There's definitely room for improvement, but what a great start to a new rpg franchise!
I'm going to start off focusing on the negative of this game. There is quite a bit they could have done better that will hopefully make it into future iterations.
First off is the story. You are (insert your name here), one day, out of nowhere, a big ass dragon comes around, trashes your village, rips your heart out and eats it. Somehow you are still alive. Now you are the chosen on...er the "Arisen". Commence questing, fetch quests, and assassinating various monsters and bandits as you travel this vast land. Not terribly original. Other games have handled this much better. Skyrim had fantastic quests that all made sense to the context of the game. In fact I will be making many comaprisons to Skyrim throughout the review. Not because these games are THAT much alike, but because Skyrim is probably the closest game to this available right now.
Next up is control. This is sort of a bittersweet department for me. COnsidering what all they are trying to do with this game, I feel the controls are reasonably solid. They could be much tighter and more responsive however. Often you will find a well planned attack go sour due to inconsistent response time and hit detection. Keep in mind however, you are questing in a massive, open world. While doing this, you are mixing the standard combat of your average open world rpg, archery combat that rivals many third person shooters and epic monster battles remniscent of Monster Hunter and Shadow of the Colossus. This is a pretty ambitious game and it manages to pull off it's ambition for the most part. Just not as well as it could have.
There were some glaring oversights in gameplay and UI that could have easily been fixed if the developers had further taken cues from the games that obviously inspired this one. Traveling this vast land is a very tedious chore. There is no fast travel. There is a teleport stone that will take you to the capitol city of Gran Soren, but these are ridiculously expensive and generally not worth the effort you need to make to earn the money. Weapon drops and upgrades are pretty few and far between. I have been using the same blades for my Ranger for the last ten hours. Of course my Ranger is more long ranged, but it would be nice to get stronger melee weapons for close range combat. Also, the game has a viscious day/night cycle. Traveling at night is a brutal experience fully equipped. An impossible one if you lack the proper tools. Mainly a lantern and plenty of healing supplies. Vision is very limited with a lantern. Non existant without. It succeeds in creating an intense atmosphere, but given the fact that the enemy encounter rate more than doubles at night, it makes nighttime travel a huge pain in the butt that's best left avoided whenever possible. The only way to pass time through the night is either to wait it out (which takes forever) or sleep at an inn, which can be pretty pricey. Especially early in the game when money doesn't come easily. On top of all this, you aren't allowed multiple save files. There's one save you can use and an auto save. There's no backup save in case you wish to undo a mistake and you will make mistakes on at least one or two missions, often leading to the closing of a mission thread. Plus you can't start another character without erasing your current game. So alt characters are out of the question.
Now onto the last gripe, which will segway into the positives of the game. This game has a very tough beginning. I couldn't do a mission early in the game, in which an important character to the main character must be saved, simply because the path I needed to take to get to her had a ridiculously powerful bandit band that wiped out my party every time. Point of fact, the bandit party was leveled just fine, but there was one insanely powerfull bandit that would wipe out my party after I killed all his buddies. I thought to do a few other missions to level up and upgrade gear, but that made the mission cancel and I have no idea the fate of this character. Until you reach level 20 or so, the game is steeped with uneven difficulty. You'll be slaying goblins aplenty when out of nowhere one guy will come out of nowhere and mess your party up! This can be very disheartening and initially made me stop playing for a couple months. Add to this the aforementioned problem with inns and lack of funds early on and it was tough to stick it out.
Eventually I came back though. I sludged through several deaths and eventually go into a mission my party and I could handle. This mission helped my pawn and I level significantly and we aquired a decent amount of loot and money. This opened up the game in a huge way. I wasn't able to breeze through the game from this point, but my party could now handle itself without dying constantly.
One of the highest points of the game is your party. You get teammates called Pawns. These characters are AI companions. COmpletely autonomous and surprisingly adept at helping in battle. You create one pawn to be your constant companion at the beginning of the game. You then recruit others throughout your journey. The recruited pawns don't level up with you though. Only your pawn does that. This keeps your party interesting and ever changing. The kicker is, most of the pawns you recruit, are the pawns other people made in their game. When you enter a rift stone, the game connects to servers and you get to recruit other peoples' pawns to aid you on your quests. Your pawn is also available for recruitment by others. Although the pawns never leave their player's side, they are also available to others during thier quests. This leads to your pawn gaining knowledge of the quests they did with that other player and of how to kill the enemies they fought with that player. In turn, the pawns you recruit carry over their knowledge from their player's game. It's a cool way to integrate online functions, while staying true to the single player rpg experience. Pawns are generally usefull in battle, working with each other and you to take out enemies in effeicient and cool ways.
You will need that help. Gransys is a land filled with monsters of all shapes and sizes and I do mean ALL. Most recently I experienced a frenzied battle against a cyclops that puts Skyrim's giants to shame, surrounded by a sizeable pack of at least two dozen goblins and their tougher cousins hob-goblins and just as I finished this difficult battle, I was walayed by a sizeable wyvern (really just a slightly smaller dragon). This thing kicked the crap out of my party and we barely escaped with our lives. Unlike Skyrim's dissappointingly easy dragon battles, this thing is truly tough to beat. Sporting several bars of health, a heavily armored hyde, fire breath, big talons and flight, this beast was a truly exhilerating and frightening foe.It still roams in the forest because I lack the strength to take it on at the moment, but I haven't forgotten the beating I took. I Before all is said and done I will be back for it.
That is what makes this game so special. There is a steep learning curve to the uninitiated. In the beginning it seems as daunting as the brutal Demon Souls. Once you get to the point where you can hold your own however, you will find yourself addicted. Unlike Skyrim, in which you had to play just one more mission to see what happens next in the story, you will be playing just one more mission to see what they throw at you next. Both have the same effect of playing "just one more mission" a dozen of so times till you only get four hours of sleep before work, but these games give you that addiction for completely different reasons. If Capcom takes a cue from Skyrim in some of the UI and travel departments, adds a compelling story, improves mission/story structure and variety and fine tunes the controls a good deal, the next Dragon's Dogma game could end up going from being a really good rpg to a truly legendary one.
I had to make an amendment to this review and lower the score by a point. Unfortunately there are some glaring glitches and mission design oversights that greatly detract from enjoyment of the game. Most recently was a mission that should have been available much sooner in the game, but the npc who gives it never showed up until a point in the game that cancels the mission; so you are offered the mission, receive what you need to start the mission, end your conversation with said npc and the mission cancels. Just prior to that, I had an escort mission in which my charge simply dissappeared. There was no attack, in fact he handled himself pretty well during prior attacks. We were just walking and all of a sudden I received a mission cancellation. He was just gone and so were my chances of comlpeting the mission. Add to the aforementioned travel issues and autosave issues and you end up with some very frustrating scenarios. I know I can just play the game again, but if we had the option to save manually in mutiple slots, this would greatly reduce this frustration. If a fast travel system were also implemented, I'd be able to completely forgive these annoying issues and stick with my original score. I understand that fast travel takes away from the realism the devs are attempting, but a travel system similar to Morrowind's would keep that effect. Meaning hiring transportation to take you to known locations and back to Gran Soren.
None of this makes me regret playing the game. I am still enjoying it very much, but these issues are highly irritating and do detract from the enjoyment quite a bit. Again, I hope these things are addressed in a sequel.