Dragon's Dogma is a very unpolished gem. The story is quite short. Just as you are going to experience the highs, the game suddenly pushes you towards the ending. For an RPG, it doesn't have much role playing aspect to it either.

But a gem is still a gem. Dragon's Dogma really shines when it comes to combat. It's somewhat similar to Monster Hunter, but different enough. Although the amount of enemy variety is lackluster, the amount of combat variety and how you approach them can differ.

The battle system looks interesting, but the story part seems close to nonexistent from the 5 hours I played. This game resembles an MMORPG more than an RPG. Many small things in the game are weird and unpolished, like the quality of life stuff when you click buttons in UI and manage characters' inventories (guess the game was intended for consoles) or the way how economy scales: killing one random mob may give you 10k money when you turn Hard Mode on, whereas one collectible ingredient or junk item costs 50 money, so there isn't really a point in collecting and micromanaging the stuff - you can just buy it in any quantities you want. It's very unobvious what to do even when you are on an active quest: some random blue circle markers on the map that don't do anything when you reach them; first quest in the game you pick leads to camp of unkillable bandits; a cutscene ends, you are supposed to go fight a monster but when you try to go to the gate an npc is scripted to send you back with words "Do Something" and you look through whole location only to find out that you had to go to the other gate. The companions being literally soulless uninteractable npcs was a disappointment too, even though that's the design. The game looks unpolished with it's underdeveloped ideas.

Dunno, maybe if I gave it more time, I would have found out that it gets better further, but after yet another random one-shot death that sent me to a pretty far last save, I guess that's a good moment to end the playthrough. If you like grinding, leveling, killing monsters and exploring you may like this game. If you like the BG, KoTOR, DAO, Witcher kind of RPGs, then you probably wont.

󠀡󠀡