I spent the last few days binging on the PC release of Dragon’s Dogma cos it’s a game I wanted to play badly for quite a while but didn’t have the console to play it. Turns out : my will to play it was, this once, not let down by the game. It’s pretty good.

But I’m not gonna finish it. Cos I feel like I’ve had enough. Cos it’s only pretty good. It doesn’t go beyond having nice gameplay, in fact everything else about it is meh.

The gameplay is fine enough, not without flaws, but in the end it is really let down by the unoriginality of it all. I don’t have a reason to go on, the game didn’t give me one.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: A big part of the story is spent fighting at some evil cult until the Dragon comes and squashes its Palpatine-wannabe leader then plainly states “yeah, these guys ? They’re actually completely irrelevant, now come and fight me.” … So the game just outright confirms that I was right to not give a shit about anything I was doing.

They rip off scenes from Berserk with no apparent reasons, the story and its pacing are a freaking mess, the characters are void of any charisma, all the monsters are your standard boring DnD fare which is so bland that I can’t get hyped for anything even if they are fun to fight (a lot of the mechanics of the game come from Monster Hunter beside the climbing that is straight from Shadow of the Colossus, if it’s the same team that made both MH and DD I wonder why it’s so visually uninspired considering how unique and virbant MH is), all in all the game fails to suck me into its world and make me care about what I’m doing.

It’s not like the Souls serie to which it’s often compared to, where the atmosphere of bleakness really hits hard, where you’re eager to see what the game has for you next, because here’s what Dragon’s Dogma has in store for you : something you’ve probably already seen.

It’s funny cos both Dark Souls and Dragon’s Dogma have something in common beside their setting : nothing you do seem to matter. The difference between the game is how it’s presented. In Dark Souls, it feels hopeless all throughout and you eventually learn that indeed it doesn’t matter, that your struggles won’t really lead to anything better in the long run. In Dragon’s Dogma, it feels like nothing matters all throughout because the game, its story and lore are fucking stupid and irrelevant.

I felt the same way in Skyrim, expect it took me six hours to think I had my fill of it. It took 30+ for Dragon’s Dogma so hey, it definitely did something right. I don’t regret playing it, I enjoyed it and am not surprised by the flaws I found in it, I might even replay it with another class someday. I’m not dissappointed, I just wish I could have gotten invested in it.