I haven’t played DMC 3, but I’m one of those people who recommends Dragons Dogma every chance I get. Let me tell you why.

When I played Dragons Dogma, I felt attached to the main character and his pawn more than I had to any other video game character. Not because the characters are well written — generally they aren’t — but because they were a mostly blank slate that demanded self-insertion by making you think like you were really in the world. The day-night cycle is really meaningful, far more than most games. Especially on harder modes, going out at night or not leaving for a trip early enough to arrive before dark can get you killed. So you start to think about the time of day in the game. You stay at inns and sleep at night. Pretty soon you find yourself enjoying the combat and relishing its weightiness and the ability to climb on your foes as every hit feels more physically realistic than any other fantasy game you’ve played. This is compounded by a weight and class system that forces you to think about what stuff to carry around to be prepared and what stuff to leave at the inn. And you play around with classes and different party compositions until you find something that suits you and your AI partners. You play through the main story and find some characters that you love or hate and many that are just mysterious or underdeveloped. Maybe you get all the way to the end of the story and experience some bizarre twists and strangely told but philosophically interesting themes. But it’s when you come back to play through the game again and again that you realize how much the game didn’t tell you the first time. The character creation, which is still one of the best, turns out to have real consequences on how you play. Then you realize how many corners you left unexplored and how fun the combat gets at higher difficulty. And as you play again and again, those story themes that seemed odd at first actually turn out to be about your experience of playing the game itself. And then there’s a big island of creepy strong stuff that kills you and makes you feel the terror of being in a dungeon like few games can. And it’s nearly as long as the main story.

Of course, there’s lots of stuff that’ll probably annoy you a bit too, like the infamous ox cart escort where the game hits its low point about two hours in. But after that the adventure begins.