Dragon's Dogma Review

Capcom’s fantasy RPG Dragon’s Dogma has been a long time coming, and it’s looked more and more interesting every time we’ve seen it, boasting robust action-focussed gameplay and an innovative Pawn system that lets you enlist avatars created by other players to fight alongside you. It often feels like an offline MMO, with a vast, scenic and perilous world to explore and a selection of thousands of characters to choose as your companions. It’s an interesting example of genre and style-mixing within the RPG, pulling in elements of traditional Japanese role-playing and churning them together with action-RPG physicality, open-world adventuring and MMO party tactics.Dragon’s Dogma regularly reminds you of other games. There are flashes of Dark Souls in the real-time combat, of Skyrim in its open wildernesses, and of Shadow of the Colossus in its large-scale battles. Sometimes, these associations work in Dragon’s Dogma’s favour; other times, they just remind you how short the game falls of these outstanding inspirations. It offers a lot of innovative ideas and a real sense of adventure, but it’s also rough-edged and sometimes oddly hollow.

The plot centres on the rebirth of an ancient dragon, which runs around ravaging the land. You can customise your avatar down to the tinest, most insignificant detail – no matter how carefully you adjust the sliders, though, you’ll probably end up looking a bit weird thanks to the game’s eerie character models. After you unwisely try to take the dragon down with a rusty sword after it attacks your fishing village, it plucks out your heart and eats it. (A word of warning: it turns out that watching a reasonably accurate facsimile of yourself get eviscerated by a giant dragon is rather uncomfortable.) Afterwards, you are reborn as the Arisen, and set out to get your heart back.
After that exciting start, Dragon’s Dogma’s plot pretty much disappears for the next 35 or so hours, reappearing at the end to deliver a conclusion so bonkers that it’s destined to turn up in Weirdest Endings lists for years to come. There’s also a romantic plot thread that revolves around a certain fair maiden – which, if you’re playing as a female character, makes Dragon’s Dogma an unexpectedly progressive medieval fantasy. The story, characters and quests are about as interesting as porridge.

But for the meat of the game, the story, characters and quests are about as interesting as porridge. Everyone talks in this faux olde-worlde way that gets really irritating (“Prithee, Arisen, there be aught to find in yonder cavern, most like.”) There’s nothing gripping about the game world, which borrows heavily from Tolkien without adding much of its own personality. The capital city is strangely deserted, and there’s not much life anywhere in the towns. All the interesting stuff is to be found out in the great outdoors, where trolls and ogres hunker in winding mountain passes and griffins nest on clifftops. Outside, Dragon’s Dogma can look gorgeous, with mist-draped scenery that stretches far into the distance.

To make up for unimaginative fiction and repetitive quest design, Dragon’s Dogma has excellent combat. You start off by picking a class from fighter, ranger or mage, but after a few hours you can start switching between them and developing hybrid classes, becoming a magic archer or an assassin. As your character levels up, you gain points to be spent on skills that liven up the combat, from nasty-looking skewering strikes for warriors to conjured orbs of magic energy that shoot lightning bolts at enemies nearby. Though your avatar levels up passively, you always have complete control over what they can do. Each class comes with benefits outside of combat, too; mages can levitate, whilst warriors can duck and roll off higher ledges.
Whenever the enemies start to get boring – and they do, especially towards the latter third of the game – you can switch up your skill set and weapons to keep things fresh. Vitally, each class is fun to play with for different reasons. As a mage you can cast walls of fire from a staff, which is pretty awesome, but as a melee character you can climb up the bodies of a really big foe and drive your sword right into its fleshy bits, hanging on for dear life as it tries to throw you off. This flexibility carries the entire game, keeping you interested in Dragon’s Dogma even when the story and quest design give you no reason to care.
Just as important as your own skills are those of your companions – your Pawns. Dragon’s Dogma gives you one permanent partner that you can customise and develop to your liking, and two others that you can hire from the Rift, a kind of netherworld whether other player’s Pawns gather. You can hire anyone you want, whenever you want, and take advantage of their battle skills and knowledge. If you’re stuck on a quest, hiring a pawn who’s already done it can really help out. If you’re not online, the game provides some standard Pawns to choose from, but playing with other people’s creations feels more personal, like picking a party for an MMO raid – except with NPCs.

The makeup of your party is vital to success in Dragon’s Dogma, because this is a difficult game. Pawns are neither enormously smart and adaptive nor face-palmingly stupid – they’ll support you in battle, but if you’re up against an ogre or a chimaera, expect to have to take the lead. Being an open-world RPG, you’re likely to find danger almost everywhere you go, especially if you venture off the path and into the forests and caves, where the gloom encroaches upon your visibility and powerful monsters wait to slice you in twain and send you right back to your last save.
It’s unforgiving, certainly – investing in the right equipment is often the difference between dying ignominiously in some cavern or coming back with spoils. But sometimes it feels as if your numerical level is more important than your skill level, which can undermine the challenge. It’s unlikely that a brave attempt to fell a monster that’s just slightly beyond what the game wants you to take on at that moment will end in success, robbing you of those joyous moments of unexpected, hard-won victory that make stories out of your experiences in games like Skyrim and Dark Souls. All the effort that’s gone into the combat and character development has left other elements of Dragon’s Dogma feeling unfinished.

It’s clear, unfortunately, that all the effort that’s gone into the combat and character development has left other elements of Dragon’s Dogma feeling unfinished. Graphical glitches and technical problems plague the game from the start, and never go away. There are times when you’ll run up to a quest marker on your map to find that the person you’re supposed to talk to simply isn’t there, and you have to wait five or ten seconds for them to stream in. Fights out in the open wilds lose a touch of their drama when a griffin’s head or a Cyclops’ club disappears through the scenery. Some equipment doesn’t place nice with the character models, so your character’s elbow might poke through their shield when they run.Walking along a road, your Pawns might start going crazy over some invisible enemy that will then suddenly appear out of nowhere. Big fights cause slowdown that can freeze the screen for seconds at a time on the Xbox 360 version. Dragon’s Dogma runs much better on the PlayStation 3 than on the 360, with a smoother frame rate and fewer streaming problems; if the 360 version is your only choice, a hard disk install is mandatory to make the game playable.

These technical problems are enough to sour the experience for anyone, but if you persist with Dragon’s Dogma, it gets more rewarding the more time you put into it. Where the game really succeeds is in providing a sense of adventure. As you press further and further out from the capital city, Gran Soren, you really do begin to feel like you’re on the frontier, exploring lands that human feet have rarely trodden. When night falls, you immediately start looking around for shelter – not because you’re told to, but because night is dangerous in Dragon’s Dogma’s world, and if you don’t hole up somewhere safe you’ll almost certainly die.
This palpable sense of danger makes quests feel exciting, even when their goals are uninspiring. Health doesn’t fully regenerate after a fight, so the longer you’re outdoors for, the harder things get. Hiding out in the wilderness in an abandoned fort, waiting for the sun to rise with only your Pawns for company, is an exhilarating feeling, as is bringing down a griffin or golem through a combination of tenacity and luck. You’ll breathe a sigh of relief every single time you return safely to an inn to rest, even 30 hours into the game.