YMMV / Dragon's Dogma

Game

• Accidental Innuendo: You get this reaction from a pawn when they see a Cockatrice for the first time.
  It has the head of a cock!
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Duke Edmun. Did he take the Dragon's deal to sacrifice his beloved in exchange for power because he was afraid that the Dragon was truly undefeatable (as he suggests when he confronts the Arisen after the Dragon is slain), or did he take the deal for the sake of gaining power? Was his mania following his Rapid Aging post-Dragon slaying brought on by pure madness, or a need to justify himself for sacrificing his beloved when he didn't need to because, as you had proven, the Dragon could be defeated?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Gran Soren's fields area includes a herd of boars inside an enclosure. Dragon's Dogma is set in a classic Middle Age-like world and, in our own universe, pigs were domesticated thousands years ago, but the pink, smoothed skinned pigs we all know didn't exist in the Middle Age. Those "boars" are supposed to be domesticated pigs, because historical medieval pigs looked like boars.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • Though the pawns are good fighters, they're unfortunately chatty and often repeat themselves a lot. Even the developers seem to have ended up agreeing, as the Dark Arisen version of the game includes the menu option to turn "Pawn Chatter" off.
  • Magic-based pawns have a rather bad habit of granting you elemental effects that are nearly useless against whatever powerful enemies you're fighting. Sometimes they'll even announce that an element is useless against an enemy, then grant you that same element moments later, making the fight even harder than it already is. You just might find yourself running away from the glowing magic orb making its way towards you, instead of the monster you're supposed to be fighting. They'll also freely attack golems with spells, despite them being immune to magic.
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • There's a lot of build-up leading to the actual boss fight against Salomet; the questline of taking him down is relatively long, he taunts you in cutscenes, and your final confrontation with him takes place in the Bluemoon Tower's top arena. While his gimmick consists of teleporting and summoning skeletons, he's still surprisingly a Squishy Wizard. If you have proficiency with the bow and brought Pawns that can buff your attacks, Salomet can be defeated with just a few bow skills.
  • Considering Savan is a Physical God that defeated a Physical God when he was still only a Badass Normal and is supposed to be the most powerful entity encountered in the game, he should be at least somewhat challenging. He is weaker than many of the mooks in the game and, by the time most players would fight him, he will drop in a couple of hits with any weapon. His damage is also extremely low, so there is very little chance of him actually killing you either, unless you deliberately waited for him to land a One-Hit Kill for a particular ending. For what it's worth though, he wants to be defeated and die, so that he may no longer be Seneschal.
• Awesome Music: The whole game's soundtrack is incredibly sweeping and epic in scope. The game's composers wisely chose to implement guitars alongside traditional epic fantasy instruments, and it makes the whole experience that much better. A small selection:
  • Into Free ~Dangan~, the original main menu song. It's sung by the legendary Japanese band, B'z. Unfortunately, not present in the Updated Re-release.
  • The rerelease spares no time with the awesomeness with its main theme, Coils of Light, and its English version is no less amazing than its original version.
  • End of the Struggle, the theme that plays whenever you fell a large and powerful beast (such as a Chimera or Cyclops) makes it feel like you won a war. Many players pick fights with these monsters just to hear this theme.
  • The Plundering Fortress, which plays as you retake the castle that is occupied by goblins.
  • Throat's Blade, the song that plays when fighting the Nameless Men. A bit of a wasted song, as most players end up winning the fights way before they can find out the track is almost one and a half minutes long.
  • Despairing Combat, a track which kicks in when you are in over your head facing much higher-leveled enemies. Unfortunately, also a wasted song like the above because once you become high-leveled enough, you're not likely to hear this again.
  • Griffin's Bane, the boss theme of the Griffin, is particularly impressive. The boss theme of the Cockatrice, Wings of Jet, is an even better remix with a more aggressive tone.
  • Clash of Fates, the theme when you face The Dragon.
  • Selection of Fate, the final battle theme against the Seneschal.
  • And finally, Eternal Return, the magnificent ending theme to the game. For a bonus, also sung by Aubrey Ashburn, the same woman who did Leliana's song.
  • This unused track, a remix of End of the Struggle which was presumably meant to play while fighting Bitterblack bosses. How or why it was decided not to use it in the final game is a mystery for the ages.
    • It's not a total loss, as the Bitterblack Isle Combat Theme is a powerful piece in its own right, with 3 different variations of increasing intensity depending on the threat faced. Small common foes get a little creepy string work and and soft percussions. Stronger enemies get some additional brass and heavier drums. And super deadly boss-level foes are accompanied by an intense theme with quaking drums and heavy guitars.
• Base-Breaking Character: Aelinore. She's either a selfish, irresponsible, foolish girl who endangers others just to enjoy the company of a sufficiently attractive man (or woman), or a naïve Pollyanna who wanted something more than a forced marriage. There's also the fact that her romance is all but pushed on the player due to Story Branch Favoritism - you can greatly increase your affinity with her when you first meet her just by talking to her enough, and both of her non-escort quests are romantically themed, with the second one outright culminating in a sex scene.
• Breather Boss: While the first third of Bitterblack Isle isn't quite as punishing as what follows, the average party that has completed the Everfall is still going to be having some issues, especially if they've encountered any Necrophages. Thankfully, the Gazer is a breeze for a sufficiently leveled and equipped party. The gaze attack can be avoid just by standing behind cover or looking away from it, the tentacles can be dealt with like an Evil Eye's and can be used to ground it, it doesn't have a barrier to contend with and can be hit in the eye at any point by ranged attacks, and thwarting its attempt to create a sigil (which isn't hard) will give you a supersized Holy Cannon that you can use against it to blow off the majority of its lifebars in one go.
• Camera Screw: Sometimes when you're clinging to a monster, the camera goes wonky. Then there are spells like Maelstrom, which will black out the entire screen. Some enemies can even inflict it on you.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Keith Silverstein uses the exact same voice for Male Voice 4 as he did for Nazeem, down to the exact same cadence and condescending tone. It also doesn't help that Rook, who is the first pawn you encounter, also uses the voice.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • Grigori can be killed in one hit using the Maker's Finger, ending what's normally a Marathon Boss fight in just a few seconds. You can outright just shoot him with the arrow while he's waiting for your answer to his Sadistic Choice.
  • Blast Arrows deal an obscene amount of damage when combined with Fivefold Flurry (for Striders and Assassins) or Sixfold Arrow (for Rangers), and deal equal amounts of stagger, allowing one to stunlock practically any boss in the game to death, even the likes of Awakened Daimon. With enough Arrows, four Conqueror's Periapts for max damage boosting, and some luck, the player can easily stunlock Death for an easy kill at at an early level, earning them dozens of levels very quickly. To maximize the cheese, the player can just go to the Fortress of Remembrance (which is just a few rooms away from the main hub of Bittterblack Isle), lure Death to the bridge near the entrance and then use Blast Arrows to knock him down into the bottomless pit to kill him instantly; you won't be able to loot him, but you'll receive huge amounts of experience for negligible effort.
  • Large monsters such as cyclopses and chimeras may wander (or spawn) near a ledge or cliff, so a common strategy of beating them easily is to lure them to the edge. They have attacks where they move or leap forward, and these may often lead to them falling to their deaths. For instance, the Gorecyclops in the Soulflayer Canyon spawns near a very tight bridge, so it can be taken down in just a few seconds with this trick. It's both anti-climactic and hilarious especially against cyclopses because they have a unique animation whenever they trip.
  • Prisoner Gorecyclopes who are still chained to a wall are valid targets for the Master Thief skill, and their loot includes Lvl 3 Bitterblack Gear and Novelties. One of those can be easily reached early in pre-Daimon Bitterblack Isle, allowing for easy farming, and the player can simply exit and re-enter the room to reset the Gorecyclops' inventory to steal from it again. Beyond potentially giving access to very powerful rings early in the game, the player can sell all the excess materials stolen for a high price as well, allowing them to not have to worry about gold for the rest of the game.
  • Perhaps the ultimate example involves exploiting Maker's Fingers and the checkpoint save system to kill the online Ur-Dragon, an opportunity usually only available to the lucky few who happen to encounter it at low health. In short: you buy an arrow from Fournival, jump into the Everfall, enter the Chamber of Lament, shoot the Dragon, wait for it to leave and update the servers, reload to the checkpoint with Fournival, and repeat. All you need is about 20 million gold and 3 hours of spare time. This may be the only feasible way for most players to acquire the Abyssinal Armor set and other rewards exclusive to beating the online Dragon.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Expect to see a lot of low-level Pawns wearing the DLC pieces of armor, particularly the Set of Voldoan Armor and Set of Queen's Clothing. This is because these armors are given to the player for free after reaching Gran Soren if they own Dark Arisen, and their stats are equivalent to that of endgame vanilla armor, making them far better than anything the player will get for a long time. This leads to droves of Pawns wearing the exact same clothing, which can be grating for players looking to hire more visually-appearing ones.
  • On the other end, max-level Pawns tend to be decked out in the Bitterblack Armaments, a collection of rare equipment only obtainable by spending a lot of time in late-game Bitterblack Isle. Aside from just being cool-looking, they're also the strongest items in the whole game, and players who manage to acquire them will understandably want to show them off. The downside is that these veteran Pawns ironically have a harder time standing out from one another.
• Complete Monster: Great Leader Elysion is the fanatical leader of Salvation, a cult dedicated to the worship of the titular Dragon, Grigori. Tearing out his own eye as a young man to prove his dedication, Elysion masterminds the attacks caused by the Salvation-branded monsters and gleefully sacrifices innocents and his own followers to die in Grigori's name, resurrecting them as undead horrors at his own whim. Elysion is a coward and a snake unwilling to combat the Arisen himself, and pledges himself purely to appeasing Grigori and causing "death and chaos" to all things.
• Damsel Scrappy: A number of players feel this way about Aelinore, especially if she isn't their preferred romance choice. It's mainly because her romance feels heavily shoehorned and forced on the player due to developer bias, and because she wouldn't need to be rescued so much if she didn't make advances on the Arisen.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Hellhounds are probably the worst offender. While you only encounter them post-game, they will easily be one of your most hated enemies. They don't stagger easily, don't sit still, and they have a long-range fire attack that knocks you to the ground. But that's not all; they'll grab you and drag you someplace far off. If you are near a cliff, most likely they'll throw you off it. If the cliff is too high up, this is a one hit kill. And they come in groups.
  • While most bandits are simple to deal with, Fighter Bandits are a nightmare for low-level players. They're all but impervious to most attacks (including magical ones), and can knock you down and kill you before you can even get up. Until you know how to deal with them, it takes your entire party just to take on one of them. What's more, it's impossible to complete some early-game quests without running into them, forcing you to either run away or deal with them via Death of a Thousand Cuts.
  • Gargoyles are the strongest vanilla variant of the Harpy, and are just as annoying as their Strigoi successors mentioned below. Rather than powering up, their piercing attack inflicts petrification, which spells doom without a Secret Softener.
  • If Griffins were annoying mostly because of the difficulty of keeping them grounded, Cockatrices are annoying for the opposite reason. They're wildly aggressive, spread lots of statuses, and most importantly, can inflict Petrification with their breath. Bring Secret Softeners, you're going to need them. You can stop the petrification breath and topple them by doing enough damage to their throat sack while they're winding up, but unless you've got a bow, you're not pulling this off. They remain obnoxious well past the point where they're a standalone threat to your party - a lone Cockatrice is a nominal threat to a postgame party, but they're still a menace in groups thanks to their breath and ability to interrupt people.
  • Dark Arisen is full of these.
    • Strigoi, a harder version of Gargoyles. Not only are they very fast, staggering resistant, and usually spawn in areas where they can throw your pawns to their death from falling, they also have a dash-grab attack that has higher priority over any defensive/counter skill. Said attack will attach it to the target and impale it with its stinger, dealing a high amount of damage each few seconds until you manage to get it off (which takes quite a while no matter how quickly you wiggle the analog stick), and every time the targets get damaged by this skill, they get stronger (they regenerate HP, deal more damage, and receive less damage). This attack is also very hard to avoid even with daggers' dodge roll core skill: they'll keep breathing on your neck until you either fail to roll again quickly enough, or until the dash animation of the attack ends (which takes 5 seconds or so), even changing directions as they fly towards you. And they usually spawn along with the physical immune, always annoying, Wraith enemy. On Hard Mode, they can juggle you to death before you can even do anything. Worst is that, if you want Bloodred Crystals to upgrade any gear that requires them, you must allow them to succeed their impale attack and power up, otherwise they will never drop them.
    • Elder Ogres are ogres, but way worse. While this may sound not too bad, considering Ogres are only a medium threat in the main game, killing on of these things will take ages, due to the low lighting, tight corridors and constantly filled with water areas of Bitterblack Isle, coupled with their higher defense stat and more HP. They also hit like a freight train, and, like their younger counterparts, are nightmarishly fast.
    • If Hellhounds are the rottweilers of Gransys, Garm are the Hounds of the Baskervilles. With high defenses and HP and weaknesses to elements that make the player walk into their lunge range (good luck hitting these with Fulmination or Seism), players without an Infinity +1 Sword will have to do chip damage all while dodging attacks that can kill them in one or two hits.
    • Eliminators are completely horrifying when you encounter them 2/3 of the way through Bitterblack Isle. Basically, shrink an Elder Ogre, buff his defenses, lower his HP by a lot and hand him a sledgehammer bigger than himself, and you have these freaks. Their attacks have a stupid amount of armor, will armor break EVERYTHING in the game, have no startup time, and have wide, fast hitboxes. Oh, did we mention that they also hit insanely hard, AND come with an instant kill attack that can be difficult to get out of? And that you also fight them in extremely tight areas with little wiggle room? Between juggling your pawns lives, your OWN life, and dealing damage to the damn thing, you may just pull your hair out. The one saving grace is that they are fairly vulnerable to Frozen and Torpor and can be stunlocked fairly easily, and have minimal resistance to magic overall, but one iffy move and you will get your shit rocked.
    • Corrupted pawns, particularly Rangers and Sorcerers. You've played the whole game unleashing your Game-Breaker skills on hapless hordes of enemies, over and over. Now you get to have them used against you.
    • Living Armor are an absolute royal pain. Immune to all ailments, hit like a Mack truck, its shield blocks all damage from the front and its attacks have large hitboxes. It also possesses an annoying quirk in which it will nullify all magic and only take damage from physical attacks at first, but after losing a certain amount of health, its ghost is exposed and now only take damage from magic attacks, which is troublesome for an Arisen with a melee/physical class and no magic, and these critters just love to interrupt pawns who are in the midst of casting. Oh and your first fight with Living Armor is mandatory, and post-Daimon some areas will have them come in groups of three. Have fun!
    • Dire Drakes. By the time you can handle yourself in Bitterblack Isle, ordinary Drakes are probably a trivial threat. Dire Drakes, on the other hand, have monstrously buffed offenses and some of the highest defense in the game, a permanent aura that damages anything in melee range and can burn, and obscene amounts of health, while also having the classic Drake aggression and speed. Fighting against just one is going to be a long and brutal battle - god help you if you're stuck with additional enemies.
• Difficulty Spike: The entirety of Bitterblack Isle is this. A lot of the common Mooks inside can straight up one shot you if you are low level, not to mention the randomly spawning Demonic Spiders that can happen. Not only that but the deeper you go into the Isle, the tougher the enemies become, making it a struggle even with Dragonforged gear and Dragon weapons. Not to mention that Death himself can randomly appear and instantly kill your party as well. Even after you kill Daimon, the spike increases, as you now have to deal with more powerful enemies that were only for one-time appearances before killing Daimon, which culminates in you killing Awakened Daimon, his true form.
• Disappointing Last Level: The Everfall, while an impressive "final dungeon" concept at first glance, is unfortunately this the more you spend time in it. It is bothersome to get to specific Chambers by falling (as you'll need to properly time pressing the grab button, and most of the entrances look fairly identical) - though you can take the stairs - and when you do, the environment is rather repetitive, and when combined with locked doors, it introduces some backtracking or trial-and-error. You need to explore the Everfall to finish the end-game quest of fetching 20 Wakestones, but this also includes dealing with powerful enemies and rare bosses.
• Ending Fatigue: The majority of the game is set up as a battle between you and the dragon. When you finally take down the dragon in the quest named "The Final Battle", you're even treated to some brief credits and a cutscene showing the consequences (both good and bad) of ending the dragon's menace. Then you're given back control of your character in the "post-game" and can tackle a Bonus Dungeon with a significant Difficulty Spike involved. Once you deal with that, the game ends for good and puts you into New Game Plus.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Rook, the first pawn you get in the game, is surprisingly popular. Even though he can never level up, people like him so much that they put him on their favorites list for Pawns and even recreate Rook with their actual Pawn. Some never even remove him from their party, which makes him a useless dead weight on the party very quickly since hired pawns can't level up (but also may give a great boost to the player's leveling late in the game due to how the game's experience system works).
  • Fournival is a popular minor NPC because he sells a bunch of useful items such as the unique Maker's Finger (which speedrunners often use to cheese Grigori) and the stat-boosting Periapts which he has an infinite stock of. Players and guides would then recommend going through the effort of proving his innocence during the "Trials and Tribulations" sidequest so that he can still remain in Gran Soren and keep selling his wares.
  • Caxton, the go-to armorer in Gran Soren who buys, sells and upgrades gear. Players will visit him a lot for the purpose of maintaining their Arisen and main Pawn's equipment. He's also the NPC who keeps saying "They're masterworks all, you can't go wrong.", a phrase that became a meme in the Dragon's Dogma fandom.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Some have taken to calling Grigori "Greg" or "Gregory". It certainly makes him less intimidating.
  • The optional area Bitterblack Isle gets simply called "BBI" by players. Items or content that can be obtained there are also prefixed with that acronym, leading to other sub-nicknames such as "BBI weapons" or "BBI gear".
  • In the quest "Pride before a Fall", Julien mocks Mercedes and calls her a "She-Goat". This has since been used as a fan nickname for her as well, and it persists even more than a decade later.
  • Pawns with the "Acquisitor" inclination (prioritize picking up loot, even in battle) are simply called "Kleptomaniacs", or labeled with the Internet slang "Loot Goblins".
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Many fans prefer to pair their Arisen with Mercedes compared to Aelinore which the game clearly pushes you toward.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Fans of this game tend to overlap with those of Dark Souls due to the thematic, stylistic and game mechanic similarities between the 2 titles. They are in turn united by a common love of Berserk, which is an immense influence on both games.
  • With Devil May Cry fans simply due to both Capcom franchises having a similar recurring director, Hideaki Itsuno. This became more apparent when Itsuno immediately began working on Dragon's Dogma II as his next major game project after Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition.
  • With Shadow of the Colossus fans because a core gameplay feature of Dragon's Dogma also involves climbing onto giant monsters and attacking their weak spots.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Magick Archer has a couple of crazy powerful abilities: the ricochet arrow and the anti-Status Effects aura. In the many tight quarters of Bitterblack Isle, having an arrow that does more damage the more it bounces around can drop even powerful enemies very quickly. And the magic aura stops every single debuff in the game, including drenched. In the various dark and watery dungeons, not having to put away and re-equip your lantern in mid combat is a huge boon.
  • A Sorcerer can potentially decimate everything in the game, including the Final Boss, with their high-level spells. Bolide can fell a chimera almost instantly, and a well-aimed High Glicel can annihilate an otherwise-challenging Drake or Cockatrice. Possibly best is Maelstrom, which can be cast from a long distance and sweeps all enemies into a swirling tornado. If the dark magic doesn't kill them, the fall damage will. And if you've got multiple Sorcerers in a party, they'll sync spells, shortening their casting times and increasing their power. Also, they have access to Exequy and High Exequy, instant kill spells that can off anything that isn't a dragon, the only downsides being it takes a long time to kill enemies and continually exhausts your stamina... except both have longer range than most bow skills and you can keep eating stamina-increasing items while casting, meaning you can use it to kill large enemies without letting them know you're present.
  • Maelstrom itself is actually it's own game breaker. Besides the aforementioned fall damage it can inflict, it has a surprisingly far cast range, lingers for a long time, and is one of the few attack spells that has a high vertical ceiling, enough to reach the top of arenas like the Rotunda of Dread. Furthermore, it deals multiple tics of damage rather than one straight chunk, and for some reason, no large enemies in the game, barring golems, have any resistance to wind damage at all. What this means is that basically, preemptively casting Maelstrom at any large enemy caught unaware will not only deal absurd amounts of damage over a long period of time, but because of how many times it hits, will almost perennially stunlock any large enemy caught in it, with your only caveat being your own stamina. Furthermore, because of its high vertical ceiling, it can be used to reliably damage and knock down flying enemies such as Cockatrices and Dragon-types (which is particularly effective against Wyverns, who refuse to land unless you down them). Finally, the damage they inflict is the same type as blades, meaning that against Hydras, if you aim for their heads instead of their bodies, it's the only spell in-game that is capable of one-shotting them by severing all of their heads at once.
  • The Mystic Knight at higher levels, to some degree. They can pack swords, maces, and staves, they got a magic shield that lets them enchant the whole party's weapons, and they can unlock support buffs as well. A Mystic Knight with Ruinous Sigil and Great Cannon is basically a deployable machine gun nest ringed by claymore mines. Abyssal Anguish will cut through most enemies and bosses alike with ease due to delivering multiple hits in a single strike and stacking your Magick stat onto the physical power of your weapon. It's not classed as an enchantment, either, so you can add it on top of an enchanted weapon.
  • Since hiring a pawn from someone on your friendlist costs no RC (regardless of level difference), you can easily steamroll most of the game with a vastly over-leveled pawn.
  • The combination of Blast Arrows, Conqueror's Periapt (using four at once) and Tenfold Flurry can knock down all kinds of creatures and kill them at ease with an absurd amounts of damage, to the point not even Daimon and Death can survive that barrage.
  • Throwblasts, an item that causes damage and inflicts burn status. You can buy them from Aestella's shop in Cassardis soon after the tutorial. It causes foes to stagger or fall prone and deals a fixed amount of damage, no matter what level you are or stats you have. Stockpile enough and with quick fingers you can chain-throw these items and kill tough monsters far above your level, such as the Gazer in Bitterblack Isle. The result is getting high-end materials and a ton of EXP.
  • Bitterblack Weapon and Bitterblack Gear. These are seemingly useless items found on Bitterblack Isle and come in levels between 1-3 that, when purified at the entrance to the cursed island, are transformed into either a weapon (the former) or armor (the latter) based on you and your main pawn's class. While this seems simple as-is, it's actually a bit more complicated; weapons and gear gained from these items are scaled to end-game levels, are usually already enchanted with an element, only cost Rift Crystals to obtain, and can be somewhat easily obtained as soon as you are able to access Bitterblack Isle ^note The Midnight Helix, where the Condemned Goreclops is chained to a wall, has 2 chests located just after the first pair of stairs you can climb in the tower in an adjacent room that almost always drops the lv. 1 variants. Despite the sheer danger of attempting to obtain one early game, doing so nets you armor and weapons that not only allow you to tear through everything the base game throws at you (and can be paired with the aforementioned game-breaking classes above to make your enemies lives forfeit in short order) while probably keeping you from actually taking damage most of the time, but also literally hands you a weapon that can actually do real damage to the horrific monsters of the island, meaning with some strategy you can level up ridiculously easy. And that's just lv. 1. Manage to grab a Lv. 3 weapon, and not even the Dragon can stand in your way.
  • Torpor is by far the strongest delibitation in the game and can turn most bosses into complete jokes. It's a debuff that causes enemies to move at about half of their usual speed (including attacking, reacting to blows, everything), leaving them extremely vulnerable to further attacks. What makes it abusable is that Torpor can be easily accessed by any character with Rusted Weapons, which start inflicting it as soon as they are upgraded to 3-star, and the vast majority of enemies and bosses in the game are susceptible to it. Some players give their pawns Rusted Weapons for the purpose of turning them into full supports, constantly applying Torpor on enemies to keep them vulnerable to your real damage dealers, and if you decide to Dragonforge and Rarify those weapons, they apply the debuff even faster, ensuring a Cycle of Hurting on whatever poor sap you're fighting.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Harpies, wolves, and all of their ilk. They harass you at every corner of the game's world, always attacking in large numbers to ensure you'll be staying a while to get them off your back and always ready to respawn the moment you leave the area. The stronger variants from the northern end of Gransys - snow harpies, direwolves and the like - are even worse due to their higher health.
  • Then you have the grimgoblins from the post-game. You fought their weaker cousins throughout the entire game, amused at their squeaky voices as you blasted them to death by the hundreds... and now here come their massively overpowered cousins who are much, much more dangerous, nearly impossible to knock over, and can take you out real fast if you're not careful. They can even kick you if you're on the ground, and sometimes several will gang up on you, making it impossible to get up while they beat you to death.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • It's one thing to fight a Griffin; it's another to get it to stick around at all. Even after you've painstakingly baited the beast down with the corpse of an animal or another enemy, it's wont to just fly away if you don't keep it grounded. Other winged bosses (like Dragons and the Cockatrice you fight in Honor in Treachery) will fly off on occasion, but Griffins are the worst about it. Because of this, farming Griffins for materials used in upgrading certain items is a delicate art.
  • The Iron Golem in the Witchwoods. Not an especially dangerous boss, but he is notable for having the medals that power him be not on his body but around the arena. First of all, if your party is primarily mages, you are already in for an annoying time, but the boss is largely impossible if you don't have a strider or ranger in your party due to the fact that one of the medals is hanging from a tree that you cannot climb. Your only real recourse is to shoot it or climb on the boss's head and hope that it's flailings will hit the medal, which is extremely unreliable. Frustratingly, magic does nothing to the medals.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Sort of; the game was specifically designed to sell to the American market, specifically the crowd that couldn't get enough of Skyrim or The Witcher. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, which were both highly popular and praised in the west, were both made by a Japanese developer who showed that this can be done. But the game bombed badly (100,000 units, a far cry from the 1.5 to 10 million Capcom was expecting) because Capcom released it at the same time as other, more highly anticipated games. In Japan, however, the game has sold nearly 500,000 copies, likely because the audience there is treating it as a stopgap for Monster Hunter 4.
  • However, it seems that while it wasn't an immediate hit in America, the game has been selling steadily since release thanks to a lot of praise and word of mouth.
  • The PC port of Dark Arisen became Capcom's fastest selling PC title at the time of its release, and one of their best-selling on the platform.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: There is a plant called the Kylo Ren.
• Low-Tier Letdown: While the Warrior vocation is extremely fun to play, it tends to struggle and is sub-optimal compared to other classes. Warriors have three skill slots, no block, no dodge, no ranged attacks, and no fast attacks outside of their air swipes. Their main source of damage is the devastating Arc of Deliverance/Obliteration, but where other classes either dish out tons of single target damage quickly or charge up for devastating area-of-effect damage, the Warrior gets the worst of both worlds - the Arc does a ton of single target damage but takes a huge amount of time to charge up and vice versa. Their climb attacks also suck, meaning disabling foes is entirely done through landing an Arc. Even with all this said, Warriors are still a blast to play, and there's no "bad" class option. As a result, Warrior Pawns are also the least-recruited Pawns due to the vocation's slow movement/attack speed and lack of ranged options, combined with the nature of the Pawn AI making their attacks miss much more often (compared to Pawns of other vocations, who are more accurate than most human players).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "The wind is pushing me!" ^ExplanationThe first line from the chorus of "Into Free -Dangan-", the song played in the original release's main menu. While it was considered "out of place" (i.e. a J-Pop song in a medieval-era game), it's still memorable in the fandom for being upbeat and energetic, hence its lyrics are mentioned to start comment chains. The song got replaced in all versions/ports of Dark Arisen, but it didn't stop PC players from modding it back. Around a decade later, it eventually had a resurgence in online platforms after Director Hideaki Itsuno confirmed the sequel, Dragon's Dogma II, to be in development, and even more so when a trailer for said sequel was revealed in 2023.
  • Just about everything that comes out of a Pawn's mouth became memes that are repeatedly quoted by the fandom in online forums due to the frequency of hearing them in-game. The most popular ones include "Wolves hunt in packs!" and "Human bones that walk on their own!"
  • "They're masterworks all, you can't go wrong." ^ExplanationThis is what Gran Soren's armorer Caxton says whenever you interact with him. Since a gameplay loop involves constantly buying, selling and enhancing equipment, you'll be constantly interacting with Caxton, and thus hear this phrase a lot.
  • And everything you can ride.
• Narm:
  • The game's steady commitment towards old-timey fantasy dialogue is well-done in some places and hilariously awkward in others.
  • Pawn Chatter may be triggered at hilariously out-of-context moments. For example:
    • Pawns may shout "No! They hold the advantage!" whenever your party is suddenly taking a lot of damage. It works at times when there's proper context (such as when being ganged on by a mob or a powerful foe), but it may also be anti-climactically said when you got damaged by unexpected or mundane means, such as rolling boulders or falling from a great height during an ongoing battle.
    • Pawns may suddenly point out and pick an object that interested them... then you'll see in the HUD that they've picked up a mundane item such as a simple rock.
  • The scene where the Dragon reveals that he's kidnapped whoever likes you the most can be this, especially if it winds up being someone like Fournival or a child NPC. Or this guy.
  • The game features a cinematic camera during combat that slow-focuses on a player or pawn's attack. More often than not, though, this will toggle when they're about to use a basic melee move - the camera holds dramatically on a party member raising their weapon, about to perform a devastating attack...only to then whack the enemy with their staff or something else similarly (and hilariously) anticlimactic.
• Narm Charm: The original version's theme may be hilariously tonally inappropriate for the game, but that's why it's awesome.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The game is committed to making every one of its monsters as nightmarish and larger-than-life as possible. A good example is the ogres, whose hoots and gnashing growls can be heard a fair distance away. The normal variants have a special preference for women and one of their attacks involves carrying you away and gnawing on you, head-first.
  • The undead murmur fragmented sentences, as if trying to recall memories from their past life. Stout undead are huge, bald, bloated corpses that explode when you strike them.
  • The Dark Arisen expansion is nothing but this. Most of the enemies are even tougher, scarier, sometimes zombified and gigantic versions of the enemies from the main game (like the gigantic gorecyclops prisoner covered in spikes or the cursed dragons), and the ones that aren't can be terrifyingly difficult, such as living armor or minotaurs with hammers that can one-shot you. The areas are much darker and require a lantern nearly at all times. When you kill enemies, they leave behind big gorey piles of flesh, and the more of these laying around, the greater the chance that an even tougher enemy will spawn to feed on the carrion. The music combined with the dark atmosphere makes things extremely unsettling, and you can hear the growls of monsters echoing through the dungeon. To make things even worse, after you manage to get through Bitterblack Isle once, things become even tougher on subsequent playthroughs; you will now have to face groups of these giant monsters than gave you a hard time when you were just fighting one, like fighting two drakes at the same time. And to top it all off, Death himself will randomly spawn and can one-shot kill you and your pawns (not the regular knock out, you have to go back to the rift and rehire them). The only thing making things easier is that you can still try to run past the monsters to the exit.
  • It's (probably) unintentional, but the Abbey is downright creepy, especially if you first find it through exploration instead of through Quina's quest. You hack through a dark forest full of undead and find a small, quiet church sitting out in the middle of nowhere with no apparent purpose, inhabited by stiff glassy-eyed nun-equivalents. Even the music is strange.
• Paranoia Fuel: In the spirit of the waterwraith, Death himself can descend on you at any time and any area in Bitterblack Isle after his initial appearance. He has a massive health bar and can slay Arisen with one swing of his scythe (Pawns are sent directly back to the rift, necessitating a trip back to a riftstone). The only warnings of his presence are a low bell chime and ominous whispers, and the only way to lessen your chance of an encounter is to turn off your lanterns - a potentially deadly handicap in the Isle's many pitch-black areas, and a sure way to attract dangerous bosses like Garm and Elder Ogres.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: While the story and lore have some interesting ideas, clunky dialogue, mediocre voice acting (though with a few exceptions), generic quests, and a very threadbare plot can make it rather forgettable. The combat on the other hand has been praised extensively, ranging from how many viable class and builds there are, to how clever the Enemy AI can be, to how impressive looking and satisfying the magick system plays.
• Polished Port: The PC version of Dark Arisen has updated textures, 4K support, support for up to 144 FPS, many graphics options, reworked controls for keyboard and mouse with rebindable keys and item hotkeys, the ability to mod "Into Free -Dangan-" back to the title screen, and it can run on a toaster. It's to the point where The Cynical Brit himself, TotalBiscuit, was nearly all compliments.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The way Dragon's Dogma handles its player data can be rather finnicky and confusing. These criticisms popped up again or became more obvious retroactively after Dragon's Dogma II released on March 2024 and used similar systems as this first game.
    • There's technically just one save slot that gets repeatedly updated as you play the game, so it isn't possible to split different vocations into different playthroughs (i.e. if you'd like a Mage playthrough on one save file, and a Strider on another, the game doesn't give you an easy means to do it). You can still somehow customize your Arisen's and main Pawn's appearances by visiting a barber, while vocations can be changed at inns. The New Game Plus feature also allows you to re-customize as if you're starting a new game while still keeping your old progress. Regardless, this one-slot limitation still received criticism from those who played games (such as Dark Souls) that easily allow separate save slots for trying out a different character build while still keeping the other characters intact. When Dark Arisen was ported to PC via Steam, players who didn't like this limitation even tried out hoops and created tutorials on how to manage multiple save files.
    • The game will save automatically when entering a new area, after completing a quest, or after defeating a boss monster. However, this doesn't guarantee your file is securely saved (when you die, it's possible for the game to revive you on an older save state or checkpoint, thus making you accidentally lose progress), so you should still manually save as often as you can, or especially rest at an inn. When you rest at an inn or enter the rift, you automatically create a "checkpoint save" that you can jump back to from the pause menu should you wish. The Dark Arisen expansion at least alleviates the worry of reaching inns when you're in a bind, thanks to the Eternal Ferrystone item that lets you instantly teleport to safe zones such as Gran Soren.
  • Many quests and characters disappear without warning as the story progresses. Most frustratingly, halfway through the game, you lose access to Madeleine's shop until the postgame.
  • The Affinity system. Not only does it force a Token Romance onto you without your permission, but if you aren't careful, the game will likely choose either a NPC you don't like or don't want to hook up with or Aelinore. The way it works is somewhat confusing (it depends heavily on whom you've last spoken to directly before a specific point in a late-game main quest) and about the only known way to efficiently game the system is to attack characters and lower their affinity towards you. Or just avoid interacting with them in any way for a few days. Though this may be a bit hard to do with shop and inn-keepers, for obvious reasons. Dark Arisen fixed this by greatly reducing the amount of affinity you get from merchants and innkeepers, meaning you need to try a lot harder to get stuck with someone you're forced to regularly talk to, but don't care to seduce. In case you end up maxing out affinity with them anyways, you can use Liquid Effluvium to reduce it substantially, which can be obtained by buying from from Barroch or by chance through purifying Bitterblack Novelty Lv. 1.
  • Almost every particularly significant NPC disappears entirely from the game once their quest line is complete. This makes keeping them as the romance option even more difficult because you can no longer talk to them to switch them back to the beloved.
  • The last two side quests that become available involve characters that max out affinity extremely quickly by completing quests they are involved in. You must interact with these characters to complete these quests.
  • The Pawn Inclination mechanic, which governs a Pawn's behavior in and out of battle. While players can fine-tune their main Pawn's inclinations by using Elixirs sold by an NPC shortly after completing an early-game story quest, what is not made apparent is that your main Pawn will change their inclinations based on your own actions, the actions of the other pawns you hire, and the commands you give them. This can at times cause conflicting inclination combinations to occur, such as Pioneer/Guardian and Mitigator/Nexus, which can cause Pawns to run around in circles like drunken fools in battle because their AI becomes confused as to whether to forge ahead of you or stay by your side...all the while not attacking any of your enemies. This is unfortunate, as a good inclination combination for your Pawn's vocation can turn them into efficient killing machines or valuable support personnel. Experienced players learn to keep an eye on their main Pawn's inclination combination to note any changes, and fix them accordingly. Newer players, however, may be completely unaware of the inclination mechanic for the entire game and wonder why no one wants to hire their main Pawn in order to earn the valuable Rift Crystals needed for high-end equipment upgrades and purchasing premium items. Oftentimes, the bad inclination combinations cause some people to dismiss Dragon's Dogma as having very poor combat AI, if they are not aware of the inclination mechanic.
  • The healing system is generally considered to be pretty bad. There's no way to heal in the heat of battle at all; if you want to use a curative, you have to open up the inventory and manually select a healing item from the curatives tab, without even the option to hotkey them for quick use. In a game as difficult as this, it's almost guaranteed you'll have to do this repeatedly, and it just breaks the momentum of combat. On top of that, healing pawns can be an exercise in frustration, with you having to rely on either magic—assuming you or your pawns have access to healing spells, and magic can only heal grey health anyway—or giving them items to heal themselves with. But, for some reason, pawns might choose to use lower-level healing items instead of higher ones, even if they have only a sliver of health left, so players need to be mindful of what healing items pawns are actually holding. And if that weren't bad enough, pawns may also heal themselves only once, leaving themselves at half or less health instead of topping off the rest of their missing health.
  • For some reason, the equipment and inventory screens are completely separate from each other, with equipment being located on the pause menu and the inventory occupying its own button. If you want to equip an item from your inventory, you have to move it from the inventory to your equipment first, and then go to a completely different screen to actually equip it.
  • Damage scaling in this game is handled really weirdly. While in most RPGs, defense is calculated by percentages^E.G.if you do 50 damage to an enemy with 50 defense, the enemy takes 25 damage because their defense blocked 50% of it, defense in Dragon's Dogma is just a flat rating^*If you do 50 damage to an enemy with 50 defense in Dragon's Dogma, you do no damage. This means that enemies just a few levels higher than you are almost impossible to kill because their defense blocks literally all the damage you're doing to them, leaving either Level Grinding or extreme patience as your only recourse for beating them, while enemies only a few levels lower become stupidly easy because your defense is so high that they're completely incapable of hurting you. This becomes especially bad in Bitterblack Isle, which almost requires you to level grind if you want to kill any of the later enemies in a timely fashion.
  • Purification in general is a whole can of worms. For one, the result is determined by your vocation^*The purified items are set up in three colors: Red, blue, and yellow, to correspond with fighter, mage, and strider, respectively., meaning that if you or your pawn are a specific color, then you will get items relating to that class. This can get really annoying really fast if you keep getting items that you can't use or are in need of a specific item. Secondly, items are generated from a list that is unique to each player, meaning that Godsbaning or save scumming will not work.
  • Dragonforging for the most part is pretty straight forward. You kill a drake or dragon, and any piece of gear you have equipped has a chance of becoming dragonforged that becomes more likely the more it has been upgraded. The annoying part is that only the Arisen's gear has a chance of becoming dragonforged. Your pawn's gear does not. So if you want to dragonforge your pawn's gear, you must personally switch to their class, equip their gear, and kill dragons until you dragonforge everything you are looking for. And if you plan on tackling Bitterblack Island, the boost that dragonforging gives becomes pretty important. And as you progress, you'll get new gear that needs dragonforging too, restarting the process.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Despite the general Nintendo Hard challenge and difficulty of the game, players have still came up with these. "No Pawns" is the most frequent one, but it can also include no class switching, and going to Bitterblack Isle as soon as you can. Not to mention the poor souls that try all three at once.
  • A player did a "Fist Only" run (i.e. not using any weapons, just punches and kicks) and surprisingly managed to beat even the Bitterblack Isle and Daimon. Much of their playthrough relied on obtaining two Bloody Knuckle rings which significantly increase unarmed melee damage.
  • All weapons and armor can be fully upgraded, meaning you can Dragonforge and Gold Rarefy even that shoddy default sword you got at the beginning of the game and transform it from a toothpick into a decently respectable weapon. Because of this, some players have taken it upon themselves to acquire and fully upgrade every single piece of equipment in the game — an enormous undertaking, given that there's a whole set of weapons rewarded from defeating the Dragon with each weapon type, requiring multiple playthroughs as each vocation (two if you're a Warrior, to get both the greatsword and hammer). Then there's the Abyssinal Armor set and four unique facemasks as well as eight unique weapons that can only be obtained by killing the Online Ur-Dragon — the latter two of which are random drops, requiring multiple kills!
• Shocking Moments: The revelation that Arisen who fail to beat the Seneschal become dragons like Grigori and attack the world in search of new Arisen shocked many players.
• Spiritual Successor: This and Dark Souls are the closest one can get to a good Berserk game. Hell, you can even find Guts and Griffith's armor in-game!
• Squick: Because the affinity system determines your love interest, in addition to everyone being bi, you can end up with gross, old, or creepy characters as your beloved or, even worse, children.
• Tear Jerker: Everything about the post-game tries its hardest to get the waterworks going. The world is plunged into darkness (your fault) and you're a wanted convict (not your fault). This is followed by a very somber and difficult trudge through the Everfall, surrounded by Pawns who have lost their masters and are doomed to wander about in remorse... assuming they can feel it.
• That One Achievement: "The Hero" requires you to complete every single non-Notice Board sidequest. Quite a few of these quests are both hard to find and even harder to solve without consulting the wiki. To make it worse, some are Permanently Missable Content. At least, any completed quests carry on to New Game Plus.
• That One Attack:
  • Any attack that inflicts petrification (such as the Cockatrice's breath, a Gargoyle's stinger attack, and the Lich's petrification spell) can be particularly devastating if you have absolutely nothing to cure it on you. It pretty much means you are going to die, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
  • Hellhound's and Strigoi's attacks, refer to Demonic Spider above.
  • Pretty much all dragonkin have two attacks that fit in this:
    • One is a roar that will instantly kill any Pawns in range and silence the Arisen, requiring you to go and revive them one by one while avoiding his attacks, since you're probably the only target left.
    • The other is a grab with its right hand: if it grabs the Arisen, it throws you on the ground for massive damage, and if it grabs a Pawn, it takes control of the Pawn until said Pawn dies (to cure it, you must kill your own Pawn). To avoid the possession, you have to either hit the arm holding the Pawn until you deal enough damage to release them, or hit it somewhere else until it staggers (usually when a horn breaks). However, the dire dragonkin (Firedrake, Frostwyrm, and Thunderwyvern) from Dark Arisen cannot be damaged anywhere but on the heart, so you MUST hit the heart until it staggers, which only happens two or three times per fight, and the Firedrake loves spamming this attack.
  • Daimon's Rift attack is his most deadly ability. He creates a vortex that begins pulling the Arisen and their Pawns toward the center, rapidly draining their stamina in the process. If anyone gets stuck in the middle? They die, regardless of how much health they had left. The Arisen can revive themselves with a Wakestone, but Pawns are immediately sent back to the Rift with no way to revive them for the rest of the battle. There's a beefed-up version of this attack that has greater range, used by Daimon's Awakened Form.
  • If a hydra eats you, there's no escape unless your pawns destroy the head that swallowed you within a certain amount of time. This attack is easy enough to escape from when fighting a normal hydra, but the window for breaking free from an Archydra's jaws is much smaller.
  • Much like the hydra, the Maneater will instantly grab you when you open a chest that it's in. Unless your pawns help you first, you'll need multiple curatives on hand while you wriggle free before it swallows you whole. Because of this, many players always wait for their pawns to open chests on Bitterblack Isle.
  • Never let a Condemned Gorecyclops grab you. If it does, you're stuck in an iron grip that's all but impossible to wriggle free from in time...at which point it bites your head, almost certainly one-shotting you. Worse is that the Gorecyclops can grab you from pretty much any area on its upper body, save for a small space on its chest.
  • The Eliminator's stomp attack is easily the deadliest attack in the game. Once you are knocked down, it is extremely difficult to get out of, and should the Eliminator slam his hammer down, it's a guaranteed One-Hit Kill. You better hope that your pawns aren't suffering from Artificial Stupidity, or else your chances of escaping are slim.
• That One Boss:
  • Ogres, at least when you first encounter them. They're both very strong and very fast, have no real weaknesses to exploit beyond hitting them in the head, have no easily-visible health bars unlike other large monsters, and become even stronger at low HP. And when you finally get to the point where Ogres are no longer a threat, Bitterblack Isle throws Elder Ogres at you.
  • Garm aren't particularly dangerous alone, though they have the tendency of showing up in packs and grabbing you, carrying you away from your pawns while slowly mauling you to death. Multiple Garm can maul you at once too, dealing extra damage.
  • Golems can be this for parties with lots of mages and sorcerers. They're all but immune to magic (besides spells that deal physical damage like Bolide), and can only be harmed by attacking the discs on their bodies.
  • The Condemned Gorecyclops is a hundred-foot-tall monstrosity that's completely in a league of its own. It has eleven bars of health, most of its attacks can one-shot you and your pawns, and it's usually fought in a cramped space that leaves little room for you or your pawns to do anything without being stomped or clubbed. And some quests require you to fight two at once!
  • The Dark Bishop is easily the biggest Beef Gate in Dark Arisen. It's a dual boss fight, with you having to fight the bishop and his dragon. The bishop loves to fly out of range and spam debuffs whenever he gets the chance. The dragon itself isn't even much of a threat due to its low health, but as soon as the bishop possesses it, it's pretty much game over. In its possessed state, the dragon can spam magic spells such as Maelstrom, Exequy, and Holy Furor, pretty much instant killing any unfortunate player caught in them and most likely all of their pawns. The only silver lining is that once the dragon is killed while possessed, the bishop is stunned for a very long time, potentially long enough to kill him.
  • The high-level dragons (Firedrakes, Frostwyrms and Thunderwyverns) found in Bitterblack Isle after beating Daimon are almost impossible to defeat without high-level equipment and can do enormous damage with just a tail-lash. Their wingbeats have a high area-of-effect and interrupt all charged skills and spellcasting. And if you thought one was hard to deal with, try fighting a pair of them.
• That One Level:
  • The Chamber of Fate room in Everfall contains a Chimera, a Gorechimera, and a Lich. Normally, this wouldn't be so bad, except that the Lich likes to summon the aforementioned Demonic Spider Hellhounds. This could in turn cause you to get severely overwhelmed, so better have those Wakestones you've been collecting, you are going to need them.
  • With the expansion, Bitterblack Isle is in an entire league of its own. Special mention goes to the multiple areas that A: are flooded, B: are pitch-black, necessitating the use of a lantern, and C: spawn monsters that constantly try to knock you down (being knocked down into water will extinguish the lantern).
  • On the topic of Bitterblack Isle, one specific room late in the dungeon, The Forgotten Hall, has the potential to be an absolute nightmare if you aren't careful. There's not one, but two, chained-up Condemned Gorecyclops in this room, just waiting to break free if a stray attack or spell clips them. Why might they get clipped? There are a number of Corrupted Pawns that also lurk on the lower floor of this room, many of them sorcerers who love to spam the Maelstrom spell. Much like the Everfall, you will need many Wakestones to survive being juggled into the ceiling repeatedly by multiple angry tornados. Thankfully, ranged characters can snipe the Corrupted Pawns from the balcony, but tough luck for everyone else.
• That One Sidequest:
  • "Trials and Tribulations" becomes this if you try to find Fournival innocent. First, there's the petitions; Symone won't give you hers if you failed her escort quest, and if Fedel's other quest is active, neither will he. Reynard can provide fake affidavits to replace the missing ones, of course... unless you didn't rescue him at the beginning of the game or you've already completed his sidequest. And the last piece of evidence? Potentially already turned in for a noticeboard quest, unless the player made a forgery beforehand. If you accidentally turn in one scrap of evidence that he's guilty, there's a slim chance he'll be convicted regardless of how much evidence regarding his innocence you provide. Did we mention that you only have four days to collect everything? Also, you'll need a character witness—a guard in the far north of Gran Soren and the need to bring this person to Aldous isn't hinted at.
  • Speaking of which, the related "Escort Duty" quest for Symone can be hairpulling if the player is unprepared. If Symone's demands aren't met perfectly, particularly the footrace segment (she can't have too much of a lead, you can't beat her, and you can't bump into her), then the player could potentially lose out on the valuable Golden Idol reward. Oh, and if you find Fournival guilty, this quest is gone forever without warning.
  • Reynard's quest, "Search Party." First, you have to buy something from his shop a certain number of times before he even offers the quest, which must be repeated between every stage of the quest. Then you have to find progressively rarer items for him, topped off by finding all the pieces of a journal that is scattered across Gransys with no in-game hints to their location at all. When you're not running around the countryside looking for the quest items, you're running around and looking for Reynard, as he can suddenly decide to move to any one of five different locations at random.
  • The Water God's Altar. You have to fight through hordes of skeletons and cyclopses to find five ancient slabs, each one weighing almost 10 pounds, and no, you can't bring one or some to the questgiver at a time. You have to collect fifty pounds worth of items in one go. This is a nightmare if you're already bogged down by your armor and materials... assuming you don't distribute the slabs between yourself and your pawns, which is entirely doable and makes it more bearable. Unless, of course, you have the terrible luck of having a pawn carrying a slab banished by one of the sprites in the depths of the caverns. If so, your only recourse is to either hotfoot it ALL the way back to Gran Soren or your home town, grab the slabs out of storage, then run ALL the way back to the shrine.
  • A Notice Board quest in Bitterblack Isle called "Trappings of Evil" requires you to gather three sets of specific armor (Sin, Shadow, and Grave) to be rewarded the one-of-a-kind Savior Ring. These can only be acquired by purifying Bitterblack Armor Lv. 3. Said cursed item is very hard to come by, and has a catch: (A) your Arisen and Main Pawn's vocation, specifically the color (red, yellow, or blue) determines what you get at the moment of purification, and (B) you must accept the result, even if you get a lot of duplicates. Resetting the game (either from checkpoint save or using the Godsbane) doesn't work. This is because a list is generated into your character profile, which starts you somewhere on said list and determines the order of items you'll receive from purification. You cannot see this list anywhere in-game. To slightly speed up the process, you can complete and equip one set to yourself or your pawn, and hire two pawns that have the other sets—nothing in the game tells you this.
  • The Wages of Death IV asks you to slay Death himself. While there are certain cheese strategies you can use against him, defeating a roaming boss with a massive health bar, resistances to every element, and the ability to kill you or your pawns instantly is going to be an incredibly daunting task for most players. Also needed for an achievement.
  • Certain escort quests count:
    • Selene's first escort quest involves hiking up the mountain and battling through enormous packs of Direwolves as well as a notorious camp of 10+ bandits. If that's not enough, there's a chance you might encounter a chimera. It's insanely hard to deal with for low-level players who unwittingly accept the quest when it first becomes available (shortly after first meeting Selene in Quina's escort quest).
    • Reynard's quest is arguably the most dangerous, especially since it involves passing through Ophis' territory. Unless your male Arisen and pawns are all in disguise, you'll be attacked on sight. And that's not even the end - you still need to hike through the bog beyond, which has phantasms and a wight. You can try to cut through the Catacombs and contend with undead and curses that could inadvertently kill him, failing the quest.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Just about every change in Dark Arisen was well-received, except for one: changing the title song. Even if it was due to legal technicalities, you can guess what the very first mod of the PC release was. Though some feel the new song fits the overall tone of the game better, as the original song clashes hilariously with the rest of the game (at first glance...).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Basically everything after the Arisen slays Grigori. The entire world has become shrouded in darkness, powerful monsters roam the land, and after returning to the capital, the entire military is out for the Arisen's blood due to the ravings of the king, a former Arisen who falsely believes that you have made a contract with the dragon as he did (since who would be mad enough to fight the dragon...). And then all of this...becomes completely irrelevant as soon as the Arisen falls into the Everfall, the final dungeon. In fact, aside from gaining materials from the stronger monsters now roaming the world, there's zero incentive to explore the more dangerous world outside Gran Soren to see how it has changed. And even though the Arisen being wanted due to the lies of the king would be a pretty interesting plot hook, as said nothing comes of it and we never even learn what happens to the king (other than presumably dying of old age rather soon.)
• Vindicated by History: The game sold very poorly in the West around its original release, not helped by the controversies Capcom was in at the time, but thanks to word of mouth, it got popular enough to warrant a PC version, which went on to become Capcom's best selling PC title up to the release of Monster Hunter: World, and then eventually further re-releases on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Nowadays, the game is generally seen as a bright spot in what was otherwise Capcom's Audience-Alienating Era, and a solid title on its own even outside of that.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The original PS3/Xbox360 versions of the game were not bad-looking at all, but the PS4 and Xbox One re-releases look amazing.

Anime

• Complete Monster: "Gluttony": The Mayor is a gluttonous pig of a man who has a Cyclops eat children under false pretenses that they are ritual sacrifices; he would only spare those who hand over all their food to him, while letting them starve to death. When Ethan and Hannah battles the Cyclops, the Mayor has his men attack the duo, potentially putting them in danger of facing the Cyclops's warpath.
• So Okay, It's Average: The overall reaction to the anime from casual viewers as it takes many notes from modern Dark Fantasy anime shows (most notably Berserk and Goblin Slayer) but doesn't use the more original aspects of the game's setting and lore, making the final product feel very unoriginal (if watchable).
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A common complaint of the anime from fans of the game is that it's a very streamlined adaptation of the game's story, simplifying the setting and lore and taking out many characters and elements of the game, all in favor of a simple revenge story with a very small cast of original characters.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The Crapsack World of the anime, not to mention the fact that the series ends with Ethan becoming the new Dragon who is destined the start the cycle all over again with no end in sight, seeing as how human nature itself dooms the Arisen every single time.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: "Envy" has Theo and his wife, Elizabeth, who admits to having married her husband because of his wealth, but the arrival of the dragon now pushes her to pursue a man who can protect her. The episode ends with Theo, having killed Goblins to defend himself and his wife, turning the blade on her and subsequently himself after one of the Knights - who had warned Ethan of her conniving ways - gave him "The Reason You Suck" Speech. However, given that Elizabeth had openly admitted her aims to Ethan while trying to seduce him, coupled with her showing her husband no affection whatsoever until after he'd staved off the Goblins, it's hard to blame him for coming to despise her.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Elizabeth, the above-mentioned Gold Digger from "Envy," who married her husband for money, treated him with disdain after he lost everything, and tried to seduce Ethan as a trade-up.
  • Hannah for her refusal to kill Ethan before he could fully transform into a Dragon. It's meant to be a sign of her character growth but comes across more as cowardice and selfishness as she not only condemned Ethan to a life of mindless violence as the new Dragon but now everyone he kills will be on her head, not to mention the inevitable continuance of the cycle when a new Arison kills Ethan.

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