Quick Review: Dragon's Dogma (Patreon)

From my short time with Dragon's Dogma, I was certain of one thing: I hated every single ally/Pawn in that game. Everybody in your party is constantly yelling at you all at the same time. Constantly. With completely useless yammering. They're actually anti-helpful. One of my allies kept shouting "Goblins!" as we walked down the road so I'd whip out my weapon and search the area but nothing was there. She may have just been crazy and seeing hallucinogenic monsters. If that was actually her character trait, that would be amazing. Otherwise, that is some godawful design. DD is a really ugly game and not just because of the terrible textures, horrible draw distance, but also that the majority of the game is brown or gray. With all the brown, it can be hard to tell enemies, allies, and the environment apart, especially when the game then throws “it's dark and you need a lantern!” as an excuse for making the game artificially harder to see. That doesn't add tension, it just makes you wade through one more menu and manage more items since you need lanterns and oil. Characters all seem to be the same basic model with varying amounts of deformity added to them. You can have what looks like a normal human being next to something that's a bloated squashed and stretched former husk of a person. For how ugly it is, it doesn't even run well. The draw distance and pop-in are terrible and in the middle of fights, the frame rate will drop into the single digits. The game starts off with the "play as a different character all decked out with good gear for a dungeon before taking over your character" trope that acts as a tutorial stage, then you have to fight a tutorial battle against a dragon that you're forced to lose, and then you have to fight a tutorial battle against a weakened monster, so you have to do three tutorial fights that all teach you the same thing but leave out any of the game's potentially unique qualities. Being able to climb on enemies seems neat and important but it's not taught to you and it's super clunky until you stumble upon it and learn how to do it well. The character's moves are hidden behind combinations of buttons so you have to hold down one button to access your magic, then you have to press or hold a button to start charging a spell, then you have to aim it, and then have to let go of the buttons to fire it. Once you know that, it's fine, but this is the kind of stuff that should be in a tutorial. Or a damn instruction booklet, which this game does not have. Having a digital manual is not helpful if I have to quit the game to read it! Magic seems neat but the tutorial level has you play as a warrior, the dragon tutorial has you play as a warrior, and then you have to choose a class before you've had a chance to play or experience the ranger or wizard. I don't like shooters so I passed on the ranger and magicians in action games are usually more miss than hit, so I picked a warrior and almost immediately regretted it in the coming battles so I was unhappy from the start. A few areas into the game and after a terrible escort mission, you can change your job and one of the new options is a Mystic Knight so I was excited to be able to play a warrior that can also cast magic, but that's not how it actually works. It just means you can equip swords OR staves, you can't actually combine them. So if you're fighting with your sword and face a ranged enemy you can't hit, you need to pause, go through the menus to your equipment, switch your weapon over to a staff, and return to the game. That's incredibly cumbersome and nothing about that is fun. As a whole, Dragon's Dogma is super UI and menu intensive and that saps a lot of the enjoyment out of a game for me. You also have to manually pick up every item that drops instead of just walking over them, there's foraging material everywhere that's ill-defined so I wasn't sure if I actually needed it, and the game has an encumbrance and weight system that hurts your performance. The very first optional quest you get has bosses that are vastly, vastly stronger than you to the point that their health bars don't go down when you hit them. There's no warning how difficult this quest is, it's in the starting town, all of the enemies leading up to the boss are super easy and die in a single hit, and once you reach the bosses you're locked in their area so once you find out they can kill you in two hits, you can't run away. That is truly terrible design. The game is grind heavy from the start because enemies are vastly stronger than you and equipment is ludicrously expensive, but you can't easily grind because it's not like a normal RPG where you can just run around getting into battles. I ran back and forth between a few areas and didn't meet any enemies so all my money came from quests, but since the quest was difficult, I needed money for equipment to beat that quest but couldn't get any. I very quickly stopped playing and then sold the game. I had heard neat things about the game from pockets of the Internet so I was super excited and really looking forward to this when I finally found it for cheap. However, after just a few short play sessions, I don't even remotely understand what people were seeing in it. Nothing about the game is well done, enjoyable, or fun. I looked up some more about it online and the story has a neat twist at the end, but if the actual gameplay is garbage, I don't want to play long enough to get there.