Watch my playtime climb because I played the ever-loving hoo-ha out of DD on 360 and I'll play the ever-loving hoo-ha out of it now.

GAMEPLAY - PROS
Dragon's Dogma is one of those unique titles that only comes around once in a blue moon. It is a solid, slick action role-playing game with an innovative mechanic: The Pawn System. In addition to creating and developing their own Arisen protagonist, every player makes their own Pawn partner. More than just accompanying you on your adventure, your pawn will be shared with other players and can be hired to accompany them in their game. (Your Pawn is always in your game, regardless). While away, your pawn won't level up, but it will gain quest, enemy and environment knowledge from his or her adventures abroad. It will also do this while adventuring with you. This accumulated knowledge is utilized in DD's phenomenal AI simulation, which defines a wide variety of behaviors for pawns based on what they have learned over the course of play. There are few Artificial Intelligence simulations more robust in any video game than DD's pawn behavior. The only other game with more advanced AI that I can think of is The Sims.

The pawns don't just get stronger by making stat numbers go up. They actually begin to play smarter and more effectively the more you play. And so will you, since DD also boasts extremely robust enemy and level design. Players and pawns alike will learn to take advantage of terrain, shortcuts, enemy elemental weaknesses, the results of targeting an enemy's specific body part, handy crowd control moves and spells in combat, the game's fluid maneuverability moveset, unique character builds and party composition, and a whole host of minute variables in DD's design all meant to provide you with inventive challenges and strategies. Pawns will help you through quests with hints on what to do next, give you tips on how to traverse certain areas, and will coordinate with you and each other in combat to bring down enemies quicker.

At the outset, before new Arisen become aware of just how deep this game is, expect to get your butt handed to you A-LOT. The thing is, DD is one of those few games I've played where you can attain true mastery of the experience by learning all of the ins and outs and shortcuts and tricks of play. And discovering new things never ends, apparently, since just this last time I stumbled upon a shortcut in a forest that after umteen playthroughs shortened the time it takes to traverse the area by 90%. It never occurred to me that it was there.

CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION
Wow. Just... wow.

CONTROLS
This game's movement and combat controls are among the best I've ever played. Quick, responsive, and fluid. DD's controls are built to feel as smooth as glass. As an ARPG, combat is DD's bread and butter. And BOY is the combat slick af. Violent, visceral... this is some serious heavy metal $h!t. Many critics agree that you will be fighting the same enemies a bajillion times over the course of the game, which is true, but for me it never gets old. Enemy groups are also found in the same places every time. There are a few occasional boss encounters in a few places that might seem random at first, until you figure out they're on a spawn timer. But at least this makes traversing a few areas surprising.

AUDIO - CONS
What does get old is the pawn chatter. These NPCs are the chattiest mofos in a video game ever and they never shut up for a second. What's worse is they trigger the same lines under the same conditions every time. Think every obnoxious "Arrow to the knee," "Patrolling the Mohave" and "I'm Dying From Poverty" line you've ever heard from every RPG ever. They've all got nothing on DD's pawns. And NPCs aren't any better. Vendors will repeat the same lines every time you navigate the shop menu. The same line. Repeated. Every. Single. Time.

AUDIO - PROS
Fortunately this version finally has an option to shut the pawns up that doesn't involve just muting the voices. Although setting the voice volume to 0 is the ideal method. Also fortunately, the game has options for full subtitles so you can read and not have to miss anything.

OTHERWISE, audio is marginally useful in gameplay. Sound effects can alert you to the presence of monsters even when you can't see them (or haven't noticed them yet.) Which isn't a big deal once you become familiar with all the enemy placements.

MUSIC is appealing and appropriate throughout and while good, doesn't exactly stand out to me among video game soundtracks.

GAMEPLAY - CONS
Another point of criticism is the checkpoint system. The game has two types of "saves." The game is saving game state progress almost constantly and at regular intervals. However, if your Arisen dies you get sent back to the last checkpoint, which is either the last time you completed a quest stage, entered certain areas, or used an inn, camp, or rift stone. Since much of the game involves trekking across wide open world environments teaming with hoards of monsters and powerful bosses, this means that you've just spent the last 40 minutes crossing the world and slaying legions of monsters only to get wiped and now you go all the way back to where you began.

In the current year this game released, that nonsense was considered medieval. There's still no excuse for it. The penalty should be in gold or expee, not precious moments of our worldly existence.

GAMEPLAY - CONS
I'm going to list DD's fast travel system as a con but not for what many familiar with the game might expect. I like the way DD handles fast travel. Initially, you can only warp to two locations - the starting area and the game's central hub area. However, during main quests you can acquire markers which you can drop almost anywhere in the game's overworld exterior to act as fast travel points. Some people think this makes traveling too restrictive, but DD is all about being prepared to set off on an intrepid trek through hostile lands and fighting your way through every epic struggle along the way. By earning the fast travel points through the main quests and then venturing further across Gransys and dropping your marker in new lands you really feel like you're conquering the world like a boss. The base game even had limited use fast travel tokens that would be consumed upon use, but were easy enough to acquire if you were even marginally conservative with fast travel use and knew where to find them. But the DLC provided a endless use ferrystone that is included with the Steam purchase. Yes, I use it, but only because it's there. But since I didn't have the DLC on 360 I still prefer having the possibility that I had to limit my fast travel use and not abuse it as is so common in games today. Either way, it isn't much of a hindrance and the way DD manages its fast travel strikes a healthy compromise between it being a convenience feature without negating the challenge that is the core tenant of the game

GRAPHICS - CONS
Do you like gray? Because DD's got gray. You've never seen how many shades of gray exist until you've played DD. Occasionally, the monotony of gray pallet might be broken up by some random shade of brown. But you're playing this game colorblind and in the dark since for gameplay purposes most areas are shrouded in darkness like the basement you live in.

Models are rough if basically competent. Animations are... present. Character models aren't first generation Lara Croft but they only boast a few more polys than that. But oh Lord the textures! We're looking at some truly horrific low resolution textures here. And the "HD" textures the Steam version comes packaged with is like freshening up a wad of moldy poop so it's not so moldy and is just moderately fresh poop. It's still poop.

Look, the game is fugly as your mum. About the only thing about the graphics that look alright is the lighting which is still unimpressive but serves its purpose of lighting things up in real time.