What is immediately and increasingly apparent is that the team has spent an awful lot of time swiping about in Dark Souls. It's in the structural cleverness of Bitterblack Isle's grand architectural puzzle, which fits together with the elegance of a giant contraption, short cuts unlocking as you press deeper and find the keys to its secrets. It's in the testy dragons with their scorched nostrils and flicking tails who show up when they smell the bodies you've left in your wake, and who stomp around these crumbling halls with all the swagger and bolshiness of a hunter that knows it vastly out-powers its prey. It's in the fake treasure chests, whose lids you flip open with wide-eyed expectation only to be gobbled up by the jack-in-a-box freak coiled inside. An optional second disc install increases the quality of the game's textures and allows players to select Japanese voice acting. It's in the curious helpers you meet along these mossy, cobbled pathways, who speak in off-kilter regional English accents and who will happily sell you useful herbs and armour, yet never quite convince you of their trustworthiness. It's in the rangy skeletons that lunge at you with cricking knees and the hollowed knights (seemingly quickened by their demise) who hop and jab with rapiers. It's in the ghostly messages that sound out when you walk past the smoke-gripped corpses that punctuate its hallways, offering mortal warnings of what lies ahead - or of what, for that particular cadaver, lies behind. It isn't a cliché in the same way, but it is nevertheless familiar. After 60 years of landscaped tributes to Tolkien's imagination in books, film and video games, there are few hills and valleys you could scatter with orcs that wouldn't feel wearyingly over-familiar.īitterblack Isle is a cove that leads to a cavernous underground network of halls, runnels and spiral stairways and the heart of Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen - Capcom's part-expansion, part nip-and-tuck of 2012's blueprint. It had to do with environmental cliché: those blanketed meadows, weathered cliffs and sinister forests stretch across all fantasy fiction from Middle-earth to Westeros, a tradition that Capcom's game all too eagerly followed. Gransys, the green and not-so-pleasant land through which players hacked and thwacked in last year's grand fantasy adventure, Dragon's Dogma, displayed a certain anonymity despite its rugged handsomeness.
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