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Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
PlayStation 3
Fire Works Well, but won't Burn Elder Scrolls
3.5/5 stars
“Dragon’s Dogma” (“DD”) stands among the few new IPs released by the venerable Capcom in the 7th Generation. While Capcom has been busy producing plenty of partial games and even more DLC to finish-out those partial games, most of those products have been sequels or dead-horse-beating rehashes of existing franchises. Yet “DD” and the expansion pack, “Dark Arisen” (“DA”) – which, in the same manner as “White Knight Chronicles” and “White Knight Chronicles II,” combines the full original game and the new content in one package – brings completely new material to the table… Yet the core of “DD” doesn’t really seem all that new. In their initial marketing surge, Capcom made a distinct effort to point out that “DD” is NOT an RPG, but an open-world action game (what sensible people call ‘sandbox’). I appreciate Capcom’s honesty and their ability to intuitively understand that so-called ‘W’RPGs are simply mislabeled action games, thus I was excited to see what the Japanese take on this relatively new genre would look like.
Presentation
“DD” is built using Capcom’s proprietary MT Framework graphics engine and tries to look like a modern Western game, with the “DA” expansion taking the focus on dark & gritty beyond sanity. Despite being dark, gritty, and realistic, “DD” sometimes has brief flashes of really great design. Enemies look spectacular (especially the big ones, though they frequently have issues with clipping into the environment), and environments stretch as far as the eye can see, with only minimal pop-in. However, the textures used on the game’s polygon models aren’t high enough resolution to stand up to close inspection. While these textures look anywhere from great to amazing during normal gameplay, during cutscenes, when the camera zooms in close to characters, the textures are noticeably pixilated, blurry, and cheap-looking. Even worse, the lip synch in “DD” is abysmal, which makes cutscenes even more cringe-inducing.
Stylistically, the world design doesn’t seem to be consistent, with the starting town and its residents looking like they belong on an island in the Mediterranean sea, but the capital city and its residents looking more at home in pre-Renaissance Europe. And, honestly, the game map just isn’t big enough to justify housing such disparate cultures (though there are a few brief mentions of lands outside the explorable map in “DD” and “DA”). Enemy design is likewise a mash-up of European and Greek mythological stylings, with most monsters tending toward the latter and looking quite spectacular.
The ‘dark’ part of dark & gritty requires special mention in “DD.” The game features a day/night system that switches every 45 minutes or so. Adventuring during the day is standard Fantasy fare, but adventuring at night really brings the dark into play, as when it gets dark in “DD” it gets REALLY dark and visibility drops to zero. Characters can carry lanterns, however, to light the way, which shows off the MT Framework’s fancy lighting engine and its ability to cast realistic shadows. I’m not really sure why the dark has to be SO dark when adventuring outside at night, as it would make sense that there would be star-and-moonlight, but such is not the case.
Another bit of fancy technical fluff provided by the MT Framework is the way the game simulates fabric, which is very impressive. Not even the fancy nVidia PhysX-powered PC games I’ve played recently have been able to create such realistically-moving cloth. Unfortunately, it seems that Capcom was pushing a bit too hard on the capabilities of aging 7th Gen hardware, as “DD” occasionally suffers from massive framerate dips and occasional stutters. I even had the game completely lock up on me once (Of course, once is significantly less than the number of times “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” froze on me, also on PS3!).
Another bit of graphical design ripped straight from the playbook of Western sandbox games is the character creator. I have a fairly strong hatred of Western character editors, as it is far too easy to make hideous mutants and far too difficult to make attractive human beings. The character editor in “DD,” however, manages to embrace both extremes. I was able to create fairly good-looking characters with relative ease. It is also quite easy to make girly-man and burly-woman characters, since most of the facial features are identical between genders. On the other end of the spectrum, however, the character generator enigmatically includes some really ugly features that, when combined as one, can generate a god-awful abomination that looks more frightening than any of the game’s monsters. Nobody should have to face a bald, obese midget with a Jay Leno chin, goblin nose, and lips that would make Angelina Jolie gasp in dismay, wearing a corset and a thong. Fortunately, there is an in-game item that can be purchased with in-game funds (NOT DLC!) that allows the player to redesign their character whenever they want.
The only part of “DD’s” design that is so truly awful that it actually impacts gameplay in a negative way is the set of icons that designates status ailments. These icons are far too small, dark colored, and nondescript to really tell what they are supposed to be (and the lack of a physical manual makes looking them up on the fly impossible). I never really got a handle on what they all stood for. It’s frustrating that these same worthless icons appear next to character’s health/stamina meters AND on equipment that provides resistance to the status ailments they represent, in which case the icons are partially obscured by resistance percentages, making them even more difficult to identify.
The audio in “DD” is not particularly noteworthy. While there is a relatively expansive soundtrack, most of it is either atmospheric or completely unmemorable. The main title theme features a woman singing slightly above her vocal range, resulting in screechy, incomprehensible lyrics, and most of the game simply has no music at all. The battle theme, however, stands out as particularly memorable, especially the dynamic use of specific musical cues to denote when the player is performing particularly well against a powerful enemy and the powerful-yet-brief victory fanfare.
“DD” features a lot of voiceacting as well, and it is mostly just passable. While there are numerous characters to talk to in the game, most of them are just filler who say nothing of importance. The game does, however, make great use of deliberate diction styles and archaic words to lend credibility to the idea that “DD” actually takes place in the past and is not just a Renaissance Faire portrayal of the old world. I did find myself constantly annoyed, though, by the long pause between initiating conversation with a character and the beginning of them saying their lines. Since all characters have speech and text, I usually found that I’d read half the text or more before the character even began talking.
Finally, one part of the game’s audio of particular note is the dialog spoken by the game’s Pawns – AI controlled companions that make-up the player’s party. They constantly babble about inconsequential things or repeat the same lines over and over in combat. I can’t count the number of times I heard, “Fire works well!” when fighting… pretty much everything except fire-proof monsters. It’s particularly bad when mashing the button to pick up loot (which also initiates conversation) while Pawns are standing nearby, as it will often cause them all to start talking at once, frequently saying the same lines with near-identical voices. While the character generator may allow for vastly different appearances in characters and Pawns, the number of available voices is far too limited.
Story
“DD” begins in the small fishing village of Cassardis. On a typical day, our nameless protagonist meets up with one of the village girls on the beach to do some of their daily tasks. Cassardis’ routine existence is interrupted, however, when an enormous red dragon appears and begins destroying the dock. Our nameless protagonist snatches up a sword dropped by a nearby guardsman and assaults the beast. Upon injuring it, the dragon glares down upon our prone character and effortlessly dislodges the sword, as it begins mumbling in incomprehensible Latin (with no subtitles). Placing one enormous talon above our nameless protagonist’s breast, the dragon literally steals the character’s still-beating heart and swallows it. Yet the loss of such a vital muscle doesn’t kill the character and the wound miraculously heals, leaving a large, ugly scar.
The next day, our nameless protagonist awakens in the village elder’s house, still heartless. Upon touching the scar, our nameless protagonist hears the dragon’s voice, which slowly transitions from Latin to English. It is now that our protagonist earns a name: Arisen. The dragon encourages the new Arisen to take up arms and seek him out if the Arisen would reclaim their heart.
Before long, the Arisen comes in contact with the Pawn Legion, a group of sub-human beings that originate from a rift between worlds and lack any form of will, ambition, or motivation aside from serving Arisens. With Pawns in tow, the Arisen joins Duke Edmun Dragonbane’s forces in hunting down the dragon and investigating the sinister goings-on in the duchy.
The overall narrative in “DD” is fairly weak. While hunting down the heart-stealing dragon is a decent enough motivation for the Arisen to move forward with the story, the events connecting the attack at Cassardis and the final confrontation with the dragon seem somewhat tenuous, unconnected, and not particularly interesting. There are a handful of side stories that pop-up and form mini-plot threads of their own that weave back into the main thread, but none of them are particularly fleshed out. However, after the confrontation with the dragon, which one would think to be the end of the game (there’s even a partial credit roll), another mission pops-up which finally brings all of the story threads together into a unified picture. It’s annoying that Capcom decided to tack-on the true ending as a post-game coda, but it’s a really great coda that salvaged the entire main story for me, tying together the world’s mythology and explaining the relationships between dragons, Arisens, Pawns, and the world.
Outside of the main story, “DD” doesn’t really have a lot of engaging sidequests for a Fantasy sandbox game. There are plenty of boring MMO-style bulletin board quests involving the killing of X copies of monster Y or collecting X copies of item Z. The “DA” expansion also includes 100 previously-for-pay DLC missions that involve scouring the far corners of the game map in search of coffee-cup-saucer-sized badges. There are, of course, a few organic sidequests given by named non-player characters, but these are largely one-off missions that trail off into dead-ends instead of developing any meaningful characterizations or plots. Overall, “DD” doesn’t really succeed as a sandbox game because there are so few options available to the player. Each quest can be completed in one or two ways, and if there is a choice, it’s largely meaningless. Also, while there’s plenty of map to explore, there’s not really a whole lot to discover, aside from monsters and treasure chests (which contain random loot and refill every few days).
The “DA” expansion, aside from integrating all of the previous “DD” DLC for free, takes place entirely on a separate island that isn’t even visible on the world map. Bitterblack Island is even darker, grittier, and filled with more horrible monsters than the base game. The Arisen is first brought to Bitterblack Island via a chance encounter with a mysterious woman on the Cassardis docks in the middle of the night. This woman, Olra, feels confused and partially amnesiac and needs the help of an Arisen to figure out what horrible things happened in the past that corrupted the island and compel her to remain in such a dreadful place. “DA” is specifically designed to be played after the main story and the coda, as it draws upon game world mythology that isn’t revealed until the coda. “DA” uses the same basic storytelling technique as vanilla “DD,” weaving a threadbare story that comes to stark clarity immediately before, during, and immediately after the final confrontation in the island’s depths.
Gameplay
“DD” comes from the same Capcom development team that has produced games in the ‘Resident Evil’ and ‘Devil May Cry’ series, so it comes from a long tradition of actiony combat. Yet the combat in “DD” is decidedly clunky. It actually reminds me quite a bit of the combat in “Demon’s Souls” or “The Witcher 2,” only more forgiving, but with zero ability to lock-onto targets. There is a reason 3D third-person action games have had some form of targeting lock-on since Nintendo first forced the ‘Zelda’ series into 3D on the N64: It is frustrating and obnoxious to play 3D games and deal with the camera swinging around like a drunken albatross without some ability to keep the player’s character facing the right direction. It’s even more frustrating and obnoxious to try to shoot small, fast enemies with a bow without any form of targeting assistance. On the flipside, magic staves shoot homing magic orbs but the player is given no ability to manually aim them.
That said, “DD” may have clunky combat, but it at least provides plenty of diversity and options during combat. In addition to hitting enemies with quick light attacks, slower heavy attacks, and up to six stamina-consuming special attacks, it’s possible to execute some “Shadow of the Colossus” style maneuvers by climbing onto the bodies of large monsters to reach specific weak points. The player also has three starting vocation options to choose from, allowing for vastly different gameplay styles.
The vocation system starts with Fighter, Strider, and Mage. Fighters use sword and shield (with the “Demon’s Souls” inspired mechanic of blocking consuming stamina), Striders use twin daggers and shortbows and can unlock the ability to roll-dodge and double-jump, and Mages wield staves and can cast a variety of attack and healing spells. Upon reaching a certain point in the game, however, it becomes possible for both the Arisen and their Main Pawn to change vocations, not just between the three starters, but also between three advanced vocations and three hybrid vocations. Main Pawns and Arisens can choose to be Warriors to tank damage and wield massively-slow 2-handed weapons, Rangers to wield significantly more-powerful longbows with their daggers, or Sorcerers to sacrifice access to healing magic for access to stupidly-powerful attack magic. The three hybrid vocations are only available to the Arisen and include the physically powerful Assassin, the auto-aiming Magick Archer, and the enchanted tank Mystic Knight. Out of all these vocations, I really only found utility in the Sorcerer and Magick Archer. The Magick Archer’s ability to fire homing arrows immediately made the game 1000% more fun for me compared to my starting Strider vocation, and the Sorcerer’s high-powered spells absolutely wreck terrible monsters from a safe distance. I spent most of my time in “DD” with these vocations, as I appreciated the Magick Archer’s happy medium between full manual aiming and full auto-aiming, but sometimes needed to rain meteors on monsters’ heads. I made my Main Pawn a Mage, then changed her to Sorcerer, but found that Pawn AI is moronic as a Sorcerer unless the Arisen is a Sorcerer too, as they will stand around in safe places NOT casting spells unless the Arisen starts casting spells first (they are, however, perfectly happy to start casting time-consuming spells when they are NOT in a safe place).
Along with the failure of its combat system, “DD” also fails conspicuously as a sandbox game due to the clunkiness of the fast travel system. Instead of having an ‘Elder Scrolls’ style system for quickly moving from place to place from the outset, “DD” instead features a travel system ripped straight from NES-era ‘Dragon Quest’ games. The player can find or purchase minor magic items called Ferrystones that allow the party to move from wherever they are to any Portcrystal set on the map. While vanilla “DD” only featured one static Portcrystal, “DA” features three. In addition to the static Portcrystals, the player can find a handful of moveable Portcrystals that can be placed anywhere on the exterior map, but not in dungeons, towns, or other enclosed locations. Each Ferrystone costs 2000 gold, which is negligible late game, but crushingly expensive early on. Furthermore, Capcom decided to screw people who didn’t buy both “DD” and “DA” by providing an Infinite Ferrystone with unlimited uses to anyone with a vanilla “DD” save on their console. With exploration being the central sandbox genre stable that “DD” actually gets right, making the fast travel system so restrictive is a pain.
Even the save system in “DD” is ham-handed and overbearing. While drastically better than the constantly-saving, player-screwing system in “Demon’s Souls,” “DD” has a tendency to bulldoze the player’s save with an auto-save at the worst possible times. Worse still, there are only two save slots available per player profile, and only one of those (the one that gets bulldozed) is accessible at will. The secondary slot is reserved for ‘checkpoint’ saves at inns or during key points of no return in the story. Fortunately, player death is treated somewhat mercifully, as there is no penalty other than retrying from the last save… of course, forgetting to save after defeating a difficult monster only to fall off a cliff in the dark is still frustrating.
The Pawn system is “DD’s” main unique gimmick, and it is fairly interesting, though could have been implemented better. The Arisen and Main Pawn are the only permanent party members in the game and the only ones who gain experience and levels. It’s possible to complete the party of four by recruiting up to two Support Pawns, either by touching a Riftstone and going through a search process or by talking to the random Pawns that the game scatters around its towns. What makes Pawns distinct from other games’ moronic AI companions is that it’s possible to recruit Pawns from other players (though offline players can still recruit randomly-generated Pawns). While “DD” doesn’t feature any form of true multi-player, players can recruit each other’s Pawns and gift items to each other via those Pawns. Of course, the fact that Support Pawns may or may not be the creations of other real, live humans has little impact on their AI stupidity. While it is possible to give Pawns vague commands (Go, Help, and Come), how they react to these commands us a crap shoot, and their general behavior while exploring an area can lead to problems. I’ve had Pawns stand right in my path when lining up a running jump across a large gap, destroy barrels/crates that I was using as platforms to reach higher ledges, and commit suicide by jumping into bottomless pits or off high ledges (though the latter only happened about 4-5 times total).
The game discourages the use of high-level Pawns to carry a low level player by charging prohibitively high Rift Crystal costs to recruit higher level Pawns but a cost of zero Rift Crystals to recruit a same-level Pawn. I waffled along with same-level pawns and found the game mostly tolerable despite a few difficulty spikes, some enemies that took so long to kill that they got bored and left, and constantly having to revive all three of my Pawns (simply touching a downed Pawn revives them for free with half their health). Upon reaching level 36, however, I recruited a Fighter Pawn named Ellie who ended up staying with me though the rest of the game (I stopped at level 112). You see, Ellie’s master must have ditched her and farmed good equipment alone, only to equip Ellie with it and leave her at low level. This Pawn had fully-upgraded gear from the vilest depths of “DA’s” Bitterblack Island, and her presence made everything flow so much better. She never went down (not even when getting stomped by two gorecyclopes), she could kill cannon fodder enemies effectively, and generally acted in a competent manner when she wasn’t seeking out every treasure chest in the vicinity to snipe the loot (which does not automatically go to the Pawn’s owner, thankfully). At level 40 I recruited a supped-up Mage Pawn named Hilda, who also stayed with me forever, providing healing for the group while my Main Pawn got the benefit of gaining levels as a Sorcerer.
It almost felt like cheater-mode to recruit such powerful characters at such a low level, but that’s pretty much the way the “DD” leveling and equipment systems work. While the difference between a character who spends 100 levels (out of a possible 200) as a Mage vs. as a Sorcerer will only be 100 points in Magic Attack and Magic Defense, this type of difference can be compensated easily with high-end equipment. Each vocation has specific stat increases per character level, which encourages min-maxers to play a specific vocations even if they don’t like said vocations. While a hybrid character with some focus on physical stats and some focus on magical stats can perform adequately in any vocation, an all physical or all magical character will have difficulty dealing significant damage in their opposite vocations. Unfortunately, when it comes to battling foes, there’s no real way to tell what level they are, nor how much damage they are taking aside from a non-numeric purple life bar.
The amount of equipment available in “DD” is fairly Spartan, but the upgrade mechanics add enough depth to make up for the lack of diversity. There aren’t a lot of different options available early on, and most of them are not particularly powerful. The post-game coda and “DA’s” Bitterblack Island, however, contain loot with at least double the potency of the rest of the game. Each piece of equipment can be strengthened by a blacksmith from 1 star to 3 stars by paying gold and handing over specific combinations of monster debris (Gee, that doesn’t sound familiar at all!). Where equipment in “DD” really starts to improve is via Dragonforging and Rarification. Defeating any of the smaller dragons that roam the game world (the heart-stealing dragon isn’t the only one) grants a chance that any piece of upgraded gear worn by the Arisen will gain an extra upgrade level and become more powerful (designated by a red dragon icon). Taking Dragonforged gear to a specific NPC on Bitterblack Island allows the stuff to be upgraded an additional two levels (by paying LOTS of gold and handing over RARE monster debris), first gaining a silver dragon icon, then getting a gold dragon icon. Ellie and Hilda ended up as potent as they were because they were fully decked-out in gold dragon icon Rarified gear.
I eventually got my Arisen and Main Pawn partially upgraded with a mix of red, silver, and gold dragon icons, but with over 100 hours into the game, I had experienced the entire story, all of the sidestories, and the whole of the “DA” expansion, so I no longer felt compelled to grind through Bitterblack Island’s and the coda’s ferocious monsters in search of random debris drops and random Dragonforging. Nor did I feel compelled to cycle through the whole game again on New Game Plus. Not even the presence of an end-game Raid Boss, an Ur-Dragon, which is fought simultaneously by every active player, could keep me interested. These kinds of grinding, upgrade, and Raid Boss mechanics are a cheap way to extend a game beyond any meaningful duration, and only end up making a net-positive experience into a tedious one… or worse.
Overall
“Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen” is a semi-competent Japanese take on the Western-dominated open world sandbox genre that nonetheless suffers from clunky gameplay systems at nearly every turn, from awkward combat, to random difficulty spikes, to the tedious retreading of already-covered ground. Due to regional preferences, “DD” more closely resembles games like From Software’s “Demon’s Souls” or Capcom’s own “Monster Hunter” than Bethesda’s ‘The Elder Scrolls.’ The sandbox in “DD” isn’t particularly expansive or very deep, and there aren’t a whole lot of things to do in it besides fight giant monsters, grind equipment upgrades, and run back and forth between quest bulletin boards. The narratives are short and threadbare, only unifying into something thought-provoking at the bitter end, while the lack of meaningful sidequests leaves the game world feeling vacant and lifeless (though also miraculously stable and glitch free compared to Western counterparts). The unified whole, however, somehow manages to be more engaging that its underwhelming component parts. While I’m not crazy about “DD,” I didn’t hate the experience either, and I applaud Capcom for releasing “Dark Arisen” as a complete experience with all the DLC included for free. Fans of “Demon’s Souls” and “Monster Hunter” will probably find “DD” too easy, too forgiving, and not grindy enough, while fans of ‘The Elder Scrolls’ will probably find it too Japanese and devoid of things to mess around with. Thus “Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen” sits uncomfortably between two styles of action game, fitting neatly into neither pidgeonhole.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
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