Loving Dragon’s Dogma the Game… Thinking About the Anime

 

This piece contains major spoilers for both Dragon’s Dogma the video game (2012) and its anime adaptation (2020). Be aware, also, that there will be some NSFW content discussed here and that this will include discussion of the show’s depiction of sexual violence. I have tried to keep the most potentially upsetting content in its own section below and have marked its beginning and end with content warnings.

 

Sections:

This piece is very long, so I have divided it up a bit. Consider using CTRL + F to jump to where you left off. Individual sections may stand alone; however, this essay was meant to be read as a whole.

 

Introduction and Initial Impressions (Read: Initial Foreboding)

Episode-by-Episode (Moral-by-Moral, Horror-by-Horror)

Part One: Taking the Bad with the Good (Wrath, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth)

Part Two: Taking the Good with the Bad (Greed, Lust, and Pride)

Not So Much A Masterwork: Further Adaptational Choices and Conclusion

 

Introduction and Initial Impressions (Read: Initial Foreboding)

Dragon’s Dogma is one of my most favorite video games of all time and possibly also the game I’ve spent the most cumulative time playing across all the characters I’ve created since I first played it back in 2017. It’s a game that means a lot to me—in part because of how I played it at an emotionally fraught period of my life when I really needed the distraction of something so time-consuming and engrossing and in part because of how unique it feels within its sub-genre of “action-RPG.” The game’s pedigree links it to developer and publisher Capcom’s other stylish action series Devil May Cry, and it feels unique within its sub-genre partly because of what it inherits from that other series, which is flexible and creative combat. The overall combination of real-time action (including gameplay elements like light and heavy attacks, double jumps, dodge rolls, parry timings, etc.) alongside stats- and gear-focused progression isn’t actually unique, but the particular blend is, thanks in part to other mechanics like the ability to grab and throw or restrain smaller enemies and to climb around on the larger ones to target specific weak points. I wrote a bit about Dragon’s Dogma in my piece on the action-RPG Mortal Shell and have tried at least a couple of times over the years to come up with a dedicated essay on just this game, but it never worked out. I actually stopped playing the recently-released titanic hit that is FromSoftware’s action-RPG Elden Ring (2022) for a time because its lighting and visuals at points reminded me enough of Dragon’s Dogma that I just felt like I had to go back to that other game again. I recently also had the brainstorm that I might be able to use the 2020 anime adaptation on Netflix as a springboard. Reviewing and critiquing the series might also give me a framework to put together some thoughts on the game. I watched a video review of the anime a couple years ago where the reviewer’s opinion was decidedly negative, but having since forgotten a lot of the particulars, I felt that I could probably approach the series with something like fresh eyes, even if I did still have impressions from that review in mind. The fact of the matter is that I was predisposed to dislike the anime from the first trailer I saw back when it was originally announced.

I want to start this piece with the red flags I saw in the trailer for the Dragon’s Dogma anime that I alluded to in the previous paragraph. There were two of them, but I do want to establish upfront that neither was the series’ use of what has been a controversial design choice in modern anime—which is to say the use of CG/3D models in place of 2D animation. I will touch on that subject below, but the heavy use of CGI was not what initially turned me against the show. The first critical issue (in my mind) was the design of the main character.

 

The default male character model from Dragon’s Dogma the game is on the left. The main character of the anime, Ethan, is on the right. While not necessarily exactly the same, there is absolutely an overall similarity.

Dragon’s Dogma has one of the best character creators in video games, still, after all these years, and one of my issues with the trailer was how the adaptation seemed to just use the “default” male character model. I guess that makes a certain kind of sense given that this design did appear on the original release’s box art, and you play as him (or at least a character with that look) in the game’s initially mysterious prologue chapter. The use of the design is, in a way, a shorthand for reverence for the series. The problem is that they really could have gone with something more creative and didn’t. To this day, Dragon’s Dogma remains a game with, in my opinion, some of the greatest flexibility where creating characters is concerned, specifically with regard to body type. Height and weight are often attributes that character creators don’t let you tweak in meaningful ways. Consequently, players often aren’t able to truly see themselves represented onscreen by their avatars, though, representation aside, everyone also just has less creative freedom due to these limitations on character appearance. It almost feels like a bad joke at this point given how these certain elements of a player character’s design remain rigid and off-limits even as games provide literally dozens of sliders for various minute bits of an avatar’s face. Some of the biggest titles out there don’t let you meaningfully tweak your character’s appearance. The extremely popular MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV is notorious for this. Every player avatar in that (admittedly quite pretty) game has essentially the same willowy build, outside of the already physically smaller or bulkier races, which is a limitation I have also noticed in a lot of other games. The aforementioned Elden Ring is actually a noteworthy contemporary example of this issue, in fact. Meanwhile, Dragon’s Dogma allows you a great deal of freedom to create characters of extremely distinct ages, heights, and weights. You can create some goofy monstrosity if you want, but you can also create some of the most visually unique (realistic, even) avatars in gaming using only a handful of sliders and a large selection of preset body parts and facial features. There may be some controversy with regard to how some of these decisions do have mechanical consequences, like how bigger characters will always have a higher carry weight and slower stamina regeneration than smaller characters, but there is a lot of diversity possible. Given the possibilities, that the anime series went with the most boring option available (not even bothering to create an avatar, in a sense) was something of a red flag for me from the get-go.

Equally or even more worrisome was how the show went with essentially the “default” narrative in media as well: a man whose wife and unborn child are killed, motivating a quest for revenge. The specific lines in the trailer that really nagged me were these: “My father taught me what it means to be a man. I failed my wife and child.” In the actual anime, I did feel like the main character, Ethan, was a lot more emotionally nuanced than I expected—that there was a lot more genuine-feeling grief than just conventional bad-ass rage in the wake of the loss of his family—but that initial premise set up by the trailer (the imagery and words) just felt so retrograde. In the year 2020, Dragon’s Dogma would attempt to hype up one of the most played out scenarios in media without apparently an ounce of self-awareness. Even if you ignore the long history of media—including both TV and video games—that came before and has rendered this premise so laughably boring and low-effort in a general sense, it once again also betrays the comparative creativity of its specific source material. Like the character creation issue, this plot also similarly runs contrary to the game’s whole deal since your character doesn’t set out on a quest for revenge for a dead spouse and child. The murder of a few of their fellow villagers plus the dragon stealing their heart while posing a threat to the entire country was actually enough reason to start a quest, it turns out. Your father figure in the game, Adaro, is also a sweet old fisherman and the village elder who doesn’t look or speak at all like the sort of person who would teach you “what it means to be a man.”

 

Here’s Adaro, a real sweetie who speaks softly and only ever worries after your safety. A fun quirk of Dragon’s Dogma that might just be the result of the devs not having enough time to work with is that male and female characters seem to share a lot of the same animations when you speak to them, meaning you get to see a surprising amount of hip-waggling and hand-waving from the men of the game. Characters also gain a sort of “blushing” effect when you max out your affinity with them, resulting in a pink glow in their face. Again, this applies to both men and women, whether you see them as a romantic partner or not. Whether intentional or not, all this extra liveliness/expressiveness/softness just further makes the anime’s conceptions of masculinity and femininity feel out of touch with its source.

  

Meanwhile, it’s also fully possible in the game to end up in a same-sex relationship thanks to the way that it handles affinity and the concept of your “beloved” late in the adventure when the dragon kidnaps the character with whom your protagonist shares the highest affection rating, asking you to choose between their life and your own. If you reject the offer and still kill the dragon (which is the canon option that progresses the story), your character and their beloved have sex and move in together. This can be incredibly awkward and/or funny, depending on who ends up being your “beloved,” but it doesn’t actually change much of anything. You just have to watch your character tumble passionately to the ground with someone before the game cuts away, and to then have that person in your character’s house back home, though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if many players didn’t even realize their character has a house in the game since it’s never really broadcasted to you before the point you’re moved there after killing the dragon and watching the credits. You can easily view the cutscene where your character gets out of bed after killing the dragon, maybe exchange a word with your so-called beloved, and then leave the house for more adventure without ever returning again and without consequence. It is worth acknowledging that the fact that the game railroads players into this relationship is a problem since, how funny I personally find the affinity system with its rough edges aside, it’s very possible for players to have their characters start relationships they don’t want—straight characters getting together with the same gender, ace characters forced into what looks like a sexual relationship, and so on. If you do every side quest in the game, your character will have implied sex with the duchess as well, which is not something that’s telegraphed in advance or opt-in, which would make supposedly monogamous characters unfaithful. I don’t want to get too lost in the gaming weeds here since this piece is ultimately about both the game and TV series at once, but I just want to provide some support for how the game A) offers very flexible options for romance (in keeping with the flexibility of character creation maybe) but also B) places hardly any weight on romance as a motivating factor apart from the one scene where the dragon makes its offer, while also mishandling romance as a gameplay feature to such a degree that players may not feel any actual attachment to the person their character ends up with. Maybe this is just a failure of the game to realize its ambitions, which is a definite possibility given that the devs’ aspirations clearly exceeded their grasp (read: budget and/or time constraints) in certain areas, but contrasting the show with the game as it exists, the old Revenge For A Dead Wife (And She Was Also Pregnant!) set-up just feels very silly, like they once again intentionally limited themselves for no good reason given the property they were working with.

I suspect that a large number of potential viewers, regardless of whether they felt like I did about the anime’s apparent lack of imagination, could likely have been turned off by Dragon’s Dogma’s visuals. The image a lot of anime fans probably associate with the use of CG character models in a series is the notorious “hopping” scene in the second season of the dark fantasy series Berserk (2017), where the main character, Guts, is in the foreground of a shot, with much of his body out of sight below the frame, and moves to the left by essentially jump-walking like a South Park character. The character model is so flat and rigid-looking, and then you have the blatant cheapness of the movement, like someone was just dragging and dropping the model. The Knights of Sidonia anime (2014-2015) which I watched years ago also featured heavy use of CG models and, early on, looked quite rough when it was using said models in non-action scenes. The show’s look improved over time, however, by more often restricting the 3D to the scenes taking place in space, which is where the intense action between mechs and aliens occurs and where those 3D models were probably genuinely useful for rendering the fast-paced sequences more easily and cheaply without necessarily sacrificing as much visual fidelity. Critically, they later seemed to avoid using CGI for shots of characters’ faces so that the dramatic moments, in space or not, were actually able to land properly. In the end, though, I don’t watch a lot of anime, so I can’t take a truly comprehensive view with this topic. All I can say is that I know the use of CGI is contentious, that even my more limited exposure to it made me at least somewhat wary of this newer show, but that the Dragon’s Dogma series ultimately really surprised me with the quality of its 3D models—especially the expressiveness of the characters’ faces. They’re able to get a lot closer to the “normal” level of intense expression you expect from anime, and it was pretty easy for me to look at the scenes in the series and envision them in 2D instead. It felt pretty one-to-one overall, which is also a compliment regarding things like shot composition and editing, which seem quite competent. I’m not going to say I never noticed any rough edges, but the series looks good on the whole. In the end, however, I still would have preferred 2D animation. There is definitely still a stiffness to the character models that renders scenes awkward-looking, emotionally flat, and even laughable in certain circumstances. The “low frame rate” look of the 3D models (especially the big monsters) also just feels… off. I’m not an animator, so I want to watch what I say—or at least use a lot of quotation marks to indicate how I’m fudging things or acknowledging that what I’m commenting on is more vibes standing in for technical know-how than anything super concrete, but the big creatures have a “low-poly” look or like they’re “missing” textures or have “lower-quality” textures. I suspect this has something to do with budget restrictions. I have to assume this series looks better than Berserk because it likely has a higher budget spread across fewer episodes but while still coming in with less cash to spread around than a feature film would have.

 

Episode-by-Episode (Moral-by-Moral, Horror-by-Horror)

With that, we come to the content of the show itself. While I don’t think it would be practical to cover every episode of most series in order, I’m going to try to use that framework here since Dragon’s Dogma is pretty short—with only 7 episodes, with an average runtime of around 20-ish minutes each. I think this approach is a good choice also because this show really does vary in quality from episode to episode. If I was to sum everything up to start out (a sort of “tl;dr” right here and now), I’d say that episode one is fine, episode two is more or less fine up until the ending, episode three is pretty bad throughout, episode four is awful, episode five is pretty good (especially in comparison to the previous ones), episode six is more disappointing in its scope than anything else, and episode seven is fine/good. What that means in terms of an overall score, I’m unsure. It feels like Dragon’s Dogma could be ok to middling, though it also dips below some sort of vague “average” to the level of bad because the low points are very low. What proves to be a throughline for the series and for my thinking about it has to be the show’s bizarre moralizing that occurs pretty much throughout. What I’m dancing around here is the fact that the anime series is structured around the seven deadly sins, and each episode is both named for a sin and seems intended to offer some sort of lesson or theme based on that sin. The framing of the show around the sins in the first place is a bit odd since the game doesn’t focus on anything so conventionally and explicitly Christian at all. Additionally, while the game’s world is monotheistic (with a vaguely Christian faith focused on the rather generic-sounding “Maker” god) and with references to gods (plural) only in ancient places, the anime makes liberal use of “gods” without the same sense of referencing some bygone era. One potentially interesting way of making sense of these differences, given the game’s eventual focus on alternate realities and endless repetition of the same cycle, is that the show could very well exist in either the same world but in the distant past or else in an alternate reality. It sounds backhanded to say, but this may be one of the best things about the series—that its existence doesn’t actually taint the game it’s based on since it may not even be directly connected. The series never shows or names “the duke” it references, for example, which suggests this may not be Duke Edmun Dragonsbane (of the game), placing it either at a different point in time or in a different universe.

Ultimately, given what I’ve already said about the design of the main character, the whole revenge plotline, and the show’s religious interests, it just feels incredibly out of step with the game as a general rule. The specifics of the sin-focused episodes can be fascinating, though, because of just how odd, sometimes laughable, and often downright regressive the ostensible morals of each one can be, and while I will touch on other elements of the show as a part of this review or discussion (or whatever), I think it’s fair to say that the moralizing or theming I’ve mentioned is the biggest factor influencing the quality of the show and is arguably the one worth digging into in the most depth.

PART ONE: TAKING THE BAD WITH THE GOOD (WRATH, GLUTTONY, ENVY, AND SLOTH)

In a way, it actually feels inappropriate to start with the first episode, “Wrath,” in large part because of how the episode immediately seems to break what I established before is a pattern of the show teaching bizarre lessons about sin, at least if you approach it with the pattern in mind but with no knowledge of the story to come. The “sin” here only seems to make sense in retrospect. At a glance, the wrath in question could appear to be the dragon’s, but the lesson seems to be, of all things, that Ethan never should have fought back against the dragon that killed his friends, family, and neighbors. This defiance is what prompts the dragon to take his heart and turn him into an “Arisen.” It’s this original sin that results in Ethan being chosen by the dragon and that leads to his slow degradation over the course of the next six episodes. He slowly loses his humanity and finally becomes a dragon himself, continuing the cycle I’ll talk about in more detail later. It is downright bizarre that the show seems to suggest that Ethan’s anger at the death of everyone he’s ever known is not justified. Nevertheless, Ethan’s anger at the dragon is seen as a sin by the show (or at least by its singular credited writer). If that is the case, it’s as equally messed up as the other “morals” since, again, Ethan was arguably, by any human metric, justified in trying to kill the dragon—especially in that moment but even later on as an act of revenge. The message that Ethan would have not sinned had he just taken the abuse thrown at him lines up with a pattern (intentional or accidental) in messaging that ultimately reveals the show’s support for various forms of the status quo, and an idea that the series returns to in other episodes is how tampering with the status quo only results in worse outcomes.

 

The moment the dragon takes an Arisen’s heart is obviously a big part of the Dragon’s Dogma story since it’s the moment when a player should be compelled to complete the game and/or the viewer should be compelled to finish watching the series to see this central, personal conflict with the dragon resolved. I will note here that I think the game’s presentation of this moment is superior. In the show, the dragon seems to remove Ethan’s heart via something like telekinesis, without actually touching him. It tears out his heart from a distance and levitates the organ into its mouth. In the game, the dragon physically removes the heart, but the moment of the removal is presented in a more stylistic way, where we see the dragon lower its talon and ultimately lift the heart to its mouth, but the moment it pierces the player character is presented more dramatically or even ambiguously, where their body lifts and convulses as if stabbed but with no claw visible. It’s still a very violent scene, but where the show opts for something more straightforwardly unpleasant and gory, the game makes presentational choices that render the act weightier. The choices of camera angle and lighting (shown above), for example, make the loss of the heart perversely beautiful in a way. This is fitting given the fact that there is a sort of godly ritual at work that begins with the taking of an Arisen’s heart. Where the TV series uses a night setting and a dark color palette to communicate a more conventional sense of negativity around the dragon’s inciting attack, the game fills the scene with light.

 

It’s actually in the second episode, “Gluttony,” that the show most clearly starts moralizing the first time you watch it, however, and where it makes its antisubversive stance most explicitly clear. On the surface and for a good chunk of its runtime, “Gluttony” is a perfectly serviceable fantasy adventure story, if maybe a bit cliché. It basically involves Ethan and his magical sub-human “Pawn” helper, Hannah, arriving in a village with a monster problem and then dealing with that problem before continuing their larger quest. While the show didn’t release on a weekly schedule, this premise is still classic “monster of the week” storytelling, where any serialized plotline takes a temporary backseat to some more immediate and self-contained problem. In “Gluttony,” the people of the village are starving because of the unreasonable levies imposed on them by their mayor, but he’s also the only one who is able to protect them from a cyclops which they must appease through human sacrifice. Of course, the twist is that the mayor is actually controlling the cyclops as a means of cowing and of extorting food from the populace, and Ethan has to ultimately face both the cyclops and the mayor’s human soldiers. It’s not necessarily an original premise but works fine within the context of a fantasy adventure story in any medium. It’s easy enough to imagine the scenario in a book or game, as it’s so stock but also kind of comfortable. The discomfort enters the picture, first, with the fatphobic depiction of the evil mayor. He's a stereotypical fat, corrupt guy extorting food from his people. When we first see him, he’s chowing down in an extremely messy fashion, with bits of meat stuck to his face. Fatness is so often associated with negative traits like greed that the fatness itself becomes a shorthand in media for an evil or corrupt or disgusting character. That, unfortunately, however, is also fairly stock and even expected. What is truly weird and perhaps even more uncomfortable is the story’s moral: Yes, the mayor using a cyclops to extract food from his villagers is evil, but aren’t the villagers just as bad when, after the mayor’s death, they riot, fight over food, and stuff their (starving) faces? That is the lesson the show seems to be teaching here with how Ethan kneels as if in emotional collapse at the end of the episode when a riot breaks out after the mayor is killed and his subjects desperately fight with one another to reclaim what they can of their stolen goods and also feed themselves. The show’s explicit goal with all these stories, which is revealed in episode seven, is to show off just how sinful humanity supposedly is. As with “Wrath,” Dragon’s Dogma and its writer seem to suggest that the villagers would have actually been better off without any sort of intervention. While they were starving and being extorted and were forced to sacrifice their children, at least they weren’t shoving one another and, in the show’s eyes, degrading themselves.

“Gluttony” also contains another creative choice that both suggests a potentially interesting direction for the series while also containing more of the problematic messaging. At one point in the story, Ethan has a flashback to his childhood where we see him hogging the water in a canteen while his father goes thirsty as the two are at sea. He offers some to his father as almost an afterthought, and the older man refuses. The implication is that Ethan himself is guilty of the sin of gluttony. This beat is interesting because it seems to suggest that we may see Ethan guilty of each of the seven deadly sins, sort of like how the 2010 video game adaptation of the Inferno portion of Dante’s Divine Comedy ultimately focuses on its revamped crusader Dante’s personal connections to each of the nine circles of hell. I had thought we might get similar character reveals from Ethan in each episode, culminating in some kind of meaningful finale. That is not actually the case, though, and Ethan’s “sins” aren’t really the focus of every episode. I put “sins” in quotation marks since, as already established, what this show considers a sin is questionable. In the case of the previously mentioned flashback, for example, we can easily read between the lines to gather that Ethan’s father is intentionally letting his son have the water just like the family Ethan and Hannah stay with briefly in the episode give up food for their kids. Is Ethan really sinning if his father is letting him have the water? It’s fair to say that a grown-up doesn’t need a child’s permission to take a portion of the food or water and that, in desperate times, it’s considered the noble thing for an adult to do to make sacrifices for their children. This moment, again, raises an interesting question about the sins depicted in the series. In this case, maybe the “sin” is just in Ethan’s head. He sees himself (perhaps unfairly) as a glutton. A better version of the series might lean into that subjectivity, focusing on Ethan’s faulty perspective on the world and people around him. Unfortunately, that isn’t actually the case. The way that the show handles its morals seems instead to suggest an objective, authorial position on sinfulness, and it’s that authorial intent that ultimately results in Dragon’s Dogma feeling like a truly twisted story at heart.

Dragon’s Dogma’s third episode, “Envy,” is a deeply messed up installment since it is the one that also attempts to work sexual assault into its conflict and messaging. I’m going to drop a content warning here for the rest of this paragraph since talking about this episode’s issues in detail is going to require getting into uncomfortable territory. I’ll include a second paragraph after this one that covers the moralizing of the episode more generally and comprehensively. Content warning officially begins here! The attempted rape scene in this episode is a victim of (maybe) bad direction and certainly of poor conception. It’s hard not to see the inclusion in the show at all as a consequence of the 2018 Goblin Slayer anime and how it put goblins-as-rapists in the anime-watching public’s consciousness more broadly. To bring in the source material once again, I don’t think there’s anything in the Dragon’s Dogma game that suggests the goblins of this fantasy universe are going around sexually assaulting people. In fact, its ogres are the more likely candidates given how they get a sort of attack buff (or at least fixation) if you have women in your party, how they can be found as a repeatable encounter at night outside an abbey staffed only by women, and how you can potentially steal a pair of women’s panties from the creatures if you have the right active skill and get extremely lucky(?). Ogres don’t even appear in the anime, however—just goblins. Given the lack of support for this depiction in the source material, it’s hard not to draw a line then from Goblin Slayer’s portrayal of goblins directly to this one. That clear (potential) line of naked inspiration makes Dragon’s Dogma feel cheap by comparison, like a trend chaser. And given that the trend in question involves sexual assault, it just makes the obvious copycat job all the more detestable. Add to that the fact that the series clearly also does not actually have the stomach for this sort of thing, and the moment is just an embarrassment. I don’t ever have any intentions of watching Goblin Slayer since I engage with media that features sexual assault in a very selective capacity (I did watch the Berserk Golden Age trilogy of films, for example), but I still have to give credit to that other series for going all in on the concept. Dragon’s Dogma presents the moment where the character Elizabeth is pulled off her horse by the goblins and almost assaulted the way that a lot of media seems to handle this sort of thing. It reminds me a bit of the conclusion of the first arc of the second season of the Sword Art Online anime (2014), where a female character seems to be just on the edge of being assaulted (but not actually assaulted) for a ridiculous period of time until the hero can charge in to save the day. This sort of depiction where the potential assailant seems weirdly hesitant to do anything more than paw suggestively at their victim makes for weird beats emotionally—playing up the (obviously) very upsetting prospect of seeing something like rape rendered onscreen but also being obviously unwilling to actually go that far. Like borrowing the goblins-as-rapists, Dragon’s Dogma’s gambit here feels at once both tawdry and cheap. We have to look at the goblins pawing ambiguously at Elizabeth—first while she’s atop her horse and then as she’s on the ground with her breasts out—for a bit, and then Ethan the hero finally swoops in and kills one of the goblins and we get this equally upsetting, tawdry, and cheap beat where the blood splatters her in a manner reminiscent of a volatile ejaculation. The whole thing is made worse by the fact that the focus of much of the episode going forward is on how Elizabeth is such a slut (in the show’s eyes), but I’ll come back to that. For now, I just want to emphasize that one major problem here is the wishy-washy half-measure that is this scene. I didn’t want a rape scene in this show, but the way that it dangles the prospect of one in what feels like such a nakedly obvious attempt to cash in on the edginess of the premise without actually committing feels… cheap. In some ways, it feels more “grim-dark” than something like Game of Thrones, where the extent of such violence and the consequences are arguably explored with more appropriate thoughtfulness and gravitas. That term—"grim-dark”—feels more fitting for a violent, disgusting, but also ultimately cowardly and empty depiction like this one. My backseat directing opinion is that they should never have gotten Elizabeth off the horse, leaving the intentions behind the goblins’ aggression more vague. Content warning ends here!

Setting aside the particulars of what may be the worst scene in the series, the character Elizabeth’s treatment in this episode and the ostensible lesson it spins from her behavior and what happens (or almost happens) to her is just disgusting. At the risk of speculating too much about an actual person, I’m almost tempted to say that Dragon’s Dogma isn’t so much a good series as it is a fascinating, if also sometimes hilarious and/or nauseating, look inside the head of its writer, Kurasumi Sunayama. Granted, a lot of other people also signed off on these stories too. There may be some commentary on Japanese culture specifically, but I won’t attempt to touch on that particular angle in any detail given my lack of knowledge. The treatment of Elizabeth in this episode feels cross-cultural to me anyway—the slutty, stuck-up woman who gets what she deserves. The way she uses the word “traumatic” to describe what almost happens to her in a flippant, blasé sort of way twists the pathos of what should be an emotionally impactful experience the viewer empathizes with into a character moment where Elizabeth instead comes off as unlikable and unappreciative as she dismisses her husband’s concern over her in favor of worrying about the safety of the horse, because otherwise her husband is going to have to carry her now. The implication of this callousness from Elizabeth—from how she’s inattentive where her husband is concerned but quick to press her bare breasts into Ethan’s back, for example—is that maybe she deserved it. Elizabeth is characterized throughout the episode as a well-to-do woman who is too well-bred and hoity-toity to defend herself in this fantasy universe and demands that her meek husband do it because she desperately wants a “real” man, like her bodyguards or like Ethan. She married for money, and now that the two have lost everything to the dragon, she’s essentially lashing out. The show suggests she had sex with one of the men guarding her, and we see her actively trying to seduce Ethan as well. It’s suggested pretty explicitly by one of Elizabeth’s guards that she’s been doing all this to get her husband to man up, which he does—first by standing up to the goblins when they return and then by killing Elizabeth so that she can never leave him and then himself when he realizes what he’s done. I don’t want to call the handling of Elizabeth slut-shaming exactly since Elizabeth is a fictional character and isn’t promiscuous because she chooses to be. It’s all a contrivance by the show’s creators, and it’s a messed up one. The episode sexualizes Elizabeth in classic “male gaze” fashion (close-up of a shining bare thigh here, massive honking, screen-filling cleavage there), while simultaneously characterizing her as a vain, unfaithful gold digger. It plays into the worst in very old misogynistic trends, asking the (presumed straight male) viewer to want this woman sexually but also hate her. It’s classic hypocritical misogyny—a simultaneous desire for and hatred of promiscuous or at least very sexual women and a viewpoint you wouldn’t have to look hard to find in real male-dominated communities. “Envy,” like the previous episodes, advocates for the status quo, of the worst of corrupted male desire but also of gender roles: A real man is fighting fit, and his violence keeps his wife safe, and the wife is humble and loyal to a fault, maybe even in deference to her husband’s manliness (read: capacity for violence) specifically. As Elizabeth says to Ethan during her attempted seduction, “The only thing a woman can depend on is a man who knows his way around a sword.”

 

Something else the Dragon’s Dogma show struggles with a bit is adding actual tension to its fights. It reminds me of other short action series where there just isn’t time for fights to be given much dramatic weight—for characters to train, plan, implement strategies, struggle, and ultimately “level up” across encounters. Ethan and Hannah have very ambiguous power levels, don’t seem to learn anything from their fights, and the combat feels almost perfunctory at times, more about the references to the creatures or specific abilities from the game than anything that adds much of value to the show. Granted, I’m not sure what else they could do with the time/space they had for these encounters. In the game itself, though, the big monsters like “Envy’s” griffin, if fought slightly under-leveled, make for thrilling encounters. Part of this comes from the versatility of combat that I previously mentioned, but there’s a tangible weightiness or even clumsiness to it that also works in the game’s favor as you, your Pawn teammates, and the creature(s) in question flail around smacking one another. It doesn’t feel snappy and precise like a straightforward action series or even some other action-RPGs. Combat in Dragon’s Dogma is like a brawl or like a violent Three Stooges bit, I feel. Those are my subjective impressions, but I don’t think the show captures what is essentially the extremely stylish and satisfying comedy of a lot of combat encounters in Dragon’s Dogma.

 

Thankfully, the show never returns to sexual violence quite the same way in its conflict or theming again. Episode four, “Sloth,” while possibly even more laughable than “Envy” in its messaging, is at least entertainingly terrible rather than repulsively terrible. To give “Envy” some credit, its messaging is consistently fucked up but is at least competently centered on real threats that make sense—sexual assault, infidelity, spousal violence, etc. These elements are emotionally resonant by default even if their execution alongside the episode’s moral renders them abhorrent and stupid. What makes “Sloth” worse in my eyes is its complete and utter inability to establish a credible threat. The hydra, one of the game’s biggest and most intimidating enemies, comes later in the story, but the conventional fantasy peril it presents is utterly overshadowed and defanged by what seems to be the episode’s True Big Bad, the Real Threat: Drugs! And we’re not talkin’ small-time stuff like heroin, ladies and gentlemen. No, this is the real deal, the real hard stuff: Pot—or, at least, a rough fantasy equivalent in the form of some sort of cave moss. The people of a village near a cave used to work under essentially slave-labor conditions, we’re told, collecting the moss for their lord. When the dragon came and scared most of the people away, however, the stragglers decided to start smoking the moss themselves while leading hedonistic, lazy lives of naked sexual avarice. The depiction of “moss”-use and the language used to discuss it are straight out of an after-school PSA about marijuana, basically. Ethan actually uses the phrase “slippery slope” at one point and comes equipped with a story about a guy who smoked so much that he lost touch with reality, couldn’t take care of himself, and one day just dropped dead while clutching a hookah to the bitter end. The ludicrous, completely straight-faced moralizing so early in the episode put me off emotionally to the point that nothing else really mattered to me or could re-engage me. “Sloth” combines all the tired old scaremongering about marijuana addiction with the interesting (read: twisted) angle that the villagers were actually better off living as slaves under their lord because they didn’t have the opportunity to get addicted. As in “Gluttony,” the show seems to genuinely feel that simply accepting an evil status quo is better than staging any sort of revolution that might result in rioting (even justified) or in some people indulging too much in recreational substances and having a bunch of guilt-free sex. Only within the context of discussing this one episode will I note a specific connection with Japanese culture since it’s pretty widely known that Japan as a country has an incredibly conservative view of even minor drugs like pot, and violations are aggressively punished, which may explain the ways that the pot equivalent is presented here—both the vehemence of the portrayal and the weird sort of seeming-naivete about what is and isn’t hard drug-use which I flippantly criticized earlier. Though again at the risk of speculating about the personal views of the real people who worked on this series, the plot of “Sloth” and its treatment of drug-use feel very appropriate coming from that cultural background, but it’s also only fair to say that there are conservative writers in places like America that could have produced much the same thing given the opportunity.

PART TWO: TAKING THE GOOD WITH THE BAD (GREED, LUST, AND PRIDE)

“Greed” really is good in this case. For one thing, from just a plot perspective, this fifth episode out of seven escalates its conflict immediately. I had expected the opening scene of Ethan and Hannah under attack by what amounts to the monster of the week (a lich) to be a flashforward that would be reversed after the opening credits, but, instead, the episode begins with that beat and builds from there, a smart choice given how little time a roughly twenty-minute show actually has to work with. The main beast is killed around the halfway mark to give way to a twist I saw coming almost immediately after being told by the guard Simon that his companion Balthazar was a nobleman without any familial wealth to lay claim to. Balthazar explicitly mentions the world being full of sin, which helps justify from within the framing of the series around the seven deadly sins and was the first such attempt I noticed. This portrayal of the vice of greed is a lot “cleaner” than the previous sins in the sense that the moralizing isn’t outright abhorrent, though it is still ultimately regressive when you look closely enough to realize that the show not only objects to Balthazar claiming any of the lich’s ill-gotten and also long-ownerless treasure, but that it also considers taking any gold to help out the families of the soldiers slain in the (terrible, virtually nonexistent) plan to kill the lich equally objectionable. The lich was a priest while living who gave way to sin after death essentially removed his mask of piety. Meanwhile, Balthazar wants nothing more than a name and wealth of his own and so succumbs to what seems to be a supernatural curse after the lich is defeated. Less explicit is how Ethan has also become cold and “greedy” in a sense for information about the dragon’s location without much care for human beings. That no one else literally turns into a lich in the episode and that we instead get this kind of cool visual of the lich’s coin-like eye reproduced by Ethan and Balthazar when they hold a coin up in front of their right eyes at points is a surprisingly subtle (even as it isn’t subtle at all) choice for the series. I really liked how the episode does slyly shift our perspective to Hannah over Ethan at noticeable points as the former becomes more human and the latter less so. Less clever is how we’re just repeatedly told that they’ve changed. Better is the visual of a tear formed from Simon’s blood on Hannah’s face as she holds him in her arms at the end while Ethan rather brutally ends his suffering. It’s almost a much more considered echo of the awful blood-as-orgasm image in “Envy.” That the episode ends with a disconnected sex scene that turns murderous to set up the focal creature of the next installment is an unfortunate capper on what could have otherwise been a fairly contemplative ending, though the visualization of this episode’s creature is another positive. The earlier monsters were more or less exact matches for their video game counterparts, but the lich has its new coin-shaped eye to better tie it to greed while also being much more visually interesting overall thanks to its extensive cloak of fire and smoke that seems to act as the catalyst for calling forth its skeleton minions in the anime. It’s a lot more impressive than the game’s version, which amounts to just a large floating sorcerer without much visual flair.

A potential big weakness of “Greed” is that the episode essentially makes Simon the moral one of the guardsmen pair who is obsessed with honor when we already know from “Envy” that Simon had sex with Elizabeth, the woman he was supposed to protect in a professional capacity. A charitable reading might see Simon and Balthazar as a parallel pair to Ethan and Hannah and who undergo a similar switching of positions in this specific episode. A less charitable reading might be that this is yet another knock against Elizabeth (retroactively) since it suggests she’s truly the culpable one—that Simon is “clean” in a sense and not at fault for that transgression of sleeping with a married woman. It puts all the blame on her as a temptress even though, of course, it takes two to cheat. As these various notes reveal, while it remains a mixed bag overall in ways both obvious and more interpretative, “Greed” is still a bit of an improvement over the previous two episodes in terms of its moral (insofar as it is not outright objectionable), and it also does some genuinely interesting things with its characters, visuals, and theming that make it probably my favorite of the batch.

After the absolute shit show that is “Envy’s” approach to sex, the pretty eye-rolling treatment of sex as a sort of secondary vice in “Sloth,” and the death-by-sex teaser at the end of “Greed,” you could reasonably expect an episode of Dragon’s Dogma ostensibly specifically themed around the sin of lust to be the worst yet; however, that isn’t actually the case. “Lust” is actually another largely competent episode in nearly every way, and maybe that’s because it doesn’t even seem to have a moral regarding the title sin, though that is itself a notable flaw since it breaks the pattern the show is supposed to follow. There is a hint of something problematic when during a flashback where we finally learn exactly what happened to Ethan’s father and mother he characterizes his father as “selfish,” even though the man lost his wife due to circumstances outside his control and then essentially went mad with grief. Though he endangered his son in his maddened state, he also never gave up on protecting him. Maybe this is evidence of the show advocating for the status quo again since Ethan’s father put his son in danger while trying to take them somewhere better, away from where his wife and Ethan’s mother died. This other place is said to be a fantasy or sort of local legend, but you could still make the case that, fantasy or not, the show objects to the idea of someone trying to radically change their situation. By the show’s logic, Ethan’s father was probably better off where he was and wasn’t rolling with the punches well enough. He doesn’t sound particularly selfish, however, and, thankfully, Ethan’s wife-to-be, Olivia, refutes this claim of Ethan’s. All that, of course, has nothing to do with the sin of lust, which is limited in this episode to a single succubus that tempts Ethan in Olivia’s form before he kills it. This is a truly tenuous link with a “sin,” however, since despite the risk of death, Ethan isn’t married anymore, and having sex with the succubus (or anyone else) would only be sinful from the most conservative, puritanical perspective, which is, frankly and as I’ve already established, one the show seems to adopt. As for the creature, succubi are a fairly weak late-game enemy in Dragon’s Dogma that are really only dangerous in groups and even then only so long as your characters haven’t levelled up enough yet to trivialize their more substantial health and defenses compared with their early- and mid-game counterparts (harpies and snow harpies). The show’s depiction of them as temptresses is more accurate to the mythological creature, while the game doesn’t do anything so expected with them. They aren’t any more sexualized than the other flying bird-women enemies, which is to say they just have something like human breasts.

My assumption going into “Lust” was that there would be more than one creature involved since a single succubus is in no way comparable to the monsters that have been the focus of the previous episodes; however, that really is it. A single, weak monster is all we get. Ethan and Hannah stop at an inn, Ethan has his flashback and is briefly seduced by the succubus while Hannah talks with the innkeeper, and then Ethan remembers the real Olivia’s death, kills the succubus with his bare hands, and storms off into the night, with Hannah following and the dragon shown waiting for them in the mountains. The succubus’ death came at what felt like the halfway point in the episode, so I thought they were going for another twist like “Greed” (maybe something involving a flock of succubi or some more human problem), but, instead, the episode just ends at 19 minutes, counting the opening and closing credits. As I said, it is “competent” but also feels lazy and like a missed opportunity to at least try to do something interesting. For all their obvious faults, at least the earlier episodes swung for the fences. This feels like filler that you could probably just skip since nothing new here is truly notable. Hannah continues to be more human in “Lust,” particularly as she interacts pretty naturally with the innkeeper, accepting that he sees her as Ethan’s wife and playing that role without skipping a beat. That interaction is probably the best part of the episode if only because it shows rather than tells regarding Hannah’s shift from robotic to human. It’s easy to imagine her earlier in the journey immediately telling the innkeeper she isn’t Ethan’s wife and is instead a Pawn from another dimension, but she’s changed enough to understand the value of the easy lie in smoothing their brief time at the inn. It’s not new characterization, though, and even the specific details about the deaths of Ethan’s parents don’t feel important. I could basically fill in the gaps myself with only the vague details from episode one. Like Ethan’s physical appearance, his tragic backstory is mostly default. The most interesting thing about it that works in tandem with information from episode one is how it takes the gameplay limitation from Dragon’s Dogma that your character simply isn’t allowed to swim and gives it a somewhat credible justification. In the game, you’ll just get consumed by “the Brine,” a supposed monster that lives in the water but really just acts as a barrier to prevent the player from going too far from shore. That way, the devs didn’t have to worry about all the complications swimming could bring to the game, like the additional animations they’d have to create. In the show, Ethan credibly avoids water because of his childhood trauma. It’s… something.

Finally, there is “Pride.” Does this finale redeem the rest of the series? Not really. At least not in the sense that it retroactively makes everything good. All that the general competence of the finale really does is end the story on what amounts to a high note. It doesn’t redeem the weakest parts in the middle—the end of episode two and all of episodes three and four—and those notable weak spots undeniably still drag the whole thing down into mediocrity as a package. “Pride” plays out exactly like you would expect, especially if you have prior knowledge of the source material. The confrontation with the dragon is not an exact match with the one in the game, though there are clear analogues to specific sequences from that big boss fight, like being chased by the dragon down a long hallway or having to scale its body while airborne to stab it in a weak spot at one point. There is a visual reverence present. The conflict is tweaked noticeably since the climactic choice in-game is about whether to risk your own life to kill the dragon and save your beloved or to sacrifice your beloved in exchange for the wealth and power you’ll earn risk-free by simply pretending you killed the dragon. In this adaptation, intent apparently matters instead (and there is no beloved), and Ethan is ultimately doomed by his own propensity for rage. The glowing red eyes he started exhibiting earlier in the series clearly linked him visually to the dragon to the point that I think anyone could see the foreshadowing even if they didn’t already know about the grand cycle at the heart of Dragon’s Dogma’s story. That being said, I would say that I liked the way Ethan started to become noticeably dragon-like back in “Sloth” for how it puts a somewhat creative and unique twist on the journey of the Arisen. There is more of a sense of a ritual harrowing here. The way that the dragon talks about the sinfulness Ethan has seen during his journey suggests that witnessing the failings of humanity is meant to prepare him in some way. The journey may be intended to strip away the Arisen’s human empathy and prepare them either for a role as the dragon or as the god-adjacent “Seneschal” in the cosmic order of things, which would be an interesting addition to the game’s lore. It is a genuinely creative extension of the rather played out philosophical quote about gazing into the abyss that the dragon paraphrases in episode one and then again here in the finale. The possibility of taking on a sort of god and replacing it that exists as the true final ending of the game is never mentioned in the anime, however, perhaps in part because Ethan “fails” the test of the Arisen in a sense. Like Arisen who give up their beloved for power and wealth or like Arisen who try and fail to best god, he gets what is essentially a bad ending to his story. Because of his wrath and because he kills the monster out of anger, Ethan cannot defeat the dragon without simply becoming it. That is me synthesizing the lore, though. I don’t believe there’s any concrete sense in the anime that there is a fate possible for an Arisen other than becoming the dragon and continuing the cycle in that way, though how the dragon chides Ethan might suggest there is an alternative for those not blinded by wrath or pride, like both Ethan and like the dragon itself was when it was once an Arisen and killed its own dragon.

There is a certain satisfaction in this ending. Ethan was a boring character from the get-go who was clearly on a collision course with a tragic end, and “Pride” makes good on those premonitions well enough. The visual symmetry with the first episode when Ethan charges the dragon for the final blow but actually evades getting stomped this time is nice to see. And the sequence where he’s physically becoming the dragon after devouring its heart is suitably body horror-adjacent. Hannah and Ethan finish switching roles here as well. She refuses to kill Ethan even out of mercy, having turned too human just like he’s turned too dragon, in a sense. The way that Ethan manages to maintain just enough control to not kill Hannah and to instead plead with her to protect humanity from him is also a competently-executed emotional beat. I’m not sure how much attachment I really had to either Ethan or Hannah, but on a raw emotional animal level, I think the anime sticks the landing with these final interactions between Ethan, Hannah, and the dying dragon. As in the game, the dragon is the character with the strongest screen presence. Even with a deeper and more conventionally villainous-sounding voice this time around, David Lodge’s performance as the foundation for whatever effects seem to have been applied in post makes the beast incredibly charismatic, and the visual design of the creature remains at once recognizably dragon-like but with enough creative twists. I also love the dragon here since it’s the only character who speaks in the manner of the game’s English localization, with “thou” and “canst” and so forth, and is also the only one in the anime to philosophize and moralize like the game does through even more minor non-player characters. A series called “Dragon’s Dogma” absolutely needs to have two things: dragons and dogma—a big, fire-breathing lizard and some pervasive set of principles that feel set in stone, probably in a negative way. The game’s scope is much larger, with its stronger focus on a monotheistic faith that dominates the land while opposing the dragon, a widespread cult that worships the dragon and desires the destruction it brings, and the many NPCs who speak in quasi-philosophical ways. In the anime, the dragon is largely all we get in this regard, and a big part of the final confrontation is given over to what amounts to a debate between Ethan and the monster which I’m not sure actually hangs together, either intentionally or accidentally. It’s hard to say given the rest of the show’s attempts at elevated meaning. The dragon essentially presents itself as a pure creature, specifically without any inclination to the vices of humans. It has no need for food or any real desire for violence and is just violent because that’s what it is. Sort of. Except it also intentionally killed Ethan’s wife in front of him to goad him into attacking it so that it could make him an Arisen and so that he could kill it because what it desires is death. It lambasts humans for being corrupt, but if that’s their nature, how is it any worse than the dragon killing because it’s a dragon? As I mentioned already, it’s not even completely without ulterior motivations with its choices about who it kills and when, and if it is making vile choices (even if only in its fleeting moments of lucidity), aren’t those still sins? At least the dragon prompts interesting questions, though. Both the game and anime have these moments where they flirt with bigger ideas than just sticking a sword in a monster, and it’s ultimately that philosophical-esque bent that helps elevate the property, I feel. The whole seven deadly sins framework is probably an attempt to translate those higher interests in some way that just falls flat due to the awful theming.

 

A great example of the game’s borderline philosophical interests comes from this little guy, Arsmith. Essentially all of the game’s collection noticeboard quests come through him, and every time you try to turn in the items to complete a quest, you have to either listen to—or else skip through—a perhaps surprising amount of dialogue. The double slashes I’ve added to the quote indicate points where, in the game, you need to press a button to advance: “I see you’re hard at work on an errand, friend. Pray, take all the time you need. // Truly, man is a marvelous creature. // Even in these dire times, desires abound. Where desperation might well take hold, dreams instead arise. // As long as man yet dreams, this world will manage well enough, mark my words. // That makes folk in the trade of making dreams turn true the saviors of the world, eh? Folk like you and me. // ’Tis work well worth doing!” And that’s just the (more notable) “before” stuff. After turning in the items, there are a couple more repeated statements to get through as well. Setting aside the annoyance, which is charming in its own way, of having this whole speech repeat every time you interact with Arsmith, the content is weirdly thoughtful coming from a character who largely exists just to accept various amounts of plants and other items in exchange for experience points, gold, and sometimes weapons. It’s just a great example of the weirdness of Dragon’s Dogma that makes it so interesting. The anime is a disappointment to me in part because it doesn’t translate this aspect of the source material.

 

Not So Much A Masterwork: Further Adaptational Choices and Conclusion

If you take away the messaging entirely, the Dragon’s Dogma anime is still a mixed bag of a series for reasons I will continue to explore. However, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad adaptation of the game in every regard. The fact of the matter is that I think hewing too close to the video game and simply putting that story in the anime would have been a mistake as well, in part because there isn’t actually much present-tense narrative in the game. Not a lot of note happens for long stretches, and that lack of urgency is arguably one of the original story’s big problems. The dragon doesn’t feel terribly present, though its absence is explained within the story, and so a lot of what you do as part of the “main” quest feels only tangentially related to what should be the driving motivation of the game—killing the dragon and getting your heart back. The game foreshadows a lot during this time, however, and it is very satisfying as a mechanical experience even if the narrative feels lacking. There may even be a roughly canonical explanation for the way that so-called main quests feel like busywork, which is that the duke in the game took the dragon’s deal years and years ago and doesn’t want you actually going anywhere near the monster, lest you learn his secret and/or take his throne from him by also accepting the deal. There’s a point toward the end of the dragon questline, for example, where the duke plans to send you away from the duchy for a time, though this supposed quest is called off when the cult Salvation attacks a major stronghold and you’re sent there instead. In retrospect, the prospect of the long trip, coming as it does after you’ve done most of the game’s content and have established yourself to the people of the land as both a true Arisen and just a capable hero in general, feels like more of that great foreshadowing I mentioned before. The duke, fearing for his throne, wants you out of the picture, though he can’t just move against an Arisen, who is revered by the church and all the folk stories of the land. The possibility of actually slaying the dragon isn’t a consideration for him at all, and there’s a great narrative moment in the game (arguably its best) when, after you’ve killed the dragon, the dramatically aged duke turns the castle guards against you by accusing you of being in league with the beast. What’s so great about this moment is that it both is and isn’t a double-cross. The duke is turning on you, but he isn’t intentionally lying. He genuinely seems to believe what he says about your making a deal with the dragon. He was a coward who traded his beloved for power and to save his own life when he was an Arisen, and he can’t actually imagine anyone else doing it differently. I love how the duke is characterized here, and the power of this well-executed climactic moment late in the story retroactively justifies a lot of the earlier seeming-aimlessness for me, but I think the creators of the anime did the right thing in telling their own story more or less from scratch rather than trying to turn the exact events of the game into a TV series. I don’t agree with everything they chose to do and do genuinely think the themes or morals or lessons of the anime are absolutely disgusting, but I don’t disagree with the overall intent to keep a lot but also change a lot.

In terms of adaptation, a big question worth asking is whether the anime is justified in making Dragon’s Dogma as “grim-dark” as it does. Is this a massive departure from the game, or is it another case where the devs had unrealized ambitions? Based on much of what is actually in the finished game, it feels like a departure, but I have to wonder, as there are some very dark moments in the game as well that feel perhaps equally unearned or unnecessary in comparison with the rest, but maybe in part due to a lack of scaffolding in the form of other tonally consistent moments that could help establish a certain mood. The game largely does not feel like it wants to present a really nasty world outside of certain parts. One involves the duke’s new, much younger wife. You can accept a side quest to meet her privately in her chamber, and upon doing this, you end up having to hide when the duke arrives. He seems to go mad with guilt at having sacrificed his previous love to the dragon and begins to strangle his wife. If you don’t intervene, he’ll kill her in this particularly intense, personal way. If you do intervene, the duchess accuses you of unseemly behavior, and you’re sent to the dungeon and tortured. This largely happens off-screen, but you can hear the crack of a whip and your character’s cries as the jailer mocks you and while the duchess cries and listens in in secret at the end of a dungeon hallway. It’s the brutal simplicity of these scenes that makes them feel (deservedly, meaningfully) grim—the attempted murder by strangulation and the unadorned brutality of the dungeon.

Another example comes later when you do a main quest to quell a rebellion at one of the duchy’s forts. It’s here that one of the duke’s noble guests from a foreign country is officially revealed to have been in league with the dragon-worshipping cult Salvation and to have been sowing discord among the armed men of the kingdom. I will quickly note that this moment can fall victim to one of the narrative flaws of the game, which is that it may mean next to nothing to you if you haven’t done all of the side quests and talked with the game’s NPCs so that you have an appropriate sense of what Salvation even is and why this guy’s betrayal matters. Also involved in this moment is a friendly officer from that same kingdom—a woman, Mercedes—who is also a noble. The traitor, Julien, reveals that he and Mercedes were not actually sent from their homeland to help with the dragon. Instead, they stand to benefit politically if the duke’s land is destroyed by the monster. Mercedes, who genuinely thought she was sent to help, was actually just sent as the barest gesture of goodwill. Julien needles her about her uselessness, suggesting that her father would have sent her brother if they were actually meant to accomplish anything. He describes her as “a bleating she-goat mocked even by her own men.” The two engage in a duel, and you can once again either intervene or not. If you let the two fight, Julien wins and taunts Mercedes further, suggesting her only real value is as a warm body for the fighting men to have sex with. Once again, the tone feels appropriately nasty in its execution in isolation but feels out of step with most of the game.

These sequences where the cutscenes have a high degree of quality are fairly rare, suggesting, perhaps, the incompleteness of the devs’ vision. Moments like these, including the aforementioned betrayal by the duke post-dragon, thus feel like the game kicking into a higher gear in a sense, with the writing, music, and performances all rising to a level they don’t normally reach. To return to the anime as an adaptation, then, these bits of the game are why I feel conflicted about the “grim-dark” approach the series takes. It feels out of step with much of the game but not all of it, and some of the game’s better-executed narrative moments suggest it may have been intended to have a darker tone itself. Ultimately, the better question may simply be not whether the darker tone is appropriate but, instead, whether the anime earns that tone or not. As I suggested earlier when covering “Envy,” I think “grim-dark” feels most appropriate as a label applied to stories that try to be dark in a way that feels contrived or pretentious. Dragon’s Dogma the game executes its darker moments well, but the anime simply does not, largely because, again, of how the darkness in question is inexorably tied to its messaging, which is awful and possibly even incompetent at points.

 

The question of the game’s intended tone also persists in these pieces depicting the various available character classes. I first saw these images in the strategy guide for Dragon’s Dogma. It is kind of laughable just how “hardcore” they look, with the characters’ pained expressions and the flames in the background. In this regard, they also feel tonally inconsistent with much of the game, which does not really have anything like this, even including the sequences I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Note also that the renderings of the classes reflect a pretty boring, conventional gendered divide as well. Most of the classes are shown to be male, with just the Sorcerer and Assassin represented by women. Of course it’s the physically frail and mystical character and the sneaky character who ostensibly kills via subterfuge that were chosen. In its regressive suggestiveness, this art raises some ugly questions. Of course, the anime has its unfortunate attitude toward women, but working on this piece did make me realize that there are almost no fighting women in the game either that are not Pawns (who are technically non-humans) outside of Mercedes who, as previously mentioned, isn’t actually a capable soldier and leader. You meet (very rare) female Arisen at points, but there are no women guards, and the only somewhat common armed women you can interact with are the members of the female-only bandit group who have so much hatred toward men that those who are normally non-hostile will attack you if you take male party members into their settlement. You have to either have a party of all women or else dress the men in drag to move peaceably among them. There is an equivalent men-only bandit band as well that are opposed to the women’s group, though they won’t attack you for bringing women into their midst. While I suppose there’s an argument some might make regarding “realism” in these depictions, it's still worth picking over the property’s handling of gender and looking at what it has to say, intentionally or accidentally. What seems presented as almost a given—the casual sexism of the artwork, for example—is most interesting and gestures most compellingly at the values of the creators. Given that a good number of armor and clothing pieces are gender-locked as well, maybe the game isn’t so far off the anime’s interest in certain status quos after all.

 

The show may arguably use the property’s big monsters better than the game does. In Dragon’s Dogma, there are smaller enemies like wolves and harpies and human bandits, but the real fun is had in encountering the creatures that are big enough to climb and attack strategically and that have a lot more health, which include the previously mentioned cyclops and hydra, as well as others like golems, chimeras, cockatrices, and beholders. A fairly valid criticism of Dragon’s Dogma the game is that it holds back its big creatures too much. It’s easy to come away with the impression that all you kill are cyclopes over the course of the story. There are other big mini-boss/boss monsters in the game world, but fighting them during the early- or mid-game often means either bumping into them accidentally or (more likely) knowing where they spawn and seeking them out intentionally. A number are still reserved for the late- and end-game, however, where a player who just wants to finish the story may not actually spend much time at all if they don’t want to grind levels, look for high-end equipment, and potentially challenge the main game’s hidden superboss or tackle the “Dark Arisen” expansion, which is designed to be a mechanical grind with narrative elements. The way that the show incorporates the major creatures it uses just makes them feel more significant. The cyclops, for example, is much bigger physically and feels like the capstone boss at the end of what is more or less the questline for an entire settlement. Another criticism of the game is that the world is too small, with few towns or cities like you might expect in an RPG. The show blows the world up to a larger size with more inhabited locations, and the encounters with the creatures feel uniquely tied to the ”questlines” of those areas in ways that might have made their use in the game more meaningful. As I noted before in the “Gluttony” section of this piece, that episode especially struck me as something like a quest that probably could have been implemented in a game. If I do have a wishlist for a theoretical Dragon’s Dogma 2, one item on that list is better integration of the big monsters so that they aren’t so easily missed by casual players. For example, you first encounter the hydra in Dragon’s Dogma as part of a main quest early on when you’re too weak to actually kill it, but the final confrontation with (I think) that same monster, which may also have a connection to an important NPC’s questline involving his missing father, comes via a simple, vague kill quest picked up from a noticeboard rather than being framed in an appropriately climactic narrative way. This dramatic treatment of the creatures is something the series does well even beyond “Gluttony.” Elizabeth’s “quest” brings Ethan and Hannah into conflict with goblins and then the griffin as a boss, while the hydra is the obvious boss of the cave-dwellers’ area, and even the “lesser” lich and succubus have narratives attached to them. All of them are afforded greater significance as well because they represent obstacles on Ethan’s journey to the dragon rather than things you just kill as you’re essentially killing time in the game while waiting for the plot to actually get underway. The creatures are arguably given priority within the setup for each episode, even if it undermines the current installment, as I previously covered with how “Greed” ends a bit awkwardly. What should have been its final shot that ends a good story in a quiet, contemplative way is undercut by the succubus’ introduction.

In fact, the end of every episode after “Wrath” focuses on setting up the focal creature of the next one, and the inclusion of these moments can be seen in either a charitable or uncharitable light. On the one hand, these scenes could charitably be said to build tension for the next episode. They’re a hook, essentially, so that even the more self-contained-feeling stories don’t end with so much finality that someone might not feel obligated to tune into the next installment. On the other hand, these creature teases are also essentially references to the game, and an uncharitable reading of their inclusion could be that they’re less about building tension and anticipation in a… pure sort of way and more so represent the series’ commitment to the reference-heavy media moment we seem to be living in where so much of our filmic landscape is nothing but adaptations and remakes, where callbacks and “easter eggs” are king. Is Dragon’s Dogma a genuine attempt at standalone storytelling that happens to be based on an existing property, or is it a cynical attempt to cash in on fan nostalgia first and foremost? Of course, the truth is probably that it’s a bit of both, but the way that it fosters such reverence for its signature creatures makes me wonder. There are other references as well, including the use of specific abilities from the game, especially by Hannah. A lantern, a crucial piece of equipment to handle the dark areas and nights in the game, plays a prominent role in the “Sloth” episode, and Ethan ultimately defeats the hydra using the one game strategy of removing all heads simultaneously to kill it instantly. The series name-drops familiar places like Aernst Castle, and the destruction of that area within the present-tense story of the anime suggests it may take place long before the game, where Aernst is already a ruin at the start. The anime’s world doesn’t necessarily resemble the one of the game geographically, although, of course, making it bigger was basically a necessity since size was likely a mechanical matter in the game (a design choice based on movement speed and the restrictive fast travel system), whereas the more expansive world of the anime is probably more realistically-sized and is better suited to the epic scale of Ethan’s quest. The new additions to the landscapes largely fit with the style of the game, which adopted a fairly conventional Western fantasy-inspired design overall, though a random tree in “Envy” that seems to exude water is a particularly weird addition without much in the way of clear analogues either elsewhere in the anime or in the game; however, the game’s magical healing springs with their jutting central crystal structures may suggest a certain amount of stylistic cohesion.

The show largely faithfully translates the narrative significance of the game’s Pawn system without necessarily being mechanically accurate. This is another adaptational element that I think is just fine as depicted. Dragon’s Dogma the game allows you to travel with up to three NPC Pawn partners—one main Pawn of your own creation that you equip and that levels up alongside your player character and two additional Pawns rented either from a developer-created pool or from other players using the game’s online system, which logs the status of players’ main Pawns and makes them available to borrow, with rewards going to players whose Pawns are recruited. Pawns aren’t functionally all that different generally and mechanically from the ostensibly human allies you take on in other RPGs. The differences lie in the specific mechanics unique to the Pawns and in their narrative role and framing in Dragon’s Dogma. For starters, one of the biggest gimmicks with the Pawns that helps make Dragon’s Dogma a unique experience is that they have stats that alter their behavior, including values that determine things like whether a Pawn will prioritize collecting items during combat over fighting or how they’ll react vocally during and after combat encounters. The framing of the Pawns as somehow sub-human and less knowledgeable than the player also helps smooth their sometimes weird or annoying AI behaviors with an in-universe explanation for their incompetence. Pawns have competency ratings for various monsters and quests that level up over time, though, which determine how well they fight their opponents and how much guidance they can provide during quests. That last element is one of the game’s under-developed areas since a Pawn’s knowledge of quests generally amounts to nothing of substance, though you can see how there might have been potential behind it—how, for example, the game could have done without conventional quest markers for objectives in favor of instead pushing players to recruit knowledgeable Pawns that would actually organically lead them to the right locations for a given quest. More complicated quests with different outcomes could have also pushed the Pawns to the forefront, with more knowledgeable Pawns providing insight into the potential choices and their results. As it is, Pawns offering to lead the way to a quest destination ends up feeling more vestigial than anything else, and there are few quests with meaningful choices to make. What is ultimately so interesting about the mechanical growth of Pawns adventuring alongside the player is how it dovetails with the narrative. While the player’s Arisen doesn’t degrade like Ethan, their main Pawn does steadily become more knowledgeable mechanically while also ultimately becoming more human narratively, eventually taking on the Arisen’s form. This twist is nicely foreshadowed by the other older Pawns you meet in the game who clearly resemble their Arisen.

While Hannah doesn’t actually physically become Ethan at the end of the anime, she still goes through the rough arc of a main Pawn in the game—from naïve and logic-focused battle helper to something more closely resembling a person. It is potentially disappointing that Ethan only has one Pawn rather than three, but it makes sense as an adaptational choice given that you can adventure with fewer Pawns in the game and since the shorter episode and series lengths would have made even more Pawns hard to work in meaningfully and might dilute the relationship between Ethan and Hannah. That Ethan views Hannah as a sort of stand-in for the child he lost makes their solitary journey as a pair make sense and also reflects the existing quasi-parental nature of the Arisen-Pawn relationship, where the Arisen is a teacher and caregiver for the hapless Pawns. The trade-off in perspective that starts happening in “Greed” probably wouldn’t be as clear with more Pawns running around either. Arguably, Ethan having only one Pawn is also an in-character touch, accidental or intentional, that reinforces the single-mindedness of his journey. He takes along Hannah since she essentially forces her presence on him, but even if he was given the choice to have more help, I get the sense Ethan would probably refuse it or wouldn’t actively seek it out in the way that the player contracts Pawns in the game. It’s ultimately kind of the point of the series that Ethan has failed to move beyond his original anger at the dragon, and that lack of growth could be said to be reflected in his choice of company. Hannah technically breaks the rules of the class system of the game since she seems to be a “Magick Archer” based on the abilities she uses with both a bow and staff in the anime. I wouldn’t be a “fan” (in the pedantic sense) of Dragon’s Dogma if I didn’t point out that Magick Archer is a hybrid class, and these are not accessible by Pawns in the game. That being said, obviously, they made this adaptational choice with Hannah since she is Ethan’s only Pawn, whatever the reason, and has to play multiple roles if the series is going to get in as many references as possible and/or leave itself with versatile options for its combat encounters.

The Dragon’s Dogma anime supposedly has at least one of the same composers as the game, though I didn’t think the score was anything noteworthy, especially compared with the tracks from the game’s “Dark Arisen” expansion. Even the base game has some standout numbers, however, like the songs that play to signal sunrise and sunset out in the overworld. Dragon’s Dogma typically forgoes music in the field, so those moments receive an extra bit of emphasis and care that can be quite affecting—the sunrise especially if you’ve been battling the whole night and the promise of dawn actually means a bit of a reprieve from the extra enemies and oppressive atmosphere that come with the dark. By comparison, I don’t think any music from the show really even registered with me apart from the opening. On the subject of that opening, I thought it had some nice visuals (like the gluttonous or lustful skeleton tableaus that tie in with the theme of sin—damned men partaking in empty pleasures, essentially); on the other hand, I also found it too reminiscent of recent trends in opening sequences. I’ve seen people draw comparisons with Game of Thrones (2011-2019), but I associated the visuals more with something like Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) because of the way that both openings specifically focus on creatures and close-ups of skin and things. The heavy “thing” focus (objects and scenery, bodies juxtaposed or synthesized with objects and scenery) can be further found in the openings for series like True Detective (2014-2019) or in games like the Resident Evil 2 remake (2019) or even in films like David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). As much as I do like the opening musical theme’s certain somber class and bombast, which is admittedly not entirely unlike the Game of Thrones theme, an anime not having a rocking opener with lyrics bugs me since I miss opening theme songs in general. These are typically present in anime, but given Dragon’s Dogma’s overall Western influence, the lack of a theme song makes a certain sad sense. One of the last Western series I remember having a strong theme was Smallville (2001-2011) with Remy Zero’s “Save Me.” It feels doubly frustrating for Dragon’s Dogma because that first game had an absolute banger of a title theme in "Into Free -Dangan-" by B'z, which both genuinely rocks but has also stuck around as a bit of a meme for the series because of just how Anime it feels in comparison to the game’s otherwise grounded Western fantasy aesthetic. That both the game and anime seem to have strayed from that initial (surprising but cool) tone is kind of disappointing.

 

The top-left image comes from Penny Dreadful’s opening credits, and the one at the top-right comes from Dragon’s Dogma. The close-up on snake scales is an obvious visual link, though I don’t want to imply that Penny Dreadful was some sort of direct inspiration (like I think Goblin Slayer was). Instead, the similarities lie less with the exact imagery used and more with the trend I mentioned above—the “thing” focus. The second pair of images come from the same two shows and demonstrate this general shared direction. The objects differ, but the presentation of them is similar. To help support the point that I don’t think Penny Dreadful is a direct inspiration, note the bottom-left image from the opening credits of the Resident Evil 2 remake and the bottom-right image from Netflix’s Daredevil series that began in 2015. (Admittedly) similar to Game of Thrones, the focus is on objects or bits of objects or impressions of people rather than concrete, fully-visible human bodies. In terms of salient points being made here, I guess, A), this style of opening is everywhere and was arguably played out in 2020 despite the fact that it can feel artsy and compelling (communicating information through bold symbolism), and, B), I wish Dragon’s Dogma had gone with something more conventionally anime-like, maybe even anime-appropriate. Though the series uses the visual style in its character designs, it’s missing the very important elements of an opening and closing theme befitting the style.

  

In conclusion, I do think there is good in the Dragon’s Dogma anime. Perhaps fittingly, it seems to fall short of realizing its ambitions in a way that feels at least somewhat of a kind with the source material and its own rough edges. Dragon’s Dogma the game retains a strong following to this day, and, thankfully, it isn’t a forgotten diamond in the rough stuck on out-of-date hardware and is instead widely available on PC and all modern consoles. I actually started work on this piece back in April with the intention of probably picking away at it over time, but I ended up fast-tracking it somewhat after realizing that this May (2022) was the ten-year anniversary of the game’s original release back in 2012. There were already rumors that Dragon’s Dogma director Hideaki Itsuno’s current project is a new installment in the series, and given how Capcom has created a 10^th anniversary website celebrating the series and how we’re going into a time of the year where new releases tend to get announced, I think it’s fair to say that hype is building up around the property again. Few fans in the West were able to play the relatively short-lived Dragon’s Dogma MMO, and while the original game has been re-released on modern consoles, we’ve all been waiting for something truly new for a while now. It’s unfortunate that the 2020 anime didn’t come out better than it did to effectively scratch that itch. It’s not a terrible adaptation when you pick it apart like I have, though I think the overall impression is middling to negative thanks in large part to the unfortunate moralizing. Obviously, my hope is that this isn’t a harbinger of things to come in a proper Dragon’s Dogma 2, and that I’ve managed to (finally) communicate why I find the game so engaging. While there is actually more I could still say (about my fears regarding too much polish on the parts of the game that make it feel so unique, for example), I think this is the end. I highly recommend Dragon’s Dogma the game, though specifically the improved “Dark Arisen” version, and don’t really recommend the anime at all. It ultimately falls squarely into the category of things I personally find interesting as a critic but that probably deserve their negative audience reputation. The Dragon’s Dogma anime is not a misunderstood gem, though its status as an adaptation is fun to examine, and its disgusting and/or incompetent messaging is a horrible delight to behold in its own way.