It is an ancient time, and dragons still roam upon the earth. Two great powers, the Union and the Empire, wage fierce war for the control of a goddess who protects the harmony of the world. In only short time, the Empire has become powerful beyond reckoning, and now it turns to attack the castle where the Union safeguards the goddess. The world teeters on the brink of chaos. Its fate now lies in the hands of one man
Pinpointing what Drakengard is constitutes a somewhat difficult task, and it’s much harder to summarize how I actually feel about it in the end. Drakengard is a very unique game, very different from Japanese games, Western games, Square-Enix games, among others. It is not a very good game, if good at all. But it’s not exactly forgettable either, for good and for bad reason. It is the directorial debut of gaming’s most outlandish writer and director, Yoko Taro, though it is not very akin to a lot of his later work.
Drakengard is a very dark game, even beneath its toned down and sanitized localization, the story of the game still delves on incredibly dark subjects such as genocide, filicide, incest, pedophilia, cannibalism, lust, among many, many more of human’s repressed and not often portrayed desires. Drakengard cuts deep on the reasoning and thought process that humans go through when performing terrible acts. While actions such as countless muder can be justified with excuses such as “I’ve had a traumatic past”, in Drakengard, it will never lead to a happy ending.
One of the most positive aspects of this game is its aversion to common storytelling tropes, ideas and narratives, especially those of war heroes, princesses and fantasy worlds. This is because in Drakengard, the protagonists aren’t rewarded for their heinous acts and no matter what they do, their tale remains tragic and depressing, as a sort of poetic punishment for their heinous acts. Even the most innocent of characters in Drakengard either hold deep secrets, judges or regrets.
But how come heroes commit such heinous acts? Well, simply by the act of playing the game, for the most part. Drakengard is excellent at tying together the actions the player makes with the kind of sick and twisted personality of its main character. In the game, the player must kill, they are rewarded for killing. To heal, they must kill; to level up, they must kill and to complete the whole story, they must play through every single chapter and unlock every weapon, all of which involves killing.
Eventually, the bodies will pile up to the thousands, and this is the player’s definition of fun and entertainment. So essentially, when the main character is perceived as a murderous psychopath by everyone around him, is the player truly surprised? They performed the killing themselves, after all.
The game turns fantasy world on its head as well thanks to its very own fantasy concepts and mythologies. Mighty beings such as dragons are terribly racist and judge humans for their every action, the playful fairies are cruel, unforgiving and manipulative, while every other creature is simply seen as inferior and therefore deserves to be killed. Drakengard’s very own gods and deities are instead abstract creatures who deeply loathe humans and wish for their destruction, or their absolute control.
When it comes to its concepts, Drakengard introduces the idea of a pact, which is a ritual a human performs with a beast after having experienced severe distress and combines both their wills and strength, making them act as a singular being. This ritual comes at the price of one of the human’s bodily or human functions, however, and these relationships are often more abusive or parasitic than they ever are helpful or desirable.
Drakengard’s visual style complements this tale of insanity and gruesome murder. The world of Drakengard, despite being set in a fantasy world, is everything but fantastical. Its environments are dreary, bleak and empty, most of them reminiscent of a wasteland, a world forsaken by the gods. The palettes are unpleasing to the eye, skies look dark and polluted, castles are dirty and grey. It really settles in the impression that the world these people live in is not a desirable or happy one, and when it comes to certain designs, Drakengard can be downright gruesome and twisted to the core.
The game’s original soundtrack is nothing short of ideal for the kind of experience Drakengard is trying to present. It is a very experimental score at heart, mixing in different samples of classical music to create a series of discordant notes and then repeating them ad nauseam to create a chilling soundtrack that oozes with maniacal and psychopathic rage, or the disturbing sounds of chaos and the unknown. Listening to it as an individual piece, while not pleasing, is still an interesting experience that is only reminiscent of Drakengard itself.
The narrative of Drakengard is also fairly interesting, though it deeply pales in comparison to its themes and characters. The story of the game is incredibly minimalistic, with all build up and development of character and narrative arcs ocurring within the span of a single scene. While this isn’t a bad approach, the wordier nature of Drakengard and its thematic complexity make the narrative feel underwhelming. Aside from this, only very few characters have an actual arc or development, often staying in the same way they were when they were first encountered. The narrative string also suffers from dealing with a very simplistic or rather unclear objective, which makes most events in the story seem like they are going nowhere at times.
Most of the important narrative points happen in the game’s endings, which are unlocked through the game’s more unconventional storytelling methods. Drakengard’s story is told through several playable Chapters, each broken up between verses. Some of these verses have special conditions that must be met in order to unlock an alternate branch of the story with events that are different to the ones the player would’ve experienced otherwise. This approach to storytelling is very refreshing, presenting a non-linear sequence of events that the player must piece together in order to get the whole picture of the story.
The endings in question are unlocked by meeting certain conditions, within the game as a whole thus requiring a lot more effort and killing from the player in order to unlock them. Each get progressively darker and more tragic for our protagonists, operating under the logic that a protagonist who murders countless people should not ever get a happy ending. This kind of meta commentary is brilliant, though mostly ineffective since these conditions force you to obsessively complete the game and subject yourself to asinine conditions that only make the game a painful experience to play, even though it makes sense for them to be that way.
And it didn’t have to be painful, really, it could’ve been better if not for Drakengard’s abysmal gameplay. While it may only seem mediocre at first, after having been subjected to conditions that only stretch out the player’s patience further, you begin to realize just how inherently broken every mechanic and aspect of its design really is.
At the core of Drakengard’s gameplay, you have two very distinct gameplay modes that overlap one another between the game’s playable missions. One of these gameplay styles is a hack and slash action game much akin to Dynasty Warriors, where the player must slaughter several targets or achieve objectives in a wide open map full of countless hordes of enemies. The other side of Drakengard, are flying missions where the player controls Caim’s Red Dragon in a gameplay style very similar to combat flight simulators such as Ace Combat, where the player must maneuver their dragon in the sky to take down other aerial threats while dodging their attacks at the same time. On certain ground missions, both gameplay styles can be combined by allowing the player to mount their dragon and take down large amounts of enemies with it.
The first issue with this gameplay is how derivative it is. While the combination of both gameplay styles can be quite novel, very little of it actually feels unique or pertinent to the game itself.
When it comes to its ground segments, the game is extremely boring since combat consists of single attack button presses with an ocassional press of an alternate button to either perform a special move or a magic attack, and this goes on for the entire game with absolutely no variation. Drakengard is absolutely repetitive up until the very end and in this regard, the soundtrack of the game fits a little too well with the gameplay, making it unbearable to listen to when accompanied with the experience of getting to play the game.
Caim is very sluggish and stiff to control, his attacks consisting of slow animations that can’t be interrupted and leave the player open to attacks by the enemies. The game is also lacking in useful defensive abilities, since the game’s block doesn’t negate damage in any way and is hard to perform at the right moment because of Caim’s sluggish animations. Aside from blocking, the player can also dodge, but the dodge sends the player a little too far from their objective, requiring that they sluggishly move on over to them to resume their combo. The dodge move is also hard to use precisely because it dodges the player left or right in relation to either the player’s position or the camera, the latter of which cannot be controlled since it is fixed to the direction the player is looking at and resets whenever the player lets go of the stick.
The final problem with the ground combat is that every single attack staggers an opponent, which means that in order to win, all the player has to do is repeat an attack in order to negate the enemies’ chance of attacking as well, until another enemy hits the player and leaves them stuck on their own attack loop. That is not to say every single enemy is like this, but that isn’t a good thing either. Faster enemies get the player stuck on loops much easier, artificially increasing the difficulty of the game a lot more.
Of course, there is some good to the ground combat, and that is the game’s weapon catalog and leveling system. Drakengard has an incredible amount of weapons to collect and use in combat, 65 to be exact, and each weapon performs differently in combat with different speeds, combos and magic attacks. Figuring out what the best weapon to use in combat is quite an engaging task, as well as leveling them up by killing a certain amount of enemies with that specific weapon in the field, tying in to the theme of murder.
That is not to say that it doesn’t have its faults, for once, most slow weapons leave the player very vulnerable to incoming enemy attacks thanks to the game’s sluggish controls, which makes most of them useless to boot. Aside from this, one the player’s strongest weapons is their very own starting weapon, which can be useful up until the very end at max level, somewhat negating the need to collect more weapons and experimenting with how they play. Besides, the process of experimenting with weapons can be really frustrating and difficult, meaning that it’s doubtful whether it’s actually useful to experiment in the first place.
But aside from ground combat, Drakengard’s aerial missions also stand out, and they can feel like a definite improvement at times. For once, the dragon controls exactly how one would expect it to, with a genuine sense of weight and versatility to its movements. While it may be sluggish at times, it only makes the beast feel more real to control. Movement aside, the dragon also has slightly more ways to attack enemies: one being a fireball, and the other being a series of homing fireballs that the player can release after locking on to enemies.
Aerial segments in the game feel like a very welcome change of pace from the more boring ground segments of the game, though the longer they go on and the more difficult they become, the more problems begin to arise. For once, the dragon has very little evasion maneuvers having only two sidesteps, one to the left and the other to the right, making a lot of these missions incredibly frustrating to play because of how hard it is to dodge the myriad of incoming attacks, such as homing shots headed straight for the player.
This wouldn’t be a problem if the other enemies and their respective attacks were as slow as the player, but this is not the case. Drakengard’s flying missions are very much designed like a Shoot-Em Up arcade level, with countless enemies and even more projectiles that the player must dodge in order to survive, all without the precise controls of those kinds of games.
Eventually, all of these problems pile up on the game’s hardest levels, turning what were once somewhat fun levels into nightmares to play through, especially the ones that have conditions that must be met in order to unlock a weapon.
The game’s presentation is also mixed. The game’s UI is mostly good looking and useful and the localized voice acting is top notch, delivering performances that adhere greatly to the atmosphere and accurately portray the character’s emotions. On the other hand, the game looks atrocious graphically, butchering its great art direction with sub-par model quality, monotone and bland textures, and a complete lack of elements that would make the world have any atmosphere or life, such as environmental sound effects.
Aside from this, the game’s draw distance is absolutely minimal; large maps with large scale conflicts still look empty because of how the game only loads models that are close enough to the camera. Though I understand this decision was made to maintain the game’s framerate, it still creates issues such as a jarring pop-in whenever enemies get close to the screen, but also gameplay annoyances that require that the player constantly looks at their map in order to pinpoint how close enemies are in relation to them and where.
With all of this said, and everything that has been done with this game… What does it all accomplish? What did I get from it?
In that regard, Drakengard is honestly unique. It is not a competent game by any means, and it often borders between the line of being an average or just an outright bad game. It’s technically mediocre and not very fun at all to play, especially if the player chooses to get invested in it and go through it up until the very end. Its a pile of ideas one on top of the other, but they don’t necessarily add up to a cohesive experience, yet the intent of its creators and the kind of vision they had for a game that so desperately fought to be the opposite of the norm is still admirable and easy to appreciate in this day and age. The fact that this game even got made the way it is right now, is nothing short of a miracle, after all the problems it faced during its development and how its creator had to fight to keep his original vision.
By all accounts and traditional forms of criticism, this is not a good game… but this isn’t wasn’t trying to be a traditional game after all;
This is Drakengard, the wild dreams of a Deluded author.