Dragon's Dogma is a console-exclusive fantasy open-world action-RPG produced by Capcom, or, in other words, their attempt to enter the same market of titles such as The Elder Scrolls, the late Fallouts, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, etc. That said, it would be unfair to single out Dragon's Dogma as a simple copy-cat, as the game offers plenty of twists on the formula, and, while taking cues from plenty of recent and less recent titles, also has its own, surprisingly well-defined, identity.

It's unfortunate that the game's design often comes off as schizophrenic and incoherent then, because Capcom's fantasy RPG actually had the potential to be great and even now might offer a fulfilling experience for many people.

Scripted Beginnings

In a fashion not unlike that of other recent titles such as Fallout 3, Skyrim and even Piranha Bytes' Risen 2: Dark Waters, Dragon's Dogma's opening is fairly linear and scripted, and serves as a way to familiarize with some of the title's basic mechanics. First you play as a pre-made character through a tutorial dungeon, then you actually get the chance to customize your own character's look, only to fight a losing battle with the titular's dragon, and finally get to choose your "vocation" (the title's class/job equivalent) minutes later.

Not even at that point you're still free to explore to your heart's content though, as the game's pawn mechanics and the rest of the map beyond the starting area only get unlocked after a few more story quests, and while this doesn't come off as particularly grating during your first playthrough, repeated playthroughs and New Game+ could have benefited from a quicker start.

This serves the purpose of setting up the premise of the title's story: you're a fisherman/woman in the village of Cassardis, which gets attacked by the titular dragon, and in your attempt to vanquish it you are defeated, and your heart is (literally) stolen. You discover you have command over the "pawn legion", a legion of mercenaries without feelings or desires, the "spark" that drives normal human beings. You're an Arisen, the last in a long series, destined to fight the dragon and vanquish it.

It's also worth noting that in between these story quests there are a few side quests you can undertake in the starting locations, and that advancing with the story will make you automatically fail them. I'm okay with the chance of failing quests, even thrilled by it, but in this case I can't help but feel like Capcom has done a bad job communicating their availability time frame to the players, and it's a problem that plagues not only the tutorial but all of the game.

The Draw of Adventure

It's outright counterproductive for Dragon's Dogma to take so much time to open up considering the title's strongest aspect is its sense of adventure and openness. The game features a well-designed, if rather small when compared to the competition, playable area, and many of the title's mechanics were clearly designed to support it, enticing the player to explore it while at the same time presenting a very real risk for traveling.

Where most modern titles try to offer the players an appropriate level of challenge all the time, Capcom went for a complete lack of level scaling: while the roads might be relatively safe, the wilderness area are full of all manners of monsters waiting to get their claws on you. Different zones of the map feature different types of monsters, so certain areas end up being a lot more difficult than others, and while there's a general difficulty progression in exploration, with the outer edges of the map being more difficult than its central hub, that's left for new players to discover, with almost no signposting. That said, fleeing from high-level monsters is always an option and NPCs constantly remind you to stick to the roads, so I never felt that the game was being particularly unfair in that respect.

Related Games: Dragon's Dogma

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In another move that defies most modern conventions but helps the core design, Dragon's Dogma's only fast travel system relies on fairly expensive magic items that are consumed after use, forcing you to travel to most locations by foot. While this helps keeping players on their toes at the beginning of the game, many quests require you to travel relatively long distances on a regular basis, which means you'll fight the same monsters and face the same challenges even when you're way past their level range, making them more of a nuisance than anything else. Putting some kind of a carriage system in the title could have prevented at least some of this tedious backtracking and would have greatly benefited the game.

Another factor that contributes to the exploration's risk-reward proposition is the day-night cycle: visibility is extremely low during the night, with your only light source often coming from your lantern (which needs to be replenished with oil to avoid dying out, though the developers have been fairly generous with its length), and undead and phantoms populate the roads adding a different dimension to the challenge in the same locations.

While not exactly on par with Ultima VII or even Skyrim, the world certainly feels alive: flowers, plants and fruits can be picked up from the ground, just as a good portion of the other rendered items, boulders fall in certain locations, bandits ambush you from appropriately advantageous places such as cliffs or walls, walking in bodies of water makes you wet and vulnerable to lightning-based attacks, travelers constantly walk along the roads, strong winds blow in certain locations, pushing you away or making you travel faster depending on what direction you're coming from, boss enemies can ambush you while you travel, etc.

The game's dungeons also merit a mention: while hardly perfect, they easily win against the competition's linear and short affairs, often spanning multiple levels, and including secret and secondary paths and chambers, puzzles and a good enemy variety (while it could be argued that it's not particularly appropriate for a cave to have a cockatrice reside in its depths, it certainly makes for a fun fight).

Overall, none of that is revolutionary or an achievement in itself, but compared to the other role-playing titles I've played in the last 5 years or so, Dragon's Dogma has some of the best dungeons, with the only downside being that there are very few of them.

That said, while it can be argued that traveling and exploring is Dragon's Dogma's biggest draw, it's hardly perfect. Sure, your characters are fairly agile and can easily climb and jump their way to most locations, but you can't really swim, and most bodies of water are limited to puddles or extremely shallow lakes: trying to get into deeper bodies of water will net you some slight damage and teleport you back location you were in before entering. Chests often hold only junk inside, due to the fact that the majority of them are random in content, and respawn on a regular basis, reducing the need to continuously search for new areas to explore.

The map's relative small size, and the plentiful use of natural barriers on part of the developers means you'll generally be walking the same path to go from A to B and vice versa, which also contributes in making the player feel tired during the end-game stages, with most quests eliciting only a "been there, done that" type of response.

Finally, the environments are pretty much all variations on the same generic medieval fantasy theme, and, while there is a certain charm to Dragon's Dogma's honest derivative art style, it's difficult to to muster much enthusiasm at the thought of visiting yet another forest or canyon to finish a quest.