Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

Don't bother unless you can get this dirt cheap. The biggest deciding factor on if you're going to keep playing it is how you handle the traversal. You get an item specific to this version of the game that allows you unlimited fast travel but it's done through stones you have to collect and place where you see fit. In the meantime, I've had plenty of instances where I'd get a new quest and see how far I'd have to go and decided "Nah, I'm done today." and clocked out. It's further exasperated by how stamina works in this game so you'll be running then walking everywhere you go and you get sick of it. So if you play for about 30 minutes and already are getting annoyed, it doesn't really get better. Sure you have the stones but they can't cover the whole map if placed tactically so you'll have to guess where you won't be making a majority of your trips and it stays this way, at least in your first play-through. I don't even know if it gets better in a new game plus since I'm definitely n...

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen stands out as one of the most monotonous gaming experiences I’ve had in recent memory. The game struggles primarily with how its open world is structured. There’s certainly a lot to do battling everything from packs of goblins to towering beasts like cyclopes but the actual interactions with NPCs feel flat and unremarkable. The story itself fails to draw you in, offering little depth or intrigue. Most main quests boil down to repetitive tasks, usually fetching items or completing near-identical objectives. Personally I gave up due to the amount of back tracking, maybe ill give it a try again sometime. The companion system, centered around pawns, is another weak point. These allies lack personality and individuality, offering little more than functional support in battle. Because of this, it’s nearly impossible to form any meaningful connection with them, which undercuts immersion. For players who are mainly seeking the thrill of monster slaying and...

Played this to death as a kid, super underrated game like no other and outshines its sequel still

Absolute Dogwater Half the time you're just running from Point A to Point B with baked in stamina system that will have you walking when traversing

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is an action RPG with an open world and party based combat system. The atmosphere and character customization are great, but the graphics and combat feel weird, with tons of bugs during fights, The gameplay overall feels pretty junky. The open world is often empty and boring, it honestly feels like a walking simulator half the time. Hopefully Dragon’s Dogma 2 fixes these issues. If you can tolerate the bugs and clunky design, there’s fun to be had, but it’s long, frustrating, and kind of a pain in the ass. 4.5/10

Legendary, hidden gem.

Dragon's Dogma: mother figure and 3 autistic children

When you finish the tutorial you get the option to restart the game (including tutorial) on hard mode. This is intended to be a new game plus feature, but the difficulty scales such that if you do it on your first playthrough, the game just becomes a decently difficult super atmospheric and immersive RPG. The combat mechanics are incredibly unique and interesting. There's a climbing system where instead of most games where it's just a quick time event, you manually attach yourself to the target and crawl on them like a crack-addled chimp. So if you're fighting something like a cyclops, whose weak point is their eye, you'd jump onto their back and crawl around to their face while they're distracted fighting your party, or while they're flailing around trying to swat you off. If they have a helmet on, you crawl under their neck so they can't see you and they'll take it off, exposing their eye. If they have a club, you bash their hand till they drop it, or you electrocute their metal hel...

TLDR; The game at its core is fun. The combat hits hard and is very satisfying. I see why so many love it, but I just do not like it as a whole due to convoluted questing. Maybe I should've pushed on for another 5 hours and things would have come together more seamlessly. However, the tedium of doing quests in the proper order and finding out where you even need to go next to do them COMBINED with the stamina loss out of combat makes a rather unenjoyable overall experience. I am typically fond of reading quest dialogue and info to figure out what to do and how to progress in quests, but this game does a poor job at doing this. (Same with items, giving vague, useless descriptions when you really just want to know what something does without wasting time or the item itself to find out.) I have read and agreed with many other players ultimate take on this game when it comes to the questing and moving forward with the story as well as side content. I am almost always against guides, as...

Cool enough back in 2016, but the Dragon's Dogma series really went downhill fast, and by 2025 none of the Dragon's Dogma games are worth playing.