Dragon's Dogma

-- ** Make sure that you always play in Online mode. If you are not given the option on load you should press Start, go down to Options/Settings, go right twice to the third tab and set Connectivity to Online and Pawn Access to Anyone. If you are not online with Anyone pawn access then your pawn will not be available to hire by other players and you will lose out on a huge source of Rift Crystals, the currency used to hire pawns and purchase several items in-game. **

- There's an early story quest (the Pawn Guild one) that has two creatures you aren't capable of fighting directly, confusing the shit out of a lot of people. You can kill one by getting it to run off a cliff, but the other you have to run away from.

- After doing everything at the encampment there are some quests you can take on that you can actually do but they're ridiculously hard if you're new to the game. If you have trouble with them, just carry on with the main plot-line.

- There're two stores in the residential district of Gran Soren (The Black Cat, which lets you make forgeries, and the barber, which... barbers). They're hard to find, but get added to your map when you do.

- Mage and sorceror are both really boring to play as. Don't do it unless you really want certain augments and/or are weird.

- Fighters and Mystic Knights (focusing on ripostes instead of sword-magic) are the most fun melee combatants and probably the most reliant on player-skill in the game. All the classes besides the two pure magic ones are fun and worth trying, though.

- The difficulty levels off really really hard, the entire game becomes a cakewalk at level 75 or so, earlier if you're an Assassin. Don't grind for levels or dcp.

- Don't be afraid of switching vocations, as long as you don't spend 50 levels playing with the same class you won't be gimped. Capcom did a great job with making them feel much different, so if you get bored - try switching.

- When you first arrive in Gran Soren, visit the inn, and see that you now have the ability to change to a two-handed weapon-wielding Warrior, resist the temptation to switch your vocation and deck yourself out in appropriate gear. The weapons cost 20k, which will be quite expensive that point; they swing extremely slowly and have long recovery times, with the bonus addition of having a stagger and longer recovery (much like in the Souls games) if you don't land an attack; the activated attacks are even slower than normal weapon swings, with prohibitively long animations, charge times, recovery times, and seriously small areas of effect (despite their anime-huge weapon designs), so much so that I had a lot of trouble simply landing the default ability before the enemies ran off to attack my pawns. Due to the two-handed weapon type you only get offensive (right shoulder button) abilities, rather than offensive and defensive (left shoulder) abilities from a shield or offhand weapon. And because the attacks are for two-handed weapons only, none of them will transfer over to other vocations because no other classes can use heavy weapons. I restarted my game because I was so dejected from going broke that garbage pile of a class. Maybe they're better later in the game, I don't doubt that they are, but at the beginning it will drain your funds and skill points and leave you bummed the fuck out.

- There's a fat merchant that wanders around, and he'll eventually give you a quest to escort his stupid looking little daughter around town. This quest is as idiotic as it sounds, but apparently if you DON'T complete it "correctly" you screw yourself out of a unique item that you can only get once per playthrough. It's not necessary, but it'll make it easier, and it'll be something you don't have to wait until a NG+ for. Just use a guide- it's a seriously uninteresting quest and it's easy to screw up.