Is dragon' dogma any good

[Lockjaw]

Hey all. I'm thinking about dropping the sixty bucks for dragon's dogma. But I wanted to talk to the good people on the playground here and get their opinions.

This is what really gets me to play hundreds of hours on a video game: A good skill system, good loot, and fun battles. That's really it. I mean, for me, any derivitive of Diablo 2 is good. I even really liked Sacred 2 quite a bit. Story lines are great and all, graphics are fine, but I just like to look for treasure and feel like my character is gaining new and useful powers.

So, for any of you who have played it, how would you rate this game based on the above mentioned?

[Tome]

Skill system: Good. There's plenty of skills and different Professions, and they're all pretty distinct. All the upgrades are pretty substantial - none of that "+1% damage" stuff here. Lots of room to build a character and you can change everything pretty easily, even your Profession is easy to change once you've unlocked it (which is easy). You can only take a very limited number of active skills (6) and passive Augments (8) with you at once, so you'll want to change things up regularly and try to find out what works best for you.

Loot: Good. Not too much vendor trash, most of the stuff you pick up can actually be used for something. You'll probably end up keeping almost everything on the off chance that you later need to upgrade a piece of equipment - new weapons come somewhat slow, but can be upgraded three times, plus one hidden upgrade level and most of them a pretty distinct. It's actually pretty similar to Monster Hunter. There's a weight limit to how much you can carry, but taking the right augments can make it stupidly high and your Pawns can carry stuff for you as well.

Gameplay: Take Monster Hunter, mix in the "climb the monster" thing from Shadow of the Colossus and sprinkle with a little Dark Souls. Very fun and engaging. As I mentioned earlier, most of the professions have fairly different playstyles, all of them good. Takes a good bit of skill to learn how to kill each sort of monster. And there's a lot of content here too. Counting NG+ and the post-game, you're probably looking at 100+ hours of gameplay. The Pawn system, which provides your party members, is also pretty interesting.

The bad points are:
The Plot: It's a thiny-veiled excuse plot trying to pretend it has depth. It's actively bad. Both the dialogue and writing are terrible.
The Romance: This could go under the plot heading, but I feel it deserves it's own bullet-point. They tried to jam a romance option in here and failed horribly. You'll only know that it's even possible at the end of the game when your character starts making out with an NPC during the credits. There is no opt out, the game will suddenly assume that whichever NPC you have the most Affinity with is your LI. Due to the way you gain Affinity, that's likely to be the innkeeper, the armourer, a fat merchant or the fat merchant's preteen daughter.
Travel Times: There's no traditional fast-travel system, nor is there any sort of mount or anything to get you around quicker. The only way to get around other than walking is to use a rare item that warps you back to the main city. In NG+ you can buy an item that lets you add additional destinations, but by that point you've already played through the game once and probably have enough Stamina that you can run halfway across the map anyway.
Graphics: They aren't the greatest. The only exception is the monsters and your character, who are much more detailed than anything else in the world.


TL;DR It sounds like it'd be right up your alley. Go for it.