Your character is supported by three 'pawns', computer-controlled characters that fight alongside you. But Capcom's action game expertise elevates the fighting above many of its straight RPG peers.ĭragon's Dogma also makes up for its deeper shortcomings in its team dynamic. Combat doesn't have the weight or grace of Dark Souls' approach, and the lack of a lock-on button ensures you'll be wrestling with the camera just as often as you try to hang on the back of a writhing giant.
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The development team's Devil May Cry heritage can be felt in the simple combos you are free to create, with launchers, ground strikes and button-mash attacks that can be strung together. These can be developed into advanced versions, with three hybrid classes to assume when you reach a high enough level. There are three basic classes to pick for your hero - Warrior, Mage or Ranger - each one drastically altering the experience in battle. Even so, at its best, Dragon's Dogma comes close to the greats it apes.Īmongst the game's successes, combat is key. It gains diversity from this approach, but at the expense of purity of vision and, often, its own identity. These are more than mere inspirations Dragon's Dogma is a curious hybrid, made of stitched-together designs. There are shades of Miyazaki's classic too in the curious multiplayer, which prevents players from questing together but provides a remote opportunity to help one another out by sending characters across the network. Meanwhile, the game aims for Dark Souls' difficulty, punishing the ill-prepared adventurer or aimless wanderer in the strictest possible terms.
The opportunity to carry out guild sub-quests and hunt down rare and dangerous beasts is reminiscent of Final Fantasy 12. Missions are received from Fable-style NPCs (minus the humour and character), while quests are handled in a similar way to the Elder Scrolls series, where selecting a new primary goal will shift your mission marker around the map. You climb onto the backs of your larger foes as in Shadow of the Colossus, nicking at their necks and tails as you seek to bring them down. Tolkien's fingerprints are pressed firmly into Gransys' hills, castles and lore, while monsters and tics of terminology are taken from a range of contemporary Western fantasy and ancient Greek myth.
It's constructed from a hotchpotch of borrowed ideas, both thematic and systemic. There's a feeling that not even the designers know quite what's going to happen, and this sense of randomness gives the adventuring in Dragon' Dogma its exciting intensity. Peel back the spectacle to look at the underlying rules and you'll see that, while these monsters have their allotted areas (and will often respawn there some time after defeat), encounters are otherwise dynamic and unscripted. This sense that any monster could arrive on the scene at any moment lends the game a fraught tension.
Midway through a routine battle with a band of goblins, a red wyrm might crash awkwardly through the tree canopy, breaking trunks like twigs as it tries to stow its wings while breathing fire. They occur brutally unannounced - truer to life perhaps, if life consisted of wandering through a dense forest patrolled by a two-ton Chimera. Warriors exchange worried glances as the string section falls silent a tumbleweed tumbles as the party stands frozen in fight/flight uncertainty an inhale of calm before the storm.īut Dragon's Dogma's set-piece battles have none of this. Despite all of this, it is also a game that understands the value of understatement.įor years, video games have aped cinema's love of the action set-piece, with critical fights telegraphed to viewers with grim ceremony. Dragon's Dogma is a game soundtracked by screaming guitars and a hyperactive orchestra a game whose story is told with showboating faux-Shakespearean flourish a game set within acres of countryside scrawled with boastful castles a game fronted by a hero whose heart has been plucked from his chest by a dragon's fingernails.
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