Okay, the fist thing you should know is that I had little to no expectations for Capcom’s new third-person RPG,Dragon’s Dogma.  That said, I am absolutely in love with it.  The story they’re telling is fairly cut-and-paste in its set-up of “ancient evil awakens and threatens the world and gives the hero a reason for picking up a sword and hunting it down” but it’s being laid out in a pretty entertaining fashion.  More than that, though, it plays out in a world that, while slightly less populated than one would imagine, feels real and believable.  The monsters that stalk its vast landscape are interesting, many in number, and present an actual threat to any who wander close enough.

What I love most about Dogma(I’m too lazy to keep typing Dragon…deal) is the Pawn system; more specifically the creation of your personal pawn.  In this world, Pawns are a race of beings that lack a true will of their own and exist in a magic realm just outside our own called the Rift where they gather in vast numbers (or however many people are online at the time, it would seem) waiting to be recruited by the Arisen…namely, you.  This basically gives the player a never-ending supply of readily available party members to recruit.  What’s really cool about the Pawns is that most–if not all–of them are created by other players.  When the story gets to a certain point, the player is asked to create a Pawn using the exact same creation tools that were used to create the player-character, which is ridiculously deep.  What Capcom has done is essentially given you a method for putting yourself and a friend (or your fiance, since I’m a huge dork) in this world.  On top of that, while you and your Build-a-Friend are gallivanting around the countryside slaying direwolves and goblins-a-plenty, your Pawn is possibly–at that very moment–aiding another adventurer in their quest.  This earns you Rift Crystals (which are used to recruit other Pawns as well as upgrade and further customize your personal Pawn) and any gifts the other adventurer sent back with them if they performed well enough.  So far I’ve yielded mostly fish and nuts, but that’s okay.

I could go on and on about this game, its lush world (complete with a lack of a real fast travel system which forces you to walk the many miles from one place to another) or the varied quests, expertly chosen and artfully rendered monsters but I don’t have time.

What I will talk about real fast, however, is the point of the comic.  While the Pawns constitute some of the most interesting NPC’s I’ve ever seen in a game short of scripted events, they are just that…NPC’s.  Which means they’re behavior is flawed sometimes.  Now, this isn’t a complaint that should keep you from wanting to play this game.  Quite frankly, I’d be shocked if you were at all surprised by the fact.  What gets me, though, is that a Pawn will yell that you should run away from a particularly dangerous enemy…

…and then run right at it!!!

I spent several large-scale fights (of which there is no shortage of) dodging the stomping footsteps of a massive beast hellbent on seeing what my insides look like desperate to revive a fallen Pawn…only to have them stand and wait to be smacked by the next swing of a giant club.  At one point, I found myself safely entrenched in a tunnel that ran beneath a keep overrun by goblins while two–two–huge cyclopes circled the human-sized hole.  I was perfectly content to bide my time and slowly pick away at their health one arrow-in-the-eye at a time, but, noooooo…my Pawns were having none of that shit.  They were all for charging headlong into death in tightly-packed convenient-to-smoosh pack.

I guess a good Pawn is hard to come by.

–Ray