Drakengard 2 is a direct sequel to the original Drakengard: the story revolves around Nowe, a boy raised by the dragon Legna, fighting against a tyrannical faction of Knights, encountering characters from the previous game and becoming entangled in the fate of the world. Like the original, Drakengard 2 combines on-foot hack and slash with aerial combat stages and RPG game mechanics. The previous game's producer, writer and character designer returned to their respective roles. The game was designed as a more mainstream game in light of the previous game's dark aesthetic and story. The game sold 206,000 copies by the end of 2005. Western reviews praised the story, but gave mixed opinions about the graphics and widely criticized the gameplay.
Reviews View More
Game too hard for m and I cant get cheats to work on pcsx2. Watched the rest of the game through a youtube playthrough and can say Drakengard without Yoko Taro is mid.
gugjhuigj
So take the gameplay of Drakengard 1 and bump it up from bad to average, but also take the most interesting part of that game which was the insane story and make it boring, take all of the eccentric characters and make them standard rpg flavor with little to no personality, and you have this game here. It's bland as sand. I don't think the story is bad conceptually, it has a few good ideas, it's just really dull execution wise. When the only part of the game that got any emotional reaction out of me was seeing characters from the previous game show up and finish their own story arcs, that says a lot to me about how little I cared about anything happening in this story. I mean as a game, it's fine enough, it plays well, but as the years go on I have a feeling I'll remember very little about it, while there's no way I could forget its predecessor.
The Yin to Drakengard's Yang. Everything this game does better, it has to do something worse in comparison. Characters actually speak to each other now, rather than talking straight past each other in stilted quips! Unfortunately, the dialogue is boring as shit and grinds the pace to the halt. Combat is now much more focused and easy to control! However, maintaining health is a chore in this game and levels are reused far too often.
Like Drakengard 1, it's a game that struggles to come together until the end, but it reaches there eventually. Unfortunately, I can't really recommend it to anyone who doesn't have the guts to stick with an awkward and poorly designed game till the end, for story's sake.
Like Drakengard 1, it's a game that struggles to come together until the end, but it reaches there eventually. Unfortunately, I can't really recommend it to anyone who doesn't have the guts to stick with an awkward and poorly designed game till the end, for story's sake.
After quite enjoying the first Drakengard last month, I rushed out to pick up the second one. I took a little while getting through it, but here I am 23.5 playtime hours later at the end and all I can really say is that I understand why this game is all around ranked lower on numbered scores than the first game is XP. I played through the Japanese version of the game on normal mode. I only got one ending, but I will still be getting fairly into plot spoilers for this review as they don't matter all that much.
Drakengard 2 takes place (kinda) after ending A of Drakengard 1, the ending where you arguably saved the world and put a new seal in place to replace the old one that was lost. 18 years have passed since then, and a new Knights of the Seal have been established to protect the various magical seals placed around the world that prevent the final seal from being awakened in the first place. You play as Nowe, a young man newly admitted to the ranks of the Knights of the Seal, but he's special: He was raised by a dragon. Very specifically, he was raised by the black dragon Inuart had in the last game, and this story follows him on his quest to save the world.
The production of Drakengard 2 virtually didn't involve the original game's director Yoko Taro at all. As a result, the game we get here has a narrative far more mainstream and typical of a Japanese-developed fantasy game in the early-mid 2000's. This MAY be the story of Nowe, but it's really more like the story of Mana, the bewitched antagonistic little girl from the first game who is now all grown up. The game doesn't have all that many returning characters (not that there were all that many to return in the first place), but most characters act fairly to very illogically compared to how you'd expect them to act given their characterizations in the first game. Even Yoko Taro acknowledges this, as the story was later retconned canonically to fit along the Ending A to alternate events of Drakengard 1, as it so poorly reflects the world that game set up (even if you were going to set the canon ending as Ending A).
The pacing of the game is all over the place with how it builds up to things, and the game is FLUSH with padding (as we'll get to more later), but it really feels like the game has like 3 or 4 climaxes one after another rather than one logical build towards a conclusion. Additionally, the way the game deals with its messaging in both Mana's psychological trauma as well as Nowe's relation to the dragon that raised him are both really hamfisted and clumsily done. They carry some ultimately really toxic notions about what mental illness is as well as the ideal relationship of a parent to their child. Drakengard 2's narrative isn't just nowhere near as daring in how it approaches the nature of storytelling in games, but it also isn't even very well told for an early/mid-2000's fantasy game.
The gameplay of Drakengard 2 can be most easily described as an effort to take the "Musou + Ace Combat + Fantasy RPG" ideas that were presented in the first game and make them work better in a more typical action game's format. They fix the camera in the ground sections (thank heck) to work like a normal 3D camera instead of the aerial and ground sections sharing their flight sim-esque "looking to each side of you temporarily" nonsense the first game has. They also make the acquisition of weapons less difficult and also make them far more immediately useful with a genuine gear curve this time around. They also make use of magic more intuitive, add more characters (different characters use different weapons instead of the main character being able to use all of them), add consumable items, a shop system, and even passive items you can equip.
Unfortunately, many of the other additions and changes since the first Drakengard do not actually enhance the experience of the game, and in many cases the attempts to make the game more complex cause far more harm than good. The biggest issues the game has can be summed up by saying that the game frequently think the systems it has are far better than they actually are, so you almost always feel woefully unequipped for the task at hand. You're more maneuverable in the air, so they made flying enemies nimble and burly enough to the point where most air combats are a grueling fight for your life just hoping that you aren't suddenly taken out by something you couldn't've seen coming. They made ground combat a bit more technical so you're constantly being overwhelmed by hordes of enemies who are constantly staggering you and shaving off HUGE chunks of your HP. Even once I realized the game had a mid-air recovery mechanic by pressing block in mid-air when you're being juggled, just how quickly enemies can take a swing at your (especially when they enter an unstaggerable stance) caused me more pain than I could've reasonably mitigated. Then take into account that the aerial lock-on camera control is worse than useless, and you somehow still have no lock-on method for ground combat, and you have a game where simply keeping your enemy in view so you can even try to hit it is one of the most difficult combat challenges you face.
The game's new characters are somewhat meant to mitigate that difficulty because of their extra health bars and natural strengths and weaknesses to certain enemy types, but the narrative so often takes these characters away from you that it is quite uncommonly any help at all. The characters and their weapons also all have different stats and levels, and they only get experience points when they fight, so you're both encouraged to use them all but also dissuaded from branching off too much because otherwise your overall power might be too weak to combat whatever you're gonna go up against next. The characters DO have different stat lines, like being better in magic or physical strength, but it's not like they can share weapons or anything, and it's also not really like enemies have obvious weaknesses to physical or magical attacks, so the differences between the playable characters doesn't really amount to much more than cosmetics at the end of the day.
The game's difficulty curve is all over the place, with several really mean enemy types (such as the gorgons in the air and the skeletons on the ground) appearing throughout the game but feeling like they have the difficulty of late-game enemies. This is all made even worse by the fact that your characters may not share health but they also have relatively small health bars, and these levels regularly take 15 to 20 minutes to complete. Especially if you're trying to get the weapons hidden in these levels (and you will, because you'll need that extra power more often than not), you'll wanna stick your neck out in more dangerous situations, but that just leads to a LOT of time being taken up replaying long levels that have no checkpoints. You also can't replay story missions until you beat the game once, so if you want those weapons, you either gotta get 'em NOW, leave them to rot, or go grind on the (weirdly quite difficult) free play missions until you're strong enough to get them.
This game also not only has narrative padding but tons of mechanical padding too, taking you back to the same stages over and over for some new contrived narrative reason, and having to slog through those same stages (even with sometimes different enemies) gets old fast. At the very least the game keeps the XP you've gained for your characters (who don't share levels) and weapons (which now level on XP rather than number of kills), but it's a small consolation with how small those stat increases often are compared to the peril you're up against. Honestly, the addition of the consumable items you can use mid-stage feel more like an admission that the game is far too often unfairly difficult rather than an option for you to utilize mid-fight.
The presentation is generally a step up graphically, but not artistically. The enemy and character design is graphically prettier than the first game, sure, but their designs are far more standard and boring. The new characters especially look by and large like they were pulled from some scrapped Final Fantasy project, with Nowe in particular looking like a dead ringer for Tidus. The music also may be more listenable than the first game's, but it's more often than not just boring and forgettable, with only one track (the one that plays in the first mission of chapter 11) really catching my ear at all.
Verdict: Not Recommended. Drakengard 2 is very much an exercise in completely failing to appreciate what made the things in Drakengard 1 work the way they did. From the combat misunderstanding that sometimes complex is not actually better to the narrative both being more typical and worse told, it's a significant step down from the first game in just about every way. While there are certainly aspects of it that have promise, it just can't deliver on its best ideas and winds up being bad or simply mediocre at everything its trying to improve on from the first game. Even if you're a fan of Yoko Taro's work and wanna see this as a curiosity, I think your time (not to mention money, looking at the price of an English copy of this) is likely better spent watching a synopsis video rather than putting yourself through the frustration of playing it yourself.
Drakengard 2 takes place (kinda) after ending A of Drakengard 1, the ending where you arguably saved the world and put a new seal in place to replace the old one that was lost. 18 years have passed since then, and a new Knights of the Seal have been established to protect the various magical seals placed around the world that prevent the final seal from being awakened in the first place. You play as Nowe, a young man newly admitted to the ranks of the Knights of the Seal, but he's special: He was raised by a dragon. Very specifically, he was raised by the black dragon Inuart had in the last game, and this story follows him on his quest to save the world.
The production of Drakengard 2 virtually didn't involve the original game's director Yoko Taro at all. As a result, the game we get here has a narrative far more mainstream and typical of a Japanese-developed fantasy game in the early-mid 2000's. This MAY be the story of Nowe, but it's really more like the story of Mana, the bewitched antagonistic little girl from the first game who is now all grown up. The game doesn't have all that many returning characters (not that there were all that many to return in the first place), but most characters act fairly to very illogically compared to how you'd expect them to act given their characterizations in the first game. Even Yoko Taro acknowledges this, as the story was later retconned canonically to fit along the Ending A to alternate events of Drakengard 1, as it so poorly reflects the world that game set up (even if you were going to set the canon ending as Ending A).
The pacing of the game is all over the place with how it builds up to things, and the game is FLUSH with padding (as we'll get to more later), but it really feels like the game has like 3 or 4 climaxes one after another rather than one logical build towards a conclusion. Additionally, the way the game deals with its messaging in both Mana's psychological trauma as well as Nowe's relation to the dragon that raised him are both really hamfisted and clumsily done. They carry some ultimately really toxic notions about what mental illness is as well as the ideal relationship of a parent to their child. Drakengard 2's narrative isn't just nowhere near as daring in how it approaches the nature of storytelling in games, but it also isn't even very well told for an early/mid-2000's fantasy game.
The gameplay of Drakengard 2 can be most easily described as an effort to take the "Musou + Ace Combat + Fantasy RPG" ideas that were presented in the first game and make them work better in a more typical action game's format. They fix the camera in the ground sections (thank heck) to work like a normal 3D camera instead of the aerial and ground sections sharing their flight sim-esque "looking to each side of you temporarily" nonsense the first game has. They also make the acquisition of weapons less difficult and also make them far more immediately useful with a genuine gear curve this time around. They also make use of magic more intuitive, add more characters (different characters use different weapons instead of the main character being able to use all of them), add consumable items, a shop system, and even passive items you can equip.
Unfortunately, many of the other additions and changes since the first Drakengard do not actually enhance the experience of the game, and in many cases the attempts to make the game more complex cause far more harm than good. The biggest issues the game has can be summed up by saying that the game frequently think the systems it has are far better than they actually are, so you almost always feel woefully unequipped for the task at hand. You're more maneuverable in the air, so they made flying enemies nimble and burly enough to the point where most air combats are a grueling fight for your life just hoping that you aren't suddenly taken out by something you couldn't've seen coming. They made ground combat a bit more technical so you're constantly being overwhelmed by hordes of enemies who are constantly staggering you and shaving off HUGE chunks of your HP. Even once I realized the game had a mid-air recovery mechanic by pressing block in mid-air when you're being juggled, just how quickly enemies can take a swing at your (especially when they enter an unstaggerable stance) caused me more pain than I could've reasonably mitigated. Then take into account that the aerial lock-on camera control is worse than useless, and you somehow still have no lock-on method for ground combat, and you have a game where simply keeping your enemy in view so you can even try to hit it is one of the most difficult combat challenges you face.
The game's new characters are somewhat meant to mitigate that difficulty because of their extra health bars and natural strengths and weaknesses to certain enemy types, but the narrative so often takes these characters away from you that it is quite uncommonly any help at all. The characters and their weapons also all have different stats and levels, and they only get experience points when they fight, so you're both encouraged to use them all but also dissuaded from branching off too much because otherwise your overall power might be too weak to combat whatever you're gonna go up against next. The characters DO have different stat lines, like being better in magic or physical strength, but it's not like they can share weapons or anything, and it's also not really like enemies have obvious weaknesses to physical or magical attacks, so the differences between the playable characters doesn't really amount to much more than cosmetics at the end of the day.
The game's difficulty curve is all over the place, with several really mean enemy types (such as the gorgons in the air and the skeletons on the ground) appearing throughout the game but feeling like they have the difficulty of late-game enemies. This is all made even worse by the fact that your characters may not share health but they also have relatively small health bars, and these levels regularly take 15 to 20 minutes to complete. Especially if you're trying to get the weapons hidden in these levels (and you will, because you'll need that extra power more often than not), you'll wanna stick your neck out in more dangerous situations, but that just leads to a LOT of time being taken up replaying long levels that have no checkpoints. You also can't replay story missions until you beat the game once, so if you want those weapons, you either gotta get 'em NOW, leave them to rot, or go grind on the (weirdly quite difficult) free play missions until you're strong enough to get them.
This game also not only has narrative padding but tons of mechanical padding too, taking you back to the same stages over and over for some new contrived narrative reason, and having to slog through those same stages (even with sometimes different enemies) gets old fast. At the very least the game keeps the XP you've gained for your characters (who don't share levels) and weapons (which now level on XP rather than number of kills), but it's a small consolation with how small those stat increases often are compared to the peril you're up against. Honestly, the addition of the consumable items you can use mid-stage feel more like an admission that the game is far too often unfairly difficult rather than an option for you to utilize mid-fight.
The presentation is generally a step up graphically, but not artistically. The enemy and character design is graphically prettier than the first game, sure, but their designs are far more standard and boring. The new characters especially look by and large like they were pulled from some scrapped Final Fantasy project, with Nowe in particular looking like a dead ringer for Tidus. The music also may be more listenable than the first game's, but it's more often than not just boring and forgettable, with only one track (the one that plays in the first mission of chapter 11) really catching my ear at all.
Verdict: Not Recommended. Drakengard 2 is very much an exercise in completely failing to appreciate what made the things in Drakengard 1 work the way they did. From the combat misunderstanding that sometimes complex is not actually better to the narrative both being more typical and worse told, it's a significant step down from the first game in just about every way. While there are certainly aspects of it that have promise, it just can't deliver on its best ideas and winds up being bad or simply mediocre at everything its trying to improve on from the first game. Even if you're a fan of Yoko Taro's work and wanna see this as a curiosity, I think your time (not to mention money, looking at the price of an English copy of this) is likely better spent watching a synopsis video rather than putting yourself through the frustration of playing it yourself.