Dragon’s Dogma is almost an excellent game, even the PC version’s much improved visuals and (more importantly) performance can’t quite elevate it’s standing, though a solid 60 FPS on even an aging rig certainly helps. It’s got a lot of good ideas, but doesn’t execute them well and wastes potential at every turn. This review is, of course, for the PC version.

Story

There isn’t one. Well, there is, and it even has an interesting opening scene and ending, but the in between is barely there, irrelevant to what’s actually happening, poorly voice acted, and easily miss-able. As in most of the “story” quests are optional. It doesn’t manage the Dark Souls level of charm by tying the lore to the story in interesting ways either, all the mysteries of the world (if they have an explanation at all) are outright explained to the player as you progress, so it’s not adding much for depth. If you’re looking for a story driven game, let me stop you right here, because this isn’t the game for you.

What I will say is it does have some good quest design. They’re almost always kill/fetch/escort quests, but many of them impact the world or standing of certain NPCs which impacts later quests and their availability. The best part is this happens in ways that make sense, but aren’t obvious, which is nice for multiple playthroughs. Shame it’s wasted on side missions and a bland story, because it could have made the story really interesting.

An interesting premise and occasionally good quest design wasted at every opportunity by a vapid presentation and lack of substance, something made worse by it’s constant insistence (when it shows up anyways) that it’s being dramatic and that it should be taken seriously. It has little of value, and actively detracts from the experience.

Bitterblack Isle Story

This criticism was noticed by Capcom. Despite a much more hands off approach to the story telling (with most of it being flavor text, environmental storytelling and speech that plays as you explore) the story of Bitterblack Isle is far better in substance, presentation and execution. Its quality is so far above that of the main game that it deserves a separate score.

Still nothing fancy, Bitterblack Isle is primarily an excuse to dungeon crawl, but it succeeds almost everywhere the main game fails and the story expands on the lore in a way that actually is interesting. This would be a 4 of 5 based on the quality of what is there, despite being relatively sparse, but too much of it is locked behind collectables you have to go out of the way to get, which is a really frustrating way to do anything, much less tell a story.

Design

It’s certainly not the prettiest game around, seeing at it’s a relatively straightforward port of a 2012 console game that ran at sub 720p. It shows it’s age most in the textures, nicely detailed textures for weapons, armor, and the well animated creatures, but some muddy textures on characters, and seriously rough textures on objects. It also has pretty serious terrain pop-in when moving between open areas, but it doesn’t impact gameplay. That said, it has been dramatically improved with significant improvements to visual clarity and stability. It manages a rock solid 60FPS even on older or budget PCs. It should, considering how obvious it’s age is, but something other PC ports manage to struggle with. The highlight’s here are the lighting and particle effects. The spells in particular, with 2 exceptions that look like cheap 2D, are visually impressive impressive affairs, even if not quite up to modern AAA standards.

Obviously shows it’s age, but it’s got good art direction and aside from the occasional crash it runs well even on older computers, which is far more important given the type of game it is.

Sound

Right off the bad the voice acting isn’t great, and you’ll be hearing it a great deal as AI loves to talk. Everything else is fantastic. The rattle of bones movement in the dark, the heavy thuds of an Ogres footsteps, the bleating of an injured magic wielding goat grafted to a lions back, even the echoes of weapons meeting flesh or steel in caves and the dynamic music that fades in an out as battles progress, it’s all very good. It’s also very informative, with audio cues with varying subtlety warning you of impending danger or marking your opening to strike. It’s so good that it’s actually easy to miss unless I stop to think about it, which is the highest praise I can give a games sound. Not an out of place effect or underwhelming sound to be heard here.

It’s near perfect, held back primarily by sheer volume of sub par voice acting from chattering AI and wordy NPCs.

Gameplay

This is the one area both most impressive and most tragically flawed, as well as the glue that holds the whole game together. The Pawns are the most unique aspect, being your AI companions. You create one permanent pawn, in much the same way you create your character (with most of the same moves and classes available to them,) and can recruit others from the Rift. You can temporarily recruit up to 2 others, either randomly generated by the computer or other peoples main pawns. The pawns also learn, from both you and others, and so can adapt their tactics for various creatures and act as information givers if they’ve already done the quest or fought the creature you’re fighting. It’s an interesting system. Sadly, the game doesn’t explain how the AI’s overall strategies (called inclinations) work and what explanations it does give are vague and sometime inaccurate. The result is that there are frequent complaints of poor AI inspired by incredibly stupid pawns, when the AI is actually very effective provided it’s been given a proper set of inclinations and it’s owner hasn’t taught it bad habits. This opacity also means finding effective pawn helpers can be rather difficult without going to a forum specifically to find good pawns who know what they’re doing. If you’ve ever done a PUG in an MMO, you know what I’m talking about.

The actual gameplay is often viewed as a mix of several different games. My go to is Monster Hunter+ Devil May Cry+ Shadow of the Colossus. It’s fast and fluid, with numerous large (several times your size, not Shadow of the Colossus large) enemies as bosses and dotted throughout it’s open world. You can scale these creatures to strike weakpoints, pin them down, or unbalance them so they’re easier for pawns to knock down (pawns can and will do these things as well) and they’ll all attempt to respond appropriately, jumping, shaking, grabbing, and rolling in an attempt to get you off.  You’re probably going to want to use the mechanic well, because Dragon’s Dogma does not hold your hand. It’s a reasonably tough game in the first place, with many larger enemies and mages being perfectly capable of knocking off half your HP in 1 unblocked blow, or even instakilling you with a specific spell, making scaling them to strike weakpoints or holding them down to let others do so a valuable survival tool.

In the same vein, the first warning you’re going to get that you’ve wandered into an area you aren’t prepared for is when a monster hits someone and knocks off 80% of their HP or better, and you’re expected to figure out that maybe this area is too tough for you just now and return later. The fast travel system is also very limited, and the world you’re getting into trouble in fairly large. You have a limited number of “portcrystals” that act as places you can teleport to with the use of an item, and you must manually walk to the desired location and place said port crystals, which means there is a great deal of walking. Some people will undoubtedly hate this, I enjoy it. Fast travel in games tends to reduce the world (both from a design and a gameplay perspective) to a mere series of checkpoints. As in other games (Dark Souls and Morrowind being the best examples) limited or missing fast travel forces the player to take the world and its dangers seriously and think as a person trying to navigate the world, instead of as a player trying to complete an objective ASAP. Doing things like memorizing the territories of specific enemy types and racing to reach somewhere safe before night falls and the ogres come out is exciting, and simply not achievable if you can fast travel everywhere at the press of a button. My only complaint is that the spawn locations and type of enemy are static, with the exception of the changes for the day/night cycle and pre/post game. This means the world loses its anything can happen magic more quickly than it needs to. (This criticism did not go unnoticed by Capcom either, as Bitter Black Isle spawns many of its tougher enemies randomly or semi-randomly and so it keeps that feeling far longer than the main game ever could, despite being far smaller.)

The combat also has a strong emphasis on equip-able skills that you acquire as you advance the class (which levels independently from your character.) These range from literal rains of arrows, to summoning meteors, to enchanting your shield so if you time your block well it shoots fireballs at your opponents. These will be most of your damage most of the time, so to stop them being spammed with impunity they drain a pool of stamina where basic attacks do not. There are 9 “vocations” (the classes) broken down by color (red=front line fighter, yellow= nimble but fragile guerilla fighter, blue=magic user, with the 3 hybrid classes mixing elements of the 2 colors they have) that you can switch between almost at will once you’ve unlocked them. Certain skills even transfer between vocations with similar weapons, and some transfer between all of them, which encourages experimenting to find a playstyle you like or simply switching to tackle a new threat. The playstlyes are all varied and done well too, even different classes with similar movesets (or the same class with a different moveset) play very differently, with a fighters sword and shield tanking playing out very different from an assassins sword and shield counter attacks and dps focus.

Sadly the theme of good ideas not executed well shows up again in the class and leveling systems. While many skills transfer between classes, what stats you get as you level are determined by which class you are when you level, which actively punishes the player for not knowing what they want to do right off the bat and leveling accordingly. What makes this particular decision a poor one is that the end game and Bitterblack Isle have absurdly powerful enemies that require a lot of raw power to damage and not all of the classes get stats that make them good at their job when they level, meaning players intending to tackle these areas may have a very hard time or be forced to level as a class other than the one they want to play in order to be effective. There are also glaring balance issues, for example enemies tend to have a large amount of HP and pawns (however clever) are simply not as good at dealing damage as the player. Combined with the lack of a ranged option for the big flying baddies (including all 3 of the “final” bosses) this makes the fighter (default tank class) an extremely poor option for the player after a certain level or point in the story, whichever comes first. The upside to all that is that it encourages multiple playthroughs to see how other classes play when you have the stats to use them effectively, but the downside is that there is only one save file per character so that will require losing access to your save (or losing access to the stuff your main pawn would have brought back while you were playing the other save, if you choose to circumvent this manually.)

Arguably the best moment to moment combat in an action RPG to date, brought down by counter a intuitive progression system, shockingly blatant balance problems, and the really odd 1 save file limitation. I strongly advise watching some gameplay, I’m simply incapable of doing it justice with words.

Overall

Dragon’s Dogma has a lot of flaws, most of them so obvious I wonder why Capcom let the game out the door in the state it’s in, or how someone made those mistakes in the first place. In a way it almost feels half finished, like it was a beta build shoved out the door before the writing staff and QA had time to finish doing their jobs. If ever there was a game that needs a proper sequel and some time to refine it’s better ideas, it is Dragon’s Dogma. The gameplay, sound, and exploration (especially in the endgame and optional dungeon) are simply so good that I find myself not caring as much as I would in any other game of this type. In fact I was willing to endure the near constant 20fps of the console version for upwards of 300 hours back in 2012, and the PC version is definitively the best version, pulling me right back in. If you’re into action RPGs and think you can handle the obvious flaws, you owe it to yourself to experience just how good this distinctively Japanese twist on class based ARPG combat can really be.

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