I'm absolutely shocked at how I'm hearing pretty much no complaints about this game. It's lots of fun, but honestly it reminds me more of Two Worlds II more than it reminds me of Dark Souls.

BAD: The graphics and production values are absolutely terrible in places. The character models are terrible (faces in particular), and some things that were overlooked are just ridiculous (my male character spontaneously grows boobs if I put a girl's shirt on him). During the daytime, everything just looks slightly muddy, and characters and enemies sometimes spawn about 3 feet in front of you, especially if you run a lot.

GOOD AND BAD: The combat is good, but the comparisons to Dark Souls are absurd. Dark Souls doesn't get so much love and praise just because it's hard. It gets love and praise because its combat is extremely polished and the game is almost always completely fair. It's also very consistent. Dragon's Dogma's combat honestly feels more like Kingdom of Amalur's combat to me, except less polished. There's no lock-on -- this isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, except your character is constantly changing his mind about who he wants to attack since there's weird pseudo-auto-lock-on that the game does. Sometimes enemies go right through you, and various other polish issues make the game seem very unfair at times (see the next point).

BAD: Difficulty. No, I'm not complaining that the game is hard (I love both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls). The problem is that the game is neither consistent nor fair. Getting hit by a broadsword makes my character slightly wince, but getting hit with an arrow sends me flying about 20 feet. The game is pretty tough for the first 10 or so levels, but then once you get stronger most enemies just become trash mobs (much like Amalur). The first few bosses felt absolutely epic (the hydra, anyone?), but I barely even care when I see a boss anymore -- mash and I win. And the game has a terrible habit of just tossing random deaths your way (at least early-on). This wouldn't be a problem if the game had any kind of regular auto-save, but it pretty much forces you to manually save the game every 5 minutes or so while you're in the wilderness, and saving is a slow process in this game. It's tedious.

BAD: Story and side quests. People bitch about how Skyrim's side quests were too same-y, and yet I somehow haven't seen it brought up in this game? I literally have 13 quests in my log right now that each tell me to go kill X number of Y enemy. No storyline involved with them, just do them. These are 90% of the side quests. There isn't a single interesting character in the game and the story is a mess -- the main questline is extremely disjoint and the main quests feel absolutely pointless and arbitrary at times.

GOOD: Atmosphere. The game just somehow makes me feel nostalgic -- in some ways it feels more like a King's Field successor than Demon's Souls does. The day/night cycle is one of the best that has ever appeared in an RPG.

DEBATABLE: Honestly, I still haven't made up my mind about the (almost completely lack of a) fast travel system. But it's something you should be aware of going into the game.

Overall, the game feels like more than the sum of its parts, and I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit. But I really don't understand the unadaltered praise it gets here on reddit.