Dragon's Dogma – review | Technology | guardian.co.uk

 

That's why so many developers and publishers have recently opted to play things safe by making low-budget mobile, social or download games. So Capcom deserves all the plaudits known to mankind – it's difficult to imagine how it could have undertaken a riskier project than Dragon's Dogma. Not only is it a full-blown, open-world RPG (and therefore eye-wateringly expensive to develop), but it's the Japanese developer-publisher's first, which partly explains why it is arriving in such an unheralded manner. Luckily – and a tad unexpectedly – it's shot through with quality, and surely destined to become a cult classic. Dragon's Dogma starts in time-honoured fashion, as far as RPGs are concerned, with an extensive character customisation phase, the ability to choose your sex and character class (warrior, mage, ranged-weapons specialist and all the usual suspects are available) and a typically mediaeval setting. The intro shows a dragon arriving to terrorise your sleepy seaside town; you take up arms against it, but it singles you out and rips your heart out. However, you miraculously survive, and find yourself lionised as The Arisen (and not the first Arisen, you learn, in the land of Gransys). So you embark on a quest to find the dragon that stole your heart, saving Gransys from the forces of evil in the process. So far, so bog-standard, you might think. But the whole Arisen thing has a point beyond adding a layer of back-story. Your semi-undead status means that so-called pawns will follow you: also semi-undead, they won't act autonomously, but otherwise seem like perfectly normal beings. So, you get to pick a main pawn, who stays with you throughout the whole game and levels up as you do, plus two other pawns, thus generating a full questing group. As you play, you encounter countless supplementary pawns, who you can hire on the spot. It's crucial to do just that, since not only can you adjust your party's skill-base that way (if, say, you need to draft in an extra mage), but you can find replacement pawns with better skills and stats than your current ones. You can also hire and fire pawns at rift-stones, found it most settlements, forts and the like. The pawn system works beautifully as, indeed, do most other aspects of Dragon's Dogma. It looks pretty good – something like a cross between Skyrim and Dark Souls. The crucial battle system is exemplary: as you learn new attacks, you can assign them to your button of choice, and you can acquire stat and skill-enhancing perks. Early on, you learn the importance of your kit. If you're a warrior, for example, a better sword makes your attacks way more effective – and there are three upgrade levels for each item of your equipment (upgrading requires workmen, money plus raw materials). It's tempting to pick up every item you come across, but too much kit makes you awfully sluggish, so you learn to store inessential kit and distribute the rest among your pawns. Again, the inventory system is pretty well designed. All Dragon's Dogma's processes, then, are nicely designed, as you would expect with competitors such as Skyrim out there. But it could still fall into the trap of being generic. Happily, it doesn't – indeed, it has loads of character, and plenty of the quirkiness for which Japanese games are renowned. There are some superb, mythology-inspired enemies to fight, such as griffins and chimeras, which are part-serpent, part-lion and part-goat. And, taking a cue from Shadow of the Colossus, you can grab onto them and climb towards their weak spots – hacking away at them, for example, in mid-air. While there are countless sub-quests to perform (such as eliminating bands of thieves, clearing mines of ogres, shadowing cultists and so on), the main storyline sees you increasing your renown until the Duke invites you into his castle, at which point things really begin to take off. Typically, your first encounter with the Duke sees you wearing a jester's hat, and being caught in the Duchess's bedchamber lands you with a spell in the dungeon. It isn't, of course, perfect: like all open-world RPGs, you will encounter the odd bug and moment of raggedness. You can lose something like half an hour's play if, say, you encounter a major enemy unexpectedly at night having forgotten to save for a while; and your pawns can annoy you with their repetitive banter (although you can actually influence your main pawn's conversational skills). But those are minor gripes in the grand RPG scheme of things, and Dragon's Dogma has everything that RPG-heads crave – you can lose yourself in tinkering around, collecting items, finding arcane quests and seeking random enemies for days. It's reassuringly complex, and astonishingly well-executed given that this is Capcom's first attempt at such a game. It may apparently have come from nowhere, but Dragon's Dogma has the wherewithal to go places. If you've extracted all you can from Skyrim, this will fill the resulting void in your life.