Dragon's Dogma

Let me preface this by saying I have never played the Dragon's Dogma games, so I cannot say whether this is a good adaptation or not. All I can say it that it was a bad anime. Not a spoiler free review.

What do you get when you simultaneously try to combine a gritty and dark fantasy world with Reading Rainbow style moral lessons at the same time? That's right! We get this shitty anime!

So in this anime they had the brilliant idea of having an episodic revenge tale with each episode representing one of the 7 deadly sins. I don't have a problem with this concept but the problem lies in how poorly it was executed. Each episode absolutely hammers you over the head with the moral lesson of the episode from, "greed to bad", to "lust is bad" all the way to "doing drugs is bad, kids!". I'm not kidding episode 4 is actually just randomly an anti-drug PSA. Meanwhile since it's episodic and there's only a very weak overarching plot the main characters actually receive very little in the way of character development.

So our main character Ethan is your prototypical angry guy protag out on a quest for revenge. However since he actually has about as much personality as a bag of bricks (as do most of the characters in the series) I don't actually give 2 shits about his quest or whether he succeeds or not. His travel companion Hannah was a little better but her personality was kind of the lack of a personality so that's not really saying much. Basically I can see that they were trying to have Ethan and Hannah go through parallel and opposite character arks where Hannah slowly gains humanity over the course of the series while Ethan loses his but it was handled so poorly that I don't think most viewers will even notice that (or care frankly).

To be honest, the random 1 off characters from episode 3 got more character development in 20 minutes than Ethan did over the entire course of the series. Moreover, I'm really upset that the ONLY 2 interesting characters in the show got killed off in the stupidest way all for the sake of pushing their stupid 7 deadly sins theme. If they didn't try to shoe-horn this theme into the writing of each episode I think the writers would have had more freedom to make more interesting 1-off stories. And speaking of the writing the dialogue in this show was a big problem for me. The lines of the characters were SO stilted and unnatural sounding that I honestly felt like they were just lifted straight out of the video game. I thought the dub was competent but the voice actor's really weren't given a lot to work with here. (Also I'm still really confused about why all the other characters had that stereotypical medieval-fantasy world accent but only Olivia didn't?)

Usually in a fully CG anime like Dragon's Dogma it'll at least be buoyed by something like strong character writing or impeccable directing but Dragon's Dogma really missed the mark there. Not only is the CGI here god ugly but it commits the sin of having 2 different cg styles that totally clash with each other. The models for the humans aren't the prettiest things to look at, and the lip sync looks super weird on them but you can get used to them pretty fast. The monster designs on the other hand look horrendous and the art style of them is totally different from the humans so it's incredibly jarring to see them interact together in the same space. The monsters truly look like they were lifted out of a bad PS1 game and this is really unforgivable to me. If you are going to have an anime called Dragon's Dogma at least have the dragon look good. But no they couldn't even make a decent looking dragon even though it's the big final boss they hyped up over the entire length of the show.

Speaking of which that final battle was a huge let-down. To me this series was really trying to be Castlevania but just could not be and this is never more evident than the final battle. See the battle against Dracula in Castlevania worked because Dracula's castle was an inherently cool setting, with interesting locations for set-piece battles. However, Dragon's castle in Dragon's Dogma could not be more generic and boring if you tried. Moreover, a large part of the appeal of Dracula's battle was the camaraderie that was forged between the cast over the course of the series, but Ethan and Hannah never really develop any sort of bond over the 7 episodes. Also while there were people with cool weapons and powers in Castlevania, Dragon's Dogma's Ethan is just....Some guy. Sure Hannah has magic but Ethan doesn't. There are other human characters that are shown to have cool magic weapons in the show but Ethan just has a normal sword. His only power if you can even call it that is just getting mad?

From start to finish I really consider watching this show to be an utter waste of time. The graphics are muddy and ugly, the characters are forgettable and/or unlikeable. The plot hits you over the head with moral lessons while trying to be grimdark at the same time and the ending was unfulfilling. The only thing I'm glad about the 7 deadly sins theme is that it was only 7 episodes long so I didn't have to waste any more of my time on this garbage.