Medium difficulty
19 hours
EA Play

First off, let's get the technical issues out of the way. There are big framerate drops in chapters 9 & 10. The game only crashed once and was in the final boss fight. There was one point where the EA servers had issues, due to this, I couldn't even start the game. It's really stupid that a single player only game is tied to an online server to even play it.

The game's UI lives up to the hype with the only issue typically being when how annoying it is to specify what you want to pick up when there are multiple pieces of loot close to each other.
Initially, I was disappointed by how weak the plasma cutter sounded, but the other guns sounded great, and playing the game with headphones kept me on edge because I could constantly hear the necromorphs climbing around and the ambient music. The game is quite great at knowing when to stop playing music while exploring the ship.

In terms of combat, Dead Space's biggest strength is its weapons and this is why I don't view it as a "survival horror" akin to the old Resident Evils. The game generally wants to or goes out of its way to put you in combat scenarios where you must kill every enemy because it is an action game. Every weapon generally starts out feeling great and only feels better as I upgrade them. The upgrade tree is fairly simple, but in an action game like this doing little things like expanding your magazine from 50 shots to 150 shots makes for a huge difference in combat. Due to this, the game wants you to swap through weapons during combat because all weapons are very effective at killing necromorphs.
In terms of enemy placements and level design, I believe there's a strong hint of randomization to the former while the latter tends to be divided into hallways, locked rooms, and open zero-g areas. necromorphs spawn from vents, shafts, air conditioners, or around corners. There are very few scenarios where Isaac ambushes necromorphs, it's typically the opposite.
The game will also spawn enemies in that manner within save rooms, with the only exception of save rooms that are very tiny halls with little space in them, I believe this was done because one can't jump in dead space. The other thing is that enemies can't open doors and except for the first few scripted hunter encounters, enemies can't follow you through different rooms.
In terms of enemy variety, there are about 8 enemy types in the game and there will never be more than 4 or 5 necromorphs on screen at once. Within hallways and long rooms, the game also loves spawning enemies behind Isaac and in front of him at the same time. This jump scare is utilized very frequently.

Knowing all of this, I started approaching much of combat using a few strategies. Once the music changed to something more sinister or tense, I would run to have the nearest door to my back since I knew an enemy couldn't spawn since a door was behind me and they couldn't open or go through it. Afterward, I just unload on as many enemies as possible. Since head shotting or shooting center mass typically won't kill most enemies, Dead Space ends up being unique by making you shoot at limbs. Shooting at weakpoints isn't new in shooters, but making it almost necessary for all enemies is what makes it stick out. The enemies I ended up disliking the most were the hunter and the huge titan that walked on all fours. I do not like the fact that an invincible enemy is just introduced halfway through the game that only returns intermittently. There's no real reason to engage the hunter, you just end up running away and the game will cheat a bit by making him climb through vents to then follow you but only within the first adjacent room you enter and it only happens sometimes. The other titan/brute, I disliked for being a huge bullet sponge in a game where you typically can kill enemies in a few shots. I didn't get this enemy, I rarely shot off limbs because it took too many shots and at times it was difficult to tell you were even doing damage because it wasn't losing limbs or much mass from being shot.

On the topic of survival horror. I think Dead Space makes a lot more sense as a horror shooter or action horror game than survival horror. The game is incredibly generous with ammunition, healing, & other supplies. There are 8 guns and all are found by the halfway point of the game. Every single enemy in the game will drop some form of random loot when killed in the form of credits, health packs, ammo, oxygen, or stasis packs. This makes sense in terms of the setting because all the necromorphs we fight are the citizens of the Ishimura. So while it's possible to run out of ammo for 1 or 2 guns, you have 6 more at any time to switch to and you are encouraged to kill more necromorphs because they will always drop something useful and there's a high chance it will be more ammo. This is what I mean when I say this game leans far more into action territory than anything. It can be quite scary but it wants me to actively engage and kill as many enemies as possible and regularly rewards me for doing so. This all works because the combat itself feels good due to being visceral, the atmosphere and sound design, and swaps through hallway, zero-g, and arenas fairly frequently to reduce monotony. For a game that almost entirely takes place in a ship, the ship itself is not just a shade of dull brown or gray.

The armor and weapon upgrades are the long-term rewards that typically come from exploration but this is gated by the plot. Except for chapters 9 & 12, all of Dead Space takes place in one contiguous location: The Ishimura spaceship. However, one can't go to all parts of the ship because there are locked doors and trains that block access to areas. The locked doors that gate the major section of the ship are only opened when you reach certain chapters and Isaac's allies give him access there, or when Isaac's allies give him security access to locked doors. Due to that, there isn't much voluntary non-linear exploration in Dead Space. There are a few side quests in the game and they give strong context to the characters that lived in this ship and how things got as bad on the Ishimura, how some coped with it, and what others did. I liked the side quests because they weren't fetch quests and they gave good characterization to the side characters we heard of that died right before the story began.

As for the ship, it's a great locale and it is a convincing location in terms of being a place where people lived and worked. The way it is designed makes sense from a non-videogame perspective with its use of various doors that just lead through the various sections of the ship without feeling like a fake maze. Elevators are in place because people would need them to get through various floors. There's a huge medical bay because a lot of doctors/scientists worked on this ship and they grew their food and took care of patients there. There's a big mining deck because the ship is a planet cracker and is used to extract minerals from planets. There's even a place of entertainment showing that the citizens of Ishimura played Zero gravity basketball as recreation. There's a big train system so the citizens could quickly get through the entirety of the ship in quick order, but even when I walked throughout the ship, it only took about an hour through most of it and each sector was connected in a manner that wasn't a winding maze that you typically find in many video games settings. That's on top of their fictional church, restaurants, etc.

Wish this game had auto-advanced dialogue in all cutscenes. Initially, you think it does, but after the first 2 hours, a lot of dialogue needs you to constantly press x to advance.

One thing I do like is that in the skill menu, you can tag 1 skill per character in your party and the game will notify you when you have enough skill points to purchase the skill.

Though, I'm not a fan of the game's lock-on mechanic. I played on manual. It uses an automatic hard lock-on that allows you to switch between targets except you can't turn off the lock-on and your character doesn't face the enemy that is locked on so it is very normal in this sense to attack and miss because your camera isn't always following the locked-on target as one would expect. However, it mostly works out because it's clear that the game doesn't want you to always move around during combat. In that case, doing combos and landing attacks works better because a lot of moves have gap closers. There is still the big annoyance of the fact that the camera doesn't follow the enemy that's locked on nor will it automatically change to the nearest enemy unless you press the lock-on button again.

Combos are handled in a manner where the game encourages you to not just spam the base three-hit combo nor should you spam the same power moves, aka artes. Instead, you want to mix them up because if you spam your base combo, your character stops moving for a full second after it ends and if you spam the artes within a four-combo string, they will do less damage to the enemy and have reduced stagger ability. On top of that, you have the burning sword which allows you to do special moves that deal more damage than a typical arte but at the cost of health instead of AG.

I was not a fan of the balseph boss. Readability is an issue due to the amount of bullshit effects that he does that obscures the screen.

Ganabelt is a tough boss, a very tough boss. I died 5 times back to back against him. The fight has the same issue as Balseph with too many effects happening on the screen at once. Ganabelt uses a lot of projectiles with particle effects and the game also specifically wants you to use boost attacks frequently to break his shield, this leads to a messy mirage of blue, red, & green lights all blocking the screen at once. Far too much visual noise in the game in general. It is disheartening in games like this where you can do 6 back-to-back super moves on a boss and you barely remove 1000 health in his 24000 health bar. This type of game design is not something that I like at all.

It's also from this point onward that I realized that every major humanoid boss will enter their super mode where they can't be stunned and they can spam astral artes once you reduce their health down to 50%, and many of them will typically take 10 - 15 seconds to charge their ultimate move in which they're stationary and you're allowed to do a bunch of free hits on them but you can't interrupt the ultimate move. Ultimate moves typically cover a large portion of the battlefield with a huge damage area of effect attack. The issue with this is that while you can't interrupt them, they can certainly interrupt you because these ultimate moves always play an unskippable cutscene. There are quite a few moves (boost strikes and mystic artes) in this game that have unskippable cutscenes mid-combat that have pros and cons. The big pro with them is that they typically do a good amount of damage, the bad news is that they interrupt whatever the party is doing and reposition the enemy. If you or an AI party member is doing a high damage attack, charging up an arte, trying to heal, or mid-combo, the cutscene will play and completely stop that, and once the cutscene is over, it will move the enemy away and reposition the camera too. The fortunate thing is that it also resets the enemy's movement so you can get breathing room if a group of enemies or a boss is kicking ass. It's shit though if you're doing really well and you have to be forced to stop because an AI party member did a mystic arte. Fortunately, you can disable those artes from AI usage like you can disable just about every other arte in the game. It's just typically beneficial to enable them because of damage and usefulness.

Most side quests are broken up into kill all enemies, fetch items, or heal people quests. They're not spectacular, however, I love the fact that you can complete some side quest objectives before you even meet the quest giver. So if a dragon is terrorizing an area and you encounter the dragon and kill it or if you went to an underground cavern and killed a powerful zeugel - then later on stumble on the quest giver and they ask you to kill a dragon in the field or kill a zeugel because merchants want to use an underground tunnel for quick travel, your party members will tell the quest giver that you already killed the dragon or zeugles in the underground area. Too bad main quests aren't like this, they're more linear and their quest items and objectives won't even appear until you progress in the story. For such a long game, there isn't much enemy variety. I understand this because each party members boost attack directly counters or interrupts a specific enemy type but you quickly realize that you're fighting the exact same enemy over and over and it eventually got annoying. It's not the worst implementation of low enemy variety but directly coming from Kingdom Hearts 1.5, it was a surprise.

Overall though, the game world design and quest structure are very linear - not in the shimmy through tight corners like FF7 remake linear - but in the quest objectives only have one way to complete them and only one area you can through. In the manner that even though the main plot of the game is to kill 5 Renan lords and liberate 5 realms of the Dahna homeworld - you will only do it in the exact order that is outlined in the game. Even within the main quests, you will be obstructed by invisible walls for areas that the game doesn't want you to go to yet.

However, I do like the progression systems in this game. They're divided into levels, skills, and arte proficiency.

You have levels that you progress through by gaining xp which increases your 6 stats. XP is only gained in battle.

Each party member has their skills divided into multiple skill trees. Most skill trees are unlocked by completing objectives like cooking x meals, saving x NPCs, finding x owls, creating x weapons, destroying armor with your arte x times, etc., and individual skills are unlocked by using skill points. Skill points (SP) are gained by winning in combat and completing quests. So they're separate from just leveling up. Then you have your arte proficiencies which is where you increase the efficiency of your activated skills by using them more in combat. The only downside is that you won't unlock certain skill trees till you progress deep into the main story because certain side quests, NPCs, recipes, owls, etc. aren't encountered until then and this is a very linear game.

Then after that, you have combat points and the battle chain bonus. After every combat encounter, you are graded based on how quickly you killed your enemy, what moves you used, whether your party was knocked out, etc. You gain XP and SP, then you get a multiplier bonus to XP & SP if you did well and you get none if you did bad such as winning but having all party members knocked out. What the battle chain bonus does is give you even more bonuses and a greater item drop chance on top of the previously mentioned bonus if you keep on doing well in many combat encounters within a short period. I'm surprised more JRPGs don't have this mechanic because it ridiculously alleviates how long one spends grinding if they choose to do so while also giving an even greater incentive to continue combat. It only sucks that the battle chain isn't unlocked as a mechanic until you reach the 3rd realm of the game. Overall, leveling up and upgrading skills is very slow in this game. You will still gain just enough XP & SP to be roughly the same level as the major boss of the main area/dungeon. Outside of that, even defeating 20+ enemies that are each 20 levels higher than your party won't net you 1 level up. All of this level pacing gets thrown off within the end game. Right about that point you'll unlock side quests that will give up to double XP. Those quests have some of the hardest boss fights in the end game and you'll likely lose them if you aren't on the same level as the boss and if you lack healing items. By that point, all that's left is to beat the game. When you get into the post-game content, however, this game has a good amount of it. You can now fight against all the previous major boss fights except this time they're all buffed to the max level of 99. There are 6 new dungeons in alternate worlds and four new real boss fights in this, the other two are rehashes of bosses in the base game. It is important that I point out that leveling went through the roof in post-game. Within 4 hours, I was able to get 30 levels in the post-game. That's more gains just in the post-game with no farming, just fighting through each area once and their boss. It's a bit ridiculous because this pacing would've been significantly more rewarding for the preceding 100 hours. On top of that, you unlock the "devil arms" for defeating each of the bosses of this area with one caveat. 5/6 of these weapons have worse stats than the next best weapons in the game, but devil arms can be upgraded to 9999 attack, elemental attack, & penetration. They increase in all these values for every enemy you kill. I didn't waste time doing this because by this point I had already beaten every boss in the game and had no interest in farming low-level enemies to increase damage. My only thought from there is, why not introduce devil arms at an early or midpoint of the game? From there, you'd have more incentive to try using a weapon that starts with lower stats but can eventually become one of the best weapons in the game, instead of getting it after you already beat the game. On top of that, there's a new game+ with many difficulty modes. I haven't tried the hardest difficulty mode, just hope it isn't BS with giving bullet sponge enemies even more health.

Even as a party-based action RPG they've been able to severely minimize how much micromanagement you have over your party by giving you a heap of options. You can play the game manually, semi-auto where you don't need to control your movement in combat, or auto where the game plays out combat for your main character and party without your inputs. You can switch to any of your party members mid-combat and take control of them or you can leave them to act on their own. The upside of not controlling your party members is that they have access to all their active skills/artes and can use them as they please, if you control them you only have access to six ground-activated artes and six activated air artes. The AI is good enough to control your other party members good enough to fight on their own if set to manual, however, when set to auto with AI controlling the entire party there are things that aren't good enough. For one, I realized that the AI won't use dodge counterattacks, counter edge, boost attacks, or a boost strike which is weird as fuck. I understand why you wouldn't want AI doing boost attacks because they're more situational and take a while to regenerate, but the player would always want to use a boost strike on normal enemies to instant kill them and always want to do counterattacks and counteredge due to the fact that they instantly cross the battlefield to the enemy and have huge invincibility frames.

They go even further by giving you a strategy menu where you can detail exactly how you want your computer-controlled party to fight with tactics such as "use the skill "steel" once when encountering an enemy that is at least 1 level higher" or "use an ailment removing arte on anyone affected with an ailment while having 25% or more CP". It's great and I'm surprised more of these non-turn-based party-based RPGs don't have this. Dragon Age: Origins did but I wished the FF7 remake had this.

However, the game starts to spoil itself later on after the fourth major region by having a lot of combat encounters back to back. The hitboxes and button presses in this game are imprecise at times, and once you lose Shionne you lose your best healer. Dohalim isn't as good of a healer as Shionne because the game's AI wants him to engage in combat more frequently than her, even if you set the strategy to focus on healing.

Even earlier than that, after the 3rd major region, the game massively inflates the health of every single enemy. Combat now becomes extremely tedious because you need to mash a large series of buttons constantly to take down enemies that don't necessarily require better tactics than what you had in the early portion. It makes combat incredibly tiring and especially annoying. Seriously, you'll fight bosses with 150,000 - 200,000 health where your regular attacks do 90 - 150 damage and they can do 1000 - 2000 damage to your meager 2800 health bar with one hit. Far too many damage sponges as the game progresses.

This is a good time to start discussing healing and the CP system. Healing through artes/spells/skills in this game is done with a shared pool called CP. CP is also consumed by non-combat optional things like breaking scripted boulders, ice, magic barriers, and/or healing people. The only way you can heal without using CP is either sleeping in an inn, or camp, using restorative items that you buy or find in the world - though there are a few of them, and healing in a magic light right before major boss fights. This sort of healing makes you have to constantly consider how much you want to heal because you have a limit to how many healing items you can hold at a specific time. It becomes significantly more punishing mid-game because of the lengthy dungeons with no camps/inns, very few healing item drops that aren't locked behind a CP-required interaction event, and the large number of damage sponge enemies you have to fight. While you can fast travel out of dungeons and fast travel into certain floors of dungeons, doing so will respawn every enemy. This creates a weird loop where you must be fairly prepared before going into one of the major dungeons, you'll kill many enemies and eventually fight 1 or 2 major bosses and a few minibosses, get good item loot, but you can't forge those better weapons and buy the better armor unless you leave mid-dungeon so you're strong enough to fight the bosses. Without doing so, those bosses are an annoying affair with huge hitboxes and massive health bars. So you're heavily incentivized to beat every major side monster boss because they will expand your CP.

As for money, I think the game does a fine job with the economy. You have things you should be buying because forging weapons costs gold, creating accessories costs gold, and buying items costs gold. You have to forge all the weapons in the game since there are no weapon drops. While there are few pieces of armor you can find in the world, most of the armor you wear has to be bought. Same for restorative items. If you don't farm, early - mid-game you'll have to somewhat spend time worrying about not having the absolute best gear because you likely don't have enough gold or you haven't encountered the enemies that drop the necessary crafting items for better weapons. Mid-late game, however, you'll typically have more than enough gold to buy all you need because the lengthy dungeons have huge stashes of gold and items to sell.

So far my biggest gripes with the overall story is how it treats its setting, side characters, and pacing. As I progressed, I realized that each subsequent realm in the game engages in some form of oppressive government between the renans and the Dhanans.

The first realm was a slave state where the renan lord was cruel and harsh and ruled over every dhanan with an iron fist and kept them in chains. The second realm was more of a police state with a Gestapo in which the Dhanans feared for their lives and snitched on their fellow countrymen for food and safety but the dictator restricted them from owning things and letting his Gestapo run the place arresting and torturing people. The third has a benevolent Renan ruler that liberated the dhanans from slavery and gave them equal treatment and position within his realm 7 years prior. Due to that, the Dhanans don't want to leave the realm nor do they want to support a major rebellion. The fourth realm's rebellion was led by a successful dictator who sacrificed his people to drive out their old lord, but he ruled with an iron fist. The big issue with all of this is that all these ideas aren't explored in-depth and just feel very surface-level because we don't spend too much time within all these areas - just about 5 or 6 hours total - and all the side quests are very simple as previously mentioned and don't aid in large scale worldbuilding or characterization. Each of these realms could be its own game or could be vastly longer, but by the time you follow the main quest and kill the lord of the realm, the only reason you need to go back is typically one side quest that's about the aftermath of liberating that specific realm because the story is urging you to move forward > kill lord > and immediately go to the next region. There should be more engaging side content revolving around the setting because the premise in itself is interesting to require that. Insofar as dialogue and character interactions are concerned, there are 300 skits in this game which are pretty much companion cutscenes where they discuss and comment on the other characters, events, locations, politics, and their feelings toward what's happening within the story. It's great because you get to know more about what your party thinks and it provides large amounts of exposition. Just think this sort of thing would be better if it was done in a side quest or in a more environmental manner from the other characters within the story than short stilted cutscenes from your party.

Ultimately, the game was vastly longer than I expected. I ended at a little over 100+ hours which I didn't expect. I am not a fan of the latter third of the story with all the alien, conspiracy, and friendship nonsense that the game devolved into. It was almost a very expected result according to the battle shonen I've played. I don't know why they didn't just spend more time giving the previous main plot of slavery, Dahna, and Rena depth instead of the whole great spirit manipulating aliens manipulating humans thing. By the end game the game dumps a lot of exposition through many cutscenes and hallway > loading screen dungeons while having a very lame villain in Vholran. I didn't talk about accessories because I don't think there's much to talk about. It's the only real way to build your party that doesn't always have one good choice. It will make you properly strong in the endgame once you start finding 5* ores to create accessories. I ended up enjoying my time with the game.

Having some of your gadgets mapped on the D-Pad would be better than switching to your last used gadget by double tapping L1. Arkham games did this well.

There are some moves that conflict with each other. If you're too close to an enemy and try to web throw, it will instead pick them up to do regular throw. This is a problem, because you can't turn off moves you've bought and the AOE throw that I'm trying to use does far more damage than the single person throw.

There are a surprising amount of glitches and bugs in this game. Getting stuck inside unenterable buildings, stuck in the air in an invisible walls, enemies getting stuck between world geometry. The last one is the worst especially when you're doing a mission since you can't damage the enemy and can't beat the mission so you have to restart checkpoint.

Bosses are great however. The ones that particularly take use of the aerial combat and web swinging are phenomenal. Vulture and Electro boss fight was great, kingpin was very good too. Shocker, Rhino and Scorpion bosses were ok.
The missions are also quite fun with their use of traversal. Being able to cling on just about every wall, whether it's running, crawling or standing upside down is handled rather well.

OpenEMU

Completion time 07:53

Collecting items rate 84%

74 hours, 0 minutes. Did nearly every quest and beat Bitterblack Isle once. I could've beat it at the 50-hour mark, but I farmed for better loot.


a lot of last gen restrictions in this game. Loading between areas, loading between towns, console UI that needs too much back-and-forth pressing just to equip shit or open a map to set waypoints.

Fighting Cyclops is fun though especially with jumping and grabbing on them, feels less of a gimmick than Monster Hunter, fighting lots of trash mob wolves isn't. So far leveling only allows you to buy skills not pick stats. Bandit mobs are strong as fuck by being sponges of health. One save files already deleted my initial save so I restarted the game. So far all quests are fetch quests or "go here kill X spiders/bandits/cyclops". It's fun fighting things and running around, hopefully, it doesn't get boring.

Unfortunately, events led me to restart the game again and it finally clicked with me.

It's like risen with better combat, a prettier world, and a more diverse bestiary and it even has lizard men carrying weapons.

I stumbled upon one dungeon called the water gods alter and it was pretty good but I couldn't complete it because there was a locked door with an incision.

So far the bosses & pawns have been quite interesting. I've fought 4 cyclops, one with an armored head. I didn't realize until the third that there are actual benefits to grappling this one-eyed fuck. If you grapple the hand and damage it enough, the cyclops will drop his club and only use his arms for a while. My pawns kept screaming to attack his face, so I didn't know how until I jumped from grappling one body part and then grabbed his head shadow of the colossus style. Attacking his eye causes him to cry in pain and slow down his attacks and you can break his tusks for loot. The armored-faced cyclops was too protected for me to do this.

Do these enough and he'll fall to his knees and leave himself open. Once the bosses get down to their last health bar they get frenzied and start attacking wildly.

It was cool fighting a cyclops but hopefully, it isn't used too frequently. They seem to be best friends with every group but the player. They help bandits, goblins & harpies.

The chimera is much wilder and more complex. Three heads. Snakehead spits poison and covers the area around the chimera with poison. Goat head casts ice & fire spells. Lion's body is very quick, lunges, and pounces on the player with a roar that knocks everyone back.

You can grapple and cut off the snake's tail removing the poison opportunity. Kill the beast head which reduces its use of spells and eventually knocks down the chimera. Finally, you have the lion's body who I found as I was fighting is especially weak to fire around its head. My main pawn covered my sword in fire and I set attacked the lion's face when the lion roars to throw me and my pawns off the fire exploded on his mane and the entire body catches on fire damaging like 30% of its health bar.

The pawns are a mixed bag. I've realized that you have to keep switching pawns because they don't level up. I was a level 12 at the time and my shitty level 6 pawns kept dying.
Luckily pawns your level or lower don't cost a thing to recruit so I didn't mind. My big problem with the pawn system is the lack of control.

Even if I sit in the chair and answer the questions about what my pawn should be like, it still doesn't perform as well as I like. I want my dumbass mage to always hang back away from the enemy but that doesn't always happen and she keeps getting damaged. I'd like the recruited pawns to use the healing herbs I give them but that never happens at all.

Worst of all when I entered the water god's dungeon, a saurian was in the water so my pawns were hostile and tried to attack even though they couldn't hit it. My main pawn apparently fell into the water behind my back and I got a message saying I should go to a rift stone so I reloaded my save. The same shit happens but luckily she didn't fall, this time she just didn't help at all against the cyclops boss in the dungeon. She just walked around watching us fight.

I understand that it would slow down battle but so does going into a menu to heal.

I hope as the game progresses there are bit better rewards. So far all I get are some animal parts that can be used to upgrade gear and no weapon loot and only one metal boot after about 6 hours of play. I did get 100,000 gold from one of the notice board quests.

I had some really good starting armor in my item storage and fully upgraded its the best thing I've gotten even in Gran Soren, which sucks because I spent 60k on armour that was worse just to end up selling it. In gran soren more armor popped up in my item storage which was odd, it gave my main pawn some good mage clothes though.

I've also found one fast travel stone but it says it's one-time use so I'm saving it. I'd hate to keep running back and forth everywhere.

Finally, this game has random loot and very quickly respawning mobs. The former has already made me lose some good loot, the latter means really annoying wolf/ bandits/ goblin fights. It's cool that goblins change positions and camps at night but fighting them, in general, is bad.

Overall, I like the game now and it's caught my attention and made me play it more than I've played nioh. Let's hope for a dragon's dogma 2.

Yeah, the game throws too many cyclops at the player. I've beat 10 now. The Chimera too keeps respawning at the same place. I stumbled upon a dragon and it kicked my ass even though I'm level 23. I found the weak point on its chest but it still takes little damage, at best I only damaged 20% of just one health bar out of 6 health bars. So shit. I need new weapons, but Gran Soren isn't selling new shit and I have looted most places in the game and they don't have good shit.

I haven't. I've actually just been exploring the world. Looking at the world map, I've covered about 80% of it. There are some woods with a freaky old woman that I haven't gone to yet because I did that on my first try of the game. I just went back to Gran Soren and got the everfall quest but haven't started it.

things didn't pan out for getting DLC weapons. I got sidetracked and explored the north of Gran Soren because I was tired of looking for Jaspar and he didn't spawn.

I switched to the assassin class. The bow is somewhat useful but the double jump and rolling are better than the fighter, and I kept most of my armor and can still use swords.

I killed more trash mobs until I stumbled upon Soulflayer Canyon. The dungeons in DD can be linear but they tend to have good traps, bosses, and atmosphere. Putting a cyclops on the bridge with the threat of instant death from falling is different from the usual forest encounter.

The mine near gran Soren was my first encounter with an ogre. They're pretty much a smaller more agile cyclops that can block. This was one of the better dungeons just due to the variety of standing on the plates to activate different cages.

I made it to an encampment north where the dragon is near according to one of my pawns. The guy with a store had good new weapons and armor.

There was a cool flying wizard that summoned the undead. I've been looking more closely into what abilities other pawns have before I get them. I got a sorcerer that has a meteor spell. This shit pretty much kills cyclops, chimera, and the wizard but for whatever reason the pawn always takes his time before using it, usually waiting till the enemy is almost dead.

Why don't enemies interact with each other and the world around them?

I'm playing this completely offline. The pawns are still dumb, one fell off a cliff and needed help so I jumped off the cliff and died losing a good amount of progress.

Anyway, I found the fort of women. When I made it to the top, their leader immediately attacked me so I massacred all of them. The guy at the great wall encampment didn't allow me to withdraw items so I couldn't check if I had anything to fool them as my pawn recommended.

I eventually made it to the Catacombs, another good dungeon that lead me directly back to Gran Soren. The game might lack easy fast travel, but there are shortcuts here and there. I went to the DLC shop because I have 350k gold and all the DLC items are worse than what I currently have, so I have money to do whatever with.

The shitty Jasper quest doesn't spawn Jasper until you wait outside Gran Soren for like 5 minutes. This is really annoying in general because both monsters and NPCs will spawn right in your face when you don't expect it. The faggot even asked for 30k gold to help him.

With this done, the rest of the dozen quests I have are to go here and kill x enemy for money and XP which I don't need nor will I trek to those places and beat on trash mobs since I'm level 33. I'm just gonna move on with the main quest of everfall.

Quest design and the open world isn't very good in this game just due to how they don't even interact with each other.

Remember how I said I went to the water gods alter and cleared it minus one locked room? Said Locked rooms key was inside a cyclops that I previously beat only this time it spawned with the key only because of the quest.

I returned to maul's bandits and he gives me two quests and I can only do one: slay the female bandits in the north or confront a deserter. The thing is, I already slayed the female bandits and their leader but maul doesn't recognize it at all.

It would've been much better if the game was more open and had extra dialogues/rewards for doing things ahead of time instead of locking them and spawning them per quest basis. Iirc risen did this much better.

On the topic of random scenes. I advanced enough that the griffon appeared as I was leaving gran soren and interrupted some soldiers defending their carriage from goblins. Why doesn't this happen more?

Defeated the drake. Fought the Griffin until it fled to a far tower. I thought my comrades would lead me there as they led me to the first encounter, but they just walk to Gran Soren and teleport away.

At this point, the game has truly stretched its enemy variety thin. The golems I saw in the woods are here in the pass to the tower, and they have the exact same movesets as cyclops except they're made out of rock and they only get harmed in the specific gems around their body. I really do not like this specific design of a monster taking most of the damage on very small gems on the body while the rest of the body receives only 10% or 0% damage.

It works in Shadow of the Colossus because the Colossi there are much much larger than the monsters here. Here, you get stupid things like trying to hit a drake's chest that is practically on the ground meaning most of my dagger hits fail to hit the actual gem and instead just register as a chest hit. Even worse is the golem who has a gem on the palm of his hand and can't be harmed anywhere else on his body, so you have to try to hit that ridiculously small target with a sword or dagger while it's flailing all around. Mounting the monster doesn't even make it easier. How disappointing to cast a meteor and multiple crashes down on your opponent just to do zero damage because it hit its back and not its palm or knee gem?

I wish it had a far better UI. Please give me a list of everything I've crafted so I don't have to sift through my materials/tools to find specific items to then combine with others for crafting. Give me a trash can to put everything I don't want.

Really early on I had no clue what the points meant because the game doesn't explain but it became apparent as it went up new moves became available. I've now maxed out assassin and fighter and I'm playing sorcerer at level 44.

It's rather different. You have to press r1 + x square, triangle, or circle and keep on holding r1 to target a specific person or group and then let go of the spell to work. Too bad there was no tutorial but it's rather easy and quite shitty that the pawns don't attack more often because it's quite powerful.

I'm pretty much working up to get bolide & fulmination since those kill the shit out of monsters when I picked pawns using them.

My pawn now is a max mage but I don't want to switch and lose the healing spells. Full sorcerer party.

I got taken to jail for dumb shit. I stood in front of the guard in the castle at night and the screen turned black and I'm in prison. I was only there to do a quest for an important person.

I sure love the sorcerer but it has one grave flaw. You can't manually lock on. It is really annoying when you want to target a spider in front of you, or a Griffon above you, or ward on a tree and the game just won't do so with its auto lock.

Other than that the vocation is great and really opens up when you get some spells rolling in. Fuck, if only the pawns were as competent as I am. Pull back, let the tank fight, and cast bolide or fulmination.

It also hit me that V from Devil May Cry 5 could easily fit into the game with proper summons. Capcom handled the controls and moveset slightly better in DMC5 by giving manual lock-on, greater moveset, and allowing you to choose to make your familiars auto attack on the fly with better ai than the pawns.

The Griffin is also pretty great as a random encounter. So far, it's definitely been the best creature of the game next to the chimera because it doesn't appear as frequently and takes better use of the grappling mechanic of the game. Partners weighing it down so it doesn't fly high and it crashing down due to too much damage is always a visual treat. If they can take it a further step like monster hunter and allow you to damage its wings to the point it can't keep flying, that would be great for a sequel.

The Golem is just pure shit and turned me off from a full magic party. I went to find Selene in the woods and ended up fighting a golden. 2 sorcerers, 1 mage, and 1 strider. This shitty fight took 20 minutes because golems don't take damage anywhere else but the discs on their body and those discs are only harmed by physical attacks. Every single fucking spell was useless and did no damage while my dumbass strider pawn was just running around or not attacking. Once we destroyed all the other discs the final one, was again, under the foot of the golem so we had to wait for it to fall on its knees to actually damage it. We had to do this twice because the pawns don't even attack immediately they see the weakness.

This just forced me to be picky and look up a bit more about pawn inclination. Pretty much I'm only picking certain pawns that attack on sight or use items frequently. It's not perfect but their performance is better than previous pawns.

Pawns knowing info about quests have been mostly useless. They primarily give vague info or directions on quests that have quest markers so they're less useful for those quests.
The only quest its been useful is Valmiro leaving the village and my pawn telling me what type of meat he wants and where I can buy pendants for him.

On a more positive note, nights and fast travel are pretty great. It's dark as it should be, you have a lantern instead of carrying a torch on your off-hand, reducing your combat potential like every other RPG. Goblins/wolves/bandits spawn day and night but in most areas undead, skeletons, wights and phantoms spawn instead of changing how you approach those areas. Phantoms were annoying when I didn't use magic because pawns suck and can't use their spells right but as a magic user they're feasible to fight now.

I beat Grigori, it was a bit easy after all the QTE and scripted stuff were done. I was getting pissed that my pawns kept falling to their deaths so I reloaded the save a bunch which didn't matter anyway because she materialized for the finale.

Arguably the gayest thing in a video game happened. Grigori gave me a choice between saving a person or fighting, obviously, I chose to fight. Do you know who the game chose as my closest person? Valmero. What would even lead the game to believe my character liked valmero? The game was ready to make my arisen kiss him and he now follows me.

Anyway, the ending is climatic, to say the least.

After maxing vocation for Sorcerer, I switched back to Assassin just due to greater control and to rack up level-up points to later switch back to Sorcerer and get the rest of the spells I wanted. oh, boy was that a bad idea.

So BBI is based on 8 different dungeons inside a big dungeon that is progressively unlocked through keys, correct?

So far, the first two floors have been regular enemies until the grim reaper appeared out of nowhere with 8 health bars, made my partners go to sleep fought for like 20 seconds, and disappeared.

I guess this is the "hardcore" Dragon's Dogma because I'm facing health sponge versions of just about every other base game enemy but with weaker versions of those enemies sprinkled here and there. The same thing has happened in the base game where nearly all enemies I've encountered have been buffed. Bigger goblins, and more drakes are around now, the wolves have been changed to fire-spitting hellhounds, and harpies have become gargoyles.

BBI fucked me when I was inside and saw the cyclops chained to a wall, I went into a cave and came out and an undead dragon spawned with 9 health bars that I barely did any damage to, so I fled. Too bad there was an "Elder Ogre" who is the same as a regular ogre but with 8 health bars and the twist of it going after male foes instead of females like regular ogres. This thing killed me so many times, it was embarrassing.

The problem is that I have two sorcerer pawns and they're too dumb to use their OP magics even when I provide them with an opening. I really fucking hate when a pawn is casting a spell and just stops to start walking around the enemy. So the fight took a good 20 minutes or so, I left BBI, and just switched to a Sorcerer myself. In Gransys we came across a Drake and we killed the shit out of it, by me hitting it with too many spells for it to handle. Gicel is very effective against its heart.

Been in BBI. So far the reaper, cursed dragon, super dogs, the golden & silver skeleton knights, sorcerer goblins, the guardian with a hammer, the dark soul's chest, and giant skeletons are the hardest enemies that magic doesn't roll over.

The most interesting fight was the holy sorcerer that revives a cursed dragon. I killed it in under 5 minutes, I guess it wasn't expecting to fight two sorcerers.

Pretty much I neglected high maelstrom because it seemed weak when I used the regular versions or when my pawns used it. Here, I and my pawn's dual high maelstrom fucked the sorcerer. Like 3 health bars each one. Too bad he'd disappear & revive the dragon when he took too much damage or else it would've been a shorter fight.

The same spell fucked the skeleton knights too.

I tried out exequy because I had no clue how this spell really worked. I used it on a savage cyclops and it took out 7 health bars in one hit. It's a really powerful spell but that took 1 minute and 40 seconds to cast. It leads to a strength of dragon's dogma being that elevation matters in combat.

The giant one-eyed ball was terrible. Overall BBI has had greater enemy variety than the base game.

I fought the hydra after leaving BBI and it easily died. Wasn't as strong as what I'd been fighting.

Gained about 8 levels so far, and now level 68.

I have the fiend luring incense and just remembered I did when going through my storage. I already went through the area so I wasn't sure if I should backtrack and use it again. The downside is that I don't even know what a fiend is because Dragon's Dogma doesn't show the name of enemies.

I guess I should go back and fight the Gore Cyclops because it's chained on a wall and I can just wait for Exequy to finish. The reason I originally ran away was the cursed dragon coming randomly. One cool thing I found in Everfall was a Cyclops attacking a Golem and doing damage, pretty cool.

One huge missed opportunity is the new enemies not making it into the base game.

Wiki says you have to kill 300 of these giant skeletons to get 3 Stars for a pawn. Capcom must've been smoking something if they believe anyone has that patience.

Just completed the game and I have mixed feelings. Bitterblack Isle is an overall disappointment. Nothing is worse than getting a weapon that does nearly triple the damage of your last and it still barely harms a shitty drake. Everything in Bitterblack Isle is done for more and more farming, something I had less patience for. I could've just beat the game 15 hours ago if I knew this was what was awaiting me.

Seriously, the final boss who is a god dies to two hits from my bow yet a shitty drake takes more than 100 hits just to take half of one of his 8 health bars. At that point, I knew I wasn't gonna do this shit twice just to run to daimon and fight him again while fighting almost all the exact same enemies.

I have no drive to replay the game anytime soon because I already fought every single enemy, did every by-the-numbers quest and tried every single class, and maxed nearly all of them within the same playthrough.

Dragon's Dogma can be enjoyable but it has a lot of problems, and I certainly didn't like how the later portions of the game boiled down to farming the Everfall or Bitterblack Isle for random loot drops and high-health enemy sponges. So please Capcom, make a worthwhile sequel sometime.