Monday, April 29, 2013

Reviews: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

Dragon's Dogma came out about a year ago with its unique style, reminiscent of Dark Souls-meets-Dragon Age. A western style RPG developed in the east. 

And it was great, a breath of fresh air in a somewhat stagnate genre with its sense of adventure and a whole new NPC system, combat feels great and intuitive, though a dodge button would not be out of place. 

Now the game has been re-released with a lot of added content, a complete underground dungeon, a few tweaks to the original game. For returning Arisen's this will be more of a good thing, the new area is both exciting and scary as hell, with the decision to feature more  tight corridors and some great enemy designs. 

Like the Ogre that gets excited with men instead of women or a pitch black dragon what'll make you regret the day you spent that extra gold on a weapon instead of lamp oil. The atmosphere created in Bitterblack isle is really taking all the great things from the original and just mush them together, and it works, its creepy and moody, yet beautiful and suspenseful. 

The writing and voice acting can at times be a little bad with awkward translations but the overall story makes up for it. There is also an option in the main menu to change voice language to Japanese with English subtitles, wich is a far superior solution for those who dont mind reading instead of hearing, the voices just sound more natural. 

Delving deeper into the dungeons reveal new, cursed items wich need to be hauled up to the surface where you can have them purified using Rift Crystals (RC). Our trusty badass female pawn, Toazter, got rented by another player and made us RC, and in this expand-release RC really comes in handy in that you can upgrade a piece of equipment forged in dragonfire to a higher level with it. 

Or you can use them to fix riftcrystals to customize your party layout with hiring and releasing your pawns, but to compliment this higher reliance on RC Dark Arisen present you with more through chests and loot.

Overall
If you have a love for role playing games and are willing to invest many hours into this game, it will certainly reward you. It is an overall great game, and this expansion continues the trend. With a new area to explore and new enemies to fight, new loot to be had, Dark Arisen takes the great formula of the original and just builds on it.

Game score: 4/5

GameViews recommendation score: 70%

This is a great game, it has alot to offer you if you get into it, but it can be hard for non-RPG fans to really appreciate what it is and what it does.

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