Now is the perfect time to return to Dragon’s Dogma

polygon.com:

As we round out a year in which Nintendo built cheat codes into its most revered series and Insomniac let us swap between two superheroes on the fly, it’s worth looking back at 2012, when Capcom ignored convention and did something dastardly: It made Dragon’s Dogma, an open-world game that actually felt dangerous. And with the sequel right around the corner, now is the perfect time to return to the cult classic, which you can play on Windows, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

Dragon’s Dogma, as the name might imply, is about slaying a mythical dragon. Along the way, you also accept contracts to hunt griffins, hydras, and harpies, to name a few, as a Witcher-esque sword for hire. But Dragon’s Dogma is also about venturing into a foreboding landscape that doesn’t want you there. It’s about gathering a party of AI companions that you’ll grow to trust (or hate) when the shit hits the fan. It’s about that moment after you’ve just triumphed over a cave troll and begun the long trek back to the city, only to see the sun sinking, knowing that you may not have enough supplies for the return journey.

Created by Street Fighter and Devil May Cry veterans, Dragon’s Dogma is as much an arcade-y hack-and-slash as it is a vanilla survival sim. There’s even a bit of Monster Hunter in the way you can latch onto a cyclops’ back and cut it as much as possible before it shrugs you off. Game designer Makoto Tanaka compared the game’s concept to the act of walking across the plains of Africa and encountering a lion, elephant, or giraffe — just swap out the creatures of the savanna for mythological beasts, and you have something similar to the fantasy world of Gransys. (This elevator pitch reminds me of Far Cry 2, and that’s never a bad