Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

 

Dragon's Dogma has been a game I have been curious about for many years now. It was always in the back of my mind for something to one day play through but I never got around to it. Finally this year I got it for very cheap and installed it. I looked up beforehand on howlongtobeat.com how long the game is (something I usually do) and said - yeah, I'm down for a 25-35 hour RPG right now. I know its made by Capcom, thats a good sign. But beyond that I don't really know anything, went in almost blind.

The game starts off with a pretty decent character creator. All sorts of sliders, options, to customize your character. Thats great, I like RPG's where you get to make your own character. After playing with it for 10 minutes it asks what class you want to be: Fighter, Archer, Mage. Ok simple enough, I went with Fighter. That seems to be the extent of your RPG creation, though. You don't get to set stats, skills, or anything like that. You do get to unlock new fighting moves asyou progress through the game, and spend some resources to assign them to a button combo, but that is about it besides upgrading your gear. Then it wants you to make a second party member to accompany you. That's odd, right out of the gate it wants you to make a "Main Pawn". Yeah, thats something distinct about Dragon's Dogma that I came to find. It tries to differ from the crowd with mechanics like this. The game is heavily centered around "Pawns", allies which accompany you throughout your journey. You have one "Main Pawn" which is a permanent sidekick, that you have full control over. Its gearing, class, it gains experience, and so on. Just like yourself. Then you can hire two others Secondary pawns - these DO NOT level up or gain experience, and you cannot change their equipment. Instead, you must periodically fire them and hire new ones as you keep leveling up. Although, this wasn't made clear enough, and for the first bit of the game I was completely unaware my pawns were not leveling up, making the game much harder than it needed to be. I also didn't understand the Main Pawn vs Secondary pawn distinction, that was also not clear. More on the pawn system later.

Anyway, after this initial character setup the game starts off showing you its premise: You're a typical villager in some coastal town, a dragon attacks and literally rips your heart out of your chest, and thus starts off the games journey: To get your heart back from the dragon. Fantastical, a bit silly, but it works as a general fantasy premise. I mean, how am I still alive? Who knows. Magic. Then you're set off to the world. The graphics for a relatively old game (2012) are quite good - or maybe we just havn't progressed graphically, technologically much since then. The environments are detailed, with many breathtaking sights and sounds you can come across. Its an open world game, but it follows quite a linear progression. You start off to the south of the map on the coastal village, then you progress through a bit of a mountainous area, then you arrive at the main hub of the game - Gran Soren,  and then its a bit more open where you roam around in any direction towards your goals. But graphically speaking it all builds a cohesive, interesting world. The characters, faces, animations, general UI all are visually pleasing and fun to experience. But more than anything perhaps is the games use of vibrant colors. Lush rolling green fields, far off views of blue oceans and medieval castles, hirable pawns roaming around the countryside, plus the vast array of strange monsters and creatures makes graphically for a fascinating experience.


Progressing through the games main campaign seems simple enough; you open the quest menu and follow the main quest...oh wait, there's no distinction between Side quest and Main quest in this game. Why do some games do this? I want to know which quests are the main ones and which ones are optional. I really dislike when games don't do this, I have seen a few now. It becomes this big guessing game of "Am I wasting my time or not?" , Sometimes you just want to progress the main story, you know? So once I realized that I kind of avoided accepting side quests for awhile until I made some solid progress.
Although something less than impressive that I began to notice while playing through some of the game, is that its open world isn't always all that open feeling. The mountain areas, and some of the earlier areas in particular really felt more like aggrandized hallway sections - big sprawling narrow paths with walls on each side where you just get funneled towards enemies and a few branching paths. It opens up more when you get closer to Gran Soren but its a feeling I never lost entirely throughout the whole playthrough. Probably this is one of the actual technical limitations of the time.

 However, one of the absolute worst and most grueling parts of the game is the sprinting around in the open worldtravelling from point A to point B outside of combat. You have a stamina bar, and it depletes fast (according to your encumbrance) and once it depletes your character comes to a complete stop, and bends over and starts panting for what seems like 15 seconds until you can play again. Not only that, but you cant simply tap the sprint button to stop if you notice the bar is low, you have to stop touching the stick entirely. It makes for an exhausting, clunky, obnoxiously annoying tedious traveling experience. They should of just let you have infinite stamina outside of combat, hell, they let you do this inside cities. Why not everywhere? This annoying stamina limitation just makes the game feel frustrating. I get it for inside of combat, but just sprinting to the next objective should not be a slow annoying arduous process. Since your stamina depletes the more you carry, the whole game I was trying to make sure I was atleast in the 'Light' range. But, since the game basically hates any semblance of quality of life, there is no fast easy way to bulk manage your inventory. There is no "Discard all" or "Transfer all"  - its always painstakingly one item at a time, pressing "Are you sure? Yes" like 50 times to drop or transfer over some useless items. As I said, the game is rife with annoying design flaws.

  Here's another one: There's no fast travel for the first like, 6 hours of the game. You fast travel by consuming an item called a Ferrystone. But I have not seen any for a long time. You supposedly get a few once you get to Gran Soren, but look at this, here's the thing: the Dark Arisen version inflates the stash with dozens of overpowered random equipment and items. I really, really dislike when games do this. Some games when you buy DLC or play the "GOTY" version they will shove all sorts of overpowered items at you and it just feels like a massive cheat. Why do devs do this? It ruins the balance of games. And so once I checked the stash in Gran Soren, I saw a dozen of these super powerful armor sets, weapons, and items. Being confused, I googled why that is. Its just extra content randomly added with the Dark Arisen version. Well, not wanting to ruin my playthrough I entirely avoided the stash for awhile and ignoring all these items.

   The problem is: I think this is where a few fast travel items were placed (Ferrystones)
   And so for the first 10+ hours of the game I just didn't use fast travel at all. Making the previous stamina issues even more grueling and a slog. Imagine slowly trekking back and forth the same long arduous path over and over.
   At some point I did find a few Ferrystones and was able to fast travel, but they were precious to me.
   Even with fast travel it doesn't help that much. You can't fast travel anywhere you want. Only to Gran Soren and the starting village. Though you can get an item and place down a marker to travel to, something I utilized only once but it was very useful.
   Though, I did eventually return to the stash and go over the items placed there.
   To my absolute shock there is an item called "Eternal Ferrystone" - that's right, an infinite fast travel item. Again, very confused, I Googled why do I have this item? - Of course it turns out its not in the original game. Its another weird almost cheatlike item placed in the Dark Arisen version. Do I use this? Will it ruin my playthrough? Do the devs want me to suffer without fast travel? Whats the "vision" of the game? Ah fuck it. I just began using it.
     Here again is my point of baffling design choices.


As for the combat, which is the elephant in the room. This is an Action Roleplaying Game (ARPG) - real time combat in third person. How does it implement it? For starters there is no lockon system. This is before the days when Souls games blew up in popularity, so this is no Soulslike. But the strange thing is, even Ocarina of Time back in 1998 had Lockon, and there are numerous examples of this game being influenced by OoT so the question arises: Why doesn't this game have lockon? I tried to get used to it and see if they were going for something different, but I'm still not convinced. No lockon is just bad. In turns into this aimless clumsy fight against the camera where half the time it feels like I'm fighting against the controls and the camera moreso than the enemies. Many of my attacks swing right past simple targets because of this frankly immature design setup. Admittedly I had changed my class from Fighter to Warrior, and the Warrior uses big bulky 2 hand swords that swing slow, so missing attacks feels even worse with this. But this was a frequent grievance throughout the whole game, often cursing the lack of lockon and the clumsiness of the combat without it. Not only this, but there is no roll mechanic either - Great, It is refreshing to play a third person ARPG that is not just a Souls game, its refreshing to see how it used to be. I tried to get into it, and feel it out. Well, the problem is that without a roll, what I found myself doing is instead jump spamming or sprinting. Doesn't exactly look or feel elegant when I'm just bunny-hopping across the screen to dodge basic attacks. But don't get me wrong, the combat isn't bad...it just has blemishes. Its more of a button mashing beat em up kind of combat than a challenging strategic combat system. I kind of just mash X over and over, or upon unlocking 2h swords I quickly found out the Jump+Y Attack is super good and used that a lot, which is kinda silly to see a guy jump attacking with a big two hand sword over and over but it is what it is.

The combat doesn't have damage numbers flying above the enemies heads or anything, you kinda just have to feel out your damage. In the main city Gran Soren is where you can find lots of merchants to buy all sorts of armor and upgrades, which was one of the most entertaining parts of the game. I always looked forward to checking the shops and slowly but surely finding new gear and upgrading my character. Finding gear in the wild isn't that frequent, though. I don't think enemies can drop weapons and armor, mostly consumables. You can find chests which have RNG loot in them and can contain weapons and armor. Finding some lucky upgrade in a chest felt pretty good, but its rare. The looting in the wild isn't too exciting because enemies just drop consumables, and there's so many of them that it bloats up your inventory and all I really cared for was the healing items anyway.

Here I will mention the save system: There are no multiple slots. There is only an auto-save, which happens whenever you enter most new zones, or complete an objective, or generally do something meaningful. Then you have one manual save accessible by the main menu. You have an option to "Reload from checkpoint" or "Reload from last save". Multiple times playing through the game I almost accidentally lost hours of progress because of this awkward save system, but thankfully it was never anything too bad. But it is a stressful and daunting system, I can see what they were going with not wanting you to endlessly spam different slots, feeling like your actions aren't as meaningful, but its a double edged sword.

You fight a large variety of monsters, goblins, lots of flying harpie birds, human bandits and mages, wolves, lizardmen
The visual designs of the armors are awesome, its a really zero to hero feeling. You start off as a peasent with tattered clothes and you slowly work your way up to this knight wearing extravagant armor and wielding giant Flamberges and stuff. It did a good job at capturing that vibe and keeping upgrades fresh and exciting. Then you have the sort of miniboss encounters. These are giant monsters such as Goblins, Hydras, these weird two-headed beasts, Giant turkeys, and all sorts of weird massive creatures. They usually have half a dozen health bars, and you can climb ontop of them to hit more devastating areas. The game basically turns into Monster Hunter at this point, with some of these fights taking upwards of 20+ minutes to complete. And honestly? The reward isn't that amazing beyond tons of XP. Yes the fights are cool visually, I'm glad they're here, but really the climbing mechanic I didn't use that much and didn't seem that fun cause you keep randomly getting knocked off, and also as Warrior when you climb on them and attack he seems to just punch the monster instead of actually use his sword? Which confused me. And some of these fights are downright awful, like the Hydra towards the end of the game I came across I literally did nothing but spam Jump attack for 20+ minutes because the only way to do damage is to hit his heads which is high above the ground. A mixed bag.


There's much to say about the combat, it has multiple facets.
Basic attacks "Core attacks" don't consume stamina. Things like mashing X or Y or jump attacks
However there are extra attacks accessible by holding LB or RB and then pressing X or Y.
These are special attacks which you can unlock and swap in and out, and upgrade.
These consume stamina. This is stuff like (atleast for Warrior) big whirlwind spins, a stabbing attack where you then toss your foe into the air, or these special Charge up attacks where you hold the sword for like 10 seconds and release a giant attack. For the whole game I mostly just used the first two, the charge up attacks just sucked and I didn't find useful.
It was fun and interesting however to rank up my class and go back to the Inn to see what new moves or abilities I could use. You also unlock passive abilities you can equip to your class as well, stuff like less fall damage, more Core attack damage, more health and so on.

Like I just mentioned about "changing classes" - another strange thing is once you reach Gran Soren and get to the main Inn you can change your class, and here it shows you a handful of new classes that aren't available at the beginning of the game. This was kinda stunning at the time. Why in the beginning of the game it only shows me 3 classes? But here tucked away in some seemingly unimportant menu about respecing it shows me this big list of classes? Stuff like Mystic Knight, Magick Archer, Sorcerer, Assassin, and so on. I just picked Warrior cause I typically gravitate towards the big bonk two hand sword guy, its simple enough and I like the playstyle but I found this yet another strange design choice.


Another strange quirk about this pawn system, which took me some hours to understand, is the online component. Yes, this game has online mechanics. But they don't involve playing with other people. Instead, you get to hire other real players pawns to join your party. As mentioned previously, you have 2 secondary pawn slots. These can either be randomly generated NPC pawns you find roaming around or inside the Pawn spawning chamber area (called the Rift) , or they can be real human Main pawns that you pull into your world. This is a quirky and interesting system, although it can be very jarring and confusing. For instance, someone on my Steam friends list had played this game, and has a level 40 pawn. Well, when I started the game and began hiring pawns, my friends level 40 pawn showed up in my world as an option for me to hire! Thats strange... why would it let me hire a level 40 party member when I just started the game? Surely it would break balance. Maybe I missed something, maybe it actually costed a lot of resources I didn't have at the time (I didn't try to recruit him) but this really threw me off for a moment. The game is rife with strange design choices and things that confuse you just like this all over the place. Overall though , the online features like seeing other players pawns roaming around the countryside randomly, interacting with them, viewing their stats and equipment and deciding to hire them, made for a quirky and unique feature of the game.

The pawns have quirky interesting stats, too. Like they have "Inclinations" I guess this is something about how they behave in combat. For instance you have "Medicant" which I suppose means they are more inclined to use the healing spell if they have it. Or the "Utilitarian" which I guess is something about teamwork? The problem is none of these are explained in game - at all, leaving it all to your imagination. There is a lot to dig through here in the games systems and deep underlying mechanics, but none of it is made clear and is through layers of obfuscation and mystery. Still, it adds a lot to the game.
And the Pawns do have a lot of personality, just roaming around the game they are constantly talking to you, commenting on states of affairs, giving you hints about the current quest, commenting on the environment. It feels like you're never alone and it keeps the game from being too dull because there's always something interesting happening or being said. The general sound design, voice acting, music, are all quite engaging and interesting.

The first bit of the game is kind of spent making your way to Gran Soren, then from there the quests sort of blend into each other. Many quests at first are just going around talking to NPC's. But, of course it isn't always that easy. In the spirit of baffling design choices, some of these NPC's only spawn at certain times, in certain areas, and there is no way to find out in-game. You have no quest marker, nothing to go on. I found myself just aimlessly roaming around town for dozens of minutes before getting frustrated and Googling it. Then it turned out the guy only spawned when the Bell rings (12pm?) and then he starts his routine close to the Inn. This happened I think a few times with a few quests and it left a sour taste in my mouth. Just totally pointless aimless time-wasting and bad game design.

Then you have a series of quests called Wyrm Hunt. Where you talk to a man and get a selection of like 6 different quests. Again, since there is no indication of what is a side quest or not, at first I thought these were side quests. I had to Google it and they are main quests, and you only have to do two of them to progress. So I picked the two closest ones.

At some point around here in the game I was doing a quest to find this cave area and talk to some guy, but it was before I learned about fast travel. Well, the game has a day/night cycle, and going outside at night is a disaster waiting to happen. It was here I noticed the game taking some inspiration from Ocarina of Time. If you roam off the main roads, zombies come out of the ground to attack you, just like OoT. I had the hunch throughout playing the game up to this point that the Soundtrack also gave me OoT vibes (good soundtrack by the way), but this also solidified it. But furthermore, the view distance at night is abysmal. You can't see 5 feet ahead of you, even with the lantern. Since I didn't have Ferrystones (or was aware of the Eternal Ferrystone) at this point, being far away from town at night is a miserable experience.

Here is another crucial baffling design choice: You can only pass time at the main Inn. Why!? I am stuck in the middle of nowhere at night, I even see a campsite with a bed. But I can't sleep. I cant press a button to just pass time. I'm just stuck in this pitch black hellscape constantly being swarmed by wolves, my party dying constantly, and its hopeless. Truly a frustrating, annoying experience, and its all due to more stupid design choices and lack of quality of life features. What were they thinking!? I had to run all the way back to Gran Soren just to rest at the inn just to have a chance to continue playing the game. This happened multiple times before I saw that I had the Eternal Ferrystone and just decided "fuck it" I'm using the infinite fast travel.

So I completed a few of these Wyrm Hunt quests, simple stuff like go here talk to this guy, but then I came across one that is pretty much the Water Temple from OoT. This really sold me, yes this game is heavily inspired by Ocarina of Time in some areas (Soundtrack, Night time mechanics, level design)  - But yet, why no lockon!? This water temple quest was pretty cool. A cryptic eerie dungeon with water you can raise and lower, infested with these serpent monsters (new at the time) and some ghostly enemies. Fun to explore and complete.

Then theres a quest to gather evidence on one of the town merchants, Fornival. You can make him guilty or innocent. Well, I went with innocent because hes a unique merchant and I guess I didn't want him to disappear so I did that. Kinda just a long series of fetch quests doing not much besides roaming around town talking to people. Not great and kinda annoying actually. I never even ended up buying anything from him.

Then I progressed through more quests, usually sending you half across the map to unknown areas. More mountainous areas, and some of these difficulty spikes would be absurd. Like one minute I'm blasting giant beasts, then the next I come across
a generic group of human bandit archers that obliterate my whole party in the blink of an eye. I never understood that. But I banged my head against the wall and got past it, to the next boss fight which is a sort of boss fight against this wizard called Salomet in an arena where he spawns enemies. This was a decent fight, and an epic build up in a big castle.

Not long after this the main city Gran Soren gets attacked and is on fire by...a giant turkey. So you go back to town and have a fun boss fight against him in the field. Next is a quest where you go on a big adventure through a castle killing lots of bandits and humans to fight another duo boss called Wrights. These are floating mages that is a pretty fun boss, except for one flaw: They will randomly conjure a tornado and if you get hit by it its game over. It just endlessly stunlocks you, this happened 3 times and was very frustrating. But then I just did as much DPS as possible in as short amount of time so I can just bypass it and it worked.

Now the game is almost over. Really all that's left is a quest where you finally come face to face and fight the dragon from the beginning of the game that stole your heart. You get a series of epic chase sequences, cutscenes of him talking to you and ranting at you, then you do a multi-phase fight where you attack him , then run away, then finally arrive at the final arena after riding on his back through the sky attacking his back in very scripted, but cinematic fashion. Thankfully there is saves in between this. The final area is an intense boss fight where he has like 8 health bars and you have to dodge his fire, get in close and attack his glowing heart, and he periodically flies around and you have to shoot him with a ballista. I only had to shoot him once with it I think. Not too hard of a fight, but it had my hands a bit sweaty by the end. A good level of challenge.

You kill the dragon, get your heart, end credits.......or not?
Yeah, more baffling design choices.
It's not over.
In fact, this is the part that had me stunlocked.
All of a sudden I'm watching a cutscene where I'm laying in bed, hugging and kissing the bald merchant Fournival guy I did a quest for earlier. What the fuck? Why? Where did that come from? This had me absolutely jaw-dropped with how out of the blue it was. This guy has a wife and kids in-game. Not only that, but after the credits its "post-game" and theres still more quests, but this bald Fournival guy is now my house-husband and we wake up in my house at the beginning village of the game. No I'm not making this up. My mind is full of fuck. WHAT is going on?

Of course I had to Google this. It turns out that theres a hidden Afinity system in the game for NPC's. The NPC which likes you the most, will be your "romantic love interest" and at the end of the game they will appear in the cutscene+at your house. It just so happens that Fournival had the highest affinity for me, I guess because I did the quest and proved his innocence? But the quest is a damn main quest! And I barely interacted with him outside of this. Is it because I talked to other NPC's even less? But how? I talked to many merchants many times. Is it because I gave Fournival a gift one single time to see if he would reduce his prices? Just utterly speechless. I've even read this can happen to ANY NPC in the game - even the children. Yes, children can become your romantic spouse in this game. What a fucking bizarre game.

As I keep saying, strange design choices. Mixed bag. Confusing game. Is it over or not? What the hell is post-game? Why do I still have main quests? Why did it show me the end credits? - It turns out the game is NOT over. You are expected to keep playing. There is not much left.

To add even more confusion, suddenly the game gives me a super powerful weapon that is miles better than my current one. Also, all of my armor is suddenly maximum upgrade? Ok, that's cool. But there's also new equipment at the merchants in town - but my current equipment it just gave me is still better than everything in the store. Why would it give me this equipment just to invalidate the excitement and joy in buying upgrades at the store? The entire rest of the game I never cared about loot or got a single new upgrade because the weapon it gave me was just so good. I don't get it. Why are there so many stupid design choices in this game?

At this point, Gran Soren is mostly destroyed, the Inn is gone, and there's a giant gaping chasm in the middle of the city. You have to jump into it, which shows you falling into this endless vortex where you can randomly grab onto ledges and explore dungeons. The Main Quest at this point is to roam these dungeons and collect 20 Wakestones. That's it. Its just a big fetch quest and exploring dungeons randomly. These stones can drop from enemies, chests, or from the minibosses you encounter in these dungeons.

So I grinded for about 3 hours in these dungeons, slowly getting all the wakestones. This part wasn't terrible, but it felt a bit lazy. I did enjoy just roaming these dungeons, fighting minibosses and grinding enemies. This is where I came across the afformentioned annoying Hydra boss that I was raging at. But I ended up defeating him after much frustration. He's optional though. Anyway, the setting is cool, this endless vortex you fall into. I dig it. I thought it would be tedious and take forever, but they came rolling in fast. After you get all the wakestones all that's left to do is turn them in, then you get a cutscene where you suddenly appear basically in Heaven and you're literally fighting God. God is weary and tired and hes piss easy and isn't a threat at all. He basically just wants you to kill him so he can stop holding the weight of the world on his shoulders. Kill God, then you become God, and now its this strange thing where you roam around the game world as an invisible ghost spectating all the NPC's but cant do anything. Funny. Then you go back to the Heaven realm, and use the new sword called Godsbane to kill yourself, finally completing the game. Once again I get end credits, and yes, even my damn romantic gay partner Fournvial shows up again happily ever after. The post-game thing was kinda odd. Was it really necessary? That's all it is? Just grinding for 20 wakestones and a piss easy final boss? The way they stringed this stuff together was just super jarring. The concepts are really cool but the execution is questionable.

Dragon's Dogma is a real mixed bag. From the combats quirks, to some of the quest design, to the baffling way the game is pieced together, to some of the more linear set pieces. But it has an undeniable charm to it, it has soul, it has character and an identity. My time spent with Dragon's Dogma I was pretty much glued to the screen. It's the kind of game I can play for hours on end without even noticing what time it is. And I did. That says something. I felt immersed in the experience, despite its flaws and rough edges. The world is interesting and I wanted to wrap my head around it. The characters and NPC's are actually memorable, and the story is simple but gripping and you want to see it through. It's cool how it even has NG+ mode and all sorts of alternate modes such as Hard Mode and Speedrun mode. It's not that long of a game for an RPG either, I finished it in just under 25 hours and even did a chunk of side quests. For all its faults it's a game I can really appreciate and can see myself playing through it again sometime perhaps. Maybe come back for the DLC?

7/10