MadCap's Game Reviews - "Dragon's Dogma"

Xbox 360 Box Art

Oh, goodie, an Eastern world attempt to do a Western Style fantasy. *sighs* Well, let’s see how this goes…

First off, though, the main title screen.  It’s a western-style fantasy Capcom, so why exactly am I hearing this on the main menu?

You couldn’t possibly do some sort of epic score that makes me really get hyped on the spirit of adventure. No, that’d be ridiculous!

 

I mean, hell, let’s take a scene from Lord of the Rings…

Like that? Great music, right? It’s all epic and grand, but it fits perfectly. Gets you all hyped up to kick some ass!  Now let’s try it again using the Dragon’s Dogma method…

 This happened and we let it happen...

In all seriousness, music is an important part of the game and Capcom just made a mess with that one.  The rest of the game’s music is alright if not at all memorable.  But the bit in the opening kind of kills it for me. Don’t get me wrong, I like the song and yes I’m aware that it was originally a Japanese game – before someone makes the comment – but the song just doesn’t fit for me. Sure, it's really awesome, but it doesn't make me think of the subject matter.

The plot starts with what I can only assume is a fast forward to the future where I am the Dragonborn, I mean the Avatar, I mean “the Arisen”, and I’m leading a party of extradimensional beings known as “Pawns” to go and kill a dragon.  Standard practice enough for a tutorial level, except for following a lengthy battle against a chimera in which nobody in my party seems to be able to crit, I find myself in a village being attacked by the very dragon that I was heading to kill with my party.

Unfortunately, I find myself a great deal less equipped and experienced than my tutorial self and when I attempt to take on the behemoth with a rusted sword I find myself getting my ass handed to me and then…well…this happens…

To answer your question – No, you are not on drugs.  The dragon takes out my heart and eats it, and then miraculously after an unknown amount of time, I wake up alive and well except for a glowing wound on my chest that apparently marks me as “the Arisen”.  Thus begins my epic quest to slay the dragon and win back my heart.  Oh, and save the world or something…

The combat is alright. You have your heavy attacks and your light attacks, but combat can often become a button mash fest, especially when enemies start to swarm.  Not that that’s a problem, because a swing of your sword can pretty much send all but the largest of enemies flying.  The largest of enemies you can deal with by jumping up on them and holding on to them as they try to shake you off Shadow of the Colossus-style and you hack at their kneecaps.

Oh, by the way, the giant monster fights are frigging awesome.   As I said, very Shadow of the Colossus.  One that sticks most vividly in mind is a fight against a Hydra early on, trying to grab hold of it and climb to hack off its head while its swerves around through an encampment and destroys things.  Great stuff.

The problem comes with the stamina. You run out of stamina when dashing, your character will actually stop and bend over hacking and wheezing for breath and leaving your susceptible to enemy attacks for a few seconds. This is why we don't have a lot of asthmatic dragon slayers, people!

And as stated before, you get up to three followers known as “Pawns” who come from another dimension and have no will of their own, so they hire themselves out as mercenaries when they arrive through Rifts. This is kind of a neat idea, but the Pawns themselves have no real personality of their own and thus are kind of uninteresting. As I said, you can have up to three at a time and they exist to help in combat, carry extra equipment, and serve as a needless source of frustration in the great RPG pastime of sorting through inventory to make sure they and I have the best items possible equipped.  This is needless busy work in any RPG and here is no exception.

Sure, it’s a staple of RPGs, but that doesn’t make it good.

Outside of the main world, the game doesn’t put much emphasis on multiplayer, mostly because there isn’t any. Oh, Dragon’s Dogma, how you make me suddenly love you (only not).  You are able to recruit other pawns from other games outside of your own world, but that’s pretty much all the interaction you have with other players of the game. And you know what? That ain’t bad.

All in all, I dislike the game. It's problems make me confused as to how it was published, and I'm even more confused to how there's talk of a sequel.  Bad games should not get sequels. I would suggest it to only the extremely tolerant or the die-hardly dedicated to RPGs. And I am neither.

Dragon's Dogma is now available from Capcom on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

This review is based on the Xbox 360 version.