Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen
This is a really weird one. Whilst I was initially quite excited about the prospect of an open-world fantasy RPG
with actually good combat, I must’ve uninstalled the game two or three times during my playthrough of the main quest. The plot was excruciating. NPCs were flatter than my ex-wife. The sidequests were interminable fetch-and-farm endeavors. Traversal between different areas of the map is soul-crushingly tedious. Enemy variety is absolutely pathetic, and I probably made a horrible mistake by ignoring warnings about not playing a standard melee class. Environments are ugly as sin and have little of interest to uncover via exploration. The soundtrack was entirely forgettable. Then, strangely, the game seems to improve right as it’s ending. The narrative and dialogue start to hint at more intriguing subplots and background lore. The final dungeon is moodier and more challenging, and the music takes on an ethereal but material, otherworldly but homely air. Then it’s over. What happened? Did they run out of time, hack the game to pieces, and just push It out the door?
I didn’t even really intend to go through the DLC dungeon, Bitterblack Isle, since I’d read it was basically a high-level postgame challenge and I hadn’t even enjoyed the main game, but thought what the hell - might as well take some screenshots. I entered and almost got one-shotted by some palette-swapped goblins. But the combat was intense, the loot was actually quite good, the music was better, and just the general feeling of hacking through the dungeon reminded me of old fantasy art of a party of adventurers braving the depths of ancient ruins – you know the stuff I mean. So I kept at it. The monsters got bigger, scarier, and more varied, the loot kept getting better, and the stakes got higher as you got farther and farther from safe havens. It reminded me a lot of Souls games, but without so much of the frustration I associated with that series. You started thinking carefully about how far you could push the party and its resources, and how much loot you could carry back. You looked for alternate routes and hedged your bets against random invasions from high-level monsters. The route to the final boss is dripping with atmosphere and after dying two or three times with a comically underpowered character I finally got his damn attack pattern down and beat him. At this point I’d completely reversed my opinion of the game and wished the entire vanilla map had been built around this carefully curated dungeon crawling.
Beating the DLC once opens up a second run of the entire area - locking everything behind you, flooding the area with even worse minibosses, and spawning an upgraded version of the final DLC boss. I didn’t enjoy this run as much as the first since, depending on your build, you really need a character of roughly double the level and equipment of what you need for the first run. This makes grinding the same areas over and over again 100% mandatory, though the second run triggers a flood of new sidequests for the best weapons and armor, which gives you a real target beyond watching the XP meter rise. My other complaint goes back to playing a standard melee class - which was even more frustrating in the DLC due to the necessity of relying on AI ranged and magic classes for most of the harder enemies. Spending every fight running around waiting for your pet mage to use the correct spell or your archer to hit the right target is maddening. Still, you do get that tiny ego boost when you finish everything after so much effort.
I honestly can’t say for sure whether I can recommend Dragon’s Dogma or not. Based on the main game I’d probably say no. It’s one of those games that doesn’t outright fail at anything in particular, but it’s so uncompromisingly mediocre that it ends up
even less than the sum of its parts. From a gameplay perspective the DLC area really clicked for me, though. It’s so very tightly designed, with the interconnected map, encounter design, loot progression and general challenge scaling coming together almost perfectly. Unfortunately, if you’re interested in roleplaying, story, dialogue, characters or interesting quests then there’s not much for you anywhere in the game. Also, never forgive Pearl Harbor.
