Lockdown 2020: The Pawn Shoppe: Dragon's Dogma (06/23/2020)

Man Jason is having a heck of a time navigating this map. Admittedly Dragons Dogma is very often an exercise in trial and error when it comes to finding your way. That said in a way I do think it ends up being richer for it. Plenty of games I played where after 50 hours I still had no idea where anything was because I was always fixated on the quest marker. In Dragons Dogma I eventually learned key landmarks and was able to find my way around the map in a more natural way. There are growing pains but it's a fairly long game so you have plenty of time to get it down - playing once a week or so isn't very conducive to this but I believe in Jason.

@humanity: I actually find this to be true with a lot of games from Japanese developers. I'm not sure what it is, but their minimaps are often times totally useless and incomprehensible to me. It definitely turns out to be a good thing after enough time investment though since it forces me to learn my way around the world.

@big_denim: modern Japanese games overall seem to still be very archaic in many respects like maps, checkpointing, general menus and inventory systems. A lot of it feels like it hasn’t evolved an inch since Resident Evil 1.

I'd be really into The Witcher 3's world and design paired with Dragon's Dogma's battle system.