A dragon is forever
The dragons, from which world the world is, are a real magnet for the attention of the public: their presence, sometimes benign but mostly naughty, puts in motion unthinkable events, from which stories often come to be deserved to be told.
Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arisen’s incipit seems to be pretending to be one of the aforementioned stories, but the illusion lasts only a handful of hours: today, like five years ago, narrative is not a central element in Capcom’s product, which tries to mix, without too much success, elements of the classic European fantasy, filtered through the Japanese sensitivity, with obscure middle-eastern legends.
Though you do not leave a mark, however, history does not interfere with the enjoyment of the product, which is rarely invasive and leaves the player’s desire and curiosity a good number of optional dialogues and numerous details about the game world.
The player will dress the chosen one, one of the very few survivors of the Barbarian attack by a huge dragon called Grigori, at the peaceful Cassardis coastal village: instead of eating or shrinking it in ash, the reptile squirts his chest at our avatar and inhale her, condemning him to hunt him for eternity. Assured of Arisen’s role, the innocent fisherman we will be called to impersonate is forced to embark on a long and perilous journey, just the one who had crossed the safe boundaries of the village only in occasional occasions.
As much as the original title, it is unlikely that someone will buy Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arisen in PS4 version (the one we tested) for the goodness of her interweaving or the psychological introspection of her protagonists, but, as already partly demonstrated by the expansive expansion,
Dark Arisen , contained in this package, if and when Capcom decides to roll up the sleeves, the results are seen: the story told by the latter is in fact better written, more focused and more engaging, albeit shorter. If the publication of this remaster is a way to test the waters in view of a possible second chapter, in short, there are concrete hopes that any sequel can bring improvements even from a narrative point of view.
untouched
The most important feature pin on the chest of Capcom production today, like five years ago, is gameplay, which worked fine at the time of the debut and does not even fade away, witnessing both the goodness of the work done and the relative immobility of the genre membership in recent years.
Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arisen has many advantages and disadvantages, and it was fair to bring it to the attention of the new generations or those who, in the frenzy of reading information about the then PS4 and Xbox One ventures, had lost it on the street: the combat system allows to climb up to the bigger beasts, we were not in the nextMonster Hunter , returning a pleasant feeling of physicality, and differently differentiated the approaches, favoring the replayability.
Facing a chimera with a first-line warrior needs very different strategies from doing it with an archer or a wizard, so slow in casting but devastating times when spells are launched. The pots, other strengths of the production, are varied and awake as they are a shine, a symbol of an asynchronous multiplayer of rare efficiency, and choose to complement one’s character, and his main chime helps enormously in the toughest stages of ‘ adventure, which, for the record, are many.
Dragon’s Dogma does not slap the player as the Dark Souls love to do and does not require the same patience in storing enemy patterns, but especially during the first twenty hours, he can give moments of pure terror, thanks to the find of the night exploration, wrapped in the darkest of darkness, and to a series of low-cost beasts that the party will tremendously struggle to put on the rug.
