Chapter 01
While the moon and the stars proclaimed their radiance in the night sky, none were as more radiant than she. High above the clouds soared a girl with tied and braided charcoal hair and silver wings, gliding passed illuminated puffs of white which soaked in the full moon’s light. Catching the wind, she dove into the glow and flew with water vapors beading against the surface of her goggles. Once she emerged, the glow turned red and was accompanied by the bombastic bursts of flames in the air. What was a serene night became violent and threatening as steel warships lumbered in the sky launching vollies of hell-fire at each other creating a surface of smoke and flames. Ceasing her descent, she tried to catch the wind again to rise above it all, but the winds pushed her closer to the battle.
The closer she got, the screams and tearing of ship material carried more clearly and loudly on the wind. Heat from the flames pulsed on her cheeks and it wasn't long before the screaming torpedoes starting launching closer and bursting around her. Panicked, she tried diving below the carnage, but a sudden shock wave from a nearby explosion ripped through her body. Her left wing was damaged and the pain started in her shoulder and ran through her left side. The blast stunned her enough for her to start falling, not by choice, but by the force of gravity. Spiraling down she struggled to reorient herself, desperately trying to slow her plummeting body by use of her other wing, but it was all in vain.
The war noises trailed off through the rushing, upward wind around her, and she could sense the blackness that the earth was getting closer. Only when a flash of light from an explosion light up the sky could she see the tops of trees and mountain slopes and how close she was from her doom. In a decision to save her life, she did her best to steer towards a nearby lake. Forcing her limp wing to steady itself despite the numbing pain, she regained a steady flight and glided towards the body of water.
The water jetted by her as she prepared to crash. Barely grazing the surface of the lake, her body skipped helplessly along the surface until finally hitting the water hard enough to stop. The force knocked most of her senses out as waves of water started crashing over her head. The frigid cold shocked her already damaged body as she helplessly tried keeping her head above water.
She could feel her vision fading as mouthfuls of air became gasps and sputters. Moments became blurry but voices seemed to be coming closer and closer. Soon she felt a tugging on her arm and then a strong grip. As her body was lifted upward the numbness and pain met the night air. It was either by some miracle she was being pulled out of the water or her fading into the abyss made it feel like the water was disappearing around her as she drifted away.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Dragon's Dogma Review
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. Let us begin...
Straight away, the tutorials should be turned off immediately. Their onslaught of messages, citing every thing you could possibly want to know about the game, and some stuff you figured out already will bombard if left to the game's devices. The pinnacle of torment came during the first major fight with a hydra, which was accompanied by a symphony of companions screaming orders and hints about the battle, tutorials flashing by, and oh, did I mention the hydra rampaging the encampment? A more inopportune time for my attention, there was not. Try again when my allies aren't playing kibble to a towering hellspawn.
Storywise: a tale like this can only be described as simple. It is template western fantasy with little variation. In summation: you are destined (because someone must be) to slay a dragon (because there's always one terrorizing a kingdom) and the only way to do so is to run through a bunch of fetch quests to prove your worth (because being destined isn't quite enough anymore).
I'd wager great story-telling was not a focus of this game. Although, I will point out the game is quite daring with its progressive ideas. As a female character, the main love interests are still all women. It's a refreshing stance on modern social dilemmas that really pave the way for more game developers to advance a social cause... or maybe the developers were lazy and thought no one would want to save the day playing as a girl. Well I proved them wrong.
Gameplay direction is a tale of two extremes: on one hand you have a tutorial system that isn't afraid to repeat the same hints for you just in case you weren't paying attention, and on the other, quests are extremely cryptic about what you're supposed to do or where to go. Heed my advice, make friends with a guide, online or physical.
The allure of this game is the ability to create a companion, or pawn as the game calls them (pawns indeed... mwahahah), character and recruit several others to your aid. You may choose to venture out into the world with only your partner to aid you, or you can enlist others from an inter-dimensional fog realm where others are just waiting to join the fray. This is the game's multiplayer aspect, and since I abhor the idea of other people touching my things, no one was going to lay their grubby hands on my team. Offline mode was my preference needless to say.
Vocal choices for your companions are disturbing. While a few sound like a human's natural speaking voice, several felt like the pitch was adjusted digitally in a studio. So what you have is a human with the voice of a chipmunk in some cases. The opposite is also true with female voices sounding particularly man-ish in some ranges.
Luckily, the game provides you with the means to change your companion's attributes to something less annoying very early on in the game. And you'll want to change any annoyances because your compatriots never shut up. Reiterating the same tired lines again and again is common practice for them. Either due to lack of memory or perhaps thinking you didn't hear them the first one hundred times, they have great enthusiasm for pointing out the obvious to you and yet still speak archaically about any serious tasks.
In a strange twist, I have to raise complaints with the saving functionality of this game. What has come to be known as standard was cast aside and replaced with ineffective nonsense. Normally, there are two means to save your game: auto-saving which the game does at various points, and a normal save which the player does manually. Not only are both those features present, but a check point system has been added which adds to the auto-save feature.
But not all auto-saves are check points, only a select few. This wouldn't concern me if it wasn't for the return to checkpoint option when loading the game. Check points are too far between for them to be considered as a viable means to return to the game, nor are check points made clear since it seems like the game is performing a regular auto-save. Only by text below the auto-save message indicates when a check point has been reached. Only by this text, which will most likely be ignored because of the frequency of auto-save and un-immediate nature, will you ever know.
What happened to me, before I figured this out, went thus: after many hours of running around questing, I had gained points to put into my skills. Being the excited type, I ran towards the character responsible for setting of said skills and acquired more powerful abilities for my mage.
Again, being the excited type, I felt the need to test these new skills on the town and its inhabitants. So after some bystanders met their end to my flames, I was promptly arrested and thrown in jail. Not wanting to deal with the complicated matters of justifying the murders of innocent people and auto-save having kicked in for some reason, I decided to go back to the nearest check point, which was established two hours ago. My mage's flames had no wrath like my scorn at the moment of realization.
But not all is lost: summoning a tornado to launch your enemies into the sky only to see them come screaming back down is a pleasure like no other, and one I've only found in Dragon's Dogma. It's one of the only games where genuine power can be felt by casting higher level spells on foes as opposed to most games having mages feel nothing more than a paper towel which lobs sparks at the enemy.
Though you may pick a job class at the start, you're by no means tied to that class for the rest of the game. You'll find that, as you increase in skill, brand new jobs will be available to you and your party. Any class unlocked by the achievements of a pawn or yourself are applicable to any other party member. The classes I have sampled all play uniquely and offer a good amount of fun.
Overall, Dragon's Dogma is a game I highly enjoyed. Traversing the land and stumbling upon a chimera in the night, then waging battle in the dark with only the light from my flame spells illuminating the ferocious beast. And then bringing the monstrosity down with a barrage of magic while charging at me with its dying lunge is the very reason I play games like this. So for its flaws, it's worth it.
Straight away, the tutorials should be turned off immediately. Their onslaught of messages, citing every thing you could possibly want to know about the game, and some stuff you figured out already will bombard if left to the game's devices. The pinnacle of torment came during the first major fight with a hydra, which was accompanied by a symphony of companions screaming orders and hints about the battle, tutorials flashing by, and oh, did I mention the hydra rampaging the encampment? A more inopportune time for my attention, there was not. Try again when my allies aren't playing kibble to a towering hellspawn.
Storywise: a tale like this can only be described as simple. It is template western fantasy with little variation. In summation: you are destined (because someone must be) to slay a dragon (because there's always one terrorizing a kingdom) and the only way to do so is to run through a bunch of fetch quests to prove your worth (because being destined isn't quite enough anymore).
I'd wager great story-telling was not a focus of this game. Although, I will point out the game is quite daring with its progressive ideas. As a female character, the main love interests are still all women. It's a refreshing stance on modern social dilemmas that really pave the way for more game developers to advance a social cause... or maybe the developers were lazy and thought no one would want to save the day playing as a girl. Well I proved them wrong.
Gameplay direction is a tale of two extremes: on one hand you have a tutorial system that isn't afraid to repeat the same hints for you just in case you weren't paying attention, and on the other, quests are extremely cryptic about what you're supposed to do or where to go. Heed my advice, make friends with a guide, online or physical.
The allure of this game is the ability to create a companion, or pawn as the game calls them (pawns indeed... mwahahah), character and recruit several others to your aid. You may choose to venture out into the world with only your partner to aid you, or you can enlist others from an inter-dimensional fog realm where others are just waiting to join the fray. This is the game's multiplayer aspect, and since I abhor the idea of other people touching my things, no one was going to lay their grubby hands on my team. Offline mode was my preference needless to say.
Vocal choices for your companions are disturbing. While a few sound like a human's natural speaking voice, several felt like the pitch was adjusted digitally in a studio. So what you have is a human with the voice of a chipmunk in some cases. The opposite is also true with female voices sounding particularly man-ish in some ranges.
Luckily, the game provides you with the means to change your companion's attributes to something less annoying very early on in the game. And you'll want to change any annoyances because your compatriots never shut up. Reiterating the same tired lines again and again is common practice for them. Either due to lack of memory or perhaps thinking you didn't hear them the first one hundred times, they have great enthusiasm for pointing out the obvious to you and yet still speak archaically about any serious tasks.
In a strange twist, I have to raise complaints with the saving functionality of this game. What has come to be known as standard was cast aside and replaced with ineffective nonsense. Normally, there are two means to save your game: auto-saving which the game does at various points, and a normal save which the player does manually. Not only are both those features present, but a check point system has been added which adds to the auto-save feature.
But not all auto-saves are check points, only a select few. This wouldn't concern me if it wasn't for the return to checkpoint option when loading the game. Check points are too far between for them to be considered as a viable means to return to the game, nor are check points made clear since it seems like the game is performing a regular auto-save. Only by text below the auto-save message indicates when a check point has been reached. Only by this text, which will most likely be ignored because of the frequency of auto-save and un-immediate nature, will you ever know.
What happened to me, before I figured this out, went thus: after many hours of running around questing, I had gained points to put into my skills. Being the excited type, I ran towards the character responsible for setting of said skills and acquired more powerful abilities for my mage.
Again, being the excited type, I felt the need to test these new skills on the town and its inhabitants. So after some bystanders met their end to my flames, I was promptly arrested and thrown in jail. Not wanting to deal with the complicated matters of justifying the murders of innocent people and auto-save having kicked in for some reason, I decided to go back to the nearest check point, which was established two hours ago. My mage's flames had no wrath like my scorn at the moment of realization.
But not all is lost: summoning a tornado to launch your enemies into the sky only to see them come screaming back down is a pleasure like no other, and one I've only found in Dragon's Dogma. It's one of the only games where genuine power can be felt by casting higher level spells on foes as opposed to most games having mages feel nothing more than a paper towel which lobs sparks at the enemy.
Though you may pick a job class at the start, you're by no means tied to that class for the rest of the game. You'll find that, as you increase in skill, brand new jobs will be available to you and your party. Any class unlocked by the achievements of a pawn or yourself are applicable to any other party member. The classes I have sampled all play uniquely and offer a good amount of fun.
Overall, Dragon's Dogma is a game I highly enjoyed. Traversing the land and stumbling upon a chimera in the night, then waging battle in the dark with only the light from my flame spells illuminating the ferocious beast. And then bringing the monstrosity down with a barrage of magic while charging at me with its dying lunge is the very reason I play games like this. So for its flaws, it's worth it.
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