A few years ago, Capcom turned some heads with their own take on the Western action RPG when they released Dragon's Dogma. It was non-linear with a huge world to explore, fluid combat, an interesting method for NPCs to help the player, and an inexplicable buttrock intro. All-in-all, the whole thing worked and the game earned itself a respectable following. With the company porting quite a few of its games to PC a lot of folks were hoping that this one would be going that route as well, but for the longest time Capcom remained silent, and the game's lead developer went so far as to say that it would never happen.
So, imagine the surprise and elation when it was finally announced that the title's follow-up, Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, would be getting ported to Steam. There were quite a few happy folk that day, and I was one of them. Now that the game is finally out, I've been pouring an ungodly amount of time into it. Really, just a disgusting amount of time. It's ridiculous. For the last few months, I've been quietly lamenting that there weren't any games out there that have really sunk their claws into me, but this is the one to finally change that.
The game starts with a little tutorial level where you and a growing team of adventurers are hunting a dragon in some old ruins nestled in the mountains. While it largely acts as a means to familiarize players with basic gameplay mechanics, the experience does get the ball rolling with the idea that the big bad of the game is a dragon, which makes sense since "dragon" is right in the name of the game.
From there it introduced her as a villager in a small fishing settlement on the cost. People are just going about their business when out of nowhere a dragon attacks. My character, seeing one of her friends in trouble runs in to try and fight the dragon. Of course, she loses, then the dragon plucks out her heart, utters an incantation, and eats the heart. After this, Paprika passed out, coming to a time later in one of the village houses with other survivors. Somehow, she's still alive with a huge scar on her chest and whenever she touches it the voice of the dragon speaks, issuing a challenge for her to come and find him for a showdown.
With that piece of knowledge in mind, I proceeded to do just about anything but that, gathering my stuff and wandering around the countryside in search of adventure. Exploration hasn't felt as completely open as something like Elder Scrolls or Fallout, being hemmed in by cliffs and mountain passes in the opening areas, but there are still plenty of wandering goblin packs, bandit camps, and the occasional cave to tempt passersby. Taking the time to indulge myself in these for a bit, I proceeded to pound out a few levels.
Paprika wasn't alone in doing this, however, as the game has a system whereby NPCs called pawns who will join her. These are beings that look human but don't quite have the spark of life that a real person has. They come from another realm and enter this one via portal stones. Since Paprika's run-in with the dragon, they view her as someone they call "The Arisen" so they're more than happy to tag along with her on adventures. What's particularly interesting about this is that each player creates a pawn of their own, just as they would a normal character (I named mine Cecil, and made him into a mage). They'll continue to grow and become more powerful just as your character does, gaining levels while the player gears them up better. Why this matters is that they're all kept track of on Capcom's servers allowing players to recruit other people's pawns. You'll see them wandering around town and along roads on the world map where you can talk to them and, if you have enough space in your party or want to boot someone else, you can add them to your group. It's also possible to go through their portal stones and select potential pawns. Of course, they'll need to be in your level range, and one needn't worry about other players being trolls as what they do with those pawns stays in their own game and won't have any impact for good or ill on your own.
Surprisingly, the pawns are reasonably bright. In a lot of other games with NPC helpers, their usefulness can be debatable. Skyrim's house jarls are a fine example of this with those guys' legendarily poor judgement. In Dragon's Dogma, the pawns look like Rhodes' Scholars by comparison. My fighter will bang her sword on her shield to distract monsters so that everyone else can go after its weak point. On humanoid enemies, if she gets close enough, she will hold it from behind so that others in the group can get some free shots on it. Meanwhile, my mages are quick to figure out what elemental weaknesses a baddy has and exploits them. So, if it appears susceptible to flame, out come the fireballs. Even more interesting, if the same monster somehow gets soaked, say it fell in a lake, the mages will pick up on this and stop using fire spells since they'll be ineffective and switch to lightning or ice spells since they'll work better on the soggy foe. The pawns are very impressive in how well they can fight on their own. Players do have some basic commands they can issue like telling them to charge into a fight, follow the player, or help the player, but a lot of the time they can be left to their own devices without much trouble.
When I finally got around to actually doing some of the main quest line, it became quite apparent that the game is not shy about pitting players against large enemies. In short order, my group found itself fighting off a cyclops and a host of goblins, then a massive hydra not long after. Big baddies like this actually feel like major battles as they have a ton of hit points and if there are a lot of other NPCs around they'll join in trying to stave the thing off. Best of all, you can actually climb up these things. If they have a weak spot on their head, it's worth it for a melee character to grab onto its leg, then try and leap to its back, and finally swing up behind its head in order to cling on and bludgeon it into submission. The thing won't just sit there doing nothing and will try to fling off anyone scaling it, but this can be offset by various stats on gear and unlockable abilities. In any case, these fights are pretty nuts.
After making my way through a few more of the main story quests, my party finds itself in the capital with a nice big stack of quests for them to get on. They've just now finished a jaunt into some old dungeons below the city that are normally watched over by the local pawns. There've been some strange goings on there that they haven't been able to deal with so it was up to us to go down there and see what was wrong.
At first, it felt like a fairly standard romp in a dilapidated dungeon with hordes of undead to fight through. However, when we finally got to the bottom and took a look at the area in question, we were set upon by these tentacles that kept coming out of the ground. After a couple of minutes, it became obvious that attacking them was pointless because all that would happen is more would come out of the ground. Looking around the room, there were no signs of levers, magic items, or anything else to deal with them. So, without any real idea of what to do about the things, I called over my pawns and got them to follow me so we could escape. Maybe I'd need to talk to someone about finding a relic or some such in order to defeat the things? As we neared the exit, it triggered a cut scene and my group finally made it to the safety of the pawn-held stronghold above. As it turns out, the correct way of dealing with the tentacles is, in fact, to run away. This surprised and impressed me because the vast majority of the time games just have players kill all the things and press on. Running away isn't an option, and in the rare case that it is, the whole thing is heavily telegraphed by cut scenes. Dragon's Dogma didn't imply this at all, with the pawns saying that attacking the tentacles was useless and nothing more. It's interesting that something like retreat can play such a major role in a quest, and the game leaves it up to the player to figure it out.
