Status: Beaten
For all the flak Capcom gets for its treatment of its older franchises, they have recently come up with some pretty awesome new ones. Dragon's Dogma is one of my favorite new ones they have made (the other being Monster Hunter), and its certainly a unique entry.
Where Monster Hunter could be defined as Bossfights: The game, Dragon's Dogma doesn't go quite that far. Dragon's Dogma still has amazing fights and set-pieces, but the key is that the game's engine from the very beginning is designed for it. The very first fight is against a giant dragon, the size of a castle, and when you fight it again later, the only thing that has changed is your gear. The game makes great use of the grab mechanics, sort of like Shadow of the Colossus, in that you need to hang on to monsters and stab/cut/whatever to do some serious damage. The difference between this and Shadow, is that you have allies who can also be away from the enemy, shooting arrows/magic/etc, or you could be doing that and leave your allies jumping on them. The game has a lot of very cool mechanics for different classes working together, such as knights using their shields to fling characters into the air to grab enemies, putting elements on weapons, and the like. The only problem with it is that you are only ever allied with AI characters, so you have to rely on them to act appropriately. They aren't stupid, since the game actually has mechanics for them 'learning' certain monsters and what works...its just too bad they'll remind you that 'Fire works well!' every five minutes, because its certainly true for almost everything.
Still, the game's mechanic treats bossfights almost as incidental...not that they aren't important, but you only a few times get a quest that says 'go kill this big monster', usually you'll be going somewhere else, you'll see a nasty thing, and you want to go kill it. The game rewards you with pieces of the monster to upgrade your gear with, so you are urged to go hack off bits and stab them. Still, sometimes the reward is the awesome gameplay that happens just from the mechanics, launching from a melee fighter's shield, landing on the wing of a flying griffen, and stabbing them in the wings until they do a death dive and carve a furrow in the ground with their sudden crash landing, while the rest of your team proceeds to hack them apart. There are some reskinned monsters, but they tend to put different spins on them, so that you'll get killed if you assume all drakes or griffen styled enemies are the same.
The game's story is pretty barren, and NPC interaction is really loose. Since you custom make your own character, and interaction is purely determined by doing nice things to people, you can be utterly surprised when the game picks your 'lover', whom you just did quests for.
Still, overall the game is very enjoyable, the only major drawback being that you are walking almost everywhere, and it can take a long while going from points, fighting the same spawned enemies every time. The bigger monsters are more random, but chimeras, wolves, bandits, and the like spawn in the same places every time. Definately a game to pick up though for a unique experience, though perhaps you should find the director's cut, entitled 'Dark Arisen'.
Lost my save due to the PS3 crashing dead, so need to replay the whole game and do new game + plus some achieves to complete.
No comments:
Post a Comment