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I absolutely love it! Highly recommended. by Mischief Maker 08/18/2017, 8:43pm PDT
It's like a cross between Devil May Cry, Shadow of the Colossus, Dark Souls, Republic Commando, and just a dash of Dragon Age omnisexuality.

It's a third person open world action RPG with a heavy emphasis on the action. Your moves aren't DMC over-the-top, but you can still expect to air-juggle a fool with a swarm of drunken magic arrpws. Enemy variety isn't huge, but the enemies in the game are lovingly rendered with multiple attack animations, vulnerability windows, and elemental weaknesses. Giant monsters are a real treat in this game because you can climb on them like Shadow of the Colossus to stab weak points, or you can bounce them back on their ass with a well-timed perfect block with your shield, or you can throw an explosive barrel into their mouth then blow it up with an arrow and blast one of their heads off.

And something I really appreciate about the game is the monsters aren't stylized. In God of War everything was run through the Todd McFarlane-o-matic but in Dragon's Dogma a Chimera or a Griffon will look exactly like their portrait in the Monster's Manual, to say nothing of the titular dragon. Throw in the bombastic music and Devil May Cry-style action kinetics, and random battles in the wilderness in this game are as exciting as final boss battles in other action RPGs.

The main thing that puts people off with this game is you're playing at the head of a party of four, the remaining three being AI-controlled "Pawns" which are transdimensional aliens that emulate human behavior but lack any will to do anything on their own. And since you can only equip six active skills at a time in a game that has seven types of elemental damage, you'll need to delegate. Plus a well-designed pawn can be really useful in battle, like a fighter who cuts your vulnerability window short when you've exhausted your stamina, then bounces you off his shield like a trampoline launching you straight at the vulnerable head of a giant flying cockatrice. Best to approach the game thinking not just about your main character's class, but the AI party lineup to best back you up.

One of these pawns is your main pawn that you can custom create with all the freedom of your main character, the other two are main pawns belonging to other players online, or randomly generated offline. Now your main pawn starts out fighting like a retard, but that's actually a gameplay element because you're supposed to "teach" your pawn how to fight the various types of monsters by racking up kills and demonstrating attacks that exploit their weaknesses. Once their bestiary rating for that monster is three-stars, your main pawn will be brutally efficient in its tactics. If you're ever not sure what to use for your two guest pawn slots, it's hard to go wrong with a mage who has healing magic and a fighter with shield summon and springboard.

My main complaint with the game is the way it handles healing. You can pause at any time and instantly devour 50 pounds of healing herbs from the inventory screen, though the game does discourage hoarding healing items with its strict encumbrance rules. You may find the nonstop childish chatter of the pawns maddening (and it can be turned off in the options screen) but I find it's a constant source of hilarity where one minute my pawn is asking me if we should be entering a stranger's house uninvited, then immediately trashing all their breakable furniture and ransacking the place. There's also a fair amount of Shadow-of-the-Colossus-style wandering through the empty wilderness between the exciting parts. The DLC mitigated this greatly by adding an "Eternal ferrystone" quick-travel device that unlocks in your storage cache as soon as you reach the main hub citadel.

Its plot won't change the nature of a man, the NPCs won't feel like a second family (though you can romance ANY NPC in the game, including the court jester), character customization is bare minimum, and while its world has occasional moments of looking gorgeous, it ain't Skyrim. What you get is the open-world equivalent of the Dungeons and Dragons-licensed beat 'em up arcade games from the 90s rendered in graphics that kick the PS3 in the balls. Between this game and Aztez, Devil May Cry 4 has finally lost its permanent space on my hard drive.

Here's a few protips I wished I knew when I first played the game:

* The translation gets a little too cute with some of the classes and makes things unclear when planning your party. "Strider" should have been translated "Thief." "Mage" should have been translated "Cleric." "Warrior" should have been translated "Barbarian."

* Around level 10 when you reach the main hub city, you can go to the inn to change your class. Pick either the Magick Knight (better with a controller) or Magick Archer (better with mouse+keyboard) for your first play because these classes have a skill for every occasion as opposed to the fighter who's great in hand-to-hand ground combat but finds himself useless against flying enemies or physical-immune ghosts. Assassin is a close combat glass cannon class meant to challenge veteran players. I'd suggest making your main pawn a sorcerer the first playthrough simply because the meteor spell in Dragon's Dogma is the most viscerally impressive I've ever seen in a video game and you'll want to see it in action.

* Ignore the character building guides. The game's level cap is 200 but I beat the final boss on normal with my level in the high 40s (and I assume you can beat Hard mode in the 90s). The difference in stats for a min-maxed character is a couple hundred, but the best equipment in the game boosts stats in the thousands. Besides, if you min-max for maximum damage and can one-hit kill a hydra, you've ruined the experience.

* If you want your main pawn to be a distance fighter, make absolutely certain when answering the personality questions in character creation that the bar for "scather" is as low as possible (and vice-versa).

Enjoy!
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Review request: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen NT by fabio 08/18/2017, 7:12pm PDT NEW
    I absolutely love it! Highly recommended. by Mischief Maker 08/18/2017, 8:43pm PDT NEW
        Oh, this is the original? by fabio 08/18/2017, 11:54pm PDT NEW
            It's the original plus all the DLC, including Bitterblack Isle. NT by Mischief Maker 08/19/2017, 5:17am PDT NEW
 
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