When first booting up Dragon’s Dogma, the title screen opens to a lovely, slow, steady piano motif playing in the background. The motif has a somber mood at first, before picking up a few seconds in, with a fuller score. But after a minute, the piano is replaced with electric guitar, and that same motif serves as the base of a catchy J-rock song that could be found at the front of most anime shows.
The change was jarring to anyone unprepared for it. It is also the tone setter for what Dragon's Dogma is, for better or worse. Most re-releases of the enhanced port of Dragon's Dogma, titled Dark Arisen, don't even carry the song at the opening, titled Into Free -Dangan by B'z. It's a shame, as it tells players up front what Dragon's Dogma truly is: it is a game that embraces its style with open arms.
It became apparent that this sudden musical change was a precursor to the game ahead. Taking ideas from its contemporaries, from Dark Souls to Monster Hunter, Dragon's Dogma is this Frankenstein monster of features that at times feels like a misshapen, shambling mess, one that apes several sources but never truly meshes together. But when it does, it is a kinetic, high-octane adventure that combines its best elements into some of the most stunning and diegetic gameplay.
Dragon's Dogma has you star as the “Arisen”. Like every other unlikely chosen one, the Arisen starts as a fresh-faced innocent in a small fishing village, until a Dragon Swoops down, plucks their heart from their chest, and eats it. After the dragon dines on your organ, you awaken as the Arisen, a character that must now go on a journey to kill the dragon before the world ends.
This plot doesn’t really go places until the last act, where a surprising twist changes the game for the better, in my opinion. But those looking for a deep, or even coherent storyline will be highly disappointed. Truthfully though, Dragon's Dogma is not really about plot, since it's attempting to recreate the feel of an adventure from an old Dungeons & Dragons module. If this is the tone Dragon's Dogma is trying to capture, it is successful, but it is leaving players wanting in some respects.
This is a weakness for those who crave a more overt narrative experience. Many of those old D&D modules really did lack character and had the barest brushstrokes of characterization, where the players fill in the gaps for themselves. Think Dark Souls, but missing a lot of the background character that makes Dark Souls feel alive despite its barrenness. The mission-based structure of Dragon's Dogma implies a narrative structure, but it just doesn't go anywhere fulfilling.
At its core, Dragon’s Dogma is all about the gameplay instead. Many of the game's elements are fairly similar to other games in the action RPG genre. Take Monster Hunter, for example. One of the most vital actions you can do in Dragon's Dogma is to hoard items found out in the field, stocking up on tons of herbs, oil flasks, mushrooms, and cyclops tusks to combine and create new, more powerful items. So right off the bat, preparation is as vital, if not more important, than finding a higher-level weapon or piece of armor, as that can help you coast just fine with most basic threats.
Combat is also a mix between Demon Souls and Monster Hunter. You have light and heavy attacks that can button-mash to death with enemies, but you're better off learning the ebb and flow of enemy abilities and attacks to be effective against them. This also leads to a fairly robust class system, here named vocations, where your Arisen can customize your primary and secondary abilities based on your class. The aptly named striders, for example, can plunge a hail of arrows from a distance and then get close with a pair of daggers, while a mage can shoot off magic missiles or take the time to conjure up a massive whip of lightning to strike foes from a distance.
Combat is easily the best aspect of the game. The mix of flavors brings things together in a way that feels and looks organic, with unique combo abilities that offer powerful attacks, which is good, as there are a lot of massive enemies in Dragon's Dogma. There is just enough customization to make combat varied, allowing a fair degree of flexibility on your preferred play style, especially as you move on to the advanced or hybrid vocations. Whether it is up close and personal or from afar, Dragon’s Dogma compensates each vocation to make them fun to play in the thick of the fight, providing a balance of abilities and skills that allow for plenty of experimentation.
And topping all of this off is the crown jewel of Dragon’s Dogma, the boss battles. Be it a mini-boss like a roaming Chimera in a thin woodland, or a scripted boss battle against a Hydra, Dragon's Dogma pulls out all the stops in making the boss fights feel dynamic and epic. Each creature you fight has a strength and weakness, and using various tricks and abilities becomes the key to exploiting them to your benefit, making these boss fights feel rewarding when you can take them down with your hard-earned skills.
Of course, you will not be alone in your quest to slay the dragon. Accompanying you are Pawns, described in-game as otherworldly sojourners who only follow the orders of the Arisen. In-game, the Pawns are used to create a balanced party of four, and the only way to create that balanced party is to borrow Pawns from friends and strangers online. Working like the hint system in Demon Souls, Dragons Dogma attempts to emulate the system by creating active, custom-made avatars for the player to use, adding a degree of connectivity with friends online while playing a single-player game.
The Pawn system, however, has some drawbacks. For starters, Pawns become useful for players when they give you hints regarding the game's numerous quest lines, expose the weaknesses of monsters, and have knowledge of the in-game world. A Pawn without quest or monster knowledge would be less helpful in the field. It is also easy to exploit the game through the Pawn system; having a friend or two who power-games their Pawn up to the higher levels, while your Arisen is only level 10, effectively breaks the game. Capcom tried to balance this out by having higher-level Pawns be rentable for a large gold price, but anyone on your friend list gives you a Pawn for free, regardless of level, so borrowing Pawns can lead to an easy, exploitable game that can ruin the whole experience.
Considering the importance of the Pawns in combat, party balancing, giving information to the player, and effectively solving quests just by asking them, Pawns become more important to the game than the Arisen is. Creating a balanced party of super-powered Pawns will allow you to pretty much walk all over any challenge you face, so your Arisen can sit back while the Pawns do all the work. So this over-reliance on Pawns becomes a winning strategy for the long run in Dragon’s Dogma, especially if you have friends who are quick to optimize their Pawns’ builds, which will see more passive or lazier players not deviate from their builds or experiment with their approaches against enemies.
Dragon’s Dogma is also plagued by several questionable design choices outside of the combat and the Pawn system. At release, the biggest offender is an archaic save system right out of Dead Rising, giving you one save slot for your entire game. Coupled with an auto-save system every time you enter or leave a zone, it makes some quest lines, particularly those of the escort variety, a complete chore to get through. The inventory system is another problematic aspect; despite categorizing the hundreds of items that can be collected and combined in Dragon’s Dogma into five different sections, the sheer amount of clutter that can accumulate over time is astounding to sift through without constant management, which non-RPG players may find a bit daunting.
Another major design issue for some would be the lack of a fast travel system, or at least, a hassle-free one. Instead of fast-traveling automatically to major cities or locations on the game map, only a specific item, one that is rather uncommon in the game, to fast-travel to the game's sole major city. On the one hand, I enjoy this as it's a resource management mechanic that functions in the logic of the game's world, allowing for a bit more realism to the entire experience. It becomes a one-way ticket to safety in a pinch to either liquidate loot or to pick up new quests. Some may see this as a weakness. It made combat more life-threatening, especially during boss fights, something that most RPGs today fail at.
Dragon’s Dogma is not the prettiest game to look at, but aesthetically the game does really well at making the world believable. Each field has its own flavor to it, each mountain side their own secrets to uncover. You also have some abandoned castles and underground tunnels to explore, allowing a variety of location set pieces that give the world of Granys its unique flavor. The monsters follow the palette swap school of design to create the illusion of different enemies, but overall that is a nitpick complaint that is just good game design.
The biggest issue, however, is the lack of a coherent art style between all of the game elements. The world is clearly Western-fantasy inspired, so most of the characters and designs in Dragon’s Dogma are slanted towards a more European-based, Elder Scrolls style. But every once in a while, a more anime-inspired character pops up, right down to the spiky hair and doe-eyes. It also doesn’t help that character customization allows you to make anime-inspired Arisens, as well as elves, dwarves, and even children. You can be as fresh-faced as you want, or a crotchety old man with blue hair or a pink beard. The huge amount of options is admirable, but it becomes super jarring when your pink-haired old man is listening to the harrowing stories of travellers who look like they came out of a Renaissance fair.
Keep in mind, no elves or dwarves exist in the world of Granys, except for custom-created characters, so having a 12-year-old elven Arisen with spiky green hair and doe eyes, with a stout, axe-wielding Pawn as a Gimli clone, really sticks out like a sore thumb when you put it in the foreground of a battle against a Chimera. There is something regarding the freedom of this character creator, as it ultimately shouldn't matter since it is your personal game, but it is a choice that can take you out of the experience.
As for the overall sound of the game, the only characters with a remote personality are the Pawns, who pretty much shout the same scripted lines every five minutes. Your Arisen is mute, and most of the faux French and English accents you hear become grating over time. Capcom also went the old English route in the game’s language, which does give the world a more ancient feel if you can sift through some cringeworthy dialogue deliveries. Music is also strangely absent throughout most of the game, only really flaring up during combat, boss battles, and cutscenes. Thankfully, the opening song by B’z is still a banger that truly represents what Dragon's Dogma is about, even if you may think it doesn't really fit into the vibe it is trying to attain.
And in the end, Dragon's Dogma is a game that has a tonal problem. Despite the craft and care put into a nearly five-year project, the Frankenstein monster that is Dragon’s Dogma buckles under its weight of ambition. Undoubtedly, role-playing fanatics will enjoy the difficulty of combat, the hours of preparation and customization, and an expansive game world to explore, but it does come at the cost of several issues that hold it back a bit from being truly great.
Author's Note: This review was originally written for Blistered Thumbs back in 2012. It has been edited from its original form and posted here for preservation.