It balances freedom and a sense of pace well.įor example, I spent most of the game tantalized by the silhouette of a curious coliseum-like structure on the north end of the coast, but my attempts to reach it always ended prematurely.

Most of Dragon's Dogma can be explored from the outset, and Capcom walls late-game sections off the way they should: by kicking players' faces in with tough encounters when they stray too far from the beaten path. Gransys consistently follows the standard open-world rule of actually being open. When I come across a ruined fortress, it sticks out because it's not the twelfth one I've run into. Gransys doesn't have many important landmarks, but that's what makes them all memorable. Situating much of the territory along a coast makes directional awareness painless, and while there's plenty of content here, Dragon's Dogma scores points for not being unreasonably big. Capcom establishes a strong sense of geography without lazily color-coding regions the way some developers would give us an ice world, a desert world, and so forth. However, a tedious late-game dungeon crawl which strips away all pretense of exploration and discovery and focuses entirely on the action demonstrates that the combat alone isn't what makes this title work.Īs it turns out, the setting of Dragon's Dogma, Gransys, is its greatest asset. One would think that a Capcom game would be more fluent in the latter, and indeed, my favorite moments in Dragon's Dogma involved nerve-wracking standoffs against cyclopes, chimeras and other enormous creatures. Interestingly, it combines the visual style and structure of an average medieval fantasy RPG with the large-scale, emergent combat thrills of Monster Hunter. However dated Dragon's Dogma feels, it still has value. But, the game balances its Western and Japanese influences in such a unique manner that it shouldn't be dismissed outright. It's been a long time to wait for such a creaky game, and lengthy journeys with anticlimactic finishes are something of a running theme with Dragon's Dogma. The famously PC-averse Capcom waited three and a half years to port it to this platform, putting it in the unenviable position of being compared to our 2015 Game of the Year, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. WTF Seriously, at least give me a horse or something.Ī Western-style open-world RPG like Dragon's Dogma seems like a natural fit for PC, and I suspect I'd have been more charitable towards it if I'd played it back when the console fans were first getting in. LOW …and then having to walk all the way back.

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