Japan doesn’t make ‘Western’ role-playing games. They generally stick to their own style, known as a JRPG – Japanese Roleplaying Game. Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, Xenoblade, Pokemon, games like these is all examples of the style. They like to base their games around killing monsters, leveling up your characters, and having a storyline driven along by a group of.. young looking characters. JRPGs like having a constructed plot, and not much straying from it. It tends to be from a third person perspective most of the time, too. Western RPGs differ a lot, however. They pride themselves on customization, by changing your face, body-type, race, and stuff like that. They like having side missions, and a setting usually taking place during a middle age-esque era. The weapons also aren’t crazy huge, like a bustersword. They keep things grounded in reality, mostly. All of this is ‘generally’, of course. Every game has their own spin on things, but these tropes are used often. In the end, for whatever reason, a lot of Japanese don’t like purely western styled RPG games.

In spite of this, or perhaps, because of this, Capcom decided to try and make a RPG that would appeal to both Japanese and Western consumers.

Story

In Dragon’s Dogma, you play as the ‘Arisen’, a hero chosen by the ultimate monster, the Dragon, to be the one who is destined to beat him, and… that’s pretty much the beginning and end of the story. The story in this game is a complete joke, if there even is one. Each ‘main’ quest feels like a side mission up until the last two when they’re like “Oh right, there’s a dragon you have to kill”. The story just doesn’t have any substance to it throughout the entire game, and is wholly comprised of boring and tedious side quests.

Nothing done during the main quests do anything to prepare you to fight the dragon either. In Skyrim, your quests had you do things like get a Dragon to ally with you, and acquire new powers to prepare yourself to fight the final boss. That doesn’t happen in this game. You just run around, solve crimes, do some escort quests, play hide and seek, fight a griffin and a giant chicken, and then you go to fight the main Dragon. You just grind and grind on the side, killing enemies and leveling up. It has no direction and no development. No feeling of epicness.

There’s also no character depth in the game. No allies that you can become attached to, since your teammates are literally mindless pawns. In something like Dragon Age, your allies have backstories. They came from interesting places, had interesting stories, and had their own personal quests you could do for them. Fix things from their past that’ve come back to haunt them. That’s a really good thing. You can begin to feel close to them when you learn of their history and who they are. In Dragon’s Dogma, your allies are ‘pawns’. They are a race of human-looking beings that have no minds of their own, and only exist to assist the Arisen. They spout off the same lines everywhere you go, and say how amazing you are once in awhile. They are absent minded and don’t have any chemistry. You can’t ask them questions, or do anything to probe into who they are, or what they think. NPCs are just the same. They don’t really say anything during the game, and you can’t have any interesting conversations with them. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if their total lines stayed in the single digits. There’s even a romance option in the game that was obviously shoehorned in to copy western RPG tropes, shown by games like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Fable. In those games, you had to choose certain dialogue options and it felt a bit more realistic than what they did in Dragon’s Dogma. To romance them here, you gift them random objects and they say thanks. Awesome. Sex now?

All in all, the story is nonexistent along with any emotion. Everyone you meet is boring, and literally every single character in the game is completely and utterly shallow.

Graphics and Design

The graphics are mediocre at best. Everything in the game looks like it has a low resolution, and is blurry. The land is colorful, if a bit dull. They did do some interesting things with nighttime, though. Different monsters spawn at night, and it is extremely dark, which sounds bad but actually works here. The monster designs are also pretty good. They all really do look great. However, there isn’t a wide variety of them.

Most of the time you’ll be fighting the same six enemies over and over. Goblins, harpies, ogres, weird water things, dogs, and thieves. You get to fight a griffin and a badass chicken at one point, but I was too lazy to go seek them out to fight again.

The music in this game is also weird. There’s one thing in it that feels like it shouldn’t be here. Right off the bat in the menu, you get some random J-Rock song that makes me want to rip my eyes out. It’s awful. I love Japan. The culture, the history, but the majority of the music that country produces sucks. Instrumental stuff is usually really good, though. Just find the song I’m talking about on youtube: Dragon’s Dogma Title Music. Whether you like it or not, that song shouldn’t be in a RPG game. The rest of the music during the game is passable I suppose. Nothing really stuck out to me during it though.

The entire map in the game is pretty small compared to most other RPGs too, but it will feel incredibly drawn out since there’s no fast travel system. Sure, you can buy a ferrystone, a ‘scroll of town portal’ thing, but if you want to teleport to a different city, you’re screwed. The only place the ferrystone will transport you is back to the main city, Gran Soren. There’s no reason to go to any other city at the end of the day though. I’m pretty sure Gran Soren is the only city with shops you can actually buy stuff. I only found one other place I could buy things, and that was at some camp in the middle of the wilderness. A lot of the times I would be overburdened, even after having used my main pawn as a pack mule. You can’t use your other two pawns, because anything placed in their inventory is instantly theirs, and you can’t get it back. It would take forever to go to Gran Soren just to sell some stuff. Ferrystones are expensive, and I couldn’t afford them all the time.

Inside Gran Soren, the place is very dead. There’s a very serious problem with how the populating of that city works, because 90% of that place is just empty. Closed doors, no people. Easy to get lost, too. Everything looks the same and is just devoid of people. Even when you run into the main square, it takes the game about 8 seconds to generate a person that’s walking around. It could probably be levied by installing the game to your console, but if you don’t have enough space on your hard drive, you’re stuck.

I suppose it would be fine walking around everywhere if it were done correctly though. I had a really good time just milling about in Skyrim for hours on end. The reason it was so good, was because there were different kinds of lands in that game. You have mountains, snow, rivers, caves and random buildings and towns you could stumble upon. In Dragon’s Dogma, the environment never changes. It’s always a green forest area. There’s a few cities you can find, but beyond that, there’s nothing. You’re disparaged from running through the forest, because you’re told high level monsters are in there. You are likewise disparaged from going into rivers, because being soaked with water makes you slower, and is an ailment. This game doesn’t like exploring. It wants you to stick to the roads, and your route is always preplanned out. You always go along the same roads too, so you keep seeing the same stuff and fighting the same spawning enemies over and over. It really is tedious.

Also, I mentioned last section that the pawns spout the same lines over and over. What I didn’t mention, was that Capcom tried wayyy too hard to make it seem all old and antiquated. At every fucking turn, they found some way to shove in the word ‘aught’. EVERY SINGLE TIME. Even when it doesn’t make sense. “If we go into that cave we might find aught inside!” “You have aught you need?” “Use this to make something with aught of use.” The latter being a description of various mushrooms and herbs. The menus should not be screwed around with, Capcom. I had a hard time trying to figure out what stuff meant when I first played the game. Changing grammar around so it sounds all old fashioned. Stop it. It’s really annoying, and stuck like a thorn in me throughout the entire game.

So, the design is nice, but the execution is bad. The monsters are cool, but there isn’t many of them. The entire land is colorful, but unchanging. The towns are empty and really the only place that has shops is the main city. The lack of a fast travel system makes getting anywhere take forever, and causes traveling to drag on and feel boring.

Gameplay

But, a game isn’t a game without gameplay. I know when I first saw previews of this game, they showed off a ton of awesome looking tornado spells, and other stuff that made Skyrim’s spells look boring. Obviously once I got the game months later, I made my Arisen a boring swordsman. I probably didn’t get the coolness factor of doing crazy spells like other people would playing this game, but dammit, I was going to be the best swordsman ever. You have your light attack and heavy attacks. Hold one of the bumpers and press a button to do a special move. For most of the game, I had a cool dash attack that I’m pretty sure destroys about half the enemies in the game, and barely does anything to the other half.

Sometimes it knocks them back, other times it doesn’t. It’s also a really bad move to do in the city. You move fast and feel cool when you do it, but when the game decides to spawn a random civilian, it’s always in front of you. For whatever reason, when I’m running to the main gate, I always bump into dudes who appears right in front of me. They just fade in, and I always hit someone. Put that together with your awesome dash attack, and it’s instantly into the dungeon. No way of running from the guards, or bribing them, or paying your fine there. If you hit someone once, a guard runs up to you and tells you to “Come with me.” You go into the dungeon and tediously wait a minute for the guard to walk past your cell so you can bribe him like 5k gold to get out. I know if you get the skeleton key you can open the cell itself, but by the time I had figured that out, I had already been to jail a bunch of times.

Beating up monsters is fun, of course. Fights take wayyy too long though, especially when fighting the large monsters. They have a really long health bar, and multiple levels of it. They are trying to be seen as bosses, but they fail awfully because they’re completely easy to beat.

For example, there’s a huge stone monster golem dude thing that you can fight, and you have to destroy little points of light on him to do any damage, but he shakes you off all the time when you’re climbing over him. I never died once fighting that monster, and barely had to use any potions, but it was just so tedious and boring I just wanted to run away. It’s just a test of patience.

Health is regenerated through eating herbs, or you can craft herbs into more concentrated potions to drink. Spells also heal health, but, they only regenerate it, and only up to a certain point. If you get hit, a bit of that life is unrecoverable, and you have to use potions to get it back. It’s okay, but I wish there were more powerful healing spells. The only way I recovered health in the end was just using herbs. The spells just aren’t good. There’s a lot of fights where regeneration isn’t going to help you, and you just need to get life back instantly. In those fights, just imagine your dude taking a breather every couple seconds to chomp down on a salad. It’s a bit silly.

Also, I never crafted one of those potions, or anything for that matter, throughout the entire game. I don’t know why, I just never did. Maybe because it never told you combinations you could do, or just how it wasn’t advertised, but for whatever reason, I just didn’t bother with it. Not like you need to anyway. The herbs you buy in the stores are powerful enough.

Conclusion

I could never finish this game. I was going all beast mode through the quests, when you just hit a brick wall in the difficulty on the final mission. The monsters are basically invulnerable. I didn’t want to grind forever to just beat it. I had enough of the game already.

If you look at Dragon’s Dogma from the outside, it doesn’t look too bad. From the inside however, you can see how Capcom didn’t do so well making this game. They had good aspirations, but the execution was disappointing. Everything they did correctly was countered by something they did awful. Dragon’s Dogma has combat that is ok, but fights against monsters take way too long without being challenging. The environment is nice, but it never changes, and traveling takes forever without a fast travel system. At the end of the day, Dragon’s Dogma is mediocre. It doesn’t stick out, it doesn’t amaze you, and it’s just… meh.