Dragon's Dogma Review

Capcom's newest adventure away from their usual

Dragon's Dogma is Capcom's newest RPG adventure that seems almost forged from a different company. Dragon's Dogma, like said above, is an RPG that feels like it carries elements of all other games, blended in a blender and spit out into a nicely made RPG child. The story of the game goes along the lines of a "chosen one", the main character is born basically to slay a dragon. What makes this different is that...The dragon kills him/her and takes his/her heart. Then by some miracle the main character is "reborn" and proceeds to go on a journey to reclaim his/her heart. Not interested? Don't worry, the gameplay is more interesting.

The gameplay is unique yet it has been seen many times before, a somewhat standard third person action/adventure/rpg. I played the demo on the PS3 so my control scheme will be based off the PS3 controller. You have a basic "command" set that you can tell your partners to do. Left and Right on the D-Pad calls for help, up demands Go and down demands Come. Go basically sends your partners forward as come commands them to come forth to you. The controls for combat may seem complex at first but are actually very easy to get the hang of, except for the bow. Triangle is a heavy attack while square is a light attack. By holding R1 or L1 you can select a "combo" chain of moves that involves skyward slashes or furious slashing with dual knives, it varies by class. Circle is simply the examine button when in the open world game. R2 lets a player use probably the most unique feature, the "grab". This allows a player, when an enemy is earthed, to grab onto a part of their body and damage it heavily. A boss I was unable to defeat normally I did away with pretty quickly when grabbing. Sadly it takes a lot of the suspense and fun away from the game just holding onto the enemy.

A character grabbing onto a Griffon's head.

The "pawns" or "followers" you have in your party of four speak to the player and assist you when needed. Despite not being able to hear them most of the time due to combat there is a scrolling text on the left side to read that soon fades so it doesn't clutter your screen. Diving into the menu you can see your characters and party's HP and Stamina. Stamina in this game is a very important component unlike Elder Scrolls Skyrim. Stamina is depleted when you attack, heavy draining more than light and is depleted as you dash. So you can't just continuously attack, you need to plan and move accordingly. There is also a weight system that is more in depth than any I've seen before. In short it's set like this, 00.00, so any item you have currently on you whether it's health restoring herbs or a lantern to light your way it has a weight classification that can range from 1.25 to 00.54 (as an example). It can become that precise. A nice little touch too, is that when an item is used or thrown out, or traded, it shows you what your weight was before and what it is now, I assume it does the same vice-versa. 

Bosses or higher leveled enemies, like the Griffon, have several layers of HP. At my first fight it was against a Chimera that had a serpents tail, a goat like back and a lion's body. During the course of the battle my team mates gave me friendly advice to attack one layer of the Griffon at a time. Attacking the serpents tail when the HP was shaved to 0 the serpents tail was ripped off leaving two more layers of HP and prompting my team mates and I to attack the goat. The same rule applies, defeated the goat end, HP down to 0 and the lion was all that was left. Along the lines of loot, I'm not sure if there is any upgrading of weapons or not as the demo only showed me so much but I did see a materials tab in the menu so it might be possible to upgrade weapons or build your own.

The character creation is deeply huge but some of it...Not so needed.

The character creation is shockingly large, much larger than Skyrim's, so take the time you take to make a character in Skyrim and multiply it by two. You have all the basic choices, male, female, name, etc, but then it becomes even more intricate. It adds character posture, bust size, muscle size, torso, arms, legs, eye brows, eyes, hair styles, character weapon classes, height, weight, skin tone, colors to the eyes, hair and eye brows. It's ridiculously huge! There are even more than I pointed out here but I won't delve too deep. Despite all this added character fun, you don't focus too much on them due to the intensive combat and slew of quests from towns. It leads me to wonder if this much is really needed...

In conclusion, the game can be pretty fun and entertaining but not without it's downsides. The combat can get confusing depending on what weapon style you're using, especially the bow. The graphics in game are a little edgy and could be softened more. The character creation is tremendously huge and saving a created character can lead to some weird errors where the menu prompt only lets you start over or continue editing which you can't even save. The music was an upside to some of the experience but could have been more...Involving? Maybe I'm just nitpicking at this point. Looking at it again this is only a demo so things could change. Who knows.

7/10. To be released May 2012.