TL;DR: avoid if you don't like having your time wasted. This game will try it at every opportunity. Despite having an epic premise and a strong start, this game is unfortunately designed to drip-feed you with decent gameplay, while most of the time you'll find yourself wondering why you keep sinking hours into it despite little progress. Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is not even an RPG in a typical sense. Yes, we have a character progression, an NPC-based party system (called Pawns), a good dose of satisfying hack'n'slash-style combat, a vast open world of epic proportions, and a quest to beat the titular dragon. However, just a few hours in, it becomes obvious that the character progression makes little difference to your abilities, the combat is repetitive and clunky, and the open world is mostly empty with repetitive encounters made to fill the void of having to travel on foot everywhere, because THERE IS NO FAST TRAVEL (in a traditional sense) in this game. While there's plenty of interesting features and mechanics (climbing on top of big monsters just to bash them on the head with your sword is really cool), the game is vastly shallow and uninspiring. Majority of your quests are typical "escort a person to location Z" or "kill X amount of Y monsters in location Z", and despite having a decent main quest line you cannot even remotely compare this to the intricate writing of The Witcher 3. Nothing you do seem to have a bigger than a cosmetic impact on the world, which is just there so you could fight and level up, then fight some more. All in all, I'm torn because I wanted to like this game very much for some of its great features, a really nice and varied open world and the prospect of being immersed in it. Sadly, the game left me feeling like I'm wasting my time with little return on that investment. Verdict: AVOID
