do most of the time.