So NieR: Automata is a great game. Everyone has sang this games praises and that is for very good reasons. I’ve sang the games praises on numerous occasions and will probably do so again and again. But every game has to start somewhere. Some of you may not know this, but NieR has got a sort of Persona situation going on, as in the spin-off game is a more popular game than the mainline series. And how could that be? Well… it’s quite simple to see. Drakengard, known in Japan as Drag-On Dragoon, was a game created by Yoko Taro, who created it to make a more grim RPG with no morally just characters, no fun adventures, and certainly no rewarding the player for endless slaughter. I get that being told you’re a bad person for killing millions of enemies is not something a lot of people like, but as long as it’s trying to tell an interesting narrative then it can be forgivable, and Drakengard does have a neat narrative. I can also forgive it if the gameplay is fun. Undertale is a good recent example of this, and that game was really fun to play. And Drakengard… Is not! I’m sorry to throw it out there right outta the gate, but every positive I have for Drakengard is completely ruined for me by the gameplay itself, but let’s at least get into the plot before I do rain on the cult following’s parade.



The game follows our hero Caim, a young man who has a massive hate boner for the Empire, an army of nights that worship entities called The Watchers for murdering his parents. He is the brother of the goddess, Furiae, who protects the world from the destruction of the Watchers. With the help of a pact partner, a dragon named Angelus, Caim cuts a bloody path to the Empire to get revenge and save his sister. Typical RPG stuff until you start pulling back the veil of the games story and explore it in deeper detail. If there is one thing I love about this game, it’s the unapologetic dark story telling. Everything in this game has a depressing backstory to it. Even the weapons you collect are depressing as all hell. And it really doesn’t help with your party members being just as horrible as Caim. Sure, Caim is a hero, but he is all about murdering the Empire for the hell of it. He also can’t speak. I mean, he could in the intro, he had a voice actor, but on a neat twist on the silent protagonist trope, for Caim to become a pact partner, he had to sacrifice something, that being his ability to speak. All of his party members sacrifice something. Leonard, the priest, sacrificed his sight. Arioch, the elf, sacrificed her ability to have children. And Seere, the annoying one, sacrificed his mortality and stayed young. And like I said, most of these characters are awful people. Seere is just the goodie-toe shoes of the group, but Arioch is a cannibal that eats children to have something inside of her, and Leonard is… well… Leonard is a pedophile… so… I don’t know which is worse. And remember, these are our protagonists. This is not me hating on the story. The opposite, really. I love this darker turn and I can’t get enough of it. It’s probably why I was lured in by NieR: Automata. And not by other... more alluring means… Ahem, so how about that gameplay?
Well, you have two versions of gameplay. On ground combat and ariel combat. The on ground combat can range from two types of things. Boring as hell or annoying as hell. There are very few times you will have fun. Enemies are either way to easy and just swarm you like it’s a Dynasty Warriors game. You spam the square button like a motherfucker. Don’t let up. Occasionally you’ll hit the triangle button to do a magic attack, but that’s it. And I bitched about the lack of variety in Gungrave’s combat, but this is just sad. I wouldn’t mind if there was so much the game asks you do with the ground combat. Kill this platoon, now go kill this group of enemies, now kill all these enemies. I’m aware that you can use the dragon, but every time I do, it’s not long before a wizard or a pack of annoying archers shoots her and sends her away, so it’s mostly just ground combat. But the annoying as hell part is reserved for much later in the game when the enemies can surround you and smack you around in groups. One really bad instant was when I was at 75% health and I was immediately knocked down to 5% in a second. I didn’t even realize what was happening before I panicked. Sure, I survived, but still. And in the late game areas, where healing is few and far between and enemies get more and more relentless, it slowly starts to drain you. Now the aerial combat, that’s where the real fun is at. If the game was all just air combat, I would probably have more fond things to say about the gameplay, because I really do enjoy playing with my bad dragon… That sounds gross but I’m keeping it. Angelus has weight to her, making her slow to steer, but just weighted enough to not be a pain. It really does have this satisfying feel to it that I can’t explain. Almost like a “You really feel like Spider-Man” thing, I tell you. But seriously, the amount of shit you have to dodge while fighting back, it almost becomes a 3D bullet hell game. You can chain a few fireballs onto enemies, be it one for major damage or multiple to get more enemies. You can also charge your magic to get a big magic attack for even more damage. It’s not much, but it’s amazing. I remember one boss fight with the Wyrm where just running in and charging my attacks wouldn’t work. I had to fire straight at the Wyrm and then dodge right out of the way to avoid a big fireball attack. And then it hit me. I actually have a chance to… strategize. Think of a plan and execute it. I’m finally not slamming my finger on the square button and hoping everyone else dies before I do. Holy shit, this is actually a fun game now!
I’m sorry if I sound really bitter about Drakengard. But you gotta remember, if you are someone who played Drakengard… I was going for the E ending. I did get the other endings prior to this, but I wanted to get the E ending, because if there is anything people know this game, it’s this ending. But the requirements for it are absolutely putrid. Collect all 65 weapons in the game. Look, I didn’t like doing it for NieR: Automata, and that game was almost flawless. So a janky game like this, I dreaded what I would have to do. And sure enough, dread hit like a truck. The requirements for getting these weapons ranged from, “Tolerable” to “I wanna fucking die, in real life”. I spent so many hours getting all these weapons, replaying levels for so long. Levels have a time limit, I forgot to mention, about an hour at most. That’s pretty forgiving, given many levels can be beaten in a short time. But let’s say you’re tasked with killing all the enemies on the field, then killing another group, then a specific number on the other field, but not all of them, and then flying to another spot where new enemies spawned but only kill one in particular. I promise, the requirements were not THAT bad as I make it out to be, but if you spend twenty minutes doing that, and then die, you gotta do it all over again. Are you really gonna spend another twenty minutes doing that? Hell no you aren’t. Or at least, I wasn’t. Every time a great story moment took me by surprise, I was thrown back into the ground combat sections and was hot and ready to quit the game. Many times I had to take breaks because it was too much for me. I’m so sorry that I am throwing this game under the bus so hard, and I am sure my negativity is only pissing off some fans of this game, so let me just talk about something I like… kinda. And that’s the actual ending E.
(SPOILERS FOR DRAKENGARD)
So ending E of Drakengard. I’ve spoken about it many times in the past, before I had any context on what the game was. And now, with context in hand, with it all laid out before me… Yeah, it’s still absolutely bat shit insane. And that is because Ending E is a joke ending. So this is after The Watchers descend upon the earth, with giant babies feasting on everyone and laughing maniacally. Honestly, Yoko Taro, the games creator, is such a mad man, that this is probably normal for anyone at Square that knows him, and I love that so much. After you reach the Mother of the Watchers, Caim and Angelus are thrown into a portal to another world, which is modern day Tokyo (Modern in 2003, anyway). And here, we have the final boss. A rhythm game fight with the Mother. On one hand, I hate how annoying the fight is because it can kill you in one hit and it can change the button prompt at any moment. But there is so much to love on a visual and thematic standpoint. The sight of this giant beast standing in the grey city, the uncanny feeling of this all taking place in a modern setting, and the damn music. It’s nothing but a few bells, and it’s the most haunting shit I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Just everything about this is so amazing. And after the fight, Caim and Angelus are shot down by Tokyo air force and are impaled on the Tokyo Tower, and that’s the ending of Drakengard… But wait! Because this all ends up leading to the spin-off series, NieR. Yes, this joke ending leads to NieR. This batshit insanity is now canon in the world of Drakengard and NieR. That’s like if the Alien Ending from Silent Hill played a new role in the new Silent Hill games by Konami, but that would be stupid and would actually be something modern Konami would do. Please kill me. Honestly, this ending is so perfect in so many ways, simply because it perfectly describes the madness that is Yoko Taro. Everything about this man is admirable, from the insane show that is his interviews and random assortment of story continuations like concertes and books and stuff, to the passion he has for telling stories that are so damn depressing and yet thought provoking. Yoko Taro is a man that I have nothing but respect for and am so thankful that he is getting the chance to work on other games. His creation with NieR: Automata not only brought his franchise out of the darkness and into the public light, but also got his name out there and also saved Platinum Games from financial ruin. This man is so humble and I just want to pinch his ice cold cheeks. That being said… Drakengard is still not a fun game to play. I’m sorry, but this should’ve been a book or something.
(END OF SPOILERS)
Drakengard is unlike any other game, sometimes for better, other times for worse. It is a game that has an amazing story and great writing, though some would say a little too melodramatic at times, but I personally love it. That said, I don’t ever want to actually play this game again. It’s way too rough, way too janky, and just a slog to get through. I was ready to put the game down by the time I got the first ending and I still had four more to get, and I assure you, Ending E, as great as it is, is not worth spending 20 hours of grinding to get. If you are truly curious, look it up online. I promise there is nothing you are missing from a gameplay perspective. That being said, I would love to see Drakengard return one day. Not NieR, as much as I love that, but Drakengard. Sure, Square could pull an Atlus and leave the mainline series to rot and decay while milking the spin-off until there’s nothing left (Where’s that SMT V progress, Atlus?! It’s been three years!). Enhance the gameplay to make it more fun, maybe like Dark Souls or something- No, not in the lame journalist difficulty way, I mean with the weight, the blocking and the amount of enemies that can rush you and how you gotta plan ahead. I dunno, I’m just spitballing here. Well, let’s move on to awarding this game, and I give it the Endurance Test award. This game has a lot of good ideas, but getting to those good ideas takes a lot of getting through obnoxious levels just to catch a glimpse. Is Drakengard a bad game? No. It functions, it works perfectly, no glitches from what I saw, it’s fine. But it is such a dull game to play that I don’t have much intention of coming back to it aside from looking up analysis videos on Youtube or something. Stay tuned when I talk about the inferior version, Drakengard 2: Otherkin Boogaloo.