Dragon's Dogma is singularly bold and focused in a genre where everyone seems to agree that's financial suicide. Odd and offputting in so many ways, I can only really compare its appeal to the first half of the original Final Fantasy: the joy is in the tedium of the simple fantasy adventure and having to fight tooth and nail to get a bit further out from your home base each time. Improvement largely comes through learning exactly what your limits are through poking and prodding the possibilities in front of you and working within them until they expand ever so slightly, then repeating the process.

I think if I were setting out to make a game to capture this same moment-to-moment feeling of simple adventure today, I'd default to throwing in a ton of survival mechanics, but Dragon's Dogma is much more traditional than that. This IS an experience that is largely about the mundane, but it's still the mundane parts that make it into the movie, even if only the director's cut. It's about making decisions about when and where to cross the river in your way, routing around cliffs, and finding a warm place to sleep for the night. I appreciate that this is built to be the perfect game for a certain kind of person. It doesn't perfectly hit the mark for me, but having a single Big Fantasy Open World Video Game that isn't trying to appeal to everyone at once is so refreshing.

And yeah, of course the combat is super dynamic and the pawn system was such a forwardthinking approach to multiplayer that it still feels like a glimpse into the future.

also how do you fuck up colors that bad why is the banding so intense what the hell