Dragon's Dogma Review

Nothing else fights like this. Grabbing a cyclops by the leg, hauling yourself up its back and stabbing it in the eye while your mage sets the club it is swinging on fire is a physical, unscripted kind of combat that most fantasy games gesture at and never deliver. The pawn system is genuinely novel: your hired companions learn the bestiary, then get rented out to other players and come home with knowledge and gifts, which makes the loneliest looking single player world quietly communal.

Nights are properly dark, lanterns matter, and travel is dangerous in a way that fast travel would have ruined. The world it happens in is thin. Gransys is largely empty hillside, the towns are small, the quests are fetch requests with placeholder prose, and the escort missions are famous for the wrong reasons. It looks rough even for 2012 and it runs worse. The Dark Arisen release added the dungeon it always needed.