Dragon’s Dogma

I finished Dragon’s Dogma yesterday. I’m unsure at this point whether I’ll go back and finish off the expansion, Dark Arisen. I’d largely enjoyed my time with the game, but the ending really wasn’t much fun at all.

I dislike cutscenes where my character literally stands, mouth agape, as villains monologue. I could accept a villain somehow briefly paralyzing my character, or something like that, as a plot device to allow time for plans to be explained, threats made, etc. I can’t accept when my character, who is (as I expected and later verified) quite capable of killing this villain in a matter of mere seconds, just stands there with his mouth open watching dumbstruck as the villain flees slowly/enacts a painstaking ritual/taunts me with minions that I can kill in literally one blow each. So naturally this happened, not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES in the half-hour or so of the game’s ending (which featured probably 10 minutes of gameplay and 20 minutes of cutscenes). Yay! And it was three different NPCs monologuing, too, which doesn’t make it any better.

The real disappointment is that Dragon’s Dogma could have been an A+ game. The art is fabulous; the world is interesting and very fun to explore; the character customization was quite well handled and allowed for a great deal of flexibility; the combat is fast paced and often quite intense; the music is sweeping and enjoyable; and the henchmen/pawns were fun to build up and hire. Sadly, the story was atrocious. I mean to say it was pathetically bad. Really awful.

Here’s the plot [SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP]: