So, being a big RPG fan, I was easily convinced by my local Gamestop to pre-order Dragon's Dogma.
The game begins with a tutorial of sorts, where you play a high level character with decent gear. It's like when you're playing Darth Vader at the beginning of Force Unleashed, except not fun. You plow through a few goblins by mashing the X button. Then you fight a harpy by waiting for it to land and mashing the X button. Then you fight a Chimera.
This is the first "climbable monster" fight. Clearly, this was supposed to be a selling point for the game and, reading some reviews online, some people just can't get enough of the climbing on monsters deal. I was seriously bored with it by the end of the Chimera fight. There doesn't seem to be a real difficulty in climbing on, you just run up and hit the right trigger (I'm playing on the X-Box 360). Once aboard the monster, there doesn't seem to be any difficulty staying on, no matter how precarious a monster bit you cling to or if you are upside down. You do get knocked off when the monster... um... decides that you do.
Now, the Chimera has a snake tail that spits poison, seemingly a ranged attack, debuff, and battlefield control spell all wrapped up in one. So, the snake tail was my first target. I climbed over to the tail and started mashing X. There are attacks in the game that don't involve mashing X, but attacks other than mashing X automatically dismount you. After mashing X for a really long time, the tail fell off. After mashing X for another long time, the goat head died. A while after that, the monster just collapsed.
So, the game goes through a few cut scenes where the writers go, "Look! Look! We're totally foreshadowing an M. Night Shyamalan twist ending!" and I make a "Strider." I decided to focus on ranged combat, because I'm a Bethesda junkie and I default to sneak-and-snipe. Before I leave the first town, I get a mage named Rook to join me with fire and healing spells.
Heading off into the wilderness, I start to question the value of ranged combat. Now, I slaughtered rabbits and seagulls by the dozens with that bow, but the lowly goblins and wolves were engaged in melee with me before I could fire more than a few shots. I was occasionally able to catch a goblin or wolf off guard at a bit of distance, and found that the bow really doesn't do much damage. I had a goblin close to melee with me, and the goblin had arrow shafts sticking out of both eye sockets and forehead. Against many enemies, I actually couldn't tell if I was doing damage with the bow.
Eventually, I hit the second town, fought a climb and mash boss, got two more pawns, and fought another climb and mash boss. The second climb and mash boss was a hydra (climb up neck of choice, mash X until head falls off). I was simultaneously grateful and irritated when the hydra fight abruptly ended after I had only severed one head. I was wondering what happened with the OTHER heads, but at the same time I really didn't want to keep mashing X.
So with a ranged DPS healer and my own (theoretically) ranged DPS character, I picked up two "tank" type pawns. I figured that a good defensive line + ranged DPS = win. Nope.
I got a quest to investigate a well. Brought down my new, full size group to see how we did at the terrors below. A few one-hit bats and rats fell before our might, and then we met the lizard men. The lizard men slaughtered us. A few more tries met with more party wipes. My attempts to stay back behind the defensive line and shoot at the lizard men was foiled when they either decimated my defenders with damage far outshining the healing capabilities of my mage, or just charged past the defenders and two- to three-shotted me.
So, being an old school player of RPGs, I looked for other quests and grinding opportunities.
Only to be slaughtered by bandits. Repeatedly...
Okay... Time to get better gear on me and the pawns. This was more frustrating and boring than I had anticipated. With three basic character classes, you would think it would be fairly easy to have things like armor fall into several distinct categories with non-mechanical hints as to what is better. No. Buying the most expensive gear seems to be a decent guideline, but you can't compare pawn gear to merchant gear without leaving the store screen and manually checking the mechanical bonuses on your spawn gear. Distributing the gear, once bought, is simple but painfully slow.
So, now followed by the newly named Stupid Hat Brigade (lots of hideous clothing in this game), I set forth to attempt those challenges that had previously thwarted me.
We got slaughtered.
I may not actually put the game in my X-Box ever again. A four man, live-action party fighting hordes of enemies is just not the clusterf*** I am looking for. There is playing chess against a good opponent difficult, and then there is having sex with a chronically dry female sex organ difficult. This game is the latter. Its supposed to be fun, but instead it's just awkward, tiresome, and painful when you don't expect it to be.
One reviewer dismissed criticism of the game by saying, "Let's see you climb on a dragon in Skyrim." I would expect for the dragon to fly up and drop me to my death, or roll over and crush me. Really, climbing on a giant monster seems like a pretty stupid idea.
