User blog comment:Raylan13/Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen Review Roundup/@comment-5337347-20130427001947

How do I answer "I already bought it."?

In my opinion, it feels like it's trying to be more than it is. The story is a bit more 'in your face', but only because it's way more linear than it was before. You kind of just go.

Half the rooms are copy pasted. "Have I been here before?" No, there was just a room that looked exactly like it 10 minutes ago. I believe the game passes this off as a type of madness the dungeon suffers from.

The difficulty ranges from effortless to impossible (assuming you didn't just so happen to have the right setup), and it can't seem decide which it wants to be. I imagine this is to encourage players to have a diverse party, but it seems more like it's screwing the behinds of all the players who prefer to go solo, especially since the solo augment was severely weakened.

I've noticed some glitches, though not many, such as enemies, objects, and item drops flying through walls and floors.

It's loaded up with bosses and minibosses, even if only to distract the player from the fact that they've seen the room four times already. There are a lot of new enemies as well, and a lot of cheap recolors. Oh, a new type of cyclops/ogre/oversized dog? Brilliant!

It is a good time waster though, and I felt a bit more challenged since I couldn't simply one shot monsters. However, that didn't make them any harder to kill, it only made it take longer.

The purification system is a bit wanker-ish, if you ask me. They could just as easily have given us new items, but instead we have to purify them for rift crystals. Nice try, Capcom, but even when I run out, I'm not buying any rift crystal packs.

All in all, it's a decent expansion. Worth the $40 for anyone who's new to Dragon's Dogma. And old players will welcome some new things to do.