Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen: On the Quest to get back your Heart

Dragon's Dogman Dark Arisen, a game by Capcom which includes the base game with all the additional DLCs included, is a 3rd person action  RPG that throws the player immediately into the thick of things with the player controlling an unknown character, and along side them are his companions in a Prologue tutorial.

This starting mission helps show off the combat system on display and attempts to teach the player of the importance of hitting weakpoints on enemies. The combat of Dragon's Dogma is one of positioning and knowing your enemies, with an added system of being able to climb on your enemies to get into position to hit a specific weakpoint. The prologue ends on a cliffhanger just before the party is ready to engage The Dragon.

When completed, the player is free to create their character. The character creator is fairly robust with a lot of options and something to be mindful of is character height and weight which does play a role in the game through exploration and combat.

Once you have created your character, the main story begins in a seemly peaceful coastal fishing village. This is quickly interrupted by an attack by The Dragon, and the player can choose to run or fight. Regardless of the decision it catches the player and proceeds to rip out their heart and eats it.

As you awake, you are informed your are an Arisen, one that is destined to slay The Dragon, and the player can then select their starting vocation - which is like choosing a character class. 

• Fighter - specialising in defence and drawing enemy aggressiveness with sword and shield
  

• Strider - a nimble duel dagger wielding rogue with a bow that specialises in swift movement, exploiting weaknesses (including climbing on enemies to reach said weaknesses) and sows discourse in enemy rank

• Mage - a generalist magic user that can support with damage and debuffs with a some healing spells as well.

The next leg of the journey sees the player head to an encampment where they proceed to create their own personal pawn. Pawns can be considered almost like dolls that can learn and through the player's actions and commands can develop their own personality so to speak. It is important to remember as retraining pawns can be a timely process but does pay off extremely well when they are properly trained.

After this and a series of events later, the player and their pawn accompany a contingent from the encampment with a prize to the city of Gran Soren - it is a perilous journey but one that provides the player with a hub to buy, sell and store all their gear.

With access to Gran Soren, one should consider visiting the pawn guild, it is here that the player can earn the ability to call up to 2 additional pawns to their party. These pawns are either randomly generated or are the personal pawns of other players that bring their knowledge and experience with them.

With these things completed does the game open up proper, with a main quest that focuses on finding clues and earning the right to fight The Dragon via completion of a series of tasks. Completing these tasks serves as a means to strengthen your character and can be quite challenging if one does not do secondary quests in between.

Secondary quests, admittedly, are mostly of the lower quality type of fetch and deliver or escort variety, with a some standouts that lead to a quest chain, that requires things done during the right time, the right way and in the right order to complete. 

Their design is more on the MMO busy work side of things and although there are points where a narrative can branch,most are not especially memorable and serves more as a means to increase affinity with characters or collect rare rewards through completing quests in the right circumstances. The main quest line is not as bad and has moments that do stand out, however the design around it is more in service of getting the player to explore, with moments that sparkle dimly,and less with do to with engaging narrative.

The combat and journey to get to the end of the game is where one can see where most of the resources were allocated and with experience gained, one can expand their vocation choices, with 3 advanced and 3 hybrid classes. 

The advanced classes are specialists in a specific aspect of combat and are strongest in their specific niche.These classes can be learnt by both the the Arisen and Pawns.

• Warrior who specialises in two-handed weapon combat
  

• Ranger that focuses on making use of a range attacks via a longbow, with dagger support
  

• Sorcerer becomes a magic user that focus on powerful area of effect attack magic and status effects
  

The Hybrid classes are a powerful combination of classes that can only be learnt by the player and mix elements with the basic vocations and add their own flavour to be powerful in their own right.

• Magic Knight, a combination of a fighter and mage, making use of a greatshield and utilising buffs and shield-based magic attacks
  

• Assassin, combines fighter and strider playstyle, specialising in causing maximum damage to enemy weakpoints and has a wide range of weapon choices to achieve this

• Magic Archer, emphasises magic and the ranged aspect of a strider, which combines magic and bow based combat with devastating effect with homing projectiles and powerful magic based on a special magic-bow.

In addition to the vocations, each one has a set of skills and augments that, once unlocked, are added to the general allocation when assigning it at class change to allow one to customise their Arisen and personal pawn. This expands the combat depth as a player can experiment with augments and skills to tailor their experience to their preferred style of play and through it find interesting combat combinations.

The world set pieces and enemies encounters throughout your journey are well realised with areas feeling lived in even though the open world as a whole feels somewhat bare for its size, which one can probably make an argument for giving the world a wild and untamed feel to it.

The main "City" feels more like a well realised castle town, but that can written off as a compromise in scope, but does makes one more critical as it is the only civilian center of the game ( not including the fishing village the player's character starts in) with a few places sprinkle here and there that offer merchant services with the more established outposts being more of a military encampment.

The expansion Dark Arisen, I think, is where Dragon Dogma plays to its strengths, with improvements in almost all aspects where I had issues with Gransys (the area of the main game) and takes place in an area known as Bitterblack Isle. The world scope is more focused, the music and sound feel better and appropriately moodier, the story although told through quests, notes and interacting with objects feels more coherent and interesting.

The combat is further refined which makes it an area more geared to those more experienced with the game as the enemies are stronger, beefier and come with higher resistances or outright immunity to skills and abilities. Another feature added is a carrion mechanic where once enough corpses are littered in an area, a stronger mini boss encounter can spawn in to add to the chaos of combat. These enemies are especially brutal and are able to wipe out an inexperienced and even an experienced party if not careful.

To add to the danger there is also a enigmatic enemy that can randomly spawn in during your journey through the isle, this grim reaper type boss enemy has the ability to instantly kill anything in its scythe's way, including enemies. Once a player learns how to fight it becomes a nice addition that one has to chip at its health over multiple encounters to temporary defeat it for its high level loot drops.

Bitterblack Isle is a repeatable large multi-level dungeon that the player will eventually grind out for the highest tier of gear and skill rings that drops from the strongest enemies and rare loot spawns found mostly in the lowest level areas and even at max rank the enemies and encounters can provide some fun to a player, although getting used to the enemies of the Isle can make the normal gameplay feel trivial by comparison.

The music and sound design is appropriately weighty and gets the job done, It rises to the occasion in important scenes and supplements the action well enough, however Bitterblack Isle of Dark Arisen raises the bar on what is presented in the game with better sound and music design.

Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen, is an interesting game that is carried by its combat first and foremost and whether someone will enjoy it is based if it catches their attention as its combat and pawn systems are the main attraction from which one will extract enjoyment from as it is engaging to deal with and has sufficient options available to craft a preferable combat style. 

The world design is difficult to criticise too harshly as it does have some genuine interesting combat encounters but they do lose a certain magic to them when you do not feel threatened, but until the player reaches that level of power it does lend to creating the image of a wild and dangerous world and a reason why it is so sparsely populated with civilisation. 

The lowest point of the game is in the quest design that, besides the main quest, can be obtuse and easy to miss secondary content by not being thorough through the game, although that can be in service in providing additional content for player to attempt to find in subsequent playthroughs.

A lot of my criticism feels less harsh when playing the expansion content of Dark Arisen and besides a sharp rise in difficulty in comparison to the main game, is an overall a better packaged experience that plays to the game's strength which provides hours of content to explore and hard battles to overcome.

Images Source:

IGDB Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen

Videos Source:

Dragon's Dogma When you discover synchronous casting

Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen Console Teaser Trailer