Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen: A Completely Serious Game

You better get used to seeing your character's gormless face throughout the story, at least they still seem a peasant regardless of their exploits throughout.

For the past few days I've been playing nothing but Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, and good God is it a ton of fun. From the unintentionally hilarious combat, to the ridiculous story, to your collection of companions, Dragon's Dogma had me bewildered, bemused, and genuinely excited throughout it's main and extra stories.

Completing side-quests also can influence future ones. I got this guy a book so he could learn magic and then a few hours later he shows up out of the blue to nuke a gryphon with me like a total boss. I actually lost it when he showed up.

Ironically, the story itself is extremely generic and unoriginal (as well as being the very definition of linear 90% of the time), being essentially adventure anime fodder. You're some schmuck living in a picturesque fishing village, minding your own business as a silent protagonist (that still interacts with people, yet nobody thinks that your speechlessness is weird), when an enormous dragon descends from the sky, rips out your heart, and flies away. After you wake up he sends a telepathic message to you saying 'Aye my man, if you want your heart back you're going to have to take it back from me lol', and it's on from there. Along the way you meet friends, allies, enemies, and the nobility (which oddly doubles as the royalty excepting two people), all of which are pretty generic and forgettable. So what makes it so enjoyable? Well it's all in the delivery, which is so completely and utterly batshit yet completely serious that you can't help but love it for all of it's genericness. Also every big character (including the antagonists most notably) sound and act like they're ripped straight from an anime and talks in some weird medieval jargon, but nobody has the same accent for some reason. Once you reach the dragon, he offers you an unexpected choice, a moment of Deal Or No Deal, in which he offers to leave the land in peace again in exchange for what you hold most dear, and if not then you have to face him head on. I thought it was a nice twist, especially as throughout the game he acted as something closer to a force of nature or a god than the traditional depiction of a dragon, and like the delivery and characters really made this game stand out strongly among all the RPG's I play. If you want to have a good time with a lot of laughs and scoffing, this has the narrative for you.

I never thought I'd enjoy encountering so much anime in my games, but here we are facing off against the very definition of a comic book villain, I mean Jesus the way he talks is exactly how he looks

In terms of gameplay, Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is action-packed and gives the player a lot of control of how they want to play. Though you're limited to three starting classes, as soon as you reach the camp you can easily respec into any of the nine classes, six of which act as some mix between the three base ones. I played through the game as a generic sword and board warrior, and though I didn't have any magic or lightning-fast stab maneuvers I felt just as capable as any of the other classes thanks to all my abilities, which made fighting normal enemies trivial. Now that sounds all well and good, but surely it would get boring no? Well there's also a grab button, which turns the multitude of combat encounters into ridiculous fun, allowing you to grab and expose enemies in addition to carringy and throwing heavy objects (including the insane number of explosive barrels lying around). But wait, there's more, it also allows you to grab and climb up onto the big monsters, which allows you to attack their weakspots. This makes each fight against them feel epic  whether it's climbing up a cyclops for the fiftieth time or forcing a gryphon (which are actually pretty scary in this for a change) to land. However, you won't be facing these foes alone, and you have 3 'pawns' or followers to help you on your journey, and these guys are another big source of absurdity in the game. See, you only make one of these guys (called your main pawn), the other two are static-level versions of other people's main pawns that you can recruit, and these run the gamut from looking like someone's ideal woman or man to utter abominations with super shrill or deep voices. They also give commentary and hints from their earlier adventures and experiences with other players, though these can get old pretty fast and now have been scarred into my memory (ThEir KiNd hAtES IcE aND FiRe BOtH indeed), you can fortunately disable the banter from the options menu. If you worry that you'll be stuck with the same 2 other pawns for your playthrough don't worry because as these two other pawns are static in their level when you hire them, in order to ensure their continued effectiveness you'll have to get new ones every couple of levels (or when you want). The inventory system is pretty interesting, with the weight of your inventory influencing your speed, stamina, and sprint cost in several teirs. There's a lot of nooks and crannies to explore and discover in the various areas throughout the (relatively small) game world which encourages you to use the full suite of your movement abilities. The fast-travel system is pretty hidden away though, and I can expect people to  Besides this, there's also the usual gameplay elements characteristic of Japanese games and RPG's like harvesting, stats, consumables, and upgrading equipment, though besides getting and upgrading my gear I didn't really do any of this stuff nor feel pressed to use it. Really how you play the game is what you make of it, there's not really any essential party component or composition, though I really felt it when I didn't have a wizard with a healing spell in my group.

Nothing like climbing an enormous creature in order to hack at its wings to make me wonder "Is this a good idea?"

Visually and audibly though is where the game stumbles, frequently. As I mentioned before, the game on the surface feels very generic, and unfortunately this very much extends to the look of well, almost everything, and on top of that a lot of stuff just looks ugly or otherwise unappealing. The characters look varying degrees of ridiculous, soulless, or unappealing. If you're looking to be captivated by a character, expect to be disappointed. In terms of models in the base game I only found the titular dragon and the gryphon to look really cool, but Dark Arisen (the expansion) goes a long way in making everything far more varied and inventive visually, and seeming a bit like Diablo too. The cinematics are frequent, inventive, and oftentimes quite funny unintentionally due to your character's speechlessness. There's some cool camera angles, your character feels like they were made for the shot, and it's very engaging whenever you're pulled from the action. In terms of music it's all generic fantasy soundtracks, with nothing really to stand out from the pack. I already talked about the voices earlier, and to be honest, as the game progressed I got pretty irritated by it. It seemed more and more that this was someone's guess of how people spoke in medieval times which I suppose is pretty innocent, but it was essentially somebody saying y'all, ain't, and howdy and thinking that this makes them sound like they're Texan. Jesus, if you're going to go through the bother of making people sound like Ye Olde Medieval Folk at least make them be somewhat accurate, and this goes for the accents too. Why does everyone have such a different accent? Why is there some French-sounding woman (admittedly from another country) but everyone else has an English or Spanish accent? Why are half of the villagers in the one and only village (of this massive duchy) Greek/Italian? Shouldn't so isolated of a community have a more unified way of speaking? I'm really giving it more grief than it probably deserves, audibly and visually it's not bad by any means (though uninspired), but it just bothered me a good deal. It's just one of those things where the more you think about it the more it stands out and raises questions.

The Dragon isn't very present physically in the story until the end, but he commands every scene he's in thanks to an earth-shaking voice and immense stature.

At the end of the day I had a ton of fun playing Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, it offers a very fun and unintentionally humor-filled experience through an albeit generic and forgettable setting. I highly recommend it, especially to fans of the Monster Hunter Franchise as it offers a nice in-between/transition from previous titles to the radically different feel of Monster Hunter World (with shorter fights to I might add). I recommend this, and am now very much looking forward to the sequel.

Not taking the coward's way out offers not only an epic multistage boss fight but also makes you wonder if it was actually the right choice in the end.