Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is an open world RPG developed and published by Capcom. You play as The Arisen, on a quest to slay the dragon who took your heart. Many claimed Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen to be an extremely underrated game comparable to Skyrim and Dark Souls but I disagree with that statement. While I’ve had fun in the game, there were many frustrating moments.

Story & Characters
I will not comment too much on the storyline as I would like to keep this review spoiler free but I do enjoy the story personally. I can see how the story can be pretty boring to some but personally, I am not too demanding when it comes to the story. Just give me a game with good combat and a huge map to explore and I’ll generally give the game a good review. As for the characters, there are many likeable characters in the game with a solid backstory. I personally enjoyed the backstory of Selene as it really intrigued me. A lot of the characters in the game have a unique backstory which is what I really like.

Combat & Vocations
Combat in this game is really well done. It is fluid, responsive and satisfying. I primarily spent my time playing as the fighter vocation. You start off with your basic light and heavy attack plus two skills in which you can utilize with your sword and shield. As you progress further, you’ll get to learn more skills and augments which are basically your passive abilities. In addition to skills, there is also this grapple mechanic which allows you to grab an enemy, allowing your companion to finish it off. Grappling also allows you to climb onto bosses to hit certain parts of their body which are unreachable especially if you’re a melee class. As you climb onto them, they might even attempt to shake you off which I find really neat! Also, bosses might grab you and there’ll be a quick time event that allows you to break hold of its grasp. It requires you to mash the ‘A’ and ‘D’ key repeatedly until you break free. In my opinion, the combat is truly one of the major selling points of this game.

Classes are known as vocations in Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. You start off with three classes: Fighter, Strider and Mage. As you progress further, you’ll get access to advanced and hybrid vocations which brings it to a total of nine vocations! The advanced vocations are the Ranger, Sorcerer and Warrior. The hybrid vocations are the Assassin, Magick Archer and Mystic Knight. All these vocations supplement players with a variety of playstyles and there’ll definitely be a vocation which suits your cup of tea! Not to mention, it also gives the game a ton of replay value. It is worth mentioning that you’ll be able to switch vocations anytime you please when you reach the capital city and you do get to go there somewhat early in the game.

Pawn System
Companions are known as pawns in this game. I find the pawn system to be rather unique as there isn’t really a game out there which has something quite like it. Firstly, you’ll get to create and customize your own pawn and you’ll be able to upload it to the server which makes it summonable by other players. This obviously requires an internet connection. As other players summon your pawn, they’ll travel with the player and when they return, they’ll gain quest and bestiary knowledge along with currency known as rift crystals. Quest knowledge allows pawns to aid you better in quests while bestiary knowledge allows pawns to learn the weaknesses of certain mobs. Rift crystals, not to be confused with gold which is the main form of currency in the game, are used to hire pawns from other players which are higher level than you. Secondly, as I’ve mentioned previously, you can hire other pawns from other players. You can have a total of three pawns travelling with you at the same time, one of them being the pawn that you’ve created and two of them being the hired ones. This makes it so much easier when you’re adventuring as you can let your pawns hold onto your stuff for you while you gather resources. Lastly, you can give your pawns commands! Tired of hearing your pawn repeating the same sentence over and over? You can ask them to shut up! You can do that by going to an inn and at the inn, there’ll be something called a knowledge chairs and this lets you change how your pawns behave. There are also basic commands you can give to them when you’re out in the field. Honestly, I haven’t dabbled much in online player due to my ♥♥♥♥ internet as of late so there might be one or two points I might have missed.

Amazing Soundtrack
Music can either help with immersion or completely destroy it. This game has some of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a video game and it definitely helps a lot with immersion. I would say it's on par with or even better than the music you'll hear in Skyrim!

So what’s the problem?

Pawn AI
Pawn AI is terrible in this game. I've had many experiences in which I would give them commands to follow me as I ran away from enemies but they would just stand still and take hits from them. At times, they would also get in my way as I loot stuff near a ledge or they might just walk off the ledge themselves like an idiot. I love the pawn system but the AI can prove to be frustrating.

One Save File
One save file. One. Save. File. Do I really need to elaborate on this?

Dull Sidequests
While I do enjoy the main story arc, the sidequests are absolutely dreadful. Majority of them usually involve you killing x amount of mobs or collecting x amount of items. There are also multiple quests that require you to travel halfway across the map, these are known as escort quests. As you escort an NPC to its destination, you’ll probably face off against countless trash mobs and probably a boss or two. While it gives you the opportunity to gain more exp along the way, it drags out the amount of time it takes to complete the quest and there is a chance that you might fail it as the health of the NPC drops to zero. Fortunately, there is an easy way to complete escort quests and that is to travel to the escort destination first before picking up the quest and placing down an item known as a portcrystal at the location. Then you’ll be able to directly teleport there without having to worry about the NPC’s health dropping too low. Even with that, escort quests are incredibly boring and provide no additional story whatsoever. The few sidequests that I actually enjoy doing are the ones with extra bits of story in them but sadly, there weren’t many that you could do.

Cancelled Quests
Why is this a feature? Never have I ever played a RPG game whereby your sidequests gets cancelled if you do not complete it before a certain part of the main quest. I'm pretty disappointed in you Capcom, this should've never been a thing. We should have the freedom to do sidequests whenever we want to and not have it cancelled. I guess I can kinda understand what Capcom is trying to do here as some side quests might not make sense after finishing a particular part of the main quest but I still do not agree to this.

TL;DR Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen had a lot of potential going for it with its unique pawn system and excellent combat but the major flaws held it back from possibly being one of the best RPGs ever made.

Rating: 6/10 - Slightly better than average

There are still a lot of features/mechanics that I have not touched on as that would make this review tediously long. Everything mentioned above are the major boons and banes of the game.