Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen (Video Game)
Ted Hentschke
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Developed by Capcom
Available on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC (Reviewed)
Rated M for Mature
You know, I don’t feel particularly bad for being a bit late on this one. I like to play games through before I pass judgement, but I cut that short when one of these 100+ hour super RPGs demands my attention. I get through enough to get a good sense of the game’s style and scope, and generally around the 20 hour mark I have a reasonable grasp on what to expect. Fallout 4 only took up about 30 hours before I gave it my seal of approval. As it stands, I am sitting now at 77 hours played of Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. Every time I boot it up to get a few screenshots, I spend another half a work day pissing away my time eviscerating ogres and dismantling dragons. This game has sucked me in like a toxic high school ex over Christmas break. I love, hate, and just cannot stop coming back to this game.
Granted, the game really played its hand just a few hours in. Assemble a balanced party, fight off smaller monsters to get to bigger monsters, climb said bigger monsters to hit them in their weak spot, do this for about 10 minutes, move on to the next objective. Each monster has its own weak points, elemental resistances, and behaviors, so there’s a good deal to be experienced with just trial and error. It reminds me of what drew me to Pokémon as a child, with each new zone and gym presenting a new and unexpected set of challenges for me to wrap my little brain around.
There’s something uniquely awesome about hanging on to a griffon for dear life as it flies around, desperately trying to thwack its wings with the right element to bring it down before your stamina drains and you fall to the earth like a defeated sack of potatoes. Dragon’s Dogma is at its best in these moments. There’s nothing like the tension of climbing on an ogre’s ass and slapping it as hard as you can to try and get it to stumble before it can eat your healer.
Or the look of “oh fuck” on a cyclops’ face after you crippled it, cut off its tusks, lit it on fire, and stabbed it repeatedly in the eye.
The amount of innovative ways to deliver death to monsters in this game is staggering. Tired of hacking and slashing your way through goblins? Grapple them, then kick them off cliffs. Lizard men giving you trouble? Cut off their tails, make them lose balance, then sit on them while your teammates laugh and unleash holy hell. There’s a stats consideration for almost anything, with certain enemies targeting women over men and certain passageways requiring a shorter hero to enter. This unique attention to detail can be often frustrating, but always respected. Making my character, I didn’t realize that being a big burly dude would actually prevent me from fitting in small spaces, but I also didn’t realize it would make it easier for me to make monsters fall down. This is a game where the weight of your inventory doesn’t just affect stamina consumption, but how quickly you can wear down a monster by grabbing onto its arm. It often doesn’t explain its mechanics in full, but I can see the appeal in taking the time to learn them.
Unfortunately, this is also the game’s greatest downfall. While this level of detail can make combat fun in a clunky, experimental way, it makes interacting with the world a fucking nightmare. This whole “just see how it works” mentality it applied across the board, without any consideration of playability, fun, or my sanity. Quests are easier to fail than North Korean loyalty screening, and with similarly unforgiving results. I actually had to restart the game 5 hours in because I had the audacity to go to the major city before exploring the forest, thus blocking off a questline and an entire zone for the rest of the game. About 60 hours in, I made the foolish mistake of talking to a random soldier with a quest marker over his head before the nobleman in the castle behind him, thereby irrevocably ruining my chances of getting the best reward. When I decided to talk to a boy about his adventures before delivering flowers to a church, I was rightfully punished with a cutscene that changed the day, withered the flowers, and led to another quest failure. Justice is swift in Dragon’s Dogma, and punishment is severe for not reading the game’s fucking mind.
This is the dungeon. I literally got thrown in here for trying to turn in a quest at night. Sorry your majesty for trying to save the kingdom outside of office hours.
Keep in mind, there are no explanations for why this would happen in the quest description. Quests generally have a brief description and mark a location on your map, with no hint as to what random other quest will instantly invalidate it. I can intuit that taking the male bandit lord’s quest will cancel out my ability to make nice with the female bandit lord, but why the fuck does killing a griffon suddenly make it impossible to discover the roots of a conspiracy? It is an unforgivably punishing style of gameplay that is indicative of a Japanese design mentality. I love the goofy freedom provided, but it makes it almost impossible to play the game without a wiki open.
Oh, and whoever decided that there needs to be one time only escort quests that require you to take a helpless NPC directly through the path of a dragon, go fuck yourself.
And good luck trying to see anything if your lantern runs out of oil at night.
So, those are the basics. Monster fighting is unique and fun, but quests are a load of boiled ass. In between all of that, there is a lot to see and a ton to do. Crafting is a big part of the game, with tons of recipes and upgrades to delight that little item hoarder in your heart. Perishable items such as fish and meat go sour, but even then can be mixed with things to create useful items. Armor and weapons can be upgraded with materials, and beyond that can be empowered by literally bathing yourself in dragon fire. It’s a surprisingly simple and intuitive system given the rest of the game’s obtuse complexity.
Ore deposits all look the same, but different zones have different loot tables. Get ready to spend a lot of time watching this animation.
As for the combat, you don’t just pick a class and play it through the whole game. There are 9 “vocations” (read character classes) for you to level up, each filling a different role and requiring a different playstyle to master. Leveling up a vocation unlocks “augments”, permanent buffs that can be equipped by any of the vocations. There are certain vocations that only you as the player character can assume, but this is fine since you usually want your sidekicks to be on support roles anyhow.
This leads me to the game’s most curious feature, the Pawns. I wasn’t sure if I should discuss them in the gameplay or plot section, since they are kind of impossible to discuss without knowing both. I’ll take this opportunity to briefly introduce the plot, which is really the best I can do anyways without giving massive 100+ hour gameplay spoilers. You play as the Arisen, a normal everyday person living in the quiet fishing village of Cassardis. One day, the skies open, and a meteor descends that turns out to also be a dragon. As the fiend lays waste to your friends and family, you gallantly pick up a sword and try to stab it. After planting your sword firmly in its claw, the dragon smacks you, claws out your heart, and eats it. Surprisingly, this doesn’t prove as fatal as you might assume, and you awaken as a newly empowered Arisen.
Yesterday, I may have been a simple fisherman, but today I am reforged as “Teddy Three Hammers”. Note triplicate hammers, and consider your argument invalid.
Aside from being able to walk around without a heart, the Arisen’s main power is the ability to command Pawns. Pawns are a race of humanlike entities with no will of their own who require an Arisen to give them purpose. You create your own personal Pawn that levels up with you and remains your companion for the rest of the game, and recruit two additional Pawns from the “Rift”. Essentially, this is Dragon’s Dogma’s take on multiplayer. The Pawns that inhabit the Rift are actually other player’s personal Pawns, who will gain insight into quests and monsters while in your world. It kind of feels like a message board with fireballs. Pawns more experienced in fighting Ogres will let you know they are weak to fire, and that wolves hunt in packs.
It is, in theory, a good idea. Different players will play the game in different ways, so it makes sense that they would have different experiences to share. In practice, it only made me wish the game was actually multiplayer. The information, “chimeras can be silenced” is only useful once before I grasp the concept that chimeras are in fact able to be silenced. Pawns also seemingly don’t possess short-term memory, so expect to be told several times a minute that “goblins hate both ice and fire!” The game is played through with a party of 4 in mind the entire time, so why they didn’t just make the whole thing multiplayer is puzzling.
And while they can be silenced, I prefer beating them in the goat until they just shut the fuck up.
Almost as puzzling as the fact that I’ve heard this often described as being like Dark Souls. This game is absolutely nothing like Dark Souls. Other than it being kind of hard at times and you can cut off tails, it is absolutely nothing like Dark Souls. The comparison is baffling, as none of the mechanics, gameplay, or even style resemble anything even remotely Dark Souls. I think that Dark Souls has just become the go-to name drop when a game was hard enough you had to actually turn on your brain, which granted Dragon’s Dogma did make me do. If you want to compare it to anything, compare it to Monster Hunter mixed with Dragon Age.
There are three more things I have to talk about before I can really call the review comprehensive, and the first is the jumping. I haven’t had this much fun just jumping around in a game since Guild Wars 2. Almost the entire game is designed to have interesting little areas that can only be reached by well timed jumps and extensive exploration. Different classes have different styles of jumping, and there are entire areas, loot crates, and quests that can only be accessed by having the right jump in the right area. It’s phenomenally well done, adding a whole new dimension to the already robust world
Sure did pick a bad day to change classes into melee warrior…
The second, less enthusiastic topic is the menu. The purpose of this review is for the PC port of the title, which was previously only available on Xbox 360 and PS3. As much as I dislike re-releases, PC ports don’t rub me the wrong way. I think the PC offers a unilaterally superior experience, with the extensive modding community part and parcel to my ability to get lasting enjoyment out of a game. That being said, there is a darker side to ports, that certainly did arise in Dark Arisen. First off, any game that doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut to a map needs to check itself, because it certainly wrecked itself. You can assign hotkeys to certain items, but not integral functions like the quest log, map, and equipment. This is totally unacceptable, and just plain lazy.
Furthermore, certain aspects of the gameplay just didn’t feel as smooth on a mouse and keyboard. Climbing monsters felt off, with directions sometimes failing to register. When using abilities, players either hold Ctrl or Alt to bring up their primary or secondary skills, which I’m assuming is reflective of holding a trigger on a controller. You then push one of three buttons to activate a skill, and release the button to cast the spell. Since spells have different charge levels, releasing at specific times is important. On a controller, I see how this works, but it just feels awkward on a mouse and keyboard. It didn’t break the game for me, but it also never got to the point where it felt natural.
Although, on second thought, not exactly sure how climbing up an angry whipping spitting snake head/tail is supposed to feel.
The final bit is the reason I’m reviewing this game in the first place, the Dark Arisen DLC content. This is actually the third release of Dragon’s Dogma. The game first came out as just Dragon’s Dogma, sans the Dark Arisen suffix. This first release of the game was riddled with flaws, many of which were addressed in Dark Arisen. Previously, the game was an absolute monster to get around, as your only means of fast traveling was to teleport to set “portcrystals”, of which there used to be only two. The DLC adds four more, as well as an “eternal ferrystone” that allows you to warp to them infinitely. It also balanced much of the game and fixed some bugs, altogether providing a significant quality of life improvement for players.
It also added a new endgame zone, the Bitterblack Isles. For a game involving ripping out cyclops eyes and cutting off hydra heads, this zone is distinctly more horror. The cramped, musty halls are dark and heavy with dread. Hideous monsters and reaper-like wraiths patrol the corridors, presenting a daunting challenge to even the most experienced players. There’s even a mechanic where enemy corpses rot, and the stench attracts bigger, more gruesome foes. It’s rife with fear, and hones the game’s sense of overwhelming monstrosity to a fine point. After grinding for a week to be worthy of entering the decrepit isle, I can easily say it was well worth the effort.
This is a Goreclops. They are what replace the cyclops on the Bitterblack Isles. They have nine healthbars. Might wana leave this guy chained up.
Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is a deeply flawed experience that will frustrate and infuriate you. There are several times I put it down and refused to come back. Yet still, even while writing this, here I am again, back into the game. It’s utterly unique and deeply engrossing. The game took risks, and for all its failings there are equal triumphs. This is the kind of game that couldn’t get made in America. A Western design studio would look at it, point to all the flaws, and opt for another polished if not short and safe clone. This kind of adventure into the unknown is what gaming is about. From deep within my cold, jaded heart, that spark of what makes me love RPGs is once again Arisen.
Tee hee. He’s gonna be soooooo crippled for life after this.
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Game
Categorized:Horror Gaming Reviews
