y’all gonna make me play this again
edit: I am playing this again, fighter main + ranger pawn, it’s been a long time since I’ve tried to make a straight ranged pawn but hopefully I can get inclinations worked out so that it tries to use great gamble on weak points
i just realized one of the barks goblins have is “WHO LET THE DOGS OUT” and im flipping out
I’ve been slowly playing small amounts of this game, and I just got to the main town. It was cool to be able to immediately respec! I started as a strider, but I tried out mage and ranger. The way magic works in this game seems pretty cool, but I think I prefer strider/ranger, though I seem to be still at a point where both those classes aren’t very different from each other yet.
I’m frustrated that no matter which class I pick, I’m doing SO little damage to big monsters. My arrows especially seem totally useless. How do I start shooting arrows that feel like they mean something?
Also, the inventory system in this game is giving me the shits. I’m trying so hard not to weigh down my character, but the entire world is filled with random items that don’t seem very useful on their face. Do I need to do deep wikidives to learn what items I need to focus on and what can be ignored, and how things need to be combined? I really don’t like bothering with inventory management even at the best of times, and this is just way too much info to deal with in a system I don’t care about. Can I safely ignore all this stuff, not pick up items, and just let my pawns gather to their hearts’ content?
Mighty Bend is a shortbow skill that hits fairly hard. Spamming the Fivefold Arrow technique is also pretty effective. If you want really strong archery skills you should use a ranger, and if you want weird magic homing archery skills use the magic archer. They each use different types of bows but they’re all dagger classes.
Large monsters have weak points where they take more damage, and if you knock them down they take even more damage while they’re prone. Protip: cut off the snake head on a chimera first, it’s a guaranteed knockdown. And if you encounter a cyclops with a helmet on, uhh, make him scratch his back 
I found the items overwhelming too at first but you can ignore most stuff that’s not obvious healing items. Don’t fuck around with the million different specific ailment cures imo.
There are really only a handful of combinations worth remembering too. In fact, here are all of them:
greenwarish + wormwood sap = potent greenwarish
potent greenwarish + curious wine = matured greenwarish
sap and wine are dropped by goblins and hobgoblins, respectively
sour meat (any type) + foreign knife, or some kind of rock/ore = backfat oil, gross but strong stamina regen item
moldy grandgrapes + water = red wine
moldy apple + water = red wine
good single person healing items
harspud sauce + large nuts (nice) = balmy perfume
good group healing item
You can also just fill a hundred glass bottles at a healing spring if you’re patient lol
Hi guys, reviving this thread because I have been playing about 5-10 hours of Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arisen.
I would like to make a premise. I am bringing up some negative impressions, not because I like to contradict others or to create “challenges” or to be a hater, but because I find basically zero negative comments on the forum and because I would like to understand:
I think the third point is the most important. For example, Animal Crossing is probably an amazing game, but I know it’s not for me and so I don’t go near it. Dragon’s Dogma, instead, is very close to other games that I like, such as Witcher 3, Zelda BotW, etc…
Some of my early impressions:
The game does some cool things: pitch black nights that have an impact in battles, the village and city layouts are quite believable.
But maybe the question is: considering we have played many games, what motivation do you find to keep playing (or to recommend) Dragon’s Dogma, specifically? Is it the subjective novelty of having the pawn party? Is it because maybe, the combat, at some point in the future could become unexpectedly amazing (as some people on Reddit would say)? Is it because it is “much less worse” (or slightly fresher) than stuff like Oblivion or Skyrim or other similar, maybe not too recent, games? Is it because it’s being evaluated as a strong change, starting from Capcom’s Mystara roots, and then it’s appreciated as an acceptable RPG attempt with a few peculiarities?
All these would be very valid reasons, but ignoring such starting points, taking the game for its own merits (“should I give it my time today?”), although some specific things are cool and curated better than some of the competition, overall Dragon’s Dogma feels dull to me.
I fell off dragon’s dogma very quickly so you’re not alone in this. I had basically the same criticisms as you.
I’ll let other folks do the praising though! I feel like this is a “not for me” situation rather than an “actually bad game” situation
Yeah, I get the feeling that the praise behind Dragon’s Dogma is especially aimed to justify that’s a good game (and save it from mediocrity/oblivion)… and it is a good game indeed, but nowadays, often, the real cost of playing videogames is time, rather than money, and I don’t see much here to make me think that I’m playing something special… but given that the game is so long, maybe I am just missing out the great bits
Dragon’s Dogma is definitely not for everyone and it’s like the opposite of Witcher 3 as far as strengths and weaknesses go
I forgot if the term « gamefeel » is taboo but Dragon’s Dogma excels at this and it’s a core part of the appeal IMO. Just running, jumping, getting drenched, grabbing goblins and throwing them off cliffs, throwing huge spells all feel amazing and this elevates everything else in the game, particularly exploration. It’s a stark contrast to Geralt’s stiff ass
Otherwise Dragon’s Dogma is a Compelling Trash Action Game with not that much real depth but a lot of skill / class variety and numbers going up + a pretty great medium-sized world to explore + a few very weird ideas for a game of that scale and genre
The game won’t change that much as it goes on, the major differences are how there’s more enemy variety later and it becomes All Dungeons instead of All Overworld. If it doesn’t speak to you now you can forget about it. (Though addendum the daggers kind of suck, if you’re a strider maybe try something else. Combat is messy but can be satisfying with swords / bows / spells)
Always assume this will never happen, or if it does it will not be worth the initial time investment. You’re an adult, right? You’ve played a ton of action games. This is not wildly different from any other, this is not going to deepen your empathy for other human beings, at best you’ll see chimera blow up real good.
I wish I liked this game as much as others but I don’t. I have reinstalled it numerous times and I’ve always bounced off it early. This is not for me, that’s just fine, I can believe there’s awesome stuff that shows up later on but I also don’t wanna pay the time tax to get there and I doubt any of it is gonna be truly revelatory 10 years after release so I’m just gonna play some other stuff.
This is interesting and indeed, I am playing as a strider (so that I make less impact than my pawns). I will give the game a bit more time and respec as something else, to see at least how it will feel.
didn’t particularly enjoy or ‘get’ dragon’s dogma until the fourth or fifth time i tried, where i suddenly ended up rinsing it and running through the postgame
if you’re not digging the intense weirdness (i remember cackling at triggering a romance storyline with some random quest giver npc i’d spoken to once, etc.) maybe pass on it? the postgame bitterblack isle dungeon is fantastic mind
I saw some of the appeal of this game. Combat does feel good, even though as a strider I was doing piddly damage. And exploring the map was fun. But I fell off pretty quickly myself. There’s just too much upkeep, between the million different combinable item types and the equipment and skills for you and all your party members. I felt like I was doing menu stuff almost as much as playing the game, and there was way too much information to absorb.
But for me the biggest problem of all is that I just don’t like the pawn system. In an action RPG like this, I just want to control my own character and not have to worry about babysitting and managing AI. If I could just turn pawns off then I’d love this game.
i’ll take a shot at this because I feel like I am one of the bigger dragon’s dogma fans around these here parts
first caveat is: this game is 100% not for everyone! if you bounce off the combat mechanics or you don’t like the pawn system or you’re overwhelmed by stats that you may or may not have to care about or the game’s tonal weirdness puts you off, that’s totally understandable and I would not blame you for playing something else
second caveat is: the game starts REAL slow and doesn’t do itself many favors as far as good impressions go, so if you’re waiting for a point to say “this isn’t for me” I’d say at least get past the part in gran soren where you have to go into the everfall inside the pawn guild, but considering the game’s first big quest is a literal escort mission, again, I would not blame you for throwing the game away in disgust
the main selling point of dragon’s dogma for me is that it’s a japanese company renowned for its action games making a game set in a weird, not-quite-there western RPG setting, with all of the strangeness that implies - it’s like playing skyrim but your character is always trying to do cool action poses with any button you hit and your companion characters literally will not shut the fuck up about goblins, but diegetically everyone in the game is taking things Very Seriously
so it ends up recreating the kind of strange other-ness that most MMOs instill in me, where the narrative and everything around it is played 100% straight but the game designers are always trying to put things in that threaten (and often straight up) ruin the tone of the game, whether it’s mechanical combat interactions like climbing ogres and having them accidentally fall off cliffs with you or your pawns on them or item effects that are modeled far too realistically for what the rest of the game requires - if you leave meat in your inventory for too long it spoils and when you eat spoiled meat you get a stamina boost but you also get poisoned, and all of this seems to be because a designer just spent a lot of time making the system for no reason outside of them wanting to do it, which I really like seeing
I’m also a huge sucker for AI systems in games that the designers give you access to, but only through the mechanics that the rest of the game uses, and the pawn system is entirely this - pawns that update their behaviors based off of inclinations that are governed by the things you do and the things you make them do. this can result in completely useless pawns that just run around yelling about goblins while opening treasure chests but it can also result in weirdly intelligent pawns running around doing exactly what you’d do. I once had a pawn in my party that was trained to slow down the final boss in the post-game content, so the player had equipped it with rusted daggers and trained it to immediately climb onto the biggest enemy in the area and hit it as many times as possible, causing the “torpor” effect and making the enemy move very slowly, and seeing that kind of stuff happen without me necessarily having to get involved is so fun for me
and I guess that’s mostly the motivation for me - I like the idea of setting up the pawn I have to do things like a player playing an MMO would, where I’m not entirely sure exactly what they’ll do, but I enjoy watching them make those decisions on their own while having my own fighting style. a lot of the way I play the game is me deciding that my pawn will be one archetype and I’ll be another and pretending to be in a weird offbrand MMO together
it’s a total niche and if that’s not what you like in your videogames, it won’t work for you! but I’ve never really encountered a game that did that specific “playing a singleplayer MMO” vibe as well as dragon’s dogma did
Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He’ll Win the Whole Thing 'fore He Enters the Ring There’s No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won’t Matter, Cuz You’ll Know That You’re Right is about Dragon’s Dogma
I liked your thoughts a lot
I must say that since when I changed vocation (class) to Magick Archer, I have been enjoying the game a lot more.
I guess I should be around 60-70 percent of the main quest (plus I did a good number of subquest). It’s not memorable, but the time spent with it is fine and doesnt feel wasted (which happens to me with most stuff). You enjoy going back to it. It’s breezy, you can unplug your brain and just play / enjoy the setting, winning some quests and special items, without thinking too much (the adolescential pleasure of looting). You can even accept spending time in the menus to improve your stuff and combine a few materials.
I think I will finish it, plus, I am very curious about Bitterblack Island, I haven’t gone to it yet, and reading around it seems the best bit of the game.
It is a really flawed game, and I admit a lot of my enthusiasm for it comes out of what I saw it trying to do. A Japanese developer has never really made an action RPG like this, at least in recent memory. It’s a fresh perspective on a tired genre, even if it’s goofy as hell. I also really like the gamefeel and the lighting. it just hit the right spots for me, so i was able to look beyond the rough edges. Or maybe i should say that they didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the parts i liked.
But also as it has already been said, if it’s not your bag, no loss. there are a lot of great games i have bounced off to my regret. we’re all made differently.
It’s never not useful as an idea:
I say that as someone who loves DD btw. It’s totally cool not to force yourself to play a game.
Well, as said, the game is so freshly playable now that I got into it (and abandoned daggers for good), that I don’t feel compelled to drop off.
Playing it is quite relaxing and feels like a pleasant way to spend time (whereas normally I hate time-sinks).
My plan for today is to finish off the Ur-Dragon. 
Quick question: how can I use Throwblast decently? I am also exploring Bitterblack and I keep getting killed by the Gazer. I read around internet that Throwblast could be super useful, but I have never really understood how to use them in the whole game. When I throw one, it normally explodes a couple of steps before the monsters and does not do anything.
I think you have to douse the enemy in oil first before using the throwblast but it’s been a few years
