[tab:Review]There’s even a whole crafting and equipment improvement section of the game that allows you to create potions, attack items, new weapons and armor, and many other useful objects. You can combine almost everything in your inventory to make something useful. It is really complex, and can take you hours just finding all the combinations.
As you can tell so far, this game is massive. Both in scale of the combat and in the overall game play. The world is just as massive. I’ve played 30 hours of the game and have yet to explore every spot on the map. Because the area is so huge, you will be doing a lot of walking. In fact, with the exception of a very limited fast travel based on stones you can drop, you will be walking everywhere. Luckily, if you do some exploring, you can find some very nice shortcuts that will allow you to get around much quicker and with fewer monster encounters. Speaking of these, Dragon’s Dogma has some really epically scaled fights. For example, you may encounter a Griffin while walking to your destination. These serve as small boss fights that can even grant you a quest to complete by killing the monsters in question. These large bosses can be grappled onto, similar to the fights in Shadow of the Colossus. You can climb up on them and attack weak spots for more damage. For instance, if you’re fighting a Cyclops, if you climb up on its back and move over to its head you can go for the single eye as its weak spot. Each of these battles feels as epic as they are fun to take on.
It is not wise to go searching for this guy until you are well-equipped.
Dragon’s Dogma is one of those games that hardcore players will get the most enjoyment out of. Casual RPG players will have a difficult time getting into this game. Preparation is a big aspect of the entire game. You may get a quest early on in the game that you may not be able to take on until after you have leveled up and bought some new equipment. The checkpoint system will infuriate careless players that don’t save manually very often. I will say, there are some problems with the game overall. Some design choices are strange, and some are straight out archaic in design.
For one, there is only one save per game. Meaning you can’t start a new game and keep your old saved game. I understand why that is here due to your pawn going to other player’s worlds, but sometimes I’d like to play a different game.
As brilliant as the pawn system is, sometimes your pawns will do some profoundly stupid things that make no sense. Falling off the cliff was not something I taught Jeff to do during a Chimera fight, but he did that anyway.
The story is there, and it’s not bad. It just doesn’t feel too fleshed out either. The silent protagonist just doesn’t help out the story unfold as much as I had hoped for. The quests you get are some decently compelling stuff, but the characters giving you those quests are just plain boring at times. I never really cared for anyone during my stay in Gransys, and that’s a shame because the world is so interesting. The big problem I had with the characters was what the pawns say to you all the time. They repeat the same dialog within seconds of each other to the point where I had almost every line memorized when walking to certain areas of the map. Sure, they can be helpful at times, but after a while I get sick of hearing “Seems all roads lead to Gran Soren.”
While the world is beautiful, and the creatures you encounter looks fantastic, the character models look very plain and animate rather clunky. This usually never bothers me, but for some reason, it’s rather jarring to me in Dragon’s Dogma. It’s probably because the game looks amazing in other areas.
This screen sums up the definition of epic.
Since fast travel is limited, you will be walking in some of the same areas. This becomes a chore at time, because you start to see that enemies will respawn in the same locations after you go back to town to heal. Because I had to go through the mountain pass many times to get to quest locations, I started to memorize exactly where the ambush was going to be.
Even with the problems I had with Dragon’s Dogma, I couldn’t keep myself away from the game. It has a compelling nature, where the game doesn’t tell you really what to do, and you have to discover it for yourself. This could be a double edged sword, though. Hardcore players will enjoy the challenge, while some players will be turned off by not being told where to go or what to do. The combat comes off as simple to begin with, but once you rank up your vocation and begin using better attacks and status effect skills on enemies, you can easily get sucked into how complex everything can get. If anything ever does get a little boring, just change up a vocation and learn a new way to play the game.
The pawn system is one of brilliance, and the way your party members learn how to handle different situations works well and keeps the encounters fresh. The crafting and equipment management can keep players busy for hours, and exploring the world is interesting as it is challenging. The hardcore RPG players that will take their time with the game, and play it how the developers intended, will have a fantastic time with Dragon’s Dogma. Impatient players and casual fans will, more than likely, need to steer clear of this hardcore game. It is as brilliant as it is difficult.
Review copy of game provided by publisher. Primary play on Xbox 360.
[tab:Screenshots]
[tab:END]
Bob
The game has awful hasseling that is supposed to suggest the player is running quite fast, but it’s rather annoying and unnecessary!