The fantasy world of Dragon’s Dogma is pretty darn unremarkable isn’t it? It’s a collection of Google image results. You want a griffin? Here’s one exactly as drawn on a fantasy novel cover from when you were a kid. Cyclops? Just like the one in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. There’s so little of the Dragon’s Dogma world that feels unique or standout. It’s as if everything was borrowed from the most typical version of itself. The world has a name but it might as well be called Ye Olde Fantasy Place.
But that’s okay, because Dragon’s Dogma does have one ace up its sleeve: the character creator. Aside from being flexible in terms of the kind of character you can create, it also lets you create your very own sidekick, called a Pawn. You can also have two other pawns to make a party of four, but these pawns must be borrowed from other players in an online sharing system – you can’t create them.
And it’s not just for show – your character’s attributes matter. If they’re too short, they can’t pick up enemies or heavy objects. The bigger they are the slower they are. The character you create informs how the game plays and shapes the experience you have with it. It helps the game backs all this up with an immense amount of freedom. There are few hard barriers. If you want to do something the game will let you, whether that’s skipping important quests or chucking NPCs off cliffs.
So when it came to creating my characters, I thought long and hard about what was going to make my experience more novel. If the fantasy world had little to offer, maybe the characters I played as would make the difference. So I opted to make a group of kids in the vein of a Goonies-esque adventure. Specifically, I chose to recreate the cast of the Paper Girls comic series (which hey, if you like good comics check that out). Restricted to crafting just two characters, creating the other two members for the gang required a bit of work. I had to create two additional Steam accounts (you can share your Steam library between accounts on a single computer) then add myself as a friend before finally uploading these pawns to the game’s servers. A lot of effort but the results made it worthwhile.