Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (PlayStation 4) review "Cheers to me for finishing this review before 2025!"

In some ways, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, despite being developed and published by Capcom, feels like any random second-tier open world action-RPG. It’s a bit clunky; outside of your protagonist’s hometown and the large capital city, its world is sparsely populated and a bit lacking in places to explore and, as a result of that, you’ll find yourself visiting most of those places over and over again in a bid to complete side quests or advance the plot. Oh, and those side quests? They’re the sort of generic and unimaginative junk you’d expect to be deluged with while playing any generic and unimaginative game. You know: “Kill 10 of this monster” and “Find five of this item”.

Yet, for one glorious month, I found myself captivated by this game, picking it up in the evening and not putting it down until it was time to collapse in my bed. Sure, some of the reasoning for that obsessive playing came down to necessity. I downloaded Dark Arisen off PlayStation Plus and, almost as soon as I started it, Sony decided it was on that service’s chopping block the very next month. Since this sort of game tends to take a fair amount of time to work through, I had to make the sort of commitment to it that normal people make to such things as “their job” or “their family”.

But even if I had all the time in the world to get through Dark Arisen, I still would have focused on it. If Capcom succeeded in one thing with this one, it was creating a legitimately fun combat experience that makes fighting large, powerful monsters feel like a truly epic experience. I might not have been all that interested in this game’s world or the vast majority of its inhabitants or the plot or the never-ending stream of generic quests found on bulletin boards, but heading out to the wilderness to tackle cyclopses or chimeras or dragons? Sign me up!

The first step in making this a lot of fun was how Dark Arisen gives players nine different character classes they can access, with each of them having positives and negatives. You start out with the option to be a Fighter, Strider (rogue) or Mage and can eventually choose between the other two classes or six different ones that are related to the original ones, but have enough differences to keep them from being carbon copies.

I started as a Strider. This guy is pretty versatile, getting a number of skills that allow him to be lethal with quick knife thrusts when close to foes and with multiple-arrow attacks when hanging back. After a while, I switched over to the Ranger class. While I could still attack with daggers, I wasn’t gaining new skills for those weapons; however, I did pick up a number of superior bow skills that allowed me to eradicate weaker foes in one volley. And if I wanted, I could have kept with that theme and moved on to Magic Archer, which combines the Ranger’s skill with bows with a magic-user’s love of elemental attacks. Or maybe become an Assassin, where all the bow stuff plays second fiddle to being lethal as hell with those knives.

Your main character quickly gains the ability to summon his own personal Pawn and then will be able to add two more to his party. Pawns are computer-controlled allies that gain knowledge about the world as you play through the game. At first, they’ll be kind of stupid due to not knowing anything about monsters or locations, but the longer you play, the smarter they’ll get. Eventually, they’ll learn what attacks a given monster is weak against and plan their battle strategies accordingly.

Having the right pawns surrounding your character is crucial to success in Dark Arisen because no single class is perfect for all situations. Ghost-class monsters are near invulnerable to physical attacks, so you need someone with magical capacities to assault them. That particular someone will be worthless in combat with Golems, as they take no damage from spells. Speaking of worthless, just watch those melee-focused Fighters and Warriors impotently flailing away at flying foes as they soar out of sword range — at least until an arrow or spell clips their wings, sending them careening into the ground!

A person can put a lot of thought into creating a party due to how each class is devised. For example: Do you want one spell-caster or two? I spent nearly all my time with two because neither Mages nor Sorcerers possess everything I desired. The Sorcerer gets some amazing offensive spells the Mage doesn’t receive. We’re talking meteor strikes and whirlwinds capable of utterly wrecking powerful foes to the degree that a lot of conflicts were essentially settled the instant my Sorcerer Pawn decided it was time to cast one of those. However, that class doesn’t get the healing magic that allow the Mage to never lose usefulness. Because let’s face it — when fighting rampaging Ogres or undead Liches, it’s a given that your guys will start getting thrown around like rag dolls.

Those foes are what makes this game so enjoyable. Even cannon fodder like Goblins and Wolves have tougher variations that can do things like kick you repeatedly after knocking you down or drag you away from your comrades for a good mauling. And the big guys necessitate a good amount of strategy. Take the Chimera for example. It’s a massive beast with three heads possessing their own attacks, with one dealing physical damage, one casting spells and one spewing poison. While the creature has a life meter, all three of those heads have individual allotments of health, meaning you can change its strategy by taking a particular head out of the fight.

That sort of stuff carried me through this game and its simple plot. Your character lives in a fishing village that gets attacked by a fearsome dragon. As a brave person, you challenge the dragon and…immediately get taken down and, through some sort of weird dragon magic, have your heart taken from you. Due to gaming logic reasons, this makes you a functional immortal destined to gain strength and challenge that dragon with a whole hell of a lot on the line. And so you go to the big capital city that’s ruled by a man renown for defeating a previous dragon and get all sorts of quests designed to give you that strength, while also fending off a cult that worships the dragon and the destruction they feel it will bring. Of course, there’s more to this whole quest than what you’ve been told, but you’ll just have to figure that stuff out the hard way.

Speaking of “the hard way”, the reason the words “Dark Arisen” are attached to the title is because this version includes Dragon’s Dogma’s Dark Arisen expansion. While you can access it really early into the game, simply by talking to a person appearing at night at the fishing village’s docks, that is not a good idea, as its island fortress is probably best tackled while going through a New Game+ run.

For me, the worst part of only having a month to play this game before it was removed from PlayStation Plus was how I only was able to get so far into Dark Arisen because, after defeating its first real boss, there was the sort of difficulty spike that made me realize I likely wouldn’t have the time to do the necessary work to make it all the way through. But man, the challenges I saw. Utterly massive giants that fortunately were (initially) chained. Extremely tough foes that randomly appear if your party leaves enough dead bodies strewn throughout corridors and chambers. The Grim Frickin’ Reaper and his instant-kill scythe swings. This would have been an awesome challenge to complete — I just ran out of time…

That was a bummer because Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is all about discovering those challenges and finding ways to topple them. I was lukewarm on the story and annoyed with how many side-quests were nothing more than generic hunts and fetch quests, but I loved being able to take down powerful and massive monsters. It never got tiresome because I was always finding something new and more difficult and would have to put my thinking cap back on again. This might not be a perfect game, but it was a fun one that made me wish I would have had one more month with it.

Community review by overdrive (December 31, 2024) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.