Reviews// Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

There are some enemies that do feel brand-new to the game however. Minotaur offer a fresh challenge, combining awesome brute strength with bursts of speed that the ponderous hulks of the original game tended to lack.

Many of the chests found throughout the dungeons are home to deadly man-eating mimics who are very capable of quickly devouring one of your party whole when disturbed, leaving you a man down in the ensuing battle. And most deadly of all is the Grim Reaper himself, who stalks the island’s tunnels and can appear seemingly at random to do battle with you.

Much like the dragons in the original game, Death is a mighty foe who, true to his name/job title/whatever, is more than capable of cutting short the lives of you and your pawns. This will likely prove far too great a challenge for most players to overcome upon their first encounter.

Escaping to fight another day is the only real option, though the promise of eventually growing strong enough to kick Death’s ass is a pretty awesome goal to work towards during your adventures.

Make no mistake, the labyrinths of Bitterblack Isle are meant to be explored by high-level veterans of the original game. My fairly low-level adventurers definitely struggled to make much progress initially, though the rich rewards of experience and equipment available from just a little exploring definitely helped.

After advancing some more in the main game I was more successful upon my return to the Isle, but the deepest reaches of the dungeons remained beyond my reach. I imagine somebody who has conquered Dragon’s Dogma’s deadliest bosses and most taxing dungeons already will have a very different time of things heading into Dark Arisen, though I’m still fairly confident that they’ll find the island to be a refreshing challenge.

It’s not like they’re just throwing you out to the proverbial wolves however, Dark Arisen gives you the tools to defend yourself against these deadly new foes in the form of powerful new skills and equipment.

Rift crystals are considerably more valuable this time round, no longer used only for hiring powerful pawns but now also in exchange for a number of services. Cursed items found throughout the island can be purified into more useful equipment and high-level gear can be enhanced even further than before, so it’s good to save as much as you can.

All of this is pretty high-level stuff and if you’re a new player it’ll be a long time before you really get to make use of it, but once you’re there you’ll appreciate the extra edge these things give you against even the mightiest enemies.

A final point that might sway some is that Dark Arisen also includes most of the additional content that was released as DLC for the original Dragon’s Dogma.

This basically amounts to a bunch of generic fetch quests that really weren’t worth buying on their own, but the rewards aren’t bad and considering they’re freely included in this package then you can’t really complain about any new content.

Unless of course you’d already bought said quests, in which case you might be even further chagrined by having to buy more stuff that you already own. I guess there really is no pleasing everybody.

When it comes down to it everybody can be easily thrown into one of four groups. Anyone still putting serious hours into Dragon’s Dogma will no doubt be desperate for this to come out and give them new stuff to hack and slash their way through, so they likely won’t need much convincing here.

If you vaguely remember playing a lot of Dragon’s Dogma back in the hazy days of 2012 and got a bit of a kick out of it then the added content of Dark Arisen is definitely worth checking out.

If you never picked up Dragon’s Dogma in the first place then I can’t recommend Dark Arisen enough. Dragon’s Dogma was a suitably meaty game in its own right, and all of the new areas and beasties of Bitterblack Isle makes Dark Arisen excellent value for money for a new player.

The fourth group would be people that didn’t like Dragon’s Dogma in the first place, and considering Dark Arisen just builds upwards from the original game’s foundations those people aren’t likely to find anything here worth looking into. But screw those guys; Dragon’s Dogma was one of 2012’s best RPGs and Dark Arisen only improves upon it.

Pros
+ Great value even if you owned the original.
+ Bigger, badder bosses.

Cons
- Anything you didn’t like about Dragon’s Dogma you won’t like about this either.

SPOnG Score: 9/10