Dragon's Dogma

It’s a really fun game and I’m very glad I bought it. But it’s not really much of a role playing game. It IS an RPG in that you do quests, gain XP and level up but the RPG elements are quite thin. When you gain a level your main attributes, health and stamina, go up automatically, you don’t assign points yourself, which is lame. The only thing you actually need to do is choose your skills. And all of the skills are combat maneuvers or enhancements to your physical prowess. There are no sneak, lock picking or speech skills or anything like that. It’s not that big of a deal but it makes levelling up a bit of a non issue. You can take on tougher enemies but it robs you of the pleasure of customising your character to some extent. But luckily there are other ways to do that. You can customise just about any detail of your physical appearance, and there is a fairly wide range of clothing and armour options. And what’s cool is you can wear both clothing and armour on your upper body and legs to further customise your look.

There are a lot of quests but here again it falls a bit flat as an RPG. Most of the quests are taken from notice boards and they are simple “kill 44 undead” quests or random escort missions. Filler in other words. The story missions are better, and you occasionally find some from NPCs but the vast majority are the notice board quests and they quickly became boring for me to the point that I stopped even looking at them. The main focus of the game seems to be exploring the world and combat. Combat is done really well. It’s fast and fluid and animations are excellent. Different weapons offer different skills and types of attacks allowing you to string different combos together. And fighting the various giant monsters is really fun as you can clamber up them to stab at their heads and eyes, or target various parts of a monster to disable it, like attacking a cyclopes weapon arm to make it drop it's club.

The dialog is fairly limited and your character doesn’t speak or have the option to ask questions. An NPC will say what he has to say and you can either accept or decline the quest. But the writing and voice work is very good, and the dialog is in ye old English with lots of “Prey, is there aught I can do for you, ser-” Which I love.

The game looks wonderful. Although the graphics are slightly dated the art design and gorgeous landscapes are a visual treat and it runs perfectly smoothly on the 360. Dungeons are well detailed as well. The art design has a sort of realistic look that I like a lot.

The only things I really don’t like about the game (besides the filler quests) are the respawn and the hinky save/load system. Everything in the world quickly respaws, from the monsters and bandits to the plants and mineral deposits (which you use for crafting) to the contents of chests. You get sick of battling through the same group of mobs over and over and the constant item respawn is just silly. All I’ll say about the save/load system is I recommend regularly copying your save file to an external source to avoid pulling your hair out in frustration.

The game world isn’t overly large which is a bit disappointing and there are only two settlements including the village you start at. But there is a lot to keep you busy and the game is just fun to play. I’d say if you’re interested enough to be reading this then you should just go ahead and buy it. Just go into it with an open mind and try not to compare it to anything.

To be honest I wasn't expecting to play this game much since Diablo 3 is stealing hours and hours from me.

but i've put in close to 60hours already and am loving it.

the “sharing” of pawns, the not completely hand held quests, the job system.

the monster battles are great fun, some of the spells/moves you can pull off look insane.

thier is a bunch of DLC online for it already, and i haven't tried any of it yet.

some of the gear lookos pretty cool as well, thier is even the armor set and weapon that Griffith from the anime/manga series “Berzerk” in the game, and some that looks very much like the gear Guts uses.

its managed to pull me away from my large backlog of games, and very few games have been able to do that lately.
overall i've extremely happy with this purchase.

The landscape is huge, the monsters are huge, and it's not very forgiving. For this reason this game can be overwhelming for people that want a casual open-world rpg experience. However for players that want a more hardcore skyrim, this game is your answer