The term “flawed masterpiece” is in itself an oxymoron. How can something be masterfully crafted and finished if it has flaws? Surely it is a binary conclusion, something is a masterpiece or it isn't. But the first man through the wall always gets bloody. And in trying to create something that no one else has achieved yet, flaws are bound to appear. It is the scope of a work's ambition and the attempt to pull it off that we call masterful, in spite of apparent flaws.
I will start by stating clearly Dragon's Dogma is not for everyone. I was so warned by many forum posts claiming it to be a polarizing game, unfinished and rough around the edges. Many mechanics in the game are dated. The inventory weight system is clunky and detracts from the fun of the game. The class system and stat distribution is restrictive and silly in some instances, and the story and quest lines are nothing the gaming hobbyist has not experienced one hundred times before. A great evil awakens and the chosen one must rise to meet it. Fetch quests, escort quests, kill 15 goblins and return to me quests.
The game also falters in it's location design and art direction, bland to the eye. Gran Soren, the major city of the region and one of only two settlements in the entire game, is a drab mass of grey and brown brick textures with only about one quarter of the city actually able to be interacted with in any meaningful sort of way, and the lack of truly memorable NPCs does not help.
“Gran Soren….home….at least it was…before I fucked everything up….” -- Anonymous San Andreas resident
Gran Soren lacks the sprawling mass and endless possibility of a city such as The Witcher 3's Novigrad, a neutral city caught in the crossfire of a war. It lacks the character of contemporaries such as Skyrim's Markarth which teemed with dwemer history etched into the cliffsides. And it fails to capture the hustle and bustle of Final Fantasy XII's Rabanastre with it's cultural fusions and proto-futuristic bazaars. It's a shame, because it serves as the hub for almost the entirety of the game, making the pronounced lack of character more and more apparent with each journey home.
The world outside Gran Soren is little better. Non-descript woodlands, mountains and caves that while perhaps topographically quite accurate, are quite dull to journey through. I assume it's quite close to what actual landscapes across medieval Europe were like and perhaps what the developers were aiming for, but considering there weren't many reports of chimeras roaming the Kingdom of Burgundy in the 11th century they probably could have used their artistic license with the world design as well.
That is not to say the world design lacks interesting elements. The inclusion of the ability to jump, double jump and levitate depending on vocation adds a great deal of vertical level design possibility that is sadly missing from most major RPGs both at the time and even today. The dungeons of DLC area Bitterblack Isle in particular shine with brilliant fusions of platform and action-adventure that is sorely missing in much of today's gaming.
But if the game is slow, clunky by today's standards with inventory and stat management, why should it be considered a flawed masterpiece? Surely this is recency bias like a new tinder hook up, or rose-tinted glasses, like an old tinder hook up? No. It is because there are so many elements of genius buried within the game that have not been replicated by modern games. It begins with the main conceit of the game: pawns.
Pawns are NPC characters you create that fight alongside you. While this isn't particularly groundbreaking, Capcom seized upon the new paradigm of gaming consoles with internet connections to make a gigantic leap forward. The online functionality for the PS3 and 360 were respectively co-developed and supported by Sony Computer Entertainment and the Japanese branch of Microsoft. Their cooperation enabled Capcom to reduce running costs for the online functions to nearly nothing, giving it a scope unfathomable for most non MMORPG games. Thus, while you could create one pawn, you could also hire two more pawns from other players around the world. Mages, warriors, rangers lovingly created by players from around the world could join you in your quest. They could be found wandering the countryside or in a special temporal area, and in turn your pawn could be hired and return with the spoils of war.
More importantly, these pawns from other player's worlds brought knowledge of the game with them. In one particular instance, I investigated a bandit hideout in search of a magical book. With no other clues, the only option seemed to be to murder everyone in the hideout until I found the book, and it's a path that most other games would have you take. However, the pawn I had hired from another player, a short and squat fellow called Danny DeVito (clearly there are no limitations on naming conventions) had lived through this quest before. His player creator had already done the quest, and so Danny had learned from the experience. He pointed out that he remembered something was stashed in the watch tower nearby. Lo and behold, I found the tome there without having to spill a drop of blood. On completion of the quest my own pawn Casca (it only seemed appropriate given the clear influence of Kentaro Miura's Berserk on the game), learned of it's location and upon being hired would be able to share the information with her next employer.
I cannot believe no other game has seized upon this phenomenal concept. A concept that completely eliminates the need for quest markers, mini-map notifications and “Witcher Sense-Batman-Detective Vision-Spidey Sense-I'll just put on my screen filter and follow these glowing dots for 3 minutes” quest progression that plagues modern games. Clues are given intuitively by pawns based by past experiences and it adds incredibly to gameplay. They learn weaknesses of enemies, alternative routes for quests and more. It is the message system of the Dark Souls series ramped up to a much greater degree, one that greatly adds to the atmosphere without the gentle trolling.
By the time Dragon's Dogma was being developed, game director Hideaki Itsuno already had a strong resume of games to his name including fighting games such as Capcom vs SNK, Power Stone and the critically acclaimed Devil May Cry series. It should come as no surprise that the combat is exemplary in the game, feeling rewarding and stylish in equal measure.
No babe, its actually SO dope because he’s wearing an armoured helmet, so you can climb up his back and make him knock it off, exposing his weakpoint an- babe? babe where are you going?
However the biggest influence can be felt not from Itsuno's CV but rather from Capcom's library. There is a great deal of commonality in the major boss fights in Dragon's Dogma and the fights in Capcom's Monster Hunter series, with Itsuno borrowing concepts such as targeted limb damage, mounting and climbing monsters and crippling/knockdown blows that all work in tandem to make boss fights feel so much grander than many other RPGs. Itsuno is quoted as saying they wanted to create a game “that really put everything together in the action parts. We figured that if there hasn't been a game made by people who understand how action works, then we ought to do it ourselves.” It is hard to argue the point, in a genre where so many fights are simply mindless slashing against a giant hitbox until a bar depletes. Climbing a cyclops' back and jabbing him in the eye with a dagger, or shooting off the serpent tail of a chimera feel satisfying and engaging no matter how many times you do it, elevating the combat beyond others in the genre.
Whether due to budget or ability restrictions, the combat does not reach the heights of the Monster Hunter franchise. I can think of few games that do. But it is the vision and scope that must be applauded for presenting a daring attempt at combat that far exceeds what any of it's contemporary peers in the genre are able to do.
As game world's expand and the appetite for open-world, non linear, find-all-the-collectibles-on-the-map-while-searching-a-hidden-cave-with-a-chest-in-it gameplay increases, the balance between expansive engaging world design and player tedium and convenience teeters. Maps are too big now to walk back and forth between. And the solution adopted by most games is simple but unengaging: waypoints and fast travel locations. Just click somewhere you've been before and you'll teleport straight there, avoiding all of that nasty trudging back and forth in a world a game designer has worked very hard at creating. The problems with this are two-fold. Firstly, it railroads the player into only traveling to pre-ordained fast travel points. You can only go to places where CD Projekt Red has put signposts across Velen, or locations where Insomniac has placed police stations across Manhattan. Players traverse the same tight corridors of a massive, wasted open world as dictated by the nearest waypoints. Secondly, and perhaps an attempt to counter the rigidity of the first point: there are far too many of them. Fallout 4 has upward of 300 fast travel locations across the map. If you can fast travel that easily to specific points on the map, completing quests is more of a slideshow of loading screens and traveling animations than any meaningful trek or journey that feels rewarding.
But it is impossible to not want to fast travel. Knowing you have four or five minutes of trudging through terrain makes the itch to fast travel unbearable.
Dragon's Dogma's solution is simple. You can carry waypoints called portcrystals with you and place them wherever you wish. Deep into a crawl through a haunted forest and running out of supplies? Simply drop your portcrystal where you are and warp home and back. Portcrystals are a rare commodity however, prohibitively expensive and found very seldom in the world. I found three during my playthrough, and the game limits you to place 10 at one time. It meant a save of time, but not a negation of the journey. Giving players an active choice in where they want to be able to access in the game world is a giving of agency still not found in modern games. Customisable but limited way points have one more benefit which impacts more greatly in this game than any other. It rewards the player for knowing the game.
I actually find it very difficult to see why people persist with New Game Plus. Why bother starting back at the beginning of a game you just played? There are of course exceptions to every rule; but I can think of few things more grim than replaying a game all the way since the beginning and following the same track over and over again.
Upon finishing my first playthrough of Dragon's Dogma, I immediately began another playthrough due to how much I was enjoying the game and was pleasantly surprised. The game, both thematically and mechanically, is designed for replays. A crafting system allowing you to forge quest items in your inventory streamlines quests. Your previous placed portcrystals are still present, allowing you to cut out much of the busy work with wisely placed fast travel points. Enemies do not scale in level, making you incredibly strong and giving free reign with your roleplaying. Much in fitting with the games theme (no spoilers here), the game becomes a repeatable open-world sandbox earned by the player through their first playthrough and subsequent gaining of knowledge. Your pawn remains the same, gaining more and more knowledge as you complete quests different, forcing different outcomes. It is a new-game plus experience that rivals any other game on the market, and rewards devoted players.
Dragon's Dogma was ambitious in scope. It was the largest open-world Capcom had ever put together in it's history. Like any good director, Itsuno claimed that “the team was only able to accomplish 60-70% of what they had wanted to in the first game,” hoping to polish the rest in a sequel that never arrived. Instead it spawned a short lived MMORPG which shut down it's servers in 2019 and Itsuno moved onto production of Devil May Cry V.
The pawn I designed was like 100 times better just fyi
It is only recently that Dragon's Dogma has re-emerged from it's near-abandonment with the announcement of an anime adaptation for Netflix that promises renewed interest in the IP. It remains to be seen if it can match the success of a similar project, Castlevania.
Judged on it's own merits and not the vapourware of a sequel, Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen remains an outlier and an innovator more than seven years on from it's release. Games with much higher budgets have delivered far less, and even in 2020 the seamless melding of online and offline solo play features still has no peer. It remains a cult classic and flawed masterpiece that still remains a unique experience for the 2020 player. Very few games in the medium are able to claim the same.