Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen - Final Thoughts

After gushing about this game in a preliminary article a short while ago, it felt a good time to come back with some closing thoughts on Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen's PC port now that I've finished the game. Long story short, it's quite a good game, and the effort that Capcom put into this port is commendable, but it isn't without its flaws. On the one hand, environments, monsters, and characters look amazing, the pawn system is interesting, combat is solid, and fights against larger foes genuinely deserve the adjective "epic". However, the world doesn't feel truly alive, much of what happens in the story is seriously lacking in context, and after a time players will notice that they are retreading the same paths again and again.

Just spending a few minutes gazing at the screen with settings turned up, it's hard not to feel that Dark Arisen is a very pretty game, even with it being a few years old now. Climbing to any high vantage point then taking a look at whatever vistas are in the area are always impressive. It's some mighty fine eye candy and if there's anything of interest in sight, a sudden urge to go there begins to swell. Characters look very good as well, and they have quite a lot of customization options thanks to all of the different gear that they can wear, not to mention the insanely detailed character creator. Unfortunately, there isn't an option for an aesthetic set of gear to display while your actual equipment is underneath. Still, there is a lot of stuff to wear and at higher levels you'll be hard pressed not to look like a badass while gallivanting around the countryside.

The real standouts are the larger enemies, though. Run-ins with ogres, cyclops, griffons, hydras, cockatrices, dragons, and the like feel like something out Shadow of the Colossus. A lot of detail has been poured into their designs and animations. Cyclops lumber around slowly, lugging their club around. Dragons soar above the canopy of trees as you make your way to this or that destination, only to swoop down in front of you. Just seeing one of these big monsters in the distance while exploring the over world can either give pause as you ponder whether or not to engage it or a sense of elation, throwing danger to the wind and dive headlong into battle.

These monsters have their own unique weaknesses and strategies for taking them down. Moreover, they can all be climbed, so you may need to scale up the tale of a griffon or dragon and be taken for a ride, or scoot up the back of a cyclops in order to poke it in the eye. While the comparison to Shadow of the Colossus is certainly a fair one, it should be said that these fights are simpler on the whole. Regardless, locking horns with these creatures is a highlight of Dark Arisen.

It really should be said that the combat in this game is quite good. Movement is fluid and controls are intuitive. Both going with a controller or keyboard and mouse feel comfortable, so it's really up to the player what they go with. Personally, I liked using a controller when going with a straight-up brawler class like a warrior or fighter, then used a keyboard and mouse as an assassin so to have better fine control while aiming a bow as I'm just not used to controllers when it comes to that sort of thing. All the while, combat feels fast and fluid. Clunky is most certainly not a word that I would use to describe combat in this game. Zip around as a rogue-ish class, blast magic from afar as some kind of mage, or stand toe-to-toe with enemies as a warrior. Even classes like warriors and fighters, which wear the heaviest gear and wield the biggest weapons don't feel all that bogged down. If anything, there's a sense of momentum and power as they swing their weapons.

A nice thing about the game is that players can change classes when talking with certain NPCs. Tired of lugging around a sword and leading the life of a fighter? Why not try assassins and whip out the daggers and bows instead? Or maybe dawning the robes and staff of a mage seems more interesting? Players can bounce around between classes as they progress through the game. Each class awards different distributions of stats with every new level, so min-maxers will need to keep that in mind. Those who bounce around willy nilly will have a more generalist character at higher levels, and this is totally fine. You won't gimp yourself into a corner by doing this. However, if you really want to accentuate aspects of your character it's better to pick a side of the fence between magic users and non-magic users. Doing this will result in either a physical attack powerhouse, or the game's equivalent of Gandalf at high levels as your character's stats climb. Your primary pawn can also have it's stats changed by the same NPCs, so players can adjust its class as well when tweaking of party composition is necessary.

And this brings me to pawns. They're helpers that swear fealty to your character who, in the lore of the game, is referred to as the Arisen, someone who has been touched by the dragon (more on this later). Players will have one of their own and be able to recruit two more into their party. What's interesting here is that the other pawns that one recruits actually belong to other players and your own pawn can be used by others as well. Players earn a specific type of currency for renting out these pawns at a one-time fee and can release them whenever they like only to find a new one to take their spot. All you need to do is give some thought to what kind of party composition you would like and then grab pawns in the desired classes. They can be recruited by visiting a rift stone and being teleported to another realm where a number of pawns in your level range will present themselves for your consideration. If they aren't to your liking, there are more selection and search options in this plane to help find a pawn more up your alley. These beings can also be recruited while wandering the game world as they can be seen wandering the major roads and loitering in the cities. In this situation one can only recruit on a case-by-case basis, stumbling across pawns that seem interesting.

What's nice is that these guys are extremely useful in battle. While not perfect, they tend to make reasonably decent decisions, learning how to fight different monsters better, making good decisions on what spells to use, and even holding baddies down so that other party members can wail on them hassle-free. Even their pathfinding is pretty good. Watching these guys do their thing, I couldn't help but think of all the time that I had spent wandering Skyrim with my house carls, marveling at the seemingly non-stop cavalcade of bad decisions that they were capable of. These pawns by comparison are brilliant, and I hope other developers that insist on having NPC helpers take some cues from this game.

As much as it may seem that I'm gushing about Dark Arisen, one area of the game that consistently felt lacking was the story. Basically, your character starts as a simple villager by the sea and is then attacked by an ancient dragon that takes his heart and tells the protagonist to come find him if he wants it back. From there, you find yourself doing odd jobs for NPCs and slightly fancier ones for the Duke, who apparently runs the Duchy of Gransys. Eventually this leads to a showdown with the dragon, but all the while things keep happening and it's hard to understand why. The narrative in this game is seriously lacking in context. At one point, the main character is somehow involved in an affair with the Duke's wife without much explanation as to why. There's a strange cult running around that worships the dragon for reasons that are never really explained, and in the end the story becomes some sort of take on the circle of life. It's something that could have worked if the game did a better job of explaining why all of this was happening.

It's also a bit weird how the world doesn't feel alive. There are people wandering around doing their thing, but they come off as cardboard cutouts. I'll visit the capital and see the same kids running around day or night, and a lot of the stores there seem to never close. Since the only inhabited areas are Gran Sorem, Cassardis, and the keeps peppered throughout the land, it doesn't feel like a very fleshed out world. Players don't have the experience of being on a long journey and coming upon the welcoming lights of an inn or other small inhabited area while exploring Dragon's Dogma. You always know that those places are behind you and not in front since there are so few towns, which can make the game feel lonely at times.

Moreover, while running around doing random quests for everyone at first it's pretty mesmerizing wandering the countryside, taking in the sights and sounds of the game, figuring out where all of the holds, bandit hideouts, and chimera stomping grounds are. After a while, though, you start to notice that the game asks players to revisit these places quite a bit and many of them feel pretty samey. Even Skyrim, a game that some criticized for having overly similar architecture and locales, feels more varied than what Dragon's Dogma has on offer.

This is somewhat offset by Bitter Black Isle, an area that is unlocked not to far into the game, but isn't really worth visiting until after one has unlocked New Game Plus mode. It's a kind of Dark Souls Lite castle that players can explore at higher levels containing very powerful enemies and gear. Exploring this place seldom gets old. It's a very large zone with multiple areas and there's always a sense of foreboding while wandering its halls. It looks ancient and you never know when you'll run across something dangerous. Bosses here will get you thinking, "That's a lot of hit points!" and they take a fair bit more strategy than others in the game. An interesting feature here is that some bosses will randomly spawn, as they're attracted by the carrion that you create by killing the lesser enemies of the castle. This can be particularly troublesome should this happen while already fighting a standard boss. Farming gear here can take a while because the items are a bit randomized and the treasure chests only respawn every four days in-game, so players have to wait before hitting them up again. There are exploit strategies floating around the internet for those so inclined, however.

One the whole, Capcom's PC port of Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is well worth a look for fans of series like Elder Scrolls, Risen, or The Witcher. It's an interesting take on these sorts of games from a Japanese developer. The combat is excellent, the game looks amazing, and the monsters are really well done. I just wish I better understood what's supposed to be going on story-wise half the time and that there were more towns to visit. That aside, this is definitely a game to look into for fans of open world fantasy RPGs.

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Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen - Goodbye Productivity

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.

After steamrolling through this and not actually fighting any dragons (but you do fight a chimera), the game fast forwards to the present where players create a character, going through a surprisingly deep selection of features for fine tuning its appearance. I went for a brunette country girl named Paprika, and made her a strider, which is a dagger and bow wielding kind of class (Note: players are able to change classes later in 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.

Currently, I have three pawns with me, a fighter and two mages. This has been proving a good mix thus far as the fighter acts as a tank while my mages cast healing, offensive, and support spells from afar and I have the option of hanging back, bombarding enemies with arrows, or running in knives ready for melee combat.

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.

And that's where I am now. Figuring out to do about some out of control tentacles (I wonder if I could convince them to take up a career in the seedier side of anime), and a small army of other odd jobs I could be doing, but the only thing I actually want to do is venture off in some random direction and see what's out there. Normally, this is the approach I'd take to a game like Skyrim, but that feeling is ten times stronger here. There's something about the way the combat, aesthetic, and exploration works so well together in Dragon's Dogma that makes me like it far more than Elder Scrolls. Crazy talk? Maybe, but I'm just glad to have finally found a game that I really want to sink my teeth into after all this time.