Review

Developed by:Capcom Published by:Capcom Genre(s):
  • Action RPG
  • Platform:
  • Microsoft
  • PC
  • Sony
  • Cost:$59.99 ESRB Rating:MATURE Players:1 Release date:May 22, 2012 Reviewed on:XBox 360
    8.8

    Dragon’s Dogma

    Dragon’s Dogma (DD) is an action RPG from Capcom that’s similar to games like the Dragon Age, Fable, and Fallout series. This is uncharted territory for Capcom, which raised some questions. Questions like how is this going to play and can Capcom really make a western styled RPG? Capcom took a shot with this game and it definitely hit its mark! Not to say this game is without flaw but it is a very good game that will satisfy any western RPG fan’s craving.

    DD tells the tale of a hero that had his or her (we’ll say it’s a “he” to save time) heart ripped out by a dragon. Somehow the hero is saved; revived as an Arisen to track down and kill the dragon that stole his heart. All of this is shown via a tutorial quest, giving you a feel of the game and to set what to expect in the future. If the tutorial quest turns you off, I’d still give it a chance. This quest barely touches the surface of what DD is capable of. The combat system is similar to Dragon Age 2 but more polished (it’s more than a button masher). After this tutorial quest you are taking to the character creation screen. While it’s not as intense as something like Skyrim, there is a healthy amount of options to tweak. The character customization allows you to pick your features including skin color, height, weight, muscle build and facial hair. The features like hair style and facial hair are pre-made; you just pick them from a list. If you decide that you don’t like what you’ve chose, you can change it by going to a barber shop later in the game. After you pick your name and moniker (alias) you’ll move on to the vocation (class) system.

    The vocation system has some nice variety to it. You have to start off with one of three basic vocations: Fighter, Strider or Mage. These are basic classes in any RPG. The Fighter uses a sword and shield, The Strider is an agile rouge/ranger and the Mage casts magic. The vocation system is tied to the discipline system. Discipline in DD works like ability points that can be used to purchase new abilities or new classes. In this way, you can get advanced and hybrid versions of the basic classes. For example, the advance version of the Fighter is the Warrior which specializes in two handed weapons. A hybrid would be something like the Mystic Knight, a combination of the Fighter and Mage classes, who uses magic and melee weapons. Just like most RPGs, not all the abilities are available to use when the vocation is first unlocked. You’ll have to use the vocation in order to rank up and unlock additional abilities for purchase.

    The Pawn system is ground breaking; Capcom definitely put time and effort into crafting this system. Pawns are your party members. You have one main pawn which is in your party indefinitely and up to two support pawns you can recruit. You’ll get to customize your main pawn, just like you did when creating your hero. Pawns do not have as many choices for vocations though (they cannot learn the hybrid vocations). Your main pawn gains experience just as your main character. Pawns you can recruit can either be found in places called Rifts or walking around specific areas in the game. What really makes the Pawn system ground breaking is that the support pawns you recruit from a rift are actually other people’s main pawns! Not only that but they learn things while they are adventuring with other players.

    Pawns can exist in more than one game at a time. You can play your game normally, even if someone has recruited your pawn. When a pawn is on a journey he will learn about whatever quest you complete and whatever enemy you kill. This information is passed on to other players. So while you walk around with an active quest, one of the pawns will say something like “We should talk to someone in the capital” and if you see an enemy they will say something like “It’s weak to fire” or “ Tis an agile foe”. It’s similar to the community function found in Demon’s Souls, except you can’t cause trouble in other people’s games. Your main pawn will level and rank up with you on your adventures but support pawns aren’t able to do so. This means you’ll have to trade out your pawns for higher level ones or suffer the harder fights with an under leveled party.

    Some pawns do not come free. Pawns can be purchased with a form of in game currency called Rift Crystals (RC). RC can be obtained in three ways. You can earn them from defeating enemies, when your main pawn returns from assisting another arisen or you can purchase 2000 at a time from the Xbox Live Marketplace/PSN Store.  The price of each pawn is based on their level. Equal or lower level pawns will be free of charge but pawns that exceed your level increase in price on the per level bases (ex. pawn 1 level higher then you cost 500 RC while a pawn that is 20 levels higher cost 30,000 RC). There is more than one cost associated with using pawns. When it comes time to release your pawn you must send a gift from your inventory and it is optional to rate the pawn on how they performed and leave a comment. Any item will do. You cannot unequip anything the pawn you recruited came with and any item you equip on someone’s pawn will be sent back as a gift. This avoids someone recruiting a bunch of pawns and stealing all their gear and sending the pawn back naked. You will get all your gifts and RC your pawn earned when you rest at an inn.

    The world of DD is a massive and harsh one. The enemy and ally AI is among some of the smartest I’ve ever seen. You will notice enemies use varying ambush tactics and while utilizing the environment to their advantage. For example, one time I was attacked by a bunch of wolves that were using a staggered ambush tactic. Three would attack while two stood back and waited for their moment to strike in an attempt to catch my party off guard. When the wolves began to fall they somewhat retreated but kept a close eye on me. I couldn’t catch them so I decided to leave them and go on with my quest. At that point they attacked and brought me back in to the fight. Different enemies use different tactics, making the game world feel more realistic. A group of goblins saw me and attacked. It was still a staggered ambush but they used their environment. As the goblins were falling some actually hid in the bushes and tried to catch me off guard. The larger goblins would attack first while the smaller goblins would stay in the back and use horns to call for reinforcements. Large enemies such as ogres can be climbed but do not think this is a free chance to attack. If you try to climb and attack an ogre he will take to the air and land on his back and cause massive damage if you don’t jump off in time. Harpies seem to have the most brutal tactic. Harpies can grab you and start flying towards cliffs and will NOT hesitate to throw you off!

    At night the world turns in to an even more brutal one. It’s a good thing you have your pawns for back up. At night you are given a lantern but they do not have infinite oil. You have to manage crafting and searching for flasks of oil. You don’t want to be caught without oil while; fights can be challenging when you can see. It’s really easy to die if you’re not familiar with the situation or get caught off guard. The pawn’s AI is definitely good enough to handle some of these situations; they hold their own in a fight using their own tactics. Pawns with acquired knowledge of a certain enemy will use special tactics to help defeat that foe. If an enemy needs to be attacked from behind a pawn will try to become a distraction and tell you to attack from behind. The game zooms in on which pawn is talking to help you understand what is going on. If one of your pawns fall in battle the ones that are alive will go pick them up and bring them to safety. You must actually revive the pawn though but at least they put them in a good position. If a pawn is KO’d too long he/she will disappear into the Rift again. The only way to get them back is to go back to the Rift, find the pawn and recruit them again. This goes for your main pawn also except he will come back as soon as you click on the Rift (you don’t have to actually enter the Rift for your own pawn).

    Speaking of dying, this brings me to the way DD saves your progress. When you die a retry screen pops up. The game uses an auto save feature but for some reason, it acts as if you paused the game and saved yourself. The screen gives you three options. First is retry which brings you back to the last point you saved (or so it says). Next is retry from last checkpoint and the description is “the last automatically saved checkpoint”. But when you click on it, it tells you this will take you back to the last inn or Rift. And last option is quit which takes you back to the main menu. Either this screen is worded very wrong or it does not work right. For instance, lets say I saved at an inn and the last auto save was after a hard boss fight. If I did poorly and wanted to go back to my save at the inn, I couldn’t because the auto save would take its place.

    Like I mentioned before the world is a massive one. There is definitely enough for even the most hardcore adventurer to enjoy. The only problem is there is no type of fast travel in this game besides running (outside of a town it can really burn though your stamina) until later in the game where you can teleport with certain purchasable items. Making things worse is the fact that your inventory also affects your travel. Every item in the game has a weight value; you can only carry so much weight before having to get rid of some of it.  There are six levels of weight for your character (very light, light, Average, heavy, very heavy and over encumbered) .Each weight class from very light to over encumbered has less stamina and lower movement speed. So, on the longer journeys you may want to adjust your inventory. You have places to store your gear in the main city and camps throughout the map. You can only withdraw your stored gear from the main city so make sure you know what you need to complete your goal.

    Items in your inventory can also be combined in the Resident Evil style where you can pick two combinable items and see what it makes (ex. back fat oil + flask = flask of oil). Every enemy in this game drops some sort of loot such as gold, combinable items or even gear and there are tons of chest in dungeons and throughout the map. It can be really hard to manage you inventory and still move faster than a slow crawl. Luckily your main pawn can kind of act as a pack mule (if you choose to use him in that way). Support pawns can be used for that also as long as it’s not gear. The inventory menu is actually very well organized. It splits everything into different categories (Curative, Tools, Weapons, Body, ect.) so it’s really easy to find what you want. Again, a quick travel would have made this issue less of a burden.

    The last thing I want to talk about, gameplay wise, are the quests themselves. The Story quests usually end at another story quest to keep the game flowing along. The optional quests are handled in one way and one way only. And that is through the use of QUEST BOARDS! That’s right you’ve seen it a million times before. Quest boards are scattered though out the main city. They’re pretty basic and it seems each quest board has only a one type of quest. I’d notice a board would only have all escort, all fetch, or all search and destroy quests. To be fair, there is another type of quest that has to do with random encounters (not the Final Fantasy or Pokemon style random encounter).You can walk through a certain area a 100 times and the 101 time there will be either an ambush or a free a prisoner type quest. Each one is equally as difficult and each can be equally as epic. In the ambush quest you are usually tasked with defeating a large wave of normal enemies, a powerful enemy with a small wave of normal enemies or a single extremely powerful enemy. I was on a quest and ended up in a random encounter with a dragon. The fight was nothing short of EPIC!! I was a little under leveled at the time so it took me an hour and a half and some quick thinking to find a working strategy but after a long battle, I felt satisfied with my victory.

    The free a prisoner quest is a large wave of enemies guarding a caged prisoner. You are tasked with killing them before they kill the prisoner. If the prisoner is killed you fail the quest. The random encounters are optional. If you want you can just run away but it will count as a failed quest and you’ll miss out on the rewards (xp, gold).  I wish all of the side quests where like this as the other can get pretty annoying (who likes escort missions?). On top of that, the quest board quests sometimes don’t have objective markers. Remember, DD features a large world to explore. Enough said!

    The graphics in this game are great. Everything on the character models moves independently; their hair bounces as they run, armor moves along with their bodies, and the grass moves when they move through it. The lighting effects and details found in the scenery is excellent. The graphics are not perfect though. There are cases where you will fight a group of enemies, kill them all, and another two or 3 will spawn out of nowhere to join the fight. Almost like the game couldn’t load them. It doesn’t seem to cause too much of a problem though. DD is perfectic in the audio department. You won’t have to worry about hearing the same grunts and battle cries during every battle as Capcom made sure to vary the sounds used. This rings true at night, when you have to use your ears to figure out what lies ahead.  You’ll hear things like wolves howling and goblins grunting that will let you decide if you should continue on a certain path. There’s been countless times where I stopped and set up my party with buffs because I heard a sound I didn’t like.

    Capcom did an amazing job in a genre they don’t really explore. They also took time to make sure they supported the game. There was DLC featuring new quests and even new hairstyles on day one. They added more support by creating Capcom special pawns you can recruit for different levels. To make the deal even sweeter they added early access to the Resident Evil 6 Demo. With the support from Capcom this game is definitely worth your hard earned money!

    Gameplay:

    8

    The combat system is pretty fleshed out. The AI in the game provides a challenge as well as lends a helping hand in battle. Story quests keep the gaming flowing along while optional quests could use some work.

    Graphics:

    9

    Besides the fact one or two enemies can spawn out of thin air during fights, everything looks great. Nicely detailed and everything moves well.

    Sound:

    10

    Capcom used audio cues really well in DD. Pawns chat about quest to help you on your way. They really make you listen to your surroundings to figure out what lies ahead

    What's New:

    10

    The pawn system is nothing short of ground breaking. Pawns are very useful with amazing AI and it helps gives the game its own community.

    Replay Value:

    7

    With so many options available like changing your features, and switching your character’s classes, you can experience a lot in just one play through!

    Final Score:

    8.8

    © United Front Gaming. All rights reserved. Site design by: 801red