Just to let you know this game was heavily resisted by capcom. They gave in a less than modest budget as well as a rushed deadline. Hideki itsuno pushed hard and grinded to bring his vision to light. The game was unfinished as said by the man himself. Development started in like late 2000s but he pitched it in 2000. It need a second chance. Support dd2!!
As a huge DMC fan I feel really bad for Itsuno. Both DMC4 and DD were unfinished but so unique compared to other games of the same genres. I love the man’s work and want to see him make his dream game.
The ending of this game was almost traumatic for me. Dragon "I have your beloved" Me "Dafaq!? Who's he talkin about? Me (see's blacksmith surrounded by goblins)
I'd like to answer a few of the questions you brought up and also point a few things out. Firstly, Grigori doesn't take your heart as punishment for defiance. He takes your heart in order to make you an arisen, because you didn't run away from him; you stood your ground and fought him even though you knew you would most likely die. You showed resolve and proved that you had the will to live, which is one of the traits of the arisen. Also yes, he offers you a chance to give up your beloved to see if you have the strength to face him, or if you are weak enough to give up the person you love and live in shame knowing that you achieved nothing. The reason Grigori is so friendly and seems to want you to kill him is because he does. He knows that he is nothing more than an obstacle for you to overcome, and he does want you to succeed. But you have to earn your victory by besting him in a battle to the death. The seneschal is not actually God. He's simply the keeper/watcher of the world that maintains order and is given the power of creation as well as immortality. Basically, he's a glorified manager. This can get very confusing since the only way to kill the seneschal is to use the "godsbane" blade. The reason killing Grigori unleashes more monsters is because doing so opened up the everfall which Gran Soren was built over. There were many monsters inside the everfall and when it opened, they escaped. Grigori's death marked your victory and showed that you were worthy to challenge the seneschal, which you could only do if the everfall was opened. It is mentioned several times throughout the game that the longer a pawn stays with its master, the more it starts becoming like its master, until it begins to change into its master and becomes human. Selene the young witch in the woods is one of the pawns that mentions this and the dragonforged and his pawn also mention this. It is hinted that the arisen that become dragons do not retain knowledge of their previous lives, as Grigori himself in the final battle seems to regain some memories, as he says that he now remembers the pain he feels you inflicting upon him as he too once inflicted it himself. I hope this helps answer a few of the questions.
Isnt it also hinted that dragons do remember who they are....they are just compelled to obey the senechal. In bbi it mentions it in the stone of remembrance
Thank you for this. I just recently completed the game and gotten all the achievements after binge playing it. I really love the game and this video really does no justice for the game in regards to the story. I've watched several reviews on this and they all seem negative. I can't understand why. The story is actually pretty great once you piece them all together, especially during the second play through. It feels sad knowing that many people who have tried this hated it.
"Use fire!" "Strike with fire!" "Even in numbers, a weakling is a weakling still!" "Their kind hates ice and fire BAWLS!" "Goblins hate fire!" "We have triumphed" "We have triumphed"
I loved this game and played it for hours, but my only takeaway was this: I named my character Master and was real tiny, my pawn was Blaster and was real huge. I though I could climb on him, but it turns out you can just pick the pawn up and carry him around. So I did this at every opportunity for no reason other than Master carrying Blaster.
One of the many things that annoyed me was how while fighting Direwolves, a pawn through gained knowledge would yell out how fire is the key to defeating these foes, and she then proceeds to enchant my sword with an ice spell.
well, the true fact is that you should give the pawns atleast two options... if there is no an option they will use the only one option they have... that is somethin you learn when played so many hours... even sometimes, the basic magic attack is better than an enchanted weapon
Aye same. I’ve legitimately never been able to explain what it is about this game that can cause me to sink 10 or more hours in a single day on the weekends. It’s just so fun for no reason
@@artemaniaco293 No, at least for me. I still enjoy playing the game from time to time, although you can only play the same content over and over again. It is truly a novel game and a fun one at that, but Capcom is sleeping on it.
@SquirrelEats Man But it is flawed, and the reason for pointing out those flaws is so that the sequel can improve on it, thus giving us an even better game.
The Dragon doesn't steal your heart because of "your defiance" The scene plays out more like he respects you, he looks at his massive paw and sees your insignificant blade stuck there, it did nothing, you had NO chance of victory and still you stood up to this world ending monster. So he makes you an Arisen, gives you a chance to build yourself up to fight him for real. The Dragon was interesting because he DIDN'T treat you like an enemy but more like an equal in some way, even giving you words of wisdom in some instances, daring you to seek out and kill him.
it almost feels like he didn't listen to any of what the dragon said, every time the dragon urges you to defeat him its not out of a villainous "hehe stop me if you can" its "i WANT you to be strong enough to stop me" and the last conversation in the temple on the tainted mountain is even dripping with respect for having managed to reach him and held onto your resolve. not to mention your entire fight with him he is praising you and encouraging you to continue and overcome him.
@@2g33ksgamingttv3 This game has a very special trait: If you aren't looking carefully, it's easy to dislike it. But once you take off your hater goggles you realize that it's an ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE.
It's kinda sad to see how many people missed that this game DOES have meaningful choices in quests. You don't pick a dialogue option, you just act and your actions affect how it resolves. When someone dies you can either just tell their beloved or try using a wakestone to revive them (it works!). Do you do the sidequests and help people? Oh, you didn't? They're dead and offer no future quests and disappear from the world. Maybe it's the game's fault for not making it clear, or even, what kind of world it is. You're not so much playing a Skyrim game, you're playing a D&D campaign. Sometimes you'll find something that's too hard for you and you're forced to run and do other quests. Sometimes you decide "I CAN DO IT" and use skill alone to beat REALLY difficult encounters before you should be able to. The meatiness of getting around the world, of cheesing systems, it very much rewards the crafty player for abusing the details the DM gives.
+Æsir I'll give you one example. Remember the guy in Gran Soren who wants Salomet's Grimoir? If you give it to him he shows up later and helps in a boss fight, but he doesn't if you do not. This might not sound like a big choice, until you realize that the forgery system in the game allows you to pass quests like this one by creating a fake copy; when he arrives to aid you in battle with the fake book you gave him The results are predictably comical. This is never telegraphed to you in the game, because like OP said, it's more of a D&D campaign than like a 3D Zelda game or an Uncharted title or whatever where you'd be told to visit the forgery place in an earlier cutscene and someone would make a not-so-cryptic hint remark when you started the quest.
Æsir, the hell do you mean "it has no impact"? It locks you out of dialogue, quests, loot, and xp options. If you don't put time into the game and do all of the side quests, they disappear. In Skyrim, all the quests are open all the time, unless you specifically kill one important NPC. Kill the dragon at the Mouth of the World for the Blades? Locks you out of talking to the High Hrothgar monks and using them to locate Word Walls. But you can still find them on your own, if you explore every single map icon. In Dragon's Dogma, if you miss a side quest and progress in the Main Quest story line too far, you get locked out of said missed side quest. This could mean that certain vendors won't have late game gear, certain NPCs are dead, certain quest lines disappear from the game, or even certain boss fights are harder cause now you have no backup. Doing, or ignoring, certain quests has a very real impact on the world of Dragon's Dogma, much more than Skyrim could ever emulate, sans you going on a murder spree.
I don't wanna be making excuses for the game or anything, but a lot of the inconsistencies in the mechanics, lack of enemy variety, the actual plot being compressed in the last quarter of the game, and so on make a bit more sense in context when you consider that it suffered a similar fate to Itsuno's previous project(DMC4). That is to say Capcom axed the project midway through development and the devs had to scramble to finish the game with what they had, so the rest of Gransys, Dragon Isle, the moon, the infinite tower(that hooked all the players' worlds together so you could actually go hang out in other people's worlds in real time) got cut.
Dude, you do good, solid work, but you really need to stop apologizing for the length of your videos. People don't mind, and those who do rarely watch anything more than 5-10 minutes long anyway and aren't really your target audience. As for the game itself, agreed on pretty much everything. There's just so much potential in the game, so many great ideas, but it feels like the devs were doing this as a side project and never really fleshed it out. I never quite finished it, mainly because I ended up disliking my build and was too fatigued to start over. However, I did find the spoilers interesting, and it's consistent with the rest of the game - great potential, the feeling of an idea deep in there that was never fully realized...
+SmugPlatypus Seriously, the videos that I watch on youtube tend to average on 30+ minutes as a general minimum with some even being podcasts that I listen to for 2-3 hours. Length's fine particularly as I feel that a decent number of folk like listening to something while playing a game that doesn't require much thinking.
It's not so much of an apology as it is trying to ease people into watching who typically don't watch long videos. I had a lot of people tell me that the only reason they watched my Fallout 4 video was because I brought up the length right at the start. You're right about my target audience, but after putting so much work into the Rise video and it receiving very little exposure, I don't think it hurts to try to make the videos more accessible--but only with tiny tweaks like pointing out links and the like. It's not worth shortening my content.
I actually think the story of Bitterblack Isle is good, not great, but good. The ending plays into it, and the cycle and lore is interesting to me, I guess.
"the damage calculation, healing management, and wakestones ruin the game" breath of the wild (flat defense instead of percent, eat food whenever, faeries that can be farmed): I'm about to end this man's whole career
if breath of the wild had even one of these combat mechanics, climbing enemies, chunking off arms, or even just the quick fast paced skills that mobile classes have it would of been insane.
@@khoing1111 Breath of the Wild was designed for you to play creatively. You are not supposed to fight enemy all the time. Sometimes waiting for nighttime and eating food to make you sneak better and stabbing everyone in the gut while they are resting is how you solve a problem. (literally its free kills) Other time its using explosives, or placing bait on the floor and using magic in funny ways to exploit their behavior. This is the true spirit of zelda titles. Link doesn't have to play the warrior class. You are there to get a specicifc thing done not fight your way out of all situations.
You're right: the game has a number of flaws that span the gamut from combat and statictical to story and pacing. But in spite of all of these problems, I still put around 150 hours into the game and its expantions. Maybe that's due to the fact that I didn't bother to explore the game's fundamental narrative absurdity or the damage reduction system that is a cross purposes with the twitchy combat. For me, much of the fun of the game's first half came from the tension between the desire to forge ahead to see what is beyond the next hill and the danger implicit in that decision. The oppressive nature of the game world is bolstered by a day-night cycle that sees stronger enemies come out at night and the world, while rather empty feeling, still had enough in it to hold my interest. Then again, I'm one of the players that enjoyed the limits the game puts on fast travel in the beginning. Also the magic is super dope.
the day and night cycle being different was what engaged me at first. also I made my first character a little girl because i could and in the first cut scene when the dragon attacks and everyone is running away, seeing a little girl defiantly grab a sword and charge the dragon was hilarious. i think it was that that made me enjoy the nonsensical story so much.
100 hours of walking in that 150 hours. I love the game too, but it's so very flawed. It's like asking people to go play The Witcher 1 not many people can get into that. Let's hope Dragon's Dogma 2 really improves everything so much better after 11 years of advancement in game design and a proper budget/timeline this time.
Ah... Dragon's Dogma is one of more modern games to have piqued my interest with just how... ambitious it is. It's flawed as hell, but, for a product that is basically Japan's first and most genuine attempt at replicating Western RPGs like the Elder Scrolls, I have to give it credit as a very innovative beginner's product. Honestly, Dragon's Dogma is the game I wish more non-traditional Japanese RPGs would try and emulate. As is, I honestly have to say I prefer Dogma's potential to the Souls series's repetition.
There have been quite a bit of attempts on Western rpgs from Japanese devs though. Even FROM made quite a few, not SOuls, but the King's Field series, and stuff like Light Crusader. Even DD feels like a 3D version of Capcom's arcade RPG from back in the day, DUngeons and Dragons. Korea has quite a bit of games like WRPGs as well(Vindictus, C9), and There's stuff like Wizardry Online.
Steven R The Elder Scrolls series isn't and NEVER should be about combat. It should be about writing and roleplaying, although Skyrim greatly lacks in both of those aspects.
One of the finest character creation setups ever in an RPG! : You can play everything from a 6 yr old elf boy to an 90 year old woman, and all inbetween! Plus you can be properly big and chunky (for once!) , or eating disorder skeletal....Nothing else like it! (in terms of who you can appear to play as) - As Capcoms first W-RPG effort it's pretty impressive!
Yeah it does a pretty good job showing what's going on in the Dragon's mind(atleast with Grigori and the one who took Daimon's heart, I forgot her name). Personally I think the base game did an excellent job when showing that Grigori wasn't doing shit to hurt you or cause pain to anyone, he was literally forging you and the game shows this. This game has some flaws but it did do well in some areas imo
I love this game, and while I agree with practically all your points here, I think you missed talking about some of the game's greatest features. -The pawn's ability to learn. How you pawn will react to enemies and situations depends heavily on what they know. If they see you strike a saurian's tail for instance, they learn how effective that is and will perform it themselves and even teach it to other pawns. Other pawns that you recruit can even attempt to teach yourself about weaknesses and strategies by calling them out to you. -Large enemies. I think this game has the single best big creature encounters out of any game. The creatures are animate and unique, and pose differing sets of challenges for you to figure out how to overcome them. Knocking a weapon out of a cyclops' hand, silencing a chimera, and hitting the wings to get a dragon to fall are excellent design decisions that make things so much more enjoyable despite the game's many flaws.
I really loved the large creature fights. So many games do large creature boss fights but they are either scripted or just standard battles where you wear down their health. This game had actual locational damage and large enemies acting like other enemies do, unpredictable and lifelike. It makes you feel like you are actually battling a large monster and makes even some random encounters feel like epic battles.
Jonny Velocity It's not likely he was playing this on PS3/X360, considering the original game came out in '12 and the PC version in '16. Likely he's playing on PC with a controller.
Pancake I was gonna say that!! Yeah if he is using a controller he can hold L1 & R1 + (d-pad) which is definitely weird and something the player has to figure out on there own but at least we get some hot keys lol. Always have my lamp and a few strong curatives on it. That kingwarish :)
I can see where you come from with that assumption, but honestly, trying to apply any sort of coherence to the story in Dragon's Dogma is an exercise in futility. I played this game for years and it is, in fact, exactly as disjointed and incomprehensible as Anderson says.
The fact that the Red Dragon has a “Dogma” to follow gives enough of an answer to the free will question. Heck, it’s even unclear as to whether or not the Seneschal has free will. Some of his lines hint at this and the lyrics to the main theme outright say that everything and everyone are all just part of the cycle of eternal return. It’s all just an effort from the world to stop itself from being consumed by entropy by keeping a steady stream of player-controlled souls.
GiRayne I don’t exactly think anything would be gained by having the main character be voiced. Not in this game anyway. BB Isle is easily the place I had the most fun on, it’s a long and arduous trek through the most complexly designed dungeon in the game against the hardest enemies on a regular play through, it’s environments and enemy spawn mechanics make for fun fights. When it comes to the story, it has a lot of wasted potential. I adore the little detail of having songs with lyrics that actually mean a damn to the plot, props go to the final boss’ theme from BB Isle for that. My disappointment with the story comes from the minimal amount of set up for the reveal of the Arisen’s true nature as a willpower battery for the world. I believe you might be projecting a small bit of you sincerely think that the game has any pretensions of “profundity.” For all it’s worth, the game is incredibly forthcoming with the nature of its story, even all the stuff with the Seneschal. From minute 1 the game sets up that its characters and world are simple and in the spirit of classical Dragon Quest, with some little spunk added in to spice up the game after the defeat of the Red Dragon. The story almost feels fairy tale-ish at several points which, judging by the verbosity and language of every character, I’m inclined to believe might’ve been kinda the point. I also very much disagree that there was ever a fight with “god” at the end, if at all. At no point do the characters challenge whatever invisible force was that set up the cycle of eternal return. You can’t take the fight to god because god ain’t there, just the assistant manager. The Seneschal in this world is a dude just like you who’s pretty much just doing his job, not to mention being an overall decent guy who merely wants some vacation time from a boring continued existence. I believe the gameplay is well enough like it is, as a hybrid of genres. As Monster Hunter trying to be even more character action, the latter being the the genre that the game’s director, Hideaki Itsuno, is most famous for defining with the release of DMC3. It’s a pretty good gameplay system that could be further improved upon in a sequel (if only)
I disagree strongly that there's no skill based element to the gameplay. The fact that most damage can be completely negated through timed blocking or dodging, as well as the fact that the game rewards good timing in the form of the perfect block system, along with the fact that combining your skills and using them effectively allows you to easily outpace most enemies in terms of damage, means that skill and knowledge of the system is both encouraged and directly rewarded. I was able to get through most of bitterblack with a character I hadn't even completed the main story with. Eventually I got to a point where I had to go back and level a bit more, but the fact remains that the player can tackle challenges far ahead of their own level if they're particularly skilled at the game. That's not something that can be claimed with most RPGs and that's precisely due to its skill based element. Enemies have telegraphed attacks with predictable patterns, clear, exploitable weaknesses, and resistances, all of which is integral to the design of any skill based game. Your 2 examples were also terrible, you listed two exceptionally powerful and exceptionally tanky bosses that are intended to be fought in the end game, both of which you're not even supposed to fight when you encounter them. Percentage reduction has its pitfalls too. It means that they can essentially get high resistance gear and be able to tank hits from an endgame enemy if this isn't properly distributed. Also, the need to grind for better gear doesn't suddenly make this no longer a skill based game. That's utterly ridiculous. Also your point on the attack damage was outright absurd. You went from doing 1 damage to 2 damage, how overpowered! You do realize how many times you'd have to hit an enemy for that kind of difference to even be noticeable? Not to mention that this very specific example completely ignores the fact that gaining attack and defense as you level is perfectly normal for an RPG, and that these increases have what is essentially diminishing returns, because by the time you're high level, getting an extra 1 damage when you level does literally nothing for you, and a case could be made that this does almost nothing for you in the early game as well. It's only when you reach the highest levels that this is actually noticeable. For healing items: they have weight, you can take a lot of healing items with you, but you'll be moving slower and using more stamina because of it, which in turn makes you have to use more of them. Another issue with your assertions on this is that many attacks can kill you very quickly. These items are also pretty expensive relative to when they're useful to you, (the potent greenwarishes cost you 70,000 gold, that's about a quarter of an average playthrough worth of gold, all being spent on consumables, you're saying they're not expensive when you're bringing over currency from a ton of previous playthroughs, and of course its not expensive then, otherwise the economy on the first playthrough, which the game is designed for, would be hopelessly unbalanced and absolutely ridiculous to expect the player to find the money to accumulate any actual stock of anything) and they're hard to find elsewhere in the world. This is nowhere near as much a problem as healing in games like Skyrim, where healing potions are practically everywhere, every alchemist in the game sells ingredients for making them, and you can pop them like candy with no downside, since the weight system only registers when you're overencumbered. This system is an immense improvement on systems like these, and that's what it's meant to be. The only way healing constantly is viable is if you've accumulated millions of gold across multiple playthroughs to spend solely on healing items, and don't care about moving like a turtle due to carry weight, even then, you're not in any way required to use these systems, because the game rewards player skill, and if you do use these systems, you're certainly not required to exploit them to the point of absurdity. Again, people exploiting the game's mechanics doesn't mean that it isn't skill based. Hell, there are ways to break dark souls in similarly ridiculous ways. Wakestones are again ridiculously difficult to find in your first playthrough, since you have to accumulate 3 shards just to get one, you lose it when you die, there's only one merchant who sells them, and even he only carries one shard, plus the only way you can really farm wakestones is if you specifically farm them in the endgame area in Gransys long past the need to accumulate them for the main quest. There is also the fact that wakestones weigh a lot. Again you're balancing your ability to heal against your ability to actually be effective.
I wont read it, but have you watched the video? He just proved how everything is working.. there is no skill needed. You can hit every fucking timed shit as much as you want but if you do 1 dmg your skill doesnt fucking matter, if you can at anytime assuming they dont one hit you in which case your skill is in the wind and none existent bring up inventory and eat the whole super market of food there is no skill. You can hit ,,your skill based element,, as much as you want. If you dont have gear you are fucked and your skill is useless. End of story. No need to read your 5th sentence.
@@budlikycz2445 I don't think any enemy in the game can 1HK you on normal mode as long as you don't get in over your head, and hard mode was never meant for the first playthrough - it wasn't even in the game on its initial release, so any arguments concerning "one hits" are null and void. Given the developer, it'd be the same as trying to play Devil May Cry games on the highest difficulties for your first playthrough (or restarting on the highest difficulty after playing a few missions on normal - thankfully neither are possible) and complaining about enemies hitting too hard, when you don't have neither moves, nor HP upgrades to deal with them, not to mention the lack of skill. Healing isn't automatic and is not required to progress through the game or win battles, because damage from enemy attacks is usually 100% avoidable. One can limit the usage of tools or curatives if he desires, to the point of completely abstaining from them. Players can choose whether they want a challenge or not. That's entirely on them. If you choose to abuse it, carry a load of healing items or wakestones, and suddenly find yourself unable to die, that's not the game - it's you. Equipment and stats aside, Dragon's Dogma is very much skill and knowledge based. It simply offers players more room for error, but that is optional. If you choose to play casually, don't blame the game for it. Equipment, enhancement and augments increasing your potential are beautifully implemented in Dragon's Dogma. You can get so strong that you will oneshot large monsters, but you can also choose to limit yourself, use non-enhanced equipment and/or no empowering augments, making fights last longer if you ever feel like it, potentially providing some additional challenge. There's also nothing wrong with your character not being strong enough, or not having good enough tools to take on certain monsters. I would say that the implementation of damage thresholds is quite imperfect and some enemies, perhaps, shouldn't be as durable as they are. However, that mostly applies to BBI only, which is supposed to be endgame content, anyway. And now to your "point." There are tools in the game that, if used and stacked, will nearly double your damage, and because of how defenses work in Dogma, it could very well be many, many times more in a combat situation against an enemy with high defense thresholds. Additionally, all enemies have weaknesses and resistances. Some struggles can be overcome by choosing a different approach. Not being able to beat the game at level 1 with rusted weapons doesn't make it a non-skill based game. It seems that many people are missing the point. It is a progression based game to a degree, but it's still a skill and knowledge based game at the same time. It has its flaws, sure enough. But the good parts outweigh them. It's not about your gear - even though it undeniably plays a role - it's about whether you're prepared or not. If you're not prepared, choose to fight and get fucked - it's your fault. The game, like any other, has a certain set of rules. If you don't agree with them - that's fine. But that's not a good enough reason to say utter nonsense.
This. The game is completely player choice on how difficult or easy you make the game for yourself. And it's very much skill based with a hint of equipment upgrading that on your first run of the game almost always costs an arm and a leg to set up you and your pawn to not quickly die against the upcoming boss fights.
what? the most expensive kind of greenwarish costs 850 gold, don't know where you have the 70k from. i've never had a problem with gold, i pretty much always had way too much
Personally I LOVED playing as a Warrior. Their Arc of Deliverance (which is an incredible name for an ability) is so satisfying when fully charged. Dealing several massive blows and shredding off multiple health bars from massive and powerful enemies is extremely satisfying.
I wanted to keep the video under 40 minutes so I cut some thoughts after writing the script. I stayed awake to finalize the upload so I'm too tired to get into them now, but I think it's worth mentioning that the pawn system / multiplayer in this game is a really interesting idea. I think it's one of the reasons that so many people like the game and, while I can understand the appeal, it didn't hook me enough to mess around with it. I found the pawns to be more annoying than helpful--especially earlier on in the game. Even in the tutorial with them all shouting so many different robotic lines. I always watch the video again before publishing on youtube to make sure it uploads properly. I think I came across more negative than I actually feel about my time with the game. If a sequel was made, I'd happily play it and be thrilled if there were improvements to the game's core components. Some of the boss fights are good, but they could be great.
+Joseph Anderson I think there's some stuff you might have missed about the Pawn system, through no fault of your own. It's all really obtuse, requiring you to read a wiki or other outside material. This is a great analysis though, and as much as I enjoy the game, it's definitely a deeply flawed game. I hope for a proper sequel, there's so much here that just needs some heavy polish and reconstructive surgery.
+Joseph Anderson Your channel is awesome dude, and I share your feelings about Dragon's Dogma almost exactly. I hate this game just as much as I love it.
Here's an article of Itsuno talking about the pawn-system. www.vg247.com/2012/03/01/pawn-system-in-dragons-dogma-inspired-by-itsunos-time-spent-on-bbs-boards/ Also, as pointless as I find to point out cut-content when it comes to measuring the wort of a game. vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/dragonsdogma/images/3/36/Original_Plans_2.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130819203659 Dragon's Dogma scope used to be much larger, maybe that would explain as to why some of issues you pointed out seem so unbalanced. Still no excuse, DD is a pretty flawed game, but one which I greatly enjoyed. Nice video, keep it up.
I respect your opinion very much; but I suspect your main premise is quite flawed, as you really only superficially went into the game mechanics, so you likely could not grasp the "skill" part of the game. It is not your fault, as the infos are not given inside the game, but inside the community. "Insider knowledge" is no ideal way (outright: it is terrible) of game presentation, but here it is at it is. First off, arguably, having an idea of how to develop your character can be counted to the "skill" you have. E.g. knowing that one level in the Warrior skill set helps everybody (especially wizards) tremendously (reduces all incoming damage by 50;- and 225 in hard mode) is kind of a "skill" ( the game will not tell you :D) . However, my main point is that different attacks have different strength/damage multipliers giving more or less armor "penetration"; - the more difficult a skill is in its use, the higher the reward. A melee attack that takes 10 secs to charge (very difficult to apply) can multiply attack strength by 8 (multiplying damage by ,say, 20-30 against proper armed boss type enemies) ; further enhanced by using buffs. (crafting, eh) This works with mediocre equipment, so your "this game is all grind" argument goes somewhat out of the window here. The major difference is with great equipment power attacks are often one shot KO (if you "git gud") against dragon kinds, while you will need two approaches otherwise. The grind only helps in trivializing (less skill is needed, -so for ppl like me :D) the content, and means for the main part not bashing a million monster`s skulls (to you, enemy density is too low, I like it; btw: The Witcher has even less enemies and far less variation, or e,g, FO NV is mostly against humanoids and trash mobs, apart from being far less crouded. - Both tell nice stories, I give you that! ) , but more exploring the map for hidden stuff, in typical Japanese ( Lara Croft, RE, FF, et al) fashion. If you are after it, the world map is actually huge (somewhat like Witcher 3) , as behind or upon every small hill there are partly very well-hidden treasures to be found. You forgot to mention that the world map is indeed a bit small, but that it has mostly 2-3 layers of height degree in it. - Also, the speed challenge record, for all you HC grinders, is about 14:30 (minutes) :D You came from Souls with your critique, and bash on the sheer and obvious lack of polishing this game throws at you, while you powergamed/rushed ( 40 hrs for Normal is actually nothing if you want to explore) a title that you did not really grasp (it works for Souls, but takes alot of the fun out here where it is about Triple Sandbox E: Explore, Enjoy, Experiment, - 200 levels long :D ) ; - neither its slightly hidden charms (it has indeed been a long time in gaming I had so many remarkable small smiley moments, and it reminds me at Gothic 2 15 years ago ; - I skipped Souls after 2 hrs because of the "psycho stress" in this game) , nor even the mechanics that actually (if you want) need a fair couple of hours preparational reading in the WWW. Yes, I cursed about the partial stupidity of the engine as well, and quite often. Yes, the illogical patchwork story is only a bare incentive (or bad excuse, like you have it) for playing; - although you recommended ( I am with you!) exactly these procedures for FO4. But, I fear that people are prone to the old tale that, when your only tool (of judgement) is a hammer , every "problem" tends to look like a nail. So, you missed out on the joy that this game, that is not Souls, nor High Fantasy story telling mastery, can deliver. Okay it was to you a mixed bag of Hate-Love-Even More Hate, after all. I believe ACG, who is generally very fair ( reviewing mostly indie titles) in his short low detail game analysis, but gave this one some extra attention, and a fanboy thumb up, is closer to my own impression. - But yes, for him graphics style ( I could talk about how every NPC really has an own face, dungeon maps that look like your home game RPG, beautiful ppl char creation, overall monster presentation, lighting, magic effects, combat movement, etc etc etc here; - lets be silent about the environment textures, meeting the limits of the console, shall we ) and sound are about 60% of his evaluation. ;)
13:36 why are you opening the menu when the game TELLS YOU you have 4 shortcut options for consumables? Also the game gives you augs that cuts the damage you take by half early game. The game gives you so many options to avoid grind, for f*ck's sake there's ppl beating the DLC at lvl 50 mate...
One huge note at the beginning of the video for him taking your heart: he isn't mad at you for attacking him (this is directly from the cutscene) but rather has respect for your courage. So he decides to imbue you with a blessing... or curse...
Wildest thing is that this review, 8 years later, is perfectly applicable to Dragon's Dogma 2. Almost all the cons are still there, minus the only good thing actually worth playing: Brittleblack Isle... Absurd.
Dragon's Dogma has always been a weird one. In some ways, it's incredibly fun, in others, it feels kinda backwards. It's flawed, but i still love the game. The healing items are probably my biggest problem, and i'd like if every class got a dodge/evade move, it'd make sense if certain classes had better versions of this. Still hoping for a true sequel to fix these issues and improve what's already there.
To be fair, the only classes not to have defensive moves are Sorcerer and Mage, and with how ridiculously strong magic is, you don't really need them on those classes. Especially sorcerer. Ah, nothing quite like nuking a chimera 100-0 with a single long ass spell.
@@wallacesousuke1433 no, that is not true, the "best" "defensive" tactic with a sorcerer is to spell sync with four sorcerers... it took no time to cast 4 big badass end-battle spell... the only thing you need to do is keep the distance... also double jump with spell caster works like a dodge... is one of the best evasive manoubers that exist at the game, it's not like evasive slash of the Warrior that gives you iFrames... but most of the times you don't really need iFrames... per example at Daemon fight when he tried to catch you... the best way to dodge that is just jump and levitate...
Did you play through as all of the vocations, like, switching them up as you played or did you stick to the same yellow path? In your section about dying in one shot or grinding, you never mentioned blocking or perfect blocking mechanics which do give you another option in hard encounters if you're under-geared/leveled. It's mostly a matter of timing, but it's basically the most "skill" based combat mechanic, unfortunately locked behind a few classes. I felt like often switching your vocation to try out new skills and combos was one of the core features or great things about the game. Locking yourself into the same rotation and routine for 20+ levels in a row is kind of ignoring one of the aaaand of course i come upon the part of the video where you sort of address that. They do need to give equally viable movement options for the other classes.
Normal mode I played as a fighter and warrior. I went strider for about an hour or two and then switched back to the warrior for the rest. Then I reset my save and started level 1 strider on hard mode. I tried ranger and assassin and then went back to strider for the moveset. I usually don't like magic in games so I avoided the spellcasters except for seeing how it all worked.
+Joseph Anderson I see. I believe their intention with the system was for you to change up your vocations often during the same play through. some of the passive buffs and attacks carry over from vocation to vocation. You'll eventually settle on the class you enjoy best, but the little stints of a different class help break up some of the repetition. Fighting an ogre the tenth time doesn't have to be routine if you're facing them while you level in another class. Not locking you into one class and letting you switch freely was one of the better design choices under all of the baffling ones.
@@JosephAndersonChannel This might be a bit late but I think you missed out on two of the most fun classes to play as by avoiding magic. Magick Archer is by far my favorite and has many ways of interacting with enemies and the world in interesting ways. It has access to the same dagger skills as the Strider (including the doge roll and double jump) but gives you the added bonus of elemental attacks, crowd control, and buffs/debuffs. There's something great about setting yourself on fire and hugging a monster to death. Sorcerer plays more like the basic mage class but with far more emphasis on damage and powerful debuffs and status effects. Being able to summon a giant spire of ice or a forcefield of lightning around yourself is pretty cool. Killing enemies with death curses or petrification is better. Summoning a meteor shower or death tornado is pretty great. But nothing quite compares to watching yourself and three sorcerer pawns group cast four meteor showers, tornadoes, etc. Group casting allows the casters to synchronize the spells and piggyback off each other to drastically cut down on cast times. You missed out on many of the best aspects of the combat and character building by sticking to only a few vocations. A proper review should explore all aspects of a game.
Before talking about the combat you should have learned the difference between gear and Level dependent. ANY piece of gear can become END game with dragon and gold forging, You do however need to level your Character in order for you to do any of that
aesthetics you simpleton, every piece if gear can be used in END game and serve you well. If you played the game you'd know that it all comes down to what you like. Fuck y ou can beat the game with rusted weapons that you gold forged and the diabilitation they cause does serious fucking work in end game because of it
Yeah this video is really terrible and honestly needs to be revisited. There's so many things he brings up that are either obvious or easily searched up
@@General_Fuck_Yeah_AnimeTitties Coming back, two years later, still laugh at how he calls grigori and the setting major clichés but he himself has wrote multiple books about dragons in fantasy settings, lol
And it should tell you something about how he felt about the rest of the game if a thing that he feels is a waste of time is still better and more enjoyable than everything else.
Ok, I know this is an old video and that you may not see this, but being a big fan of this game, I feel that I should defend some things here (TL;DR ahead of time). 1. Exactly how much did you experiment with different vocation skills? You claim that climbing on monsters is useless, yet not once in your gameplay did I see you have Scarlet/100 Kisses equipped. That skill (and Gouge, the sword based one for Assassin) can be used while climbing, and they result in some of the highest DPS in the game when used on weak points. Also, while Fighter and Warrior don't have dodge rolls, they do have skills that grant them extensive i-frames. Fighter has Full Moon Slash and Dragon's Maw (both of which have i-frames for their entire duration), and Warrior has Exodus Slash (which has i-frames during the initial sideways slash). 2. I don't understand your complaint about the gear progression. Yes, you have to upgrade or change your gear to stand a chance just like in *every RPG ever.* So how exactly is this a bad thing? Also, raw damage isn't everything. Status effects are extremely powerful in this game; *especially* ones like Topor. It's the reason why the starting rusted weapons are borderline broken when you fully upgrade them. I also don't get why you make such a big fuss about grinding. I've hardly ever had to stop what I was doing and grind in the 6 playthroughs of the game that I've done, and even then I would never mind grinding thanks to how fun the game's combat is. 3. You aren't supposed to go to Bitter Black Isle until *AFTER* you beat Grigori! The game makes this blatantly obvious with how strong the enemies are. You're supposed get the extremely strong vocation based Dragon weapons and *THEN* give it a try. Yes, you can go to Bitter Black Isle the second that you start the game (and there are challenge runs of it at level 5, so it is totally possible), but I see that as no different than attempting Ashes of Ariandel in DS3 when you first reach it. It's going to be hell and both of them warn you about it. 4. Saying that you stopped caring about the plot 10 minutes into the game is quite unprofessional. You're playing a fantasy game with dragons and magic, just watched your heart get ripped out and eaten yet you still survive, and you draw the line at strange people coming out of magic portals, really? I would break down more on why the plot is not only fully coherent, but rather brilliant, however a top comment already did that perfectly, so I'll refrain. I'll finish this off by saying that the claim that "Dragon's Dogma is a pretty bad game" is completely false. Flawed, yes (as most original IPs that try something totally new tend to be), but it's nowhere close to being "pretty bad". What is your standard of "pretty bad" anyways? What would you compare Dragon's Dogma to that is also "pretty bad"? Finally, if you aren't aware of what Monster Hunter is than you should definitely look into it. It's another Capcom property that Dragon's Dogma drew heavily from. Heck, with how Monster Hunter World looks, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Dragon's Dogma was actually a test bed for future Monster Hunter mechanics.
theguywithnoaccount holy shit i never thought of that. That might be why mhw looks so amazingly good, they took both ideas and put everything into them instead of stopping the project halfway. I still wish dd was completely finished what with the infinite tower and such.
Yeah his criticism of the combat is built upon a strawman of people claiming the game is skill-based, and then goes off to use BBI as an example, ignoring key things like periapts and gear not being level gated. I've never had to grind levels in the game, only grind for vocation skills and augments. He is right about the attack power thing though. If you don't reach a certain attack threshhold, you might as well not bother. However, the sort of enemies it usually applies to in BBI can actually be avoided or you use periapts to level the playing field. The fact that the way the healing and wakestones work also help greatly with this, since enemies will hit you hard and death can come quickly at certain points, with insta-kill magic, spells like maelstrom and one hit kills or grabs. Not to mention, not all vocations are created equally and some die much easier than others. His entire criticism of the combat seems to be based on the strawman and not for criticisng it for what it is, an RPG with a real-time combat system, not some Dark Souls clone, DMC with rpg progression or some super skill based game.
To OP here, coming from a year later on: Your 4th point is pretty ridiculous, because of a thing called "suspension of disbelief". If we assume the rulework of the game to be a standard magic, high fantasy setting, having an undead main character is not an issue, no. But having a "random" person drop out of the skies, pledging their allegiance to you without ANY set up beforehand, and getting an NPC to explain what happened after the matter is cheap and immersion-breaking. It's a moment where you realise that the writers didn't forget that the player is not the player character, and they went for a bit of "exposition" after the fact, as opposed to setting the whole thing up. There's no other way to put it than "it's incredibly cheap". It shows that the writers could not be bothered to make the whole Pawn-aspect of the game more interesting and involved in the story, other than a standard "ah, that's normal around these places; btw it only happens once every 50 or so years, so it *really* isn't common" (Disclaimer: I have no idea if the Pawns actually *only* serve the arisen, since I haven't actually played the game yet).
@@doomdoot6731 Pawns roam the world, you see them on roads, in Gran Soren, and then there are corrupted pawns who roam and try to kill people. There are also pawns who are in the story itself including vendors and people at the pawn place. While the dragon thing happens once every 50 years, there are a number of masterless pawns inhabiting that place, they don't just 'fall from the sky'. Also dragonkin can exercise control over pawns, I'm not sure if they can entirely own them, but they can instantly kill them or control them for a time. They even say things like "I am your master now" when they possess your pawn.
Whoah, up until around 18:00 it was easy listening, but when you've said "chimera, a drake, a lich and that's about it" I tapped out. How? How did you not fight anything else? And the better question to JA from 3 years ago, how did you decide to make a video based on "somehow" incomplete experience? It's like making a deep analysis of Star Trek: TNG after only watching every other season.
12:11 this dude really be complaining about DLC that's meant to be played after finishing the game, while he didn't even finish the game.... "Yeah let me try this end-game end-game content with my mid-level gear that would go fine"
32:40 You mention losing all your stamina when climbing the monsters. Did it ever occur to you that you could just go into inventory and eat a mushroom (or any other stamina-recovery item)?
Or use a Liquid Vim that grants unlimited stamina. Or improve upon on his stamina stats via Augments and gear. Or reduce his inventory capacity. Carrying all those healing herbs along with his other gear he probably is pretty heavy or average. Even being average is kind of a hindrance.
This kinda goes against what he wanted since a main argument is that consumables that you can use while completely pausing the game as a way to balance your game around is bad.
It's interesting. I played the game twice but never ate to recover health, even though that is all I did in BotW. Since I always had a healer with me I had a more organic combat experience.
1) whaat? equipment and stats affect damage? oh noooo. just as it does in 99% of RPGs 2) the affair with the duchess is a reference to the manga Berserk 3) arisens are chosen irregularly
Honestly, this game feels like there was so much more planned for it, both gameplay and story wise, but was cut short for time or budget constraints. I feel like they had planned to fill the map more, to develop the story more and explain it more, to expose some gameplay features more. It's also very obscure in many ways as there are so many things you only learn about once you make mistakes. Overall, it feels like a wiki game where, once you read the wiki and learn about all the things, you get a much better gasp of the game and it almost feels like you play a different game with all the stuff you understood thanks to the wiki. I personally like the combat overall but, in my opinion, the key to enjoying the combat is avoiding too much cheese. For example, I avoid using healing items and instead rely on a mage pawn to heal me. I also avoid Periapts and other damage boosting items as it makes things too easy for me. Combat does have its flaws like some hitboxes being a bit wonky and pawns being outright stupid at times, but I think it's way more enjoyable and complex than you put it. For example, about climbing combats, I have had little issues with stamina and you actually get a damage bonus for climbing, even more so with a Strider who also gets a climbing speed bonus (which really outlies how the game fails to communicate such unique mechanics to non-wiki players).
The games main flaw is that capcom decided to ax it halfway through production so the devs were forced to remove over half of the stuff that was supposed to in it just so they could still ship a finished game instead of scrapping it altogether. And it's still turned into a cult classic with many fans and got multiple ports to other consoles.
But Itsuno-san said in an interview he was at a crossroads he wanted to make DMC5 or DD2, now that DMC5 is a thing maybe, just MAYBE, we will get DD2 next!
@@Cozonac3000 Imagine coming onto a critique video and then complaining that he critiques. Do you also purposely order food you dont like and complain?
@White-Van Helsing Exactly how is it like an MMO? Is it the the fact that there's no legitimate multiplayer? Or maybe the huge, heavily populated world? Perhaps the fast, reaction-based combat that requires you to dodge and avoid attacks as much as you attack? Perhaps it's the bosses with all their different hitboxes and weak points. All those things are standard for an MMO, right?
I think you misunderstood the idea behind how many combat related things are supposed to work together. You refer to this as skill- or level-based, if this is the kind of distinction you want to make then the best description for Dragon's Dogma would probably be "knowledge-based". In this regard I would compare it to Dark Souls 1 or Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13, and i know that this might be a rather confusing comparision. What these games have in common is that with every playthrough you learn new tips and tricks which you use in your next one, leading you into new situations where you learn new things again. Specifically for Dragon's Dogma this revolves around consumable items and quest order, you know when to go where and what to bring on that journey, even reorganizing the pawns you use to fit upcoming monsters, not to mention inclinations. Same goes for Bitterblack Isle, the big monster chained to the wall should probably be ignored until you have the right buffs with you or leveled up a bit. And one more thing: Bitterblack Isle is usually played through twice, because it changes after beating the boss the first time.
Dragon's Dogma is a really weird game. It's incredibly average, but the combat and pawn system are so dispreportianatly fun that I'm super conflicted about how I feel about the game overall. There's so much potential for a sequel to be amazing, but I think they're turning the franchise into a shitty MMO, so rip
Actually Dragon's Dogma Online is a lot of fun it feels exactly like Dark Arisen just in a MMO setting, sadly there is no western release so to truly play all it has to offer you are gonna need to have a good understanding of Japanese. The new end game classes are incredibly fun to play and are way more original then the variation/ hybrids of Dark Arisen. And Capcom has stated they are interested in a true sequel, Itsuno himself said he wants to work on it as well so I hope they get him on it after he finishes DMC 5.
Great game, but too much annoying aspects of it makes you want to give up.... which i did. To think some people compared this game to Skyrim.... What a joke!
@@SaberRexZealot Combat system is not everything in a game. Just compare the success of the 2 games and there is a clear winner. But man, good for you if you love this game!
@@FrankyboyFloyd I just, really like violence in video games to feel satisfying ya know? I treasure it more than anything else in games. In Elder Scrolls it feels like I’m hitting enemies with a flaccid dildo. I guess we’re all different in what we value.
God I hate how people use how successful something is as a sole way of measuring or comparing instead of quality. Skyrim is extrrnely successful and well sold, obviously. And I would honestly rather spend my time playing bubble bobble. Cannot stand the combat, cannot stand the morrpwind 2001 engine full of glitches and pathfinding issues and crashes, cannot stand the lackluster character creation. Dragons dogma was never supposed to be similar to skyrim, and comparing it is insulting to both games.
that took me about two years of playing the game to learn about... is a "really hard" mechanic of the game... most the things about Dragon's Dogma are so hidden that a normal player would never find... Hahahaha... per example the lattern thing... WHO IN THE HELL THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA??? WHY??? I have played so much time trying to kill the death itself a the third level of BBI... without light cause I never find that mechanic either... Hahahaha this game is so fun... made me laught so much when I recall those kind of stuffs
Yeah, but it helps only a bit. There's 10 categories on each of the 4 characters so that means checking 40 different tabs to see if someone picked up something you need to deposit, and deposit if needed.
you are just straight up wrong about the combat system, the only class that is totally reliant on character ability instead of player ability is mages, sorcerers and warriors. every other class gets abilities to avoid or block damage that are necessary on hard mode the way DD calculates damage is an overly simplified way of doing the objectively best method of damage calculation (which is a system like damage threshold you see in new vegas and some table top games) resource management should be more punishing, that i'll admit, but inventory management is an often ignored but vital gameplay element for an adventure game (not the poorly named genre, games that emulate going on an adventure). managing a tight inventory with supplies to help deal with enemies is one of the best parts of the game, and it is tight, much more so than you are implying unless you are fine being massively overweight and slowing the game down to a crawl. the story is pretty good, just _ terribly_ told.
stat progression and skill progression arent mutually exclusive like, you can kill the Gazer (the first boss of the Dark Arisen) and the Dark Bishop (the 2nd boss of Dark Arisen) at basically level 1 with clever use of items and game mechanics, when you first approach the Ruins of Aernst Castle encounter a heavily armored warrior that is basically impervious to physical damage (the one at 11:30) if you go there as early as you can, but if you manage to knock him over you can just pick him up and chuck him off the cliff instantly killing him. sure you can just grind exp until you're like lvl 30 get a Dragon's glaze for free in Dark Arisen and oneshot everything in the story. but the same goes for dark souls, final fantasy, borderlands, Tales of, you name it. the catch is how you want to play the game, if you are not invested enough to care to find a way to kill that enemy that has way higher stats than you then maybe skill driven combat is not your thing. except if you think that system knowledge does not equal skill, in that case you better play stuff like jubeat or taiko because i cant think of many games that requires only physical skill and no amount of system knowledge (granted the instant heals from items and infinite lifes provided by wakestones are pretty bs) i dont want to discredit your opinion, i am just kind of frustrated that you tried to kill a gorecyclops with a dark enchated weapon (and apparently only 1 pawn?) but complain about not doing any damage and say its the game's fault, not to mention that are arent even supposed/meant to fight that gorecyclops the first time around Dark Arisen, the game specificly tells you that you dont need to engage in combat with enemies that are above your capability. you can play dark souls at SL1 without weapons or armor, but youll take a long ass time to kill anything, but thats not valid critisism towards dark souls having bad combat. i really like your videos and even that they are so long, but this time i cant help but downvote because there is just a lack of understanding (just a bit but still) of the game that is passed of as criticism
I agree with pretty much everything you said here. This guy clearly has experience with video games and is good at expressing his opinions in a way that clearly articulates what he does and doesn't like about a game, but I think he simply didn't play enough of this game to have valid criticisms. Many of the things he lists as a negative are only a problem because he didn't utilize the proper mechanics. Much of his criticism is due to his own choices or lack of knowledge. The story, for example. He says it's boring, bland, and not worth paying attention to then later says the game's story makes no sense. He says the combat is boring and repetitive but admits he only used three vocations which and those three just happen to be the three most basic and repetitive in the game. He mostly avoided the magic vocations and the only hybrid he tried was Assassin which, as most players can tell you, is just a hybrid of Fighter and Strider. He explored only the most bland of vocations and blames the game for his unsatisfying experience with the game's combat. He clearly didn't understand elemental weaknesses, status effects, or the effects of hitting different parts of an enemy and seems to think that the best and only way to kill something is by repeatedly stabbing it's face. He wants to be able to fight and beat every enemy he sees the first time he comes across it rather than have reason to go back and explore areas he's already been to.
@@jordonkautz1470 yea its like, you are a purely physical class with no elemental options i wonder why you're not doing any damage against this fire themed enemy or this heavily armed 2m mountain of muscle. :thonk:
There's a difficult to trigger sidequest chain that goes down this rabbit hole about Pawns being granted souls by their Arisen, including another pawn who was granted free will by her dying master. It also goes into this whole concept that, over time, the pawn will start to look like their Arisen, which doesn't happen in game until the final cinematic.
took me 3 cycle to meet this npc back in the ps3 era, it blew my mind and made me think that if I've missed it then I would've likely missed other quest and part of the game, like the childhood friend questline in the church or resurrect the knight who rebelled. You could have such a diferent experience from someone else!
It's difficult in the original because you have to go all the way back to the starting village after reaching the capital, which is a very long walk and the player probably would not think of doing that for no good reason. In Dark Arisen you get a permanent portcrystal at the starting village you can teleport to immediately once you reach the capital using the infinite waystone you can for free. So it's a lot more likely you will bump into this quest, though still very much missable if you just proceeded with the main quest or doing other things.
Damn, it ALWAYS hits me hard at how strange it is, Joe saying a 30+ minutes video is long, long enough to watch it in parts, even??? Oh, how things change I love it XD
So the game is as obtuse as it can be and the only reason as to why people hold it as one of the greats, is because it's as challenging as it gets for all the wrong reasons?
You say the romance option with the Duke's wife was obvious, but my character was a little girl so in the initial scenes where you meet her, the lines that were supposed to be flirty came off like she just thought I was adorable. Then I went to her room to see what was up and I realized what was going on and I was like "I need an adult!" and then the Duke showed up and I was like "I NEED A DIFFERENT ADULT!" Things were very awkward after that...
While it may have its shortcomings Dragon's Dogma, I feel, is able to offer an amazing experience. Encountering monsters feels exciting and you feel as if you're actually fighting something grand and fierce, not a regular enemy. Most creatures have a weakness you need to discover in order to do good damage to them, whether it be an element or a certain attack type or a weakspot on their bodies. It actually gives you the feel of travelling the world as a group of adventurers and facing impossible odds and I love this game for that. The story isn't stellar but some characters can be actually charming and slowly make you love them. The world is fairly unique and the thematic is well executed. The combat can either be looked at as a pro or a con. Longer grueling fights where you whittle down massive enemies can feel epic. Someencounters just force you to run from them because you aren't strong enough - that's ok since it shows you that you have a lot more progress to do. I never once needed to grind, simply doing a few sidequests had me at a decent level to tackle the game's challenges. The healing system wasn't a problem for me because I never tried to abuse it. I never bought 80 Greenwarishes, I just ran on what I could find in the world, I only used a wakestone once for a room with 2 chimeras and a lich. These things are there to make the game easier for those who are struggling, it is entirely a choice whether you want to exploit it not.
I feel like the whole thing about combat being entirely progression-based is false. See, this isn't dark souls, you can't expect to go up to a monster, without any added things, and do a shit ton of damage. Have you seen how people have fared in souls-like games when they had crappy equipment versus extremely difficult bosses? If you're absolutely amazing you can beat the whole game without ever even getting a sword, but if you're an average player? You're gonna wanna upgrade at some point. Anyway, thats not the point. The point is, you think it should be as simple as finding the weakspot, climbing onto a monster, and hacking away, but just because you can't do that, doesn't mean the game isn't skill-based as much as progression-based. Taking things into the mix like elemental weapons, tons of poison, certain type of weapons. You see people pulling off kills all the time with stuff like rusted weapons, which are extremely low-level weapons with awful damage, yet people do wonders with them. When you get to a boss in dark souls, you usually add things into the mix like gold pine resin. Dark Souls isn't the be-all end-all of skill-based games, and some games use the term "skill-based" differently. I've been in awe at certain characters and builds with low-level stats killing much much more powerful beings. Utilizing the weak point of a monster on top of utilizing the game's mechanics in your favor to make the monster more susceptible to attacks is something to take into account as well. You can't rule out a game being skill-based simply because you struck their weakpoint and nothing happened, because Dogma requires a bit more thinking then that, just like Dark Souls does to a ton of its bosses. Sure in that game all it takes is a bunch of rolling, parrying, and backstabbing to get the better of your opponent, but Dogma requires you to think more about how you're going to take down certain enemies, not all bosses will die to the same strategy, and you shouldn't expect them to. If you're still unconvinced, I beg you to take a look at one such instance where a person utilized the game's mechanics despite having shitty weapons to take down one of the toughest bosses in the entire game at a level where they shouldn't even be able to deal any damage, regardless, they manage to beat them quick and easily: ruclips.net/video/-u4Dak7PMUE/видео.html Then we go even further, to even worse weapons: ruclips.net/video/BgzIEYu5A8Q/видео.html Then you take into account certain skills, rings, and the game goes even further in-depth.
Despite being 3+years old review, he sure didn't play the game using everything to actually pinpoint its true flaws. Overall, he tried, but lacked the proper approach on the system and the game.
Oh well... there is so many "off-set" points at the video... per example "big-or-tiny-map" that didn't even matter... it's what it's you know... it's big enough to give you atleast 20 hours of play being a bit modest... and still... don't matter much... the fun part is wander around, searching around... there is always something new you can find... and well... even if that ended being small... it's the game... also, atleast as far as I know... and of course, the Elder Ogre and the Giant Gore Cyclop were thought to be a second run at Bitterblack Isle ("normal" mobs)... "normal"... they weren't made to be attacked at level less than 100... even with that... they still over that level... in hardmode still at level 180 being low level to face the Gore Cyclops... the fun part of BBI is how they teach you that sometimes you should run from an enemy... no matter what... the Garm are the worse... fast, deadly... a moment of distraction and you are dead... no matter the healing system that you can pause or any other thing... they deal like 2.5k damage twise and you are dead... Dragon's Dogma teach you the hard way, that... knowledge is the key
I'm not sure if I'm misinterpreting here, but Dragon's Dogma using flat ratings to formuate damage is nothing new; plenty of menu-based RPGs use a similar formula, like Final Fantasy.
You're only misinterpreting a bit. I don't think he's saying this is new or inherently bad. Rather, he's using it as evidence that the game is more gear-based and less skill-based.
A couple of misconceptions: When you're facing the expansion you're supposed to use the Grigori weapons, which got a nice boost in the DLC. You're also supposedly familiar with the cuadruple conqueror periapth mechanic, which boost your attack a lot. Follow this in a third playthrough and you'll see how the enemies don't take so much time. The healing mechanic kinda balances itself, more item weight = slower character = ineffective Arisen. This is a loot based rpg and your runs are supposed to be FAST and effective. If you somehow manage to beat a boss dealing like no damage and using 909 potions and 64 wakestones, you're wasting time and resources and you'll be just a bad adventurer. Yeah, you still beat the Boss though...at a price... Anyway, I'm not saying you're really wrong, just some details to consider.
I honestly don't think this is a fair review, you're reviewing DD as if it's an action game akin to Dark Souls, whereas it's actually obviously very much an ARPG, and though it has some flaws as you've mentioned, other systems such as leveling and gear work exactly as they should within the way the game is designed.
Dragon's Dogma IS an action adventure, not an RPG. Dark Souls is the same way. Putting a fucking progression system in your game doesn't make it an "RPG".
@Josiah Sepulveda Well, I guess I used the wrong term. By "narrative" I'm not just talking about the main story but side quests as well. Example: the first side quest in New Vegas allows you to side with Goodsprings or the Powder Gangers. The NPCs even react to you if you just outright kill the powder ganger who is harassing Trudy which then leads to the Powder Gangers attacking Goodsprings right away. You can complete this quest in 3 different ways alone. Each with their own consequence. It's not just about having multiple endings for the finale but rather multiple endings for most quests.
Also if you replay the game in New Game+, the "God" Arisen is the previous one you played as with all of your gear and skills. I think that's kind of a really cool idea honestly. Also that huge dragon boss whose health can be widdled away by players online until someone deals the final blow is a pretty smart idea. It really does only go halfway with them though...
The idea here is reused in Monster Hunter World for it's siege fights. Basically a lobby of 16 goes into a fight in teams of 4. They each fight the boss separately from each other, but if they fail, they make some progress on a meter. Any teams attempting after that will have a slightly easier fight. The team that beats the boss first gets the best rewards, while everyone else gets decent rewards. The progress meter of the boss is reset, and the lobby starts the process again.
Protip: You can setup hotkeys for important items in the PC version. Like pressing 1 to lanturn, or 2 for heals. Still yeah it is kinda hidden and clunky to setup.
I can guarantee that 100% of the flaws in this game will be present in Dragon dogma 2 since it's a copy paste with a new engine. It's going to be hilarious.
@@daneelaartbecause it's actually fun to play. Far less jank than 1 and actually has things to find in the open world. Executes interconnected quest lines better than 1. It's basically just 1 but what they originally intended.
As someone who has sunk countless years into this game I can fairly say that you are right about it not being skill based... sort of. I think in the way that the average casual or single run player will play it, it definitely is entirely based on stats and gear. The skill part of the game really kicks in when you have already maxed out your level in the end game, Bitterblack Isle and are doing runs for time, gear and fun. At that point you have already levelled your character and pawn all the way up and even then most good players I know play pawnless most of the time. This end goal phase of the game is entirely about knowledge of enemy weaknesses and patterns, your own skills and execution of abilities correctly. Also almost all of the best skills in the game are the hardest to execute mechanically.
Direct damage reduction rather than percentage can work. It can work really well. I think the main problem here is that enemies have high amounts of defense. Terraria does the direct damage thing really well, and I think it's based mostly on how much enemies have. No enemies have stupid high amounts of defense unless they're supposed to be effectively impossible to beat, like the Dungeon Guardian or Skeletron's head on expert mode. I feel like that game is all about maximizing your effectiveness in small ways. Potions provide relatively small buffs but when combined with other potions and effects, the difference is more than tangible. That's where the defense comes in. Some bosses, like the Wall of Flesh, have weaker points where you will do 5 more damage. Adding 5 damage to every attack can add up especially when combined with proper arena building and potions. Dragon's Dogma seems to make defense more of a wall than an obstacle.
I just LOVE Dragon's Dogma DA. It's the greatest open world action rpg i played till now, for sure (i own the PS3 version) Can you imagine the ppl reaction if Capcom announces "DD2, now in development" on this E3?
While I love this game with all of my heart, I find myself agreeing with the points made here. I guess I play Dragon's Dogma simply because it carried me through some rough times. I'll never forget getting home, powering on my Xbox, and letting the real world's troubles be replaced by the simple cycle of fight, level, die, repeat. I would still recommend this game to anyone who wants a mindless grindfest to spend a few hundred hours on. DD is the kind of game you can play without paying much attention to. Yes, in hard mode you have to be careful, but you're not doing much actual thinking, just dodging at the right moment, and hitting the right weak spot as often as is possible.
My naturally stingy state of mind helped with one of the big problems of this game. I usually only carried around twenty healing items with me and tried using a pawns healing sigil whenever I could. I also used wakestones more for profit since they sell for so much and I saw using one after dying as a financial punishment. This is similar to something I did in Demon's Souls where I'd only have about 20 or less of each type of grass to save a little item space since I doubted that I'd ever need much more anyway.
This game should not work. But I love it more than any other RPG I've played, including Skyrim and The Witcher. I dunno why. I'm just hoping that for DD2 they will fix most of the stuff like healing mechanics and damadge balance. Maybe the Monster Hunter team can help them.
Kinda surprising how you kind of missed the story of the game, especially after playing bitterblack because the dlc expands on "this is just a never ending loop to find someone who's worthy of becoming god". It's a simple story but I don't often see it used so I thought it was vastly more interesting than what most other developers try to flesh out. You were right about all the quests leading up to the conclusion though.
LUL that was one I hate most... almost... each playthrought I did... almost... all the times I have played that cave... always a pawn fall at the water... almost ALWAYS... Hahahaha someone disappear at that cave... and... most of the cases is the ice caster wizard
This is in the uncanny valley of video games. Doesn't look too good , but has amazing animations. Terrible story, but amazing lore (if only it went deeper). Really fun combat, but the DLC suddenly made me realise that skill meant less than it seemed in the base game, making me hate that I asked for more of a challenge. Everything is almost good to make this terrible game that I still love and want to play again.
You are quickly becoming my favorite youtuber, man. Your critical analysis of games should be the new gold standard for other reviewers. Keep it up, duder. I can't get enough.
+Jon Doe This game is especially baffling on the critiquer side. This is literally the first review I've seen written, in video, or even including in podcasts conversation, that actually analyses and talks about this game for what it is. Not even any of the few outlets I generally respect have talked about any of these problems (except the fast travel stone, that is the one point people do mention). Dragon's Dogma somehow found itself in this bizarre position where everyone is so enamored by its cool concepts, but none of them have bothered to play the game more than a couple hours. Or if they did, I cannot comprehend how they could push aside so many of these massive design problems, as they repeatedly get in the way of enjoyment. So yeah, just doing an actual analysis of this to begin with is great, but it being a good thoughtful analysis on top of that really pushes Joseph above and beyond. Major props. ps: It's very well possible I could have missed decent critique of this game out there, but it's not by lack of trying that I haven't found it.
+Kuroonehalf Because the game is still fun... and thats what matters to most people... Besides, they see great potentials to it. It bridges the gap between open worlds rpgs like Skyrim, frentic boss battles like Monster Hunters and unique cross-player "cooperative gaming" that resembles MMORPGs. For a first attempt, i dont think its that bad. This video's analysis is true though but personally none of his points actually dissuade me from playing and enjoying the game maybe because i didnt let the Soul series spoiled my taste.
I think the positives outweigh the negatives. If the combat is fun, then grinding and repetition isn't as big an issue as the uploader of the video thinks. Loot games like Diablo and Borderlands are a perfect example of this where getting better gear to improve you chances of living against much stronger enemies than you is the whole point of playing. Without the promise of better and shinier things, the more pointless fighitng becomes. The only thing to make repetition not borng is to make the core comabat really responsive and arcadey so it is fast paced and quick and makes you feel powerful just moving around and killing stuff easily. The YS series is one such franchise where the main character moves fast and combat is smooth. Grinding becomes less of a chore and more of a fun thing to do because you apreciate the good controls. You can't say the same about games like the Witcher where you have horrible combat.
UToobUsername01 I agree with what you are saying except Witcher 3 has a great combat system though idk if you were referring to older Witchers. But I do like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Monster Hunter combat much better.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
“Warning: long video” *laughs in Witcher video*
Was about to post something similar. Well played
I scrolled expecting this exact comment.
@@Crimson350 me too
You said what we all instantly thought, comrade
Sat through that and this while at work lol
Warning: "long" video!
>not even 45 minutes
Lol 2016 RUclips was wild
yeah, yesterday i watched an 5 hour Oblivion Review.
2018 Joseph Anderson:
*3 hour God Of War review*
funni n original 9 hour Witcher video incoming
@@christiancassam it's more ~15 hrs
*laughs in EFAP*
Just to let you know this game was heavily resisted by capcom. They gave in a less than modest budget as well as a rushed deadline. Hideki itsuno pushed hard and grinded to bring his vision to light. The game was unfinished as said by the man himself. Development started in like late 2000s but he pitched it in 2000. It need a second chance. Support dd2!!
I dream of a new DD😭
Capcom leaks suggest DD2 for Q2 2022 fingers crossed!
As a huge DMC fan I feel really bad for Itsuno. Both DMC4 and DD were unfinished but so unique compared to other games of the same genres. I love the man’s work and want to see him make his dream game.
That just makes the game more impressive, at least for me. Also, we need Dragon's Dogma 2!
I fucking hate capcom so much every single game they publish gets attacked relentlessly by those corporate fucks
The ending of this game was almost traumatic for me.
Dragon "I have your beloved"
Me "Dafaq!? Who's he talkin about?
Me (see's blacksmith surrounded by goblins)
@KonicavaBR that is the mid game
I had same issue he kidnapped reynard the merchant but I never used him. So I was like who this guy lol
Theyre masterworks all
you can't go wrong
LoL
I'd like to answer a few of the questions you brought up and also point a few things out.
Firstly, Grigori doesn't take your heart as punishment for defiance. He takes your heart in order to make you an arisen, because you didn't run away from him; you stood your ground and fought him even though you knew you would most likely die. You showed resolve and proved that you had the will to live, which is one of the traits of the arisen. Also yes, he offers you a chance to give up your beloved to see if you have the strength to face him, or if you are weak enough to give up the person you love and live in shame knowing that you achieved nothing.
The reason Grigori is so friendly and seems to want you to kill him is because he does. He knows that he is nothing more than an obstacle for you to overcome, and he does want you to succeed. But you have to earn your victory by besting him in a battle to the death.
The seneschal is not actually God. He's simply the keeper/watcher of the world that maintains order and is given the power of creation as well as immortality. Basically, he's a glorified manager. This can get very confusing since the only way to kill the seneschal is to use the "godsbane" blade.
The reason killing Grigori unleashes more monsters is because doing so opened up the everfall which Gran Soren was built over. There were many monsters inside the everfall and when it opened, they escaped. Grigori's death marked your victory and showed that you were worthy to challenge the seneschal, which you could only do if the everfall was opened.
It is mentioned several times throughout the game that the longer a pawn stays with its master, the more it starts becoming like its master, until it begins to change into its master and becomes human. Selene the young witch in the woods is one of the pawns that mentions this and the dragonforged and his pawn also mention this.
It is hinted that the arisen that become dragons do not retain knowledge of their previous lives, as Grigori himself in the final battle seems to regain some memories, as he says that he now remembers the pain he feels you inflicting upon him as he too once inflicted it himself.
I hope this helps answer a few of the questions.
Awesome run down of the lore and story i think this game has a very interesting lore and world
Isnt it also hinted that dragons do remember who they are....they are just compelled to obey the senechal. In bbi it mentions it in the stone of remembrance
Playing this game with the original Japanese audio does help to understand things better.
This boy lores
Thank you for this. I just recently completed the game and gotten all the achievements after binge playing it. I really love the game and this video really does no justice for the game in regards to the story. I've watched several reviews on this and they all seem negative. I can't understand why. The story is actually pretty great once you piece them all together, especially during the second play through. It feels sad knowing that many people who have tried this hated it.
"Use fire!"
"Strike with fire!"
"Even in numbers, a weakling is a weakling still!"
"Their kind hates ice and fire BAWLS!"
"Goblins hate fire!"
"We have triumphed"
"We have triumphed"
This is why I throw every pawn to a body of water.
"Wolves hunt in packs!"
@@keijohwade8348 no shit
@@fredrikgranstrom6743 just my favorite pawn quote lol
ahahahah! TODOS odian el fuego.... ><
EVERYONE hates fire fuking no souls people
THE WIND IS PUSHING ME
this comment is what I came to this video for
ZenakuShinigami WOLF HUNTS IN PACK
INTO THE CURRENT AGAIN
Goblins!!!
GOBLINS ARE WEAK TO FIRE!
I loved this game and played it for hours, but my only takeaway was this: I named my character Master and was real tiny, my pawn was Blaster and was real huge. I though I could climb on him, but it turns out you can just pick the pawn up and carry him around. So I did this at every opportunity for no reason other than Master carrying Blaster.
uzimonkey i guess you never got BEYOND THUNDERDOME!!!
YEESSSS I FINALLY DID IT!! I CAN DIE HAPPY NOW!!
I made my character look like Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction and my pawn was John Travolta. I forget what I named them.
Leviathon672015 - Vincent and Jules, probably :P
Your special attack is throwing your pawn, and it's called master blaster
The Master works all, you can't go wrong.
One of the many things that annoyed me was how while fighting Direwolves, a pawn through gained knowledge would yell out how fire is the key to defeating these foes, and she then proceeds to enchant my sword with an ice spell.
Give your pawn blank skill slots. NEVER give pawns options, they WILL make the worst possible one
well, the true fact is that you should give the pawns atleast two options... if there is no an option they will use the only one option they have... that is somethin you learn when played so many hours... even sometimes, the basic magic attack is better than an enchanted weapon
The only elemental enchantment your mage should have is holy affinity. 99% of enemies are weak to it
This video is long? He didnt know..
hey nice dich hier zu sehen
Was geeeeeeeht
SILENCE VERIFIED
Despite all its flaws and mistakes, I will always have a soft spot for this game. I can't fully explain why but I really do enjoy it.
Aye same. I’ve legitimately never been able to explain what it is about this game that can cause me to sink 10 or more hours in a single day on the weekends. It’s just so fun for no reason
Same...
nostalgia
@@artemaniaco293 No, at least for me. I still enjoy playing the game from time to time, although you can only play the same content over and over again. It is truly a novel game and a fun one at that, but Capcom is sleeping on it.
@SquirrelEats Man But it is flawed, and the reason for pointing out those flaws is so that the sequel can improve on it, thus giving us an even better game.
2016: “Warning! Long video”
2020: “Witcher is a weird word” (4.5 hours remaining)
The Dragon doesn't steal your heart because of "your defiance" The scene plays out more like he respects you, he looks at his massive paw and sees your insignificant blade stuck there, it did nothing, you had NO chance of victory and still you stood up to this world ending monster. So he makes you an Arisen, gives you a chance to build yourself up to fight him for real. The Dragon was interesting because he DIDN'T treat you like an enemy but more like an equal in some way, even giving you words of wisdom in some instances, daring you to seek out and kill him.
it almost feels like he didn't listen to any of what the dragon said, every time the dragon urges you to defeat him its not out of a villainous "hehe stop me if you can" its "i WANT you to be strong enough to stop me" and the last conversation in the temple on the tainted mountain is even dripping with respect for having managed to reach him and held onto your resolve. not to mention your entire fight with him he is praising you and encouraging you to continue and overcome him.
@@2g33ksgamingttv3 This game has a very special trait: If you aren't looking carefully, it's easy to dislike it. But once you take off your hater goggles you realize that it's an ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE.
@@deerlow1851
It's almost a masterwork, if only it had the time to cook.
@@Wizard_Pikachu masterworks all. You cant go wrong...
@@Wizard_Pikachu Dragon's Dogma 2 hype
It's kinda sad to see how many people missed that this game DOES have meaningful choices in quests. You don't pick a dialogue option, you just act and your actions affect how it resolves. When someone dies you can either just tell their beloved or try using a wakestone to revive them (it works!). Do you do the sidequests and help people? Oh, you didn't? They're dead and offer no future quests and disappear from the world.
Maybe it's the game's fault for not making it clear, or even, what kind of world it is. You're not so much playing a Skyrim game, you're playing a D&D campaign. Sometimes you'll find something that's too hard for you and you're forced to run and do other quests. Sometimes you decide "I CAN DO IT" and use skill alone to beat REALLY difficult encounters before you should be able to. The meatiness of getting around the world, of cheesing systems, it very much rewards the crafty player for abusing the details the DM gives.
Except those aren't actual choices nor do they have any meaning..
+Æsir
I'll give you one example. Remember the guy in Gran Soren who wants Salomet's Grimoir? If you give it to him he shows up later and helps in a boss fight, but he doesn't if you do not. This might not sound like a big choice, until you realize that the forgery system in the game allows you to pass quests like this one by creating a fake copy; when he arrives to aid you in battle with the fake book you gave him The results are predictably comical. This is never telegraphed to you in the game, because like OP said, it's more of a D&D campaign than like a 3D Zelda game or an Uncharted title or whatever where you'd be told to visit the forgery place in an earlier cutscene and someone would make a not-so-cryptic hint remark when you started the quest.
Mister Bones
But it doesn't have any impact on the world.
It has impact on you, your story, and the character.
Æsir, the hell do you mean "it has no impact"? It locks you out of dialogue, quests, loot, and xp options. If you don't put time into the game and do all of the side quests, they disappear. In Skyrim, all the quests are open all the time, unless you specifically kill one important NPC. Kill the dragon at the Mouth of the World for the Blades? Locks you out of talking to the High Hrothgar monks and using them to locate Word Walls. But you can still find them on your own, if you explore every single map icon.
In Dragon's Dogma, if you miss a side quest and progress in the Main Quest story line too far, you get locked out of said missed side quest. This could mean that certain vendors won't have late game gear, certain NPCs are dead, certain quest lines disappear from the game, or even certain boss fights are harder cause now you have no backup. Doing, or ignoring, certain quests has a very real impact on the world of Dragon's Dogma, much more than Skyrim could ever emulate, sans you going on a murder spree.
Spent most of my time buying healing herbs.
Ended up sould bound to a merchant.
10/10 would gay-marry again
/s
LUL that never happen to me... I can't remember something like that... Hahahaha
I don't wanna be making excuses for the game or anything, but a lot of the inconsistencies in the mechanics, lack of enemy variety, the actual plot being compressed in the last quarter of the game, and so on make a bit more sense in context when you consider that it suffered a similar fate to Itsuno's previous project(DMC4). That is to say Capcom axed the project midway through development and the devs had to scramble to finish the game with what they had, so the rest of Gransys, Dragon Isle, the moon, the infinite tower(that hooked all the players' worlds together so you could actually go hang out in other people's worlds in real time) got cut.
imgur.com/a/h4nMo
We were supposed to go to the MOOOOOON
In other words, fuck capcom, am I right?
are you fucking kidding me? that sort of awesome shit got cut from this game? that is incredibly sad.
This shit is what the true sequel needs.
This actually makes a lot of sense, puts all the gripes in context.
This is indeed a flawed game, but I love it :)
Dude, you do good, solid work, but you really need to stop apologizing for the length of your videos. People don't mind, and those who do rarely watch anything more than 5-10 minutes long anyway and aren't really your target audience.
As for the game itself, agreed on pretty much everything. There's just so much potential in the game, so many great ideas, but it feels like the devs were doing this as a side project and never really fleshed it out. I never quite finished it, mainly because I ended up disliking my build and was too fatigued to start over. However, I did find the spoilers interesting, and it's consistent with the rest of the game - great potential, the feeling of an idea deep in there that was never fully realized...
+SmugPlatypus Seriously, the videos that I watch on youtube tend to average on 30+ minutes as a general minimum with some even being podcasts that I listen to for 2-3 hours. Length's fine particularly as I feel that a decent number of folk like listening to something while playing a game that doesn't require much thinking.
It's not so much of an apology as it is trying to ease people into watching who typically don't watch long videos. I had a lot of people tell me that the only reason they watched my Fallout 4 video was because I brought up the length right at the start.
You're right about my target audience, but after putting so much work into the Rise video and it receiving very little exposure, I don't think it hurts to try to make the videos more accessible--but only with tiny tweaks like pointing out links and the like. It's not worth shortening my content.
Projared actually said Dragon's Dogma has the best combat system in any action-rpg ever.
I actually think the story of Bitterblack Isle is good, not great, but good. The ending plays into it, and the cycle and lore is interesting to me, I guess.
SmugPlatypus I watch BECAUSE of the long videos. Most content creators are trying to push out and spam videos.
I love how DD2 solved none of these issues lmao
and fools still drooled and paid $70 for it. Elden ring and BG3 dont even cost $70. lmaooooooo
@@hameed I mean, I still enjoyed it more than either of those games, so...😅
Nonsense! You don't have to click multiple times to gather materials/ores anymore. Game of the Year
DD2 didn't solve a lot of the main issues. But man I still love it so much
@@hameedyou yourself determine the worth of a game. DD2 has been the best gaming experience I’ve had in a while, so I gladly spent my 65€ on it
"the damage calculation, healing management, and wakestones ruin the game"
breath of the wild (flat defense instead of percent, eat food whenever, faeries that can be farmed): I'm about to end this man's whole career
And the combat system is one of the weakest parts of breath of the wild. The exploration carries the whole game in my opinion.
if breath of the wild had even one of these combat mechanics, climbing enemies, chunking off arms, or even just the quick fast paced skills that mobile classes have it would of been insane.
Ironically he actually said in his Breath of the Wild video that it had all the same problems that Dragon’s Dogma had
@@khoing1111 Breath of the Wild was designed for you to play creatively. You are not supposed to fight enemy all the time. Sometimes waiting for nighttime and eating food to make you sneak better and stabbing everyone in the gut while they are resting is how you solve a problem. (literally its free kills) Other time its using explosives, or placing bait on the floor and using magic in funny ways to exploit their behavior. This is the true spirit of zelda titles. Link doesn't have to play the warrior class. You are there to get a specicifc thing done not fight your way out of all situations.
All Bethesda games have pause healing
You're right: the game has a number of flaws that span the gamut from combat and statictical to story and pacing. But in spite of all of these problems, I still put around 150 hours into the game and its expantions. Maybe that's due to the fact that I didn't bother to explore the game's fundamental narrative absurdity or the damage reduction system that is a cross purposes with the twitchy combat.
For me, much of the fun of the game's first half came from the tension between the desire to forge ahead to see what is beyond the next hill and the danger implicit in that decision. The oppressive nature of the game world is bolstered by a day-night cycle that sees stronger enemies come out at night and the world, while rather empty feeling, still had enough in it to hold my interest. Then again, I'm one of the players that enjoyed the limits the game puts on fast travel in the beginning.
Also the magic is super dope.
the day and night cycle being different was what engaged me at first. also I made my first character a little girl because i could and in the first cut scene when the dragon attacks and everyone is running away, seeing a little girl defiantly grab a sword and charge the dragon was hilarious. i think it was that that made me enjoy the nonsensical story so much.
100 hours of walking in that 150 hours. I love the game too, but it's so very flawed. It's like asking people to go play The Witcher 1 not many people can get into that. Let's hope Dragon's Dogma 2 really improves everything so much better after 11 years of advancement in game design and a proper budget/timeline this time.
Ah... Dragon's Dogma is one of more modern games to have piqued my interest with just how... ambitious it is. It's flawed as hell, but, for a product that is basically Japan's first and most genuine attempt at replicating Western RPGs like the Elder Scrolls, I have to give it credit as a very innovative beginner's product. Honestly, Dragon's Dogma is the game I wish more non-traditional Japanese RPGs would try and emulate. As is, I honestly have to say I prefer Dogma's potential to the Souls series's repetition.
There have been quite a bit of attempts on Western rpgs from Japanese devs though. Even FROM made quite a few, not SOuls, but the King's Field series, and stuff like Light Crusader. Even DD feels like a 3D version of Capcom's arcade RPG from back in the day, DUngeons and Dragons. Korea has quite a bit of games like WRPGs as well(Vindictus, C9), and There's stuff like Wizardry Online.
Yeah me too...
Souls is more like 3d Castlevania to me...
DD is more like a genuine action western RPG complete with party and dungeon raiding.
Steven R
The Elder Scrolls series isn't and NEVER should be about combat. It should be about writing and roleplaying, although Skyrim greatly lacks in both of those aspects.
Æsir but if you're gonna have combat, don't make it boring and repetitive, actually do something that makes combat interesting and enjoyable
Though I guess Monster Hunter World is the latest attempt.
One of the finest character creation setups ever in an RPG! : You can play everything from a 6 yr old elf boy to an 90 year old woman, and all inbetween! Plus you can be properly big and chunky (for once!) , or eating disorder skeletal....Nothing else like it! (in terms of who you can appear to play as)
- As Capcoms first W-RPG effort it's pretty impressive!
I really really wish you would have looked at the story Arc of dark arisen. It answers your question about whether or not Grigori has free will.
Yeah it does a pretty good job showing what's going on in the Dragon's mind(atleast with Grigori and the one who took Daimon's heart, I forgot her name). Personally I think the base game did an excellent job when showing that Grigori wasn't doing shit to hurt you or cause pain to anyone, he was literally forging you and the game shows this. This game has some flaws but it did do well in some areas imo
The tittle of the game by itself can answer that question if you just give it some thought
bitterblack isle was a fantastic dlc.
I mean he didnt even finish dark arisen so thats to be expected.
@@defonoteleazar4998 giving some though? Asking too much from joseph here (watch his silent hill 2 playthrough for another example, lol)
I still think the pawn system is one of the most innovative things in gaming, I really wish a modern game would take another crack at it.
I love this game, and while I agree with practically all your points here, I think you missed talking about some of the game's greatest features.
-The pawn's ability to learn. How you pawn will react to enemies and situations depends heavily on what they know. If they see you strike a saurian's tail for instance, they learn how effective that is and will perform it themselves and even teach it to other pawns. Other pawns that you recruit can even attempt to teach yourself about weaknesses and strategies by calling them out to you.
-Large enemies. I think this game has the single best big creature encounters out of any game. The creatures are animate and unique, and pose differing sets of challenges for you to figure out how to overcome them. Knocking a weapon out of a cyclops' hand, silencing a chimera, and hitting the wings to get a dragon to fall are excellent design decisions that make things so much more enjoyable despite the game's many flaws.
I really loved the large creature fights. So many games do large creature boss fights but they are either scripted or just standard battles where you wear down their health. This game had actual locational damage and large enemies acting like other enemies do, unpredictable and lifelike.
It makes you feel like you are actually battling a large monster and makes even some random encounters feel like epic battles.
You can hotkey the lamp...and anything else too...
yep on pc you can map consumables to 1234 keys)
What keys on the controller?
Jonny Velocity It's not likely he was playing this on PS3/X360, considering the original game came out in '12 and the PC version in '16. Likely he's playing on PC with a controller.
Pancake I was gonna say that!! Yeah if he is using a controller he can hold L1 & R1 + (d-pad) which is definitely weird and something the player has to figure out on there own but at least we get some hot keys lol. Always have my lamp and a few strong curatives on it. That kingwarish :)
@@HeavensOfMetal hes playing on 360 you can see the button prompts
If you lose to "God" your soul is taken and you become a dragon. I would assume losing your soul would also mean losing your free will.
I can see where you come from with that assumption, but honestly, trying to apply any sort of coherence to the story in Dragon's Dogma is an exercise in futility. I played this game for years and it is, in fact, exactly as disjointed and incomprehensible as Anderson says.
...if you properly analyze the game, the lack of free will the dragon has is fairly obvious.
I mean the dragon ending is officially named the "servitude" ending so that should tip people off.
The fact that the Red Dragon has a “Dogma” to follow gives enough of an answer to the free will question.
Heck, it’s even unclear as to whether or not the Seneschal has free will. Some of his lines hint at this and the lyrics to the main theme outright say that everything and everyone are all just part of the cycle of eternal return. It’s all just an effort from the world to stop itself from being consumed by entropy by keeping a steady stream of player-controlled souls.
GiRayne
I don’t exactly think anything would be gained by having the main character be voiced. Not in this game anyway. BB Isle is easily the place I had the most fun on, it’s a long and arduous trek through the most complexly designed dungeon in the game against the hardest enemies on a regular play through, it’s environments and enemy spawn mechanics make for fun fights.
When it comes to the story, it has a lot of wasted potential. I adore the little detail of having songs with lyrics that actually mean a damn to the plot, props go to the final boss’ theme from BB Isle for that. My disappointment with the story comes from the minimal amount of set up for the reveal of the Arisen’s true nature as a willpower battery for the world.
I believe you might be projecting a small bit of you sincerely think that the game has any pretensions of “profundity.” For all it’s worth, the game is incredibly forthcoming with the nature of its story, even all the stuff with the Seneschal. From minute 1 the game sets up that its characters and world are simple and in the spirit of classical Dragon Quest, with some little spunk added in to spice up the game after the defeat of the Red Dragon. The story almost feels fairy tale-ish at several points which, judging by the verbosity and language of every character, I’m inclined to believe might’ve been kinda the point. I also very much disagree that there was ever a fight with “god” at the end, if at all. At no point do the characters challenge whatever invisible force was that set up the cycle of eternal return. You can’t take the fight to god because god ain’t there, just the assistant manager. The Seneschal in this world is a dude just like you who’s pretty much just doing his job, not to mention being an overall decent guy who merely wants some vacation time from a boring continued existence.
I believe the gameplay is well enough like it is, as a hybrid of genres. As Monster Hunter trying to be even more character action, the latter being the the genre that the game’s director, Hideaki Itsuno, is most famous for defining with the release of DMC3. It’s a pretty good gameplay system that could be further improved upon in a sequel (if only)
I disagree strongly that there's no skill based element to the gameplay. The fact that most damage can be completely negated through timed blocking or dodging, as well as the fact that the game rewards good timing in the form of the perfect block system, along with the fact that combining your skills and using them effectively allows you to easily outpace most enemies in terms of damage, means that skill and knowledge of the system is both encouraged and directly rewarded. I was able to get through most of bitterblack with a character I hadn't even completed the main story with. Eventually I got to a point where I had to go back and level a bit more, but the fact remains that the player can tackle challenges far ahead of their own level if they're particularly skilled at the game. That's not something that can be claimed with most RPGs and that's precisely due to its skill based element. Enemies have telegraphed attacks with predictable patterns, clear, exploitable weaknesses, and resistances, all of which is integral to the design of any skill based game.
Your 2 examples were also terrible, you listed two exceptionally powerful and exceptionally tanky bosses that are intended to be fought in the end game, both of which you're not even supposed to fight when you encounter them. Percentage reduction has its pitfalls too. It means that they can essentially get high resistance gear and be able to tank hits from an endgame enemy if this isn't properly distributed. Also, the need to grind for better gear doesn't suddenly make this no longer a skill based game. That's utterly ridiculous. Also your point on the attack damage was outright absurd. You went from doing 1 damage to 2 damage, how overpowered! You do realize how many times you'd have to hit an enemy for that kind of difference to even be noticeable? Not to mention that this very specific example completely ignores the fact that gaining attack and defense as you level is perfectly normal for an RPG, and that these increases have what is essentially diminishing returns, because by the time you're high level, getting an extra 1 damage when you level does literally nothing for you, and a case could be made that this does almost nothing for you in the early game as well. It's only when you reach the highest levels that this is actually noticeable.
For healing items: they have weight, you can take a lot of healing items with you, but you'll be moving slower and using more stamina because of it, which in turn makes you have to use more of them. Another issue with your assertions on this is that many attacks can kill you very quickly. These items are also pretty expensive relative to when they're useful to you, (the potent greenwarishes cost you 70,000 gold, that's about a quarter of an average playthrough worth of gold, all being spent on consumables, you're saying they're not expensive when you're bringing over currency from a ton of previous playthroughs, and of course its not expensive then, otherwise the economy on the first playthrough, which the game is designed for, would be hopelessly unbalanced and absolutely ridiculous to expect the player to find the money to accumulate any actual stock of anything) and they're hard to find elsewhere in the world. This is nowhere near as much a problem as healing in games like Skyrim, where healing potions are practically everywhere, every alchemist in the game sells ingredients for making them, and you can pop them like candy with no downside, since the weight system only registers when you're overencumbered. This system is an immense improvement on systems like these, and that's what it's meant to be. The only way healing constantly is viable is if you've accumulated millions of gold across multiple playthroughs to spend solely on healing items, and don't care about moving like a turtle due to carry weight, even then, you're not in any way required to use these systems, because the game rewards player skill, and if you do use these systems, you're certainly not required to exploit them to the point of absurdity. Again, people exploiting the game's mechanics doesn't mean that it isn't skill based. Hell, there are ways to break dark souls in similarly ridiculous ways. Wakestones are again ridiculously difficult to find in your first playthrough, since you have to accumulate 3 shards just to get one, you lose it when you die, there's only one merchant who sells them, and even he only carries one shard, plus the only way you can really farm wakestones is if you specifically farm them in the endgame area in Gransys long past the need to accumulate them for the main quest. There is also the fact that wakestones weigh a lot. Again you're balancing your ability to heal against your ability to actually be effective.
I wont read it, but have you watched the video? He just proved how everything is working.. there is no skill needed. You can hit every fucking timed shit as much as you want but if you do 1 dmg your skill doesnt fucking matter, if you can at anytime assuming they dont one hit you in which case your skill is in the wind and none existent bring up inventory and eat the whole super market of food there is no skill. You can hit ,,your skill based element,, as much as you want. If you dont have gear you are fucked and your skill is useless. End of story. No need to read your 5th sentence.
@@budlikycz2445 I don't think any enemy in the game can 1HK you on normal mode as long as you don't get in over your head, and hard mode was never meant for the first playthrough - it wasn't even in the game on its initial release, so any arguments concerning "one hits" are null and void. Given the developer, it'd be the same as trying to play Devil May Cry games on the highest difficulties for your first playthrough (or restarting on the highest difficulty after playing a few missions on normal - thankfully neither are possible) and complaining about enemies hitting too hard, when you don't have neither moves, nor HP upgrades to deal with them, not to mention the lack of skill.
Healing isn't automatic and is not required to progress through the game or win battles, because damage from enemy attacks is usually 100% avoidable. One can limit the usage of tools or curatives if he desires, to the point of completely abstaining from them. Players can choose whether they want a challenge or not. That's entirely on them. If you choose to abuse it, carry a load of healing items or wakestones, and suddenly find yourself unable to die, that's not the game - it's you. Equipment and stats aside, Dragon's Dogma is very much skill and knowledge based. It simply offers players more room for error, but that is optional. If you choose to play casually, don't blame the game for it.
Equipment, enhancement and augments increasing your potential are beautifully implemented in Dragon's Dogma. You can get so strong that you will oneshot large monsters, but you can also choose to limit yourself, use non-enhanced equipment and/or no empowering augments, making fights last longer if you ever feel like it, potentially providing some additional challenge. There's also nothing wrong with your character not being strong enough, or not having good enough tools to take on certain monsters. I would say that the implementation of damage thresholds is quite imperfect and some enemies, perhaps, shouldn't be as durable as they are. However, that mostly applies to BBI only, which is supposed to be endgame content, anyway.
And now to your "point." There are tools in the game that, if used and stacked, will nearly double your damage, and because of how defenses work in Dogma, it could very well be many, many times more in a combat situation against an enemy with high defense thresholds. Additionally, all enemies have weaknesses and resistances. Some struggles can be overcome by choosing a different approach. Not being able to beat the game at level 1 with rusted weapons doesn't make it a non-skill based game.
It seems that many people are missing the point. It is a progression based game to a degree, but it's still a skill and knowledge based game at the same time. It has its flaws, sure enough. But the good parts outweigh them. It's not about your gear - even though it undeniably plays a role - it's about whether you're prepared or not. If you're not prepared, choose to fight and get fucked - it's your fault. The game, like any other, has a certain set of rules. If you don't agree with them - that's fine. But that's not a good enough reason to say utter nonsense.
Budliky CZ Ok dude you’re really annoying and have said literally nothing of value
This. The game is completely player choice on how difficult or easy you make the game for yourself. And it's very much skill based with a hint of equipment upgrading that on your first run of the game almost always costs an arm and a leg to set up you and your pawn to not quickly die against the upcoming boss fights.
what? the most expensive kind of greenwarish costs 850 gold, don't know where you have the 70k from. i've never had a problem with gold, i pretty much always had way too much
Dragon's Dogma is the Demon Souls of a series that doesn't exist.
You're a genius
You're a modern day philosopher
You're a new age intellectual
Realest thing anyone ever said
damn...
Personally I LOVED playing as a Warrior. Their Arc of Deliverance (which is an incredible name for an ability) is so satisfying when fully charged. Dealing several massive blows and shredding off multiple health bars from massive and powerful enemies is extremely satisfying.
Harpies: 🌝
Any flying monster: 🌝
I wanted to keep the video under 40 minutes so I cut some thoughts after writing the script. I stayed awake to finalize the upload so I'm too tired to get into them now, but I think it's worth mentioning that the pawn system / multiplayer in this game is a really interesting idea. I think it's one of the reasons that so many people like the game and, while I can understand the appeal, it didn't hook me enough to mess around with it. I found the pawns to be more annoying than helpful--especially earlier on in the game. Even in the tutorial with them all shouting so many different robotic lines.
I always watch the video again before publishing on youtube to make sure it uploads properly. I think I came across more negative than I actually feel about my time with the game. If a sequel was made, I'd happily play it and be thrilled if there were improvements to the game's core components. Some of the boss fights are good, but they could be great.
+Joseph Anderson I think there's some stuff you might have missed about the Pawn system, through no fault of your own. It's all really obtuse, requiring you to read a wiki or other outside material. This is a great analysis though, and as much as I enjoy the game, it's definitely a deeply flawed game. I hope for a proper sequel, there's so much here that just needs some heavy polish and reconstructive surgery.
+Joseph Anderson Your channel is awesome dude, and I share your feelings about Dragon's Dogma almost exactly. I hate this game just as much as I love it.
Here's an article of Itsuno talking about the pawn-system.
www.vg247.com/2012/03/01/pawn-system-in-dragons-dogma-inspired-by-itsunos-time-spent-on-bbs-boards/
Also, as pointless as I find to point out cut-content when it comes to measuring the wort of a game.
vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/dragonsdogma/images/3/36/Original_Plans_2.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130819203659
Dragon's Dogma scope used to be much larger, maybe that would explain as to why some of issues you pointed out seem so unbalanced.
Still no excuse, DD is a pretty flawed game, but one which I greatly enjoyed.
Nice video, keep it up.
the game is fun who cares
Joseph Anderson the magic of the rogue classes is the blast arrow. you got enough of those, and anything will be brought down
I respect your opinion very much; but I suspect your main premise is quite flawed, as you really only superficially went into the game mechanics, so you likely could not grasp the "skill" part of the game. It is not your fault, as the infos are not given inside the game, but inside the community. "Insider knowledge" is no ideal way (outright: it is terrible) of game presentation, but here it is at it is.
First off, arguably, having an idea of how to develop your character can be counted to the "skill" you have. E.g. knowing that one level in the Warrior skill set helps everybody (especially wizards) tremendously (reduces all incoming damage by 50;- and 225 in hard mode) is kind of a "skill" ( the game will not tell you :D) .
However, my main point is that different attacks have different strength/damage multipliers giving more or less armor "penetration"; - the more difficult a skill is in its use, the higher the reward. A melee attack that takes 10 secs to charge (very difficult to apply) can multiply attack strength by 8 (multiplying damage by ,say, 20-30 against proper armed boss type enemies) ; further enhanced by using buffs. (crafting, eh)
This works with mediocre equipment, so your "this game is all grind" argument goes somewhat out of the window here. The major difference is with great equipment power attacks are often one shot KO (if you "git gud") against dragon kinds, while you will need two approaches otherwise.
The grind only helps in trivializing (less skill is needed, -so for ppl like me :D) the content, and means for the main part not bashing a million monster`s skulls (to you, enemy density is too low, I like it; btw: The Witcher has even less enemies and far less variation, or e,g, FO NV is mostly against humanoids and trash mobs, apart from being far less crouded. - Both tell nice stories, I give you that! ) , but more exploring the map for hidden stuff, in typical Japanese ( Lara Croft, RE, FF, et al) fashion. If you are after it, the world map is actually huge (somewhat like Witcher 3) , as behind or upon every small hill there are partly very well-hidden treasures to be found. You forgot to mention that the world map is indeed a bit small, but that it has mostly 2-3 layers of height degree in it.
- Also, the speed challenge record, for all you HC grinders, is about 14:30 (minutes) :D
You came from Souls with your critique, and bash on the sheer and obvious lack of polishing this game throws at you, while you powergamed/rushed ( 40 hrs for Normal is actually nothing if you want to explore) a title that you did not really grasp (it works for Souls, but takes alot of the fun out here where it is about Triple Sandbox E: Explore, Enjoy, Experiment, - 200 levels long :D ) ; - neither its slightly hidden charms (it has indeed been a long time in gaming I had so many remarkable small smiley moments, and it reminds me at Gothic 2 15 years ago ; - I skipped Souls after 2 hrs because of the "psycho stress" in this game) , nor even the mechanics that actually (if you want) need a fair couple of hours preparational reading in the WWW.
Yes, I cursed about the partial stupidity of the engine as well, and quite often. Yes, the illogical patchwork story is only a bare incentive (or bad excuse, like you have it) for playing; - although you recommended ( I am with you!) exactly these procedures for FO4.
But, I fear that people are prone to the old tale that, when your only tool (of judgement) is a hammer , every "problem" tends to look like a nail.
So, you missed out on the joy that this game, that is not Souls, nor High Fantasy story telling mastery, can deliver.
Okay it was to you a mixed bag of Hate-Love-Even More Hate, after all.
I believe ACG, who is generally very fair ( reviewing mostly indie titles) in his short low detail game analysis, but gave this one some extra attention, and a fanboy thumb up, is closer to my own impression.
- But yes, for him graphics style ( I could talk about how every NPC really has an own face, dungeon maps that look like your home game RPG, beautiful ppl char creation, overall monster presentation, lighting, magic effects, combat movement, etc etc etc here; - lets be silent about the environment textures, meeting the limits of the console, shall we ) and sound are about 60% of his evaluation. ;)
13:36 why are you opening the menu when the game TELLS YOU you have 4 shortcut options for consumables? Also the game gives you augs that cuts the damage you take by half early game. The game gives you so many options to avoid grind, for f*ck's sake there's ppl beating the DLC at lvl 50 mate...
One huge note at the beginning of the video for him taking your heart: he isn't mad at you for attacking him (this is directly from the cutscene) but rather has respect for your courage. So he decides to imbue you with a blessing... or curse...
I beat this game four times. I must have liked it
i beat it 6 times with peppermint ice belle star widow twanky sandy bartelli and redwidow1 all lev 200 on xbox 360 happy days
and they are all my tags
ged barker Level 200 nice what vocation did you like the best?
Wildest thing is that this review, 8 years later, is perfectly applicable to Dragon's Dogma 2. Almost all the cons are still there, minus the only good thing actually worth playing: Brittleblack Isle... Absurd.
The silence you put after "sigh-clops" was the exact amount of time that it took for me to get done with my UGHHHHHHHHH.
I love puns. I try not to overuse them or else they'd be in every video, haha.
Man, Itsuno really just went and made Dragon's Dogma 1+1. God fucking dammit.
LUL
I played through this game at least 20 times, I enjoyed it that much.
Dragon's Dogma has always been a weird one.
In some ways, it's incredibly fun, in others, it feels kinda backwards.
It's flawed, but i still love the game. The healing items are probably my biggest problem, and i'd like if every class got a dodge/evade move, it'd make sense if certain classes had better versions of this.
Still hoping for a true sequel to fix these issues and improve what's already there.
To be fair, the only classes not to have defensive moves are Sorcerer and Mage, and with how ridiculously strong magic is, you don't really need them on those classes. Especially sorcerer. Ah, nothing quite like nuking a chimera 100-0 with a single long ass spell.
@@lred1383 the best defensive "skill" for magic casters is to cast spells on enemies that are on another room and haven't even seen you lol
@@wallacesousuke1433 no, that is not true, the "best" "defensive" tactic with a sorcerer is to spell sync with four sorcerers... it took no time to cast 4 big badass end-battle spell... the only thing you need to do is keep the distance... also double jump with spell caster works like a dodge... is one of the best evasive manoubers that exist at the game, it's not like evasive slash of the Warrior that gives you iFrames... but most of the times you don't really need iFrames... per example at Daemon fight when he tried to catch you... the best way to dodge that is just jump and levitate...
Did you play through as all of the vocations, like, switching them up as you played or did you stick to the same yellow path? In your section about dying in one shot or grinding, you never mentioned blocking or perfect blocking mechanics which do give you another option in hard encounters if you're under-geared/leveled. It's mostly a matter of timing, but it's basically the most "skill" based combat mechanic, unfortunately locked behind a few classes. I felt like often switching your vocation to try out new skills and combos was one of the core features or great things about the game. Locking yourself into the same rotation and routine for 20+ levels in a row is kind of ignoring one of the aaaand of course i come upon the part of the video where you sort of address that. They do need to give equally viable movement options for the other classes.
Normal mode I played as a fighter and warrior. I went strider for about an hour or two and then switched back to the warrior for the rest.
Then I reset my save and started level 1 strider on hard mode. I tried ranger and assassin and then went back to strider for the moveset. I usually don't like magic in games so I avoided the spellcasters except for seeing how it all worked.
+Joseph Anderson I see. I believe their intention with the system was for you to change up your vocations often during the same play through. some of the passive buffs and attacks carry over from vocation to vocation. You'll eventually settle on the class you enjoy best, but the little stints of a different class help break up some of the repetition. Fighting an ogre the tenth time doesn't have to be routine if you're facing them while you level in another class. Not locking you into one class and letting you switch freely was one of the better design choices under all of the baffling ones.
@@JosephAndersonChannel This might be a bit late but I think you missed out on two of the most fun classes to play as by avoiding magic. Magick Archer is by far my favorite and has many ways of interacting with enemies and the world in interesting ways. It has access to the same dagger skills as the Strider (including the doge roll and double jump) but gives you the added bonus of elemental attacks, crowd control, and buffs/debuffs. There's something great about setting yourself on fire and hugging a monster to death.
Sorcerer plays more like the basic mage class but with far more emphasis on damage and powerful debuffs and status effects. Being able to summon a giant spire of ice or a forcefield of lightning around yourself is pretty cool. Killing enemies with death curses or petrification is better. Summoning a meteor shower or death tornado is pretty great. But nothing quite compares to watching yourself and three sorcerer pawns group cast four meteor showers, tornadoes, etc. Group casting allows the casters to synchronize the spells and piggyback off each other to drastically cut down on cast times.
You missed out on many of the best aspects of the combat and character building by sticking to only a few vocations. A proper review should explore all aspects of a game.
Before talking about the combat you should have learned the difference between gear and Level dependent. ANY piece of gear can become END game with dragon and gold forging, You do however need to level your Character in order for you to do any of that
Why gold forge a shitty barbarian helmet when you can get superior stats by gold forging an ugly demon helmet?
aesthetics you simpleton, every piece if gear can be used in END game and serve you well. If you played the game you'd know that it all comes down to what you like. Fuck y ou can beat the game with rusted weapons that you gold forged and the diabilitation they cause does serious fucking work in end game because of it
@@god_hand576 yeah, this game is probably one of, if not the only game, where a literally broken weapon is actually 'broken'
Yeah this video is really terrible and honestly needs to be revisited. There's so many things he brings up that are either obvious or easily searched up
@@General_Fuck_Yeah_AnimeTitties Coming back, two years later, still laugh at how he calls grigori and the setting major clichés but he himself has wrote multiple books about dragons in fantasy settings, lol
"Combat in this game feels like a waste of time", "my favorite part of the game is going in and out of the coliseum to fight".
The town was making him stupid
And it should tell you something about how he felt about the rest of the game if a thing that he feels is a waste of time is still better and more enjoyable than everything else.
Going in and out is not fighting ;)
Ok, I know this is an old video and that you may not see this, but being a big fan of this game, I feel that I should defend some things here (TL;DR ahead of time).
1. Exactly how much did you experiment with different vocation skills? You claim that climbing on monsters is useless, yet not once in your gameplay did I see you have Scarlet/100 Kisses equipped. That skill (and Gouge, the sword based one for Assassin) can be used while climbing, and they result in some of the highest DPS in the game when used on weak points. Also, while Fighter and Warrior don't have dodge rolls, they do have skills that grant them extensive i-frames. Fighter has Full Moon Slash and Dragon's Maw (both of which have i-frames for their entire duration), and Warrior has Exodus Slash (which has i-frames during the initial sideways slash).
2. I don't understand your complaint about the gear progression. Yes, you have to upgrade or change your gear to stand a chance just like in *every RPG ever.* So how exactly is this a bad thing? Also, raw damage isn't everything. Status effects are extremely powerful in this game; *especially* ones like Topor. It's the reason why the starting rusted weapons are borderline broken when you fully upgrade them. I also don't get why you make such a big fuss about grinding. I've hardly ever had to stop what I was doing and grind in the 6 playthroughs of the game that I've done, and even then I would never mind grinding thanks to how fun the game's combat is.
3. You aren't supposed to go to Bitter Black Isle until *AFTER* you beat Grigori! The game makes this blatantly obvious with how strong the enemies are. You're supposed get the extremely strong vocation based Dragon weapons and *THEN* give it a try. Yes, you can go to Bitter Black Isle the second that you start the game (and there are challenge runs of it at level 5, so it is totally possible), but I see that as no different than attempting Ashes of Ariandel in DS3 when you first reach it. It's going to be hell and both of them warn you about it.
4. Saying that you stopped caring about the plot 10 minutes into the game is quite unprofessional. You're playing a fantasy game with dragons and magic, just watched your heart get ripped out and eaten yet you still survive, and you draw the line at strange people coming out of magic portals, really? I would break down more on why the plot is not only fully coherent, but rather brilliant, however a top comment already did that perfectly, so I'll refrain.
I'll finish this off by saying that the claim that "Dragon's Dogma is a pretty bad game" is completely false. Flawed, yes (as most original IPs that try something totally new tend to be), but it's nowhere close to being "pretty bad". What is your standard of "pretty bad" anyways? What would you compare Dragon's Dogma to that is also "pretty bad"? Finally, if you aren't aware of what Monster Hunter is than you should definitely look into it. It's another Capcom property that Dragon's Dogma drew heavily from. Heck, with how Monster Hunter World looks, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Dragon's Dogma was actually a test bed for future Monster Hunter mechanics.
theguywithnoaccount holy shit i never thought of that. That might be why mhw looks so amazingly good, they took both ideas and put everything into them instead of stopping the project halfway. I still wish dd was completely finished what with the infinite tower and such.
Ah, another internet essay that misuses the word 'objectively'. I'll just add this to my collection.
Yeah his criticism of the combat is built upon a strawman of people claiming the game is skill-based, and then goes off to use BBI as an example, ignoring key things like periapts and gear not being level gated. I've never had to grind levels in the game, only grind for vocation skills and augments.
He is right about the attack power thing though. If you don't reach a certain attack threshhold, you might as well not bother.
However, the sort of enemies it usually applies to in BBI can actually be avoided or you use periapts to level the playing field. The fact that the way the healing and wakestones work also help greatly with this, since enemies will hit you hard and death can come quickly at certain points, with insta-kill magic, spells like maelstrom and one hit kills or grabs. Not to mention, not all vocations are created equally and some die much easier than others.
His entire criticism of the combat seems to be based on the strawman and not for criticisng it for what it is, an RPG with a real-time combat system, not some Dark Souls clone, DMC with rpg progression or some super skill based game.
To OP here, coming from a year later on: Your 4th point is pretty ridiculous, because of a thing called "suspension of disbelief". If we assume the rulework of the game to be a standard magic, high fantasy setting, having an undead main character is not an issue, no. But having a "random" person drop out of the skies, pledging their allegiance to you without ANY set up beforehand, and getting an NPC to explain what happened after the matter is cheap and immersion-breaking. It's a moment where you realise that the writers didn't forget that the player is not the player character, and they went for a bit of "exposition" after the fact, as opposed to setting the whole thing up. There's no other way to put it than "it's incredibly cheap". It shows that the writers could not be bothered to make the whole Pawn-aspect of the game more interesting and involved in the story, other than a standard "ah, that's normal around these places; btw it only happens once every 50 or so years, so it *really* isn't common" (Disclaimer: I have no idea if the Pawns actually *only* serve the arisen, since I haven't actually played the game yet).
@@doomdoot6731 Pawns roam the world, you see them on roads, in Gran Soren, and then there are corrupted pawns who roam and try to kill people. There are also pawns who are in the story itself including vendors and people at the pawn place. While the dragon thing happens once every 50 years, there are a number of masterless pawns inhabiting that place, they don't just 'fall from the sky'.
Also dragonkin can exercise control over pawns, I'm not sure if they can entirely own them, but they can instantly kill them or control them for a time. They even say things like "I am your master now" when they possess your pawn.
Modding this game to have unlimited carry weight + unlimited stamina while sprinting makes this game *much* more enjoyable.
Whoah, up until around 18:00 it was easy listening, but when you've said "chimera, a drake, a lich and that's about it" I tapped out. How? How did you not fight anything else? And the better question to JA from 3 years ago, how did you decide to make a video based on "somehow" incomplete experience? It's like making a deep analysis of Star Trek: TNG after only watching every other season.
I’m not sure if this is a deep analysis, he played the game twice and this a video about his opinion.
12:11 this dude really be complaining about DLC that's meant to be played after finishing the game, while he didn't even finish the game....
"Yeah let me try this end-game end-game content with my mid-level gear that would go fine"
Exactly. Like the direwolves that'll kick your ass didn't tip you off that maybe you shouldn't be here yet?
He is using the fights to show how damage is calculated affects the level of skill the game actually demands.
32:40
You mention losing all your stamina when climbing the monsters. Did it ever occur to you that you could just go into inventory and eat a mushroom (or any other stamina-recovery item)?
Or use a Liquid Vim that grants unlimited stamina. Or improve upon on his stamina stats via Augments and gear. Or reduce his inventory capacity. Carrying all those healing herbs along with his other gear he probably is pretty heavy or average. Even being average is kind of a hindrance.
This kinda goes against what he wanted since a main argument is that consumables that you can use while completely pausing the game as a way to balance your game around is bad.
It's interesting. I played the game twice but never ate to recover health, even though that is all I did in BotW. Since I always had a healer with me I had a more organic combat experience.
1) whaat? equipment and stats affect damage? oh noooo. just as it does in 99% of RPGs
2) the affair with the duchess is a reference to the manga Berserk
3) arisens are chosen irregularly
It hurt hearing some of the bad things be ripped apart on this game but, they are correct . I love this game but it has alot of flaws
Honestly, this game feels like there was so much more planned for it, both gameplay and story wise, but was cut short for time or budget constraints. I feel like they had planned to fill the map more, to develop the story more and explain it more, to expose some gameplay features more. It's also very obscure in many ways as there are so many things you only learn about once you make mistakes. Overall, it feels like a wiki game where, once you read the wiki and learn about all the things, you get a much better gasp of the game and it almost feels like you play a different game with all the stuff you understood thanks to the wiki.
I personally like the combat overall but, in my opinion, the key to enjoying the combat is avoiding too much cheese. For example, I avoid using healing items and instead rely on a mage pawn to heal me. I also avoid Periapts and other damage boosting items as it makes things too easy for me. Combat does have its flaws like some hitboxes being a bit wonky and pawns being outright stupid at times, but I think it's way more enjoyable and complex than you put it. For example, about climbing combats, I have had little issues with stamina and you actually get a damage bonus for climbing, even more so with a Strider who also gets a climbing speed bonus (which really outlies how the game fails to communicate such unique mechanics to non-wiki players).
60% of the game got cut due to time constraints.
ruclips.net/video/3G5o3KhXv6w/видео.html
It’s because it was immensely rushed. A dev spoke and said only 40% of what was planned made it to the final game.
Review was made 3 years ago. Sees comments made 1 day ago.
That's how amazing DD is. The game is played and loved 'til today despite its flaws.
The games main flaw is that capcom decided to ax it halfway through production so the devs were forced to remove over half of the stuff that was supposed to in it just so they could still ship a finished game instead of scrapping it altogether. And it's still turned into a cult classic with many fans and got multiple ports to other consoles.
Yep, I enjoyed it thoroughly
But Itsuno-san said in an interview he was at a crossroads he wanted to make DMC5 or DD2, now that DMC5 is a thing maybe, just MAYBE, we will get DD2 next!
i remember playing this game after playing the heck out of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite. It scratched the same itch a little bit.
If the game had a better way of fast traveling it would be so much better. Not a big fan of fast travel, but the map is so damm big
"Dragon's Dogma is a pretty bad game"
What?
Same, I don't get it. Another mmo player who complains about everything
Xander1097 He disagrees. That simple.
@@Cozonac3000 Imagine coming onto a critique video and then complaining that he critiques. Do you also purposely order food you dont like and complain?
@@TheSectric Yes
@White-Van Helsing Exactly how is it like an MMO? Is it the the fact that there's no legitimate multiplayer? Or maybe the huge, heavily populated world? Perhaps the fast, reaction-based combat that requires you to dodge and avoid attacks as much as you attack? Perhaps it's the bosses with all their different hitboxes and weak points. All those things are standard for an MMO, right?
I'd like to hear your opinion on the witcher 3 one day
Plisken Power's The Glitcher 3: Wild Plagiarism*
557deadpool Ok...
+557deadpool Cool
557deadpool Elaborate, since no one questioned you on this seemingly ignorant statement.
Blurredborderlines it's a joke. No need to get worked up.
I think you misunderstood the idea behind how many combat related things are supposed to work together. You refer to this as skill- or level-based, if this is the kind of distinction you want to make then the best description for Dragon's Dogma would probably be "knowledge-based". In this regard I would compare it to Dark Souls 1 or Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13, and i know that this might be a rather confusing comparision. What these games have in common is that with every playthrough you learn new tips and tricks which you use in your next one, leading you into new situations where you learn new things again. Specifically for Dragon's Dogma this revolves around consumable items and quest order, you know when to go where and what to bring on that journey, even reorganizing the pawns you use to fit upcoming monsters, not to mention inclinations. Same goes for Bitterblack Isle, the big monster chained to the wall should probably be ignored until you have the right buffs with you or leveled up a bit.
And one more thing: Bitterblack Isle is usually played through twice, because it changes after beating the boss the first time.
Dragon's Dogma is a really weird game. It's incredibly average, but the combat and pawn system are so dispreportianatly fun that I'm super conflicted about how I feel about the game overall. There's so much potential for a sequel to be amazing, but I think they're turning the franchise into a shitty MMO, so rip
Actually Dragon's Dogma Online is a lot of fun it feels exactly like Dark Arisen just in a MMO setting, sadly there is no western release so to truly play all it has to offer you are gonna need to have a good understanding of Japanese.
The new end game classes are incredibly fun to play and are way more original then the variation/ hybrids of Dark Arisen.
And Capcom has stated they are interested in a true sequel, Itsuno himself said he wants to work on it as well so I hope they get him on it after he finishes DMC 5.
@@ramue5749 It's also a shame they shut it down recently ;-;
This guy forgot to roleplay on a roleplaying Game 😭😭
Many such cases
Great game, but too much annoying aspects of it makes you want to give up.... which i did. To think some people compared this game to Skyrim.... What a joke!
Dragon’s Dogma is way more fun than Skyrim for me. The combat system in Elder Scrolls is a joke.
@@SaberRexZealot Combat system is not everything in a game. Just compare the success of the 2 games and there is a clear winner. But man, good for you if you love this game!
@@FrankyboyFloyd I just, really like violence in video games to feel satisfying ya know? I treasure it more than anything else in games. In Elder Scrolls it feels like I’m hitting enemies with a flaccid dildo. I guess we’re all different in what we value.
God I hate how people use how successful something is as a sole way of measuring or comparing instead of quality.
Skyrim is extrrnely successful and well sold, obviously. And I would honestly rather spend my time playing bubble bobble. Cannot stand the combat, cannot stand the morrpwind 2001 engine full of glitches and pathfinding issues and crashes, cannot stand the lackluster character creation.
Dragons dogma was never supposed to be similar to skyrim, and comparing it is insulting to both games.
Has anyone told him he could have used the "category" button when deposting items to select them all?
that took me about two years of playing the game to learn about... is a "really hard" mechanic of the game... most the things about Dragon's Dogma are so hidden that a normal player would never find... Hahahaha... per example the lattern thing... WHO IN THE HELL THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA??? WHY??? I have played so much time trying to kill the death itself a the third level of BBI... without light cause I never find that mechanic either... Hahahaha this game is so fun... made me laught so much when I recall those kind of stuffs
Yeah, but it helps only a bit. There's 10 categories on each of the 4 characters so that means checking 40 different tabs to see if someone picked up something you need to deposit, and deposit if needed.
you are just straight up wrong about the combat system, the only class that is totally reliant on character ability instead of player ability is mages, sorcerers and warriors. every other class gets abilities to avoid or block damage that are necessary on hard mode
the way DD calculates damage is an overly simplified way of doing the objectively best method of damage calculation (which is a system like damage threshold you see in new vegas and some table top games)
resource management should be more punishing, that i'll admit, but inventory management is an often ignored but vital gameplay element for an adventure game (not the poorly named genre, games that emulate going on an adventure). managing a tight inventory with supplies to help deal with enemies is one of the best parts of the game, and it is tight, much more so than you are implying unless you are fine being massively overweight and slowing the game down to a crawl.
the story is pretty good, just _ terribly_ told.
I know he heavily criticizes the games that he reviews but something about his descriptions make me want to play them even more.
stat progression and skill progression arent mutually exclusive
like, you can kill the Gazer (the first boss of the Dark Arisen) and the Dark Bishop (the 2nd boss of Dark Arisen) at basically level 1 with clever use of items and game mechanics, when you first approach the Ruins of Aernst Castle encounter a heavily armored warrior that is basically impervious to physical damage (the one at 11:30) if you go there as early as you can, but if you manage to knock him over you can just pick him up and chuck him off the cliff instantly killing him. sure you can just grind exp until you're like lvl 30 get a Dragon's glaze for free in Dark Arisen and oneshot everything in the story. but the same goes for dark souls, final fantasy, borderlands, Tales of, you name it. the catch is how you want to play the game, if you are not invested enough to care to find a way to kill that enemy that has way higher stats than you then maybe skill driven combat is not your thing. except if you think that system knowledge does not equal skill, in that case you better play stuff like jubeat or taiko because i cant think of many games that requires only physical skill and no amount of system knowledge (granted the instant heals from items and infinite lifes provided by wakestones are pretty bs)
i dont want to discredit your opinion, i am just kind of frustrated that you tried to kill a gorecyclops with a dark enchated weapon (and apparently only 1 pawn?) but complain about not doing any damage and say its the game's fault, not to mention that are arent even supposed/meant to fight that gorecyclops the first time around Dark Arisen, the game specificly tells you that you dont need to engage in combat with enemies that are above your capability. you can play dark souls at SL1 without weapons or armor, but youll take a long ass time to kill anything, but thats not valid critisism towards dark souls having bad combat.
i really like your videos and even that they are so long, but this time i cant help but downvote because there is just a lack of understanding (just a bit but still) of the game that is passed of as criticism
I agree with pretty much everything you said here. This guy clearly has experience with video games and is good at expressing his opinions in a way that clearly articulates what he does and doesn't like about a game, but I think he simply didn't play enough of this game to have valid criticisms. Many of the things he lists as a negative are only a problem because he didn't utilize the proper mechanics.
Much of his criticism is due to his own choices or lack of knowledge. The story, for example. He says it's boring, bland, and not worth paying attention to then later says the game's story makes no sense.
He says the combat is boring and repetitive but admits he only used three vocations which and those three just happen to be the three most basic and repetitive in the game. He mostly avoided the magic vocations and the only hybrid he tried was Assassin which, as most players can tell you, is just a hybrid of Fighter and Strider. He explored only the most bland of vocations and blames the game for his unsatisfying experience with the game's combat.
He clearly didn't understand elemental weaknesses, status effects, or the effects of hitting different parts of an enemy and seems to think that the best and only way to kill something is by repeatedly stabbing it's face.
He wants to be able to fight and beat every enemy he sees the first time he comes across it rather than have reason to go back and explore areas he's already been to.
@@jordonkautz1470 yea its like, you are a purely physical class with no elemental options i wonder why you're not doing any damage against this fire themed enemy or this heavily armed 2m mountain of muscle. :thonk:
There's a difficult to trigger sidequest chain that goes down this rabbit hole about Pawns being granted souls by their Arisen, including another pawn who was granted free will by her dying master. It also goes into this whole concept that, over time, the pawn will start to look like their Arisen, which doesn't happen in game until the final cinematic.
took me 3 cycle to meet this npc back in the ps3 era, it blew my mind and made me think that if I've missed it then I would've likely missed other quest and part of the game, like the childhood friend questline in the church or resurrect the knight who rebelled. You could have such a diferent experience from someone else!
It's difficult in the original because you have to go all the way back to the starting village after reaching the capital, which is a very long walk and the player probably would not think of doing that for no good reason. In Dark Arisen you get a permanent portcrystal at the starting village you can teleport to immediately once you reach the capital using the infinite waystone you can for free. So it's a lot more likely you will bump into this quest, though still very much missable if you just proceeded with the main quest or doing other things.
I honestly found this game much more challenging and more fun than games like witcher
Damn, it ALWAYS hits me hard at how strange it is, Joe saying a 30+ minutes video is long, long enough to watch it in parts, even???
Oh, how things change
I love it XD
So the game is as obtuse as it can be and the only reason as to why people hold it as one of the greats, is because it's as challenging as it gets for all the wrong reasons?
You say the romance option with the Duke's wife was obvious, but my character was a little girl so in the initial scenes where you meet her, the lines that were supposed to be flirty came off like she just thought I was adorable. Then I went to her room to see what was up and I realized what was going on and I was like "I need an adult!" and then the Duke showed up and I was like "I NEED A DIFFERENT ADULT!"
Things were very awkward after that...
While it may have its shortcomings Dragon's Dogma, I feel, is able to offer an amazing experience.
Encountering monsters feels exciting and you feel as if you're actually fighting something grand and fierce, not a regular enemy. Most creatures have a weakness you need to discover in order to do good damage to them, whether it be an element or a certain attack type or a weakspot on their bodies.
It actually gives you the feel of travelling the world as a group of adventurers and facing impossible odds and I love this game for that.
The story isn't stellar but some characters can be actually charming and slowly make you love them. The world is fairly unique and the thematic is well executed.
The combat can either be looked at as a pro or a con. Longer grueling fights where you whittle down massive enemies can feel epic. Someencounters just force you to run from them because you aren't strong enough - that's ok since it shows you that you have a lot more progress to do. I never once needed to grind, simply doing a few sidequests had me at a decent level to tackle the game's challenges.
The healing system wasn't a problem for me because I never tried to abuse it. I never bought 80 Greenwarishes, I just ran on what I could find in the world, I only used a wakestone once for a room with 2 chimeras and a lich. These things are there to make the game easier for those who are struggling, it is entirely a choice whether you want to exploit it not.
I feel like the whole thing about combat being entirely progression-based is false.
See, this isn't dark souls, you can't expect to go up to a monster, without any added things, and do a shit ton of damage.
Have you seen how people have fared in souls-like games when they had crappy equipment versus extremely difficult bosses? If you're absolutely amazing you can beat the whole game without ever even getting a sword, but if you're an average player? You're gonna wanna upgrade at some point.
Anyway, thats not the point. The point is, you think it should be as simple as finding the weakspot, climbing onto a monster, and hacking away, but just because you can't do that, doesn't mean the game isn't skill-based as much as progression-based. Taking things into the mix like elemental weapons, tons of poison, certain type of weapons.
You see people pulling off kills all the time with stuff like rusted weapons, which are extremely low-level weapons with awful damage, yet people do wonders with them.
When you get to a boss in dark souls, you usually add things into the mix like gold pine resin.
Dark Souls isn't the be-all end-all of skill-based games, and some games use the term "skill-based" differently. I've been in awe at certain characters and builds with low-level stats killing much much more powerful beings. Utilizing the weak point of a monster on top of utilizing the game's mechanics in your favor to make the monster more susceptible to attacks is something to take into account as well. You can't rule out a game being skill-based simply because you struck their weakpoint and nothing happened, because Dogma requires a bit more thinking then that, just like Dark Souls does to a ton of its bosses. Sure in that game all it takes is a bunch of rolling, parrying, and backstabbing to get the better of your opponent, but Dogma requires you to think more about how you're going to take down certain enemies, not all bosses will die to the same strategy, and you shouldn't expect them to.
If you're still unconvinced, I beg you to take a look at one such instance where a person utilized the game's mechanics despite having shitty weapons to take down one of the toughest bosses in the entire game at a level where they shouldn't even be able to deal any damage, regardless, they manage to beat them quick and easily: ruclips.net/video/-u4Dak7PMUE/видео.html
Then we go even further, to even worse weapons:
ruclips.net/video/BgzIEYu5A8Q/видео.html
Then you take into account certain skills, rings, and the game goes even further in-depth.
Despite being 3+years old review, he sure didn't play the game using everything to actually pinpoint its true flaws. Overall, he tried, but lacked the proper approach on the system and the game.
What the hell...all this talk about stamina consumption....by some damn mushrooms....sheesh
Oh well... there is so many "off-set" points at the video... per example "big-or-tiny-map" that didn't even matter... it's what it's you know... it's big enough to give you atleast 20 hours of play being a bit modest... and still... don't matter much... the fun part is wander around, searching around... there is always something new you can find... and well... even if that ended being small... it's the game... also, atleast as far as I know... and of course, the Elder Ogre and the Giant Gore Cyclop were thought to be a second run at Bitterblack Isle ("normal" mobs)... "normal"... they weren't made to be attacked at level less than 100... even with that... they still over that level... in hardmode still at level 180 being low level to face the Gore Cyclops... the fun part of BBI is how they teach you that sometimes you should run from an enemy... no matter what... the Garm are the worse... fast, deadly... a moment of distraction and you are dead... no matter the healing system that you can pause or any other thing... they deal like 2.5k damage twise and you are dead... Dragon's Dogma teach you the hard way, that... knowledge is the key
Joseph : says the video is long
Also Joseph : has a 3 hour god of war video
I'm not sure if I'm misinterpreting here, but Dragon's Dogma using flat ratings to formuate damage is nothing new; plenty of menu-based RPGs use a similar formula, like Final Fantasy.
Damage RESISTANCE not damagr
Subaru Conatoo So... defense, then?
Yea
You're only misinterpreting a bit. I don't think he's saying this is new or inherently bad. Rather, he's using it as evidence that the game is more gear-based and less skill-based.
You had around 4 valid sentences in this entire vid, but at least I finished my lunch watching it lol
Funny i just finished my dinner watching this video. Anyway this is one of the most confused, confusing and interesting game.
Took the words out my mouth dude. I for one loved this game and it's ideas though. Most I can do is hope the sequel is improved upon.
"...almost like he wants you to kill him!" Because he literally does lol he intentially makes you an Arisen just for that its blindidly obvious
A couple of misconceptions:
When you're facing the expansion you're supposed to use the Grigori weapons, which got a nice boost in the DLC. You're also supposedly familiar with the cuadruple conqueror periapth mechanic, which boost your attack a lot. Follow this in a third playthrough and you'll see how the enemies don't take so much time.
The healing mechanic kinda balances itself, more item weight = slower character = ineffective Arisen. This is a loot based rpg and your runs are supposed to be FAST and effective.
If you somehow manage to beat a boss dealing like no damage and using 909 potions and 64 wakestones, you're wasting time and resources and you'll be just a bad adventurer. Yeah, you still beat the Boss though...at a price...
Anyway, I'm not saying you're really wrong, just some details to consider.
I honestly don't think this is a fair review, you're reviewing DD as if it's an action game akin to Dark Souls, whereas it's actually obviously very much an ARPG, and though it has some flaws as you've mentioned, other systems such as leveling and gear work exactly as they should within the way the game is designed.
Dragon's Dogma IS an action adventure, not an RPG.
Dark Souls is the same way.
Putting a fucking progression system in your game doesn't make it an "RPG".
@Josiah Sepulveda Choices and consequences that changes the outcome of the narrative.
@Josiah Sepulveda Well, I guess I used the wrong term. By "narrative" I'm not just talking about the main story but side quests as well. Example: the first side quest in New Vegas allows you to side with Goodsprings or the Powder Gangers. The NPCs even react to you if you just outright kill the powder ganger who is harassing Trudy which then leads to the Powder Gangers attacking Goodsprings right away. You can complete this quest in 3 different ways alone. Each with their own consequence. It's not just about having multiple endings for the finale but rather multiple endings for most quests.
@@sir3543 "Choices and consequences that changes the outcome of the narrative."
@@sir3543 ughhh do you even know the definition of rpg games? -_-
Binging your videos today. Loving them!
Also if you replay the game in New Game+, the "God" Arisen is the previous one you played as with all of your gear and skills. I think that's kind of a really cool idea honestly. Also that huge dragon boss whose health can be widdled away by players online until someone deals the final blow is a pretty smart idea. It really does only go halfway with them though...
The idea here is reused in Monster Hunter World for it's siege fights. Basically a lobby of 16 goes into a fight in teams of 4. They each fight the boss separately from each other, but if they fail, they make some progress on a meter. Any teams attempting after that will have a slightly easier fight. The team that beats the boss first gets the best rewards, while everyone else gets decent rewards. The progress meter of the boss is reset, and the lobby starts the process again.
Dragons dogma is honestly the best bad game i've ever played
2016, 36 minutes: "Warning long video!"
2020, 4 + hours: "This is how you bang a striga in The Witcher"
Protip: You can setup hotkeys for important items in the PC version.
Like pressing 1 to lanturn, or 2 for heals.
Still yeah it is kinda hidden and clunky to setup.
And on console version
I can guarantee that 100% of the flaws in this game will be present in Dragon dogma 2 since it's a copy paste with a new engine. It's going to be hilarious.
If this is true, I’m kinda happy I just played the first one to get used to the flaws.
you were right, and they STILL happily eat it up
@@daneelaartbecause it's actually fun to play. Far less jank than 1 and actually has things to find in the open world. Executes interconnected quest lines better than 1. It's basically just 1 but what they originally intended.
You God dam right
As someone who has sunk countless years into this game I can fairly say that you are right about it not being skill based... sort of. I think in the way that the average casual or single run player will play it, it definitely is entirely based on stats and gear. The skill part of the game really kicks in when you have already maxed out your level in the end game, Bitterblack Isle and are doing runs for time, gear and fun. At that point you have already levelled your character and pawn all the way up and even then most good players I know play pawnless most of the time. This end goal phase of the game is entirely about knowledge of enemy weaknesses and patterns, your own skills and execution of abilities correctly. Also almost all of the best skills in the game are the hardest to execute mechanically.
Direct damage reduction rather than percentage can work. It can work really well. I think the main problem here is that enemies have high amounts of defense. Terraria does the direct damage thing really well, and I think it's based mostly on how much enemies have. No enemies have stupid high amounts of defense unless they're supposed to be effectively impossible to beat, like the Dungeon Guardian or Skeletron's head on expert mode. I feel like that game is all about maximizing your effectiveness in small ways. Potions provide relatively small buffs but when combined with other potions and effects, the difference is more than tangible. That's where the defense comes in. Some bosses, like the Wall of Flesh, have weaker points where you will do 5 more damage. Adding 5 damage to every attack can add up especially when combined with proper arena building and potions. Dragon's Dogma seems to make defense more of a wall than an obstacle.
I just LOVE Dragon's Dogma DA. It's the greatest open world action rpg i played till now, for sure (i own the PS3 version)
Can you imagine the ppl reaction if Capcom announces "DD2, now in development" on this E3?
I can't stand when people say this game doesn't have a good story when it really does.
The story is interesting but badly told I think.
While I love this game with all of my heart, I find myself agreeing with the points made here. I guess I play Dragon's Dogma simply because it carried me through some rough times. I'll never forget getting home, powering on my Xbox, and letting the real world's troubles be replaced by the simple cycle of fight, level, die, repeat. I would still recommend this game to anyone who wants a mindless grindfest to spend a few hundred hours on. DD is the kind of game you can play without paying much attention to. Yes, in hard mode you have to be careful, but you're not doing much actual thinking, just dodging at the right moment, and hitting the right weak spot as often as is possible.
My game that helped get me through tough times is dark souls ironically
Isn't that what games are for?
DD was that game for me too.
My naturally stingy state of mind helped with one of the big problems of this game. I usually only carried around twenty healing items with me and tried using a pawns healing sigil whenever I could. I also used wakestones more for profit since they sell for so much and I saw using one after dying as a financial punishment. This is similar to something I did in Demon's Souls where I'd only have about 20 or less of each type of grass to save a little item space since I doubted that I'd ever need much more anyway.
For all it's flaws this game is still full of mystery and uniqueness. It's cute in a japanese way. For me Dragon's Dogma is kinda special.
I hope the new game won't repeat the combat problems like the damage calculation and the healing system
This game should not work. But I love it more than any other RPG I've played, including Skyrim and The Witcher. I dunno why. I'm just hoping that for DD2 they will fix most of the stuff like healing mechanics and damadge balance. Maybe the Monster Hunter team can help them.
Kinda surprising how you kind of missed the story of the game, especially after playing bitterblack because the dlc expands on "this is just a never ending loop to find someone who's worthy of becoming god". It's a simple story but I don't often see it used so I thought it was vastly more interesting than what most other developers try to flesh out. You were right about all the quests leading up to the conclusion though.
the water dungeon was one of the most enjoyable dungeons Ive played in an RPG. Game has a lot of potential with the sequel
LUL that was one I hate most... almost... each playthrought I did... almost... all the times I have played that cave... always a pawn fall at the water... almost ALWAYS... Hahahaha someone disappear at that cave... and... most of the cases is the ice caster wizard
This is in the uncanny valley of video games. Doesn't look too good , but has amazing animations. Terrible story, but amazing lore (if only it went deeper). Really fun combat, but the DLC suddenly made me realise that skill meant less than it seemed in the base game, making me hate that I asked for more of a challenge. Everything is almost good to make this terrible game that I still love and want to play again.
Ok man wakestones make the game easier but have you tried fighting the evil eye while underleveled?
You are quickly becoming my favorite youtuber, man. Your critical analysis of games should be the new gold standard for other reviewers. Keep it up, duder. I can't get enough.
+Jon Doe This game is especially baffling on the critiquer side. This is literally the first review I've seen written, in video, or even including in podcasts conversation, that actually analyses and talks about this game for what it is. Not even any of the few outlets I generally respect have talked about any of these problems (except the fast travel stone, that is the one point people do mention). Dragon's Dogma somehow found itself in this bizarre position where everyone is so enamored by its cool concepts, but none of them have bothered to play the game more than a couple hours. Or if they did, I cannot comprehend how they could push aside so many of these massive design problems, as they repeatedly get in the way of enjoyment.
So yeah, just doing an actual analysis of this to begin with is great, but it being a good thoughtful analysis on top of that really pushes Joseph above and beyond. Major props.
ps: It's very well possible I could have missed decent critique of this game out there, but it's not by lack of trying that I haven't found it.
+Kuroonehalf
Because the game is still fun... and thats what matters to most people...
Besides, they see great potentials to it.
It bridges the gap between open worlds rpgs like Skyrim, frentic boss battles like Monster Hunters and unique cross-player "cooperative gaming" that resembles MMORPGs.
For a first attempt, i dont think its that bad.
This video's analysis is true though but personally none of his points actually dissuade me from playing and enjoying the game maybe because i didnt let the Soul series spoiled my taste.
I think the positives outweigh the negatives. If the combat is fun, then grinding and repetition isn't as big an issue as the uploader of the video thinks. Loot games like Diablo and Borderlands are a perfect example of this where getting better gear to improve you chances of living against much stronger enemies than you is the whole point of playing. Without the promise of better and shinier things, the more pointless fighitng becomes. The only thing to make repetition not borng is to make the core comabat really responsive and arcadey so it is fast paced and quick and makes you feel powerful just moving around and killing stuff easily. The YS series is one such franchise where the main character moves fast and combat is smooth. Grinding becomes less of a chore and more of a fun thing to do because you apreciate the good controls. You can't say the same about games like the Witcher where you have horrible combat.
el duderino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing...
UToobUsername01 I agree with what you are saying except Witcher 3 has a great combat system though idk if you were referring to older Witchers. But I do like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Monster Hunter combat much better.