Reviews from

in the past


This review contains spoilers

Skip this first paragraph if you want to just start with the gameplay breakdown.

I think most would agree that most of Yoko Taro's games are not fun to play. I would go as far as to say that none of them are, but I'm aware that Automata fans would sharply disagree with that. I think none of his games are satisfying tests of dexterity, pattern-recognition, or ability to strategize. At best, they're B action-games. At worst, they're miserable repetitive slogs. They're never all of one or the other though. I do think Taro's direction is in service of an experience at the expense of gameplay. Which means, these games wouldn't have their current strongest points if say Taro was writing and someone else was directing. You kind of have to accept that from an experience-crafting perspective, you're stuck with a bad/mediocre game. I do feel that Taro can sometimes reward your patience with something that's at least interesting.

Ground combat goes like this; you mash square to do light-attacks. At various points in this chain, you can press triangle to unleash a finisher. Hitting enemies with non-magic attacks builds your chain. Enemies drop orbs when you hit them, 17, 36, 57, 77, and 100 times in one chain. The three orb drops will be a green one for health if you need to heal or a red orb that creates a small shockwave. The fourth orb is always a red one regardless of your HP. The fifth orb is the most useful. It's a black orb that massively powers up Caim so that he can one-shot the mooks and work through the sponges quicker. It does take a bit of strategy and skill (pick the correct weapon, space your attacks right) to do this later in the game. Another orb drops at 150, but you probably won't do this often. I didn't get a chain much further than that either.

Aerial combat goes like this; your dragon flies forward by itself and has tank-controls otherwise, something important to remember when the auto-lock points you at something. R1/L1 dodge you left and right, relative to where you're facing, and pressing both at once nets you a quick-turn. Cross boosts your speed, and you can still R1/L1 dodge while holding cross. Tapping square unleashes a strong fireball that builds a little magic. Holding square charges weaker homing fireballs that build more magic. A magic-attack is screen-clearing. You can also ride the dragon in most of the ground-combat stages, and the main difference is a lack of 3D flight-control (you can't ascend/descend) and you don't have the homing-attacks.

The RPG-leveling doesn't really matter for the most part. You can level up Caim to increase his HP, but all damage is avoidable and some bosses can still shred you with a maxed HP gauge. You're better off learning to dodge than grinding for EXP. Leveling up Caim's damage doesn't really matter either. Weapons have their own EXP that's accrued by defeating enemies, but the weapons don't get significantly better from their starting stats. Your damage will go up by finding a better weapon. The strongest weapon in the game's starting stats match most of the other weapons at max-level. It is worth it to level the dragon. That increases its attack outright, which will reduce the game's tedium incrementally.

The last bit of gameplay is your allies. You can temporarily summon them 3 times per stage. They're out on a time-limit represented by their remaining HP. Getting hit drains it quicker, but they can't die or anything. Allies have insanely strong magic-attacks, and can cast whenever. Their attacks nuke the spongiest sponges in one hit, including enemies that are supposed to be immune to attacks.

Enemies in the ground stages are almost all completely worthless. The only fun you can have is trying to group them to build your chain. The archers will get significantly more accurate if you're on your dragon and can knock you off pretty quick. The dragon's attacks are also strictly magical, so you'll have to get your hands dirty yourself whenever they show up. Enemies in the aerial stages are better just because it's more fun to dodge things while flying around than it is to mash square on a million mooks. The boss-fights, of which there are few, are the best part of the game.

This game is also, for better or worse, insanely meaty. There are 65 weapons to collect and 3 allies. There are also plenty of hidden events and stages. Many of these are unlocked by sub-missions, some hidden some not, such as defeating specific enemies in specific locations, completing stages in a time limit, being in a stage for a long time (these ones are bad), or are just hidden in chests. The weapons in particular are hidden across every mode; events, story missions, free expeditions, and this includes ground and aerial variants. You will be playing this game for a long time if you want every weapon, even if you use a guide to hunt down the cryptic ones. I found about 10 of them by myself. The game also has 5 endings, though, thankfully, you just have to play the new chapters after getting an ending instead of going through the entire thing again. But, you do have to get all 65 weapons for the final ending (you don't have to level any of them up though).

Final Spoiler Warning, it's story time.

The game takes place in a low-fantasy alternate-reality version of 11th century medieval Europe where magic was introduced to the world. You play as Caim, a dude who lost his kingdom and his parents (they got killed by a dragon), as he tries to protect his sister. 6 years of constant fighting has made him a psychotic murderer and not particularly heroic. He mainly fights because he's perpetually angry. The game starts with a castle housing his sister who is the current "goddess" under siege. Caim is, for better or worse, really good at fighting. But, he's just a guy. After mowing through 50-100 dudes outside the front door to get inside, he is mortally wounded and on his way out. On the ground in front of him is an also mortally wounded dragon. Caim hates dragons because they killed his parents, and the wounded dragon right there hates humans. If they enter a pact with each other, they get to live. Caim can't die because he's got shit to do, and the dragon's not interested in being dead either. They enter the pact which takes away whatever is most valuable to the human (surprisingly for Caim, this would be his ability to speak) in exchange for superhuman abilities (Caim and the dragon share a health-pool after this) and Caim gets to use the dragon's abilities (riding it around on it while it blows things up) to help in combat. Caim does temporarily save his sister before she's kidnapped again, and her fiancee, and Caim's childhood friend, turns evil. You spend the rest of the campaign slogging through boring fights to get to your sister once again, and she's killed herself. Turns out, the "goddess" is a person who prevents the world from ending by not killing themselves. It's ok if someone else kills them. The "goddess" status will just transfer to someone else. But, she did actually kill herself. All of the endings branch off after this point.

So, the interesting parts of the story take place in a cosmic horror apocalypse. It is, to me, fascinating to watch these people struggle to make it as each successive ending to the game gets increasingly bleak/weird. This is what the slog is for. To see this stuff.

We're reviewing a game here though. Your mileage may vary on the above story coverage, but it won't factor into the score. For its gameplay alone, the game just isn't worth playing. It's almost all bad combat almost all the time. The aerial missions might be the best part, but the game still wouldn't be worth playing if they were the only thing in it. There just aren't enough good moments to justify it. However, there are a handful of good boss fights, they're just behind the ending criteria.

The game is a 1.5/5 for me. It gets the 0.5 extra for the few good boss fights in it. However, if you're after more than gameplay, you might find this game worth checking out. I absolutely would not think less of anyone for avoiding the game because of its gameplay though. For what it's worth, I found the narrative, eventually, more interesting than NieR or Automata.

Fantastic story with very cohesive themes and symbolism that feels genuinely subversive in its commentary on violence and how its presented in most games. Overall an oppressively fatalistic game but has some truly touching moments of hope and optimism sprinkled in, which end up being very effective given how dark the rest of the game is.

Brought down a bit by enjoyable but pretty simplistic musou gameplay that can get a bit tedious after a while. A lot of people say that the musou gameplay in Drakengard is bad on purpose which 1. is just wrong - its definitely not bad just tedious after a while and 2. i refuse to believe that the gameplay is "bad on purpose". This game is definitely disturbing and disquieting and unconventional on purpose - which I guess some people could be referring to when they say "bad" - but the idea that Yoko Taro would intentionally sabotage the gameplay in Drakengard to make a point is kind of ridiculous to me. For any piece of media with profit motivation - which this game does have being published by Square Enix - its incredibly rare and difficult for a creator to essentially make it "bad on purpose". There are too many people to push back against it and the higher ups would have to be remarkably incompetent to not notice this sort of thing going on and course correct. The only piece of media where i actually believe this claim of "bad on purpose" is Freddy Got Fingered and that was like a once in a generation fluke for a studio to somehow let that kind of thing happen.

Anyway really unique and genuinely subversive game with clearly a lot of artistic passion behind it. Highly recommend given just how one of a kind it is.

Aprecio los esfuerzos conscientes de Yoko Taro para que el juego se aproxime lo máximo posible a una lobotomía, no sé ni que rating ponerle siquiera

dropped at chapter 3 then watched the cutscenes

no regrets

las increíbles aventuras de caim y su dragón mariángeles junto a sus amigos la caníbal el monje con demencia un señor ciego que no me ha quedado muy claro quién es y el gemelo de los rugrats

como juego cómico es increíble, como juego que te tienes que tomar en serio es lo peor que he visto en mi vida


Listen, I love the story but this gameplay is untenable. Boring, monotonous trash. Watch a youtube essay instead

Bitches will tell you it's dogshit intentionally and not understand that a director can have creative ideas on how to mess with the player and also work with a studio that has no idea what video games even fucking are. Did Yoko Taro decide to lock the one ending that matters behind absurd completionist nonsense to punish completionists? Yeah, maybe. The soundtrack is definitely jarring and uncomfortable on purpose. Did Lord Emperor Taro-sama decide with his holy heart to have an unusable camera and to give the dragon a magic attack that blasts your speaker every single time and to make 50% of all fucking enemies completely immune to any kind of magic or any interaction with the core gimmick of the game? No, I think those decisions come from Cavia sucking at making games. A very interesting game held down by being borderline unplayable garbage.

84

The story rips, the soundtrack rips, the atmosphere rips, the gameplay kinda rips if you play a couple missions a day, stop, turn off the game, leave your room, go down stairs, prepare yourself a nice lunch, prepare your two cats a meal as well, sit down to eat your meal, finish your meal, let out a long, hard burp of satisfaction, before getting off your ass and considering cleaning the dishes, but ultimately deciding to hold off on it till later. You decide to move your way into the living room, so you can relax on your newly bought, comfortable couch. You fall down onto the couch, and start to ponder what you should do next in the day. You could go back to gaming, but the weather is unexpectedly nice today and a walk in the park does sound relaxing right now. Oh, what the hell!" you say, as you attempt to get off the couch. Unfortunately, the comfortability of the couch magnetizes you to it leaving you unable to get up. You try again to get up, but despite all your effort and might you're unable to win. The couch looks at you with a smug grin as you helplessly attempt to rip yourself from its grip. Time goes by at a rapid pace, and you're losing your chance to take that much needed park walk. At long last you gain the strength to break free, and you lift yourself with the might of a lion. You've a taunting glance at the couch, before heading outside and getting inside your car. You drive all the way to the park, take your walk, and come back home exhausted. You prepare you and your cats a large meal, eat it, and then head upstairs to play some rounds of (Insert multiplayer game here) with your friends. After a long day, you get yourself ready for bed, before finally falling on the bed and getting yourself a nice four hours of sleep. A couple more missions of Drakengard will be pretty fun after that.


tengo una relacion toxica con este juego

so i bought this used last year and played it until i hit a loading screen that just doesn't budge, right around when they get to the elf village. it's probably the old ps2 laser getting weak. gonna have to find another way to play this. the soundtrack was banger! and super edgy story hell yeah

There probably is a good game hidden somewhere under all the grinding. That's the only explanation I can think of.

Beautiful gowns, also Growing Wings is my jam

Drankengard fans singing my praises after I beat them up and steal their wallets(I intended to give them a painful experience.)

This game aims to be an awful experience, and boy does it succeed at it.

A masterpiece that has aged like milk

I'd like to preface this by saying that of the five available endings (or routes), I had to stop after reaching Ending A because I simply couldn't take this anymore. At times, Drakengard is incredibly fun, but those times are few and far between. Most of the time you are spent fighting spongy enemies and bosses pressing the same button thousands of times and doing the most mindnumbingly boring tasks imaginable for the sake of reaching a minor plot development, only to do the same surface level hack and slash combat for another few hours. At times, the visuals are Drakengard excel for the times, but others, the arenas are nothing but grey expanses. It's truly impressive just how little character this game has once you do anything but look at the story. The difficulty scaling is abysmal, and the mechanics of the boss fight are frustrating for the sake of it. There is no reward to overcoming obstacles, unless you've got a hankering for more boring combat.

en mi vida he jugado nada igual (despectivo) (afectuoso)

I adore both Nier and its sequel Nier: Automata. When I first completed Nier years ago, I attempted to play through its director Yoko Taro's first big game Drakengard and was pretty firmly not impressed. After finishing and adoring Nier: Automata earlier this year, I decided to give Drakengard (or as it's known in Japanese "Drag-On Dragoon) another try to see what people see about this game. Like Nier, Drakengard has multiple endings and they're certainly all intended to be played through, and up until even after completing the first ending of Drakengard I was really unimpressed and frustrated with my time with it. However, as I went on to see the other endings and content (as the completion percentage in the lower right is keen to inform you, more than half of the game is still waiting for you after you see ending A), I began to respect Drakengard more and more as a game and as a work of fiction. It took me just about 24 hours to get all five endings in the Japanese version of the game. Before the review beings properly, I want to clarify that while I won't get into any discussions that require content warnings in this review (and hoo boy does Drakengard need them), I will be getting into some fairly heavy spoilers for the game in my discussion of the themes it presents.

​Drakengard is the story of Caim, a soldier and prince of the allied army, and the red dragon he has formed a pact with. Despite Caim's hatred of dragons (an imperial dragon killed his parents) and the dragon's general detest for humans, they form a pact between their souls to save their own lives when they're both on the brink of death. Caim and his dragon go on to fight the imperial army headed by an evil empress bent on destroying the world by killing Caim's big sister who is also a goddess that acts as a seal against the aforementioned world destruction. The story itself is somewhat complicated on paper as far as characters, motivations, and places go, but the particulars aren't really important. Most characters in Drakengard don't really change over the course of the story, and this is a game whose message is much more about its themes than the story itself, but we'll get back to that later. First we need to mention the actual gameplay of Drakengard.

​Drakengard as a project started out as something to capitalize on the success of the Dynasty Warriors (aka "Musou") series, which is why Drakengard has big fields of enemies for you to tear down hundreds of. However, midway through its development, it was also decided that it would also be prudent to make Drakengard a vehicle to ALSO jump onto the popularity of the Ace Combat series, which is why Drakengard also has the aerial combat sections on the dragon. Neither of these sections are particularly impressive in and of themselves, and honestly both somewhat work against each other on a more fundamental mechanical level.

The most solid parts overall are the air missions where you have your dragon and can fly around the skies defeating targets. It can be a bit overly difficult to maneuver at times and when characters talk mid-mission they cover up your enemy radar (very annoyingly), but overall these are far more like the simplicity of Star Fox's flying missions than something more technical than Ace Combat. You have a normal breath attack, a homing attack, and a super magic attack as well as the ability to zoom to the right or left to avoid incoming fire. They're quick, breezy, and a little annoying with how you can sometimes get overwhelmed, but they overall work fine.

The on-ground sections are very Musou-like, with you going around and slicing up tons of enemies trying to kill targets to win that particular mission. You have a normal attack, a magic attack you can do if you have enough mana from killing enemies, and a combo super you can do by pressing the button for your magic attack mid-combo (which yes, results in a lot of whiffed magic uses when you meant to do your combo super). You also, quite usefully, have a ground dodge just like the dragon has side-dashes in the air. There are also new weapons scattered throughout the game that you can get to allow you access to new combos as well as new magic spells to fling around.

The ground combat is where most of the outright faults with the game mechanically derive from, however. Very annoyingly, your camera is also the same as in the sky. Turning the right stick just makes you look in that direction temporarily. It doesn't actually properly turn the camera. It turns it like you're looking left and right in a cockpit like in Ace Combat. This is all well and fine for the flying sections, but it is not welcome at ALL in the ground sections, and the only way to refocus the camera is by holding the block button. This was likely a compromise made due to how you can also summon your dragon to fly on during the on-ground missions, but it's still one I could've easily done without.

The new weapons are also not very fun either, ultimately. Despite there being 65 of them, most of them require some real sleuthing or dumb luck to find without a guide, with many being locked behind killing specific enemies, taking specific paths, beating certain enemies or levels within time limits, or even just waiting around as long as 25 whole minutes for the chest to just spawn on its own. Just to top that whole mess off, none of these secrets are communicated to the player in any way shape or form. You aren't even told which verses (segments of chapters) have weapons remaining in them to find. To make matters even worse, you can't even really properly use a weapon when you first find it. Caim and the dragon both level up, but Caim's levels only affect his and the dragon's shared max HP, and the dragon's levels only affect the dragon's attack power. Weapon attack is entirely down to the level of the weapon, and weapons don't really have much of a power creep, and you can't really know how powerful a weapon will be until you level it up. This means every time you want to try out a new weapon to really get use out of in the story, you'll need to grind for like half an hour in earlier stages to get it to max level so THEN you can start really getting a feel for it. HOWEVER, as bad as ALL that sounds (and is), I would argue that a significant portion of it is actually in the positive service of the game as a whole.

Drakengard's endings progressively make the narrative get to worse and worse places. Arguably, the first ending you get is the "good" ending for the story, as it's certainly the happiest outcome for everyone involved. Caim's priest ally even posits whether the "gods" have decided to spare [humanity]. As you go towards further and further endings, playing more and more of the game, you see more and more just how monstrous all the characters, Caim included, are. The further endings all progressively doom the world to differing but all worse fates, with the final ending opening up a portal to modern day Tokyo (and, given that that is the inciting plot incident for Nier's canon, you could argue it ends up destroying all of the real world's humanity).

Drakengard is ultimately a game that is trying to comment on how players interact with games and particularly the narratives within them in relation to the gameplay. When you enter the portal in ending E to the real world's Tokyo, the dragon remarks that you've entered the world of the "gods". When the priest asks in ending A if the gods have decided to spare them, he isn't referring to unknowable gods of his world. He's referring to you, the player, and all of us in our own world. Much like Undertale would get so much praise for more than a decade later, we, the player, will decide if we spare them and their world by stopping at our first ending and not continuing as we are prompted to. Getting ending E requires going through the monotonous task of collecting all 65 weapons in the game. It is an extremely deliberate act that takes no small amount of time (I'd say it's easily more than a third of the game's completion time), and the final rhythm game-like boss battle of that ending is also very difficult. The player is REALLY committing to this destruction all in the sake of completing a game, and Drakengard wants us to ponder the morality of that in the context of its narrative. I think something like Undertale achieves this a bit more successfully, but I can't say that I didn't leave Drakengard impressed with the message it tries to tell with what could otherwise come off as just a quite dark (for a video game, certainly) medieval fantasy story.

Presentation-wise, Drakengard is a bit of an odd mixed bag. Visually, it's quite a nice-looking game for 2003, with the CGI cutscenes (particularly of the later endings) looking very nice even today. The ground enemy designs are a bit uninteresting, but the flying enemy designs are generally really cool (they feel far more Nier-like), and once you get to the giant babies borne from space at the end of the game, it just gets to plain nightmare fuel territory. The music is really weird, being remixes of pieces of classical music. From what I've read about it, they were apparently deliberately put together to evoke the game's theme of "madness", and given how several of my friends who watched me play it over Discord described the music as "brain melting", I think they achieved their goals XD. As a final note, while I remember the English VA being fairly dire, I thought the Japanese VA was really good, although I don't believe any version of the game has any kind of language select option, unfortunately.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I really liked this game, but it will definitely not be for everyone. Drakengard is a game much more than the sum of its parts mechanically, and that will turn off a lot of people pretty quickly, and I also don't blame them for that. I think Drakengard is a fascinating and fairly bold attempt at creating a narrative in a video game for its budget in 2003, and I really respect it for that, but I also have the good sense to realize that that is SO not what many (or even most) people go to video games seeking. If what this review has described has piqued your interest, then I'd say it's probably worth hunting the game down and giving it a try. Drakengard is a game that most people will quickly dislike and for good reasons, but I think it will always be a game I have a certain fondness for.

Does some interesting things, but it never really executes on it's darker themes and as a result just feel like a game where you get yelled at through a magical earpiece for 9 hours for fighting the literal inhuman empire trying to cause the end of the world. Also the ground gameplay is straight bootycheeks

Drakengard isn't the worst game in the world because it does have some awesome things going for it such as story, soundtrack, and atmosphere. The gameplay on the other hand leaves much to be desired. It’s got the whole musou aspect and some moves feel good, and some just don't quite do it. Like for example landing the finishing blow after a long combo string feels awesome right? True, but then the general clunk impedes a lot of that. Riding the dragon can be awesome but has its share of issues as well. However, the biggest problem is that if you want to see all the endings you have grind like hell. Imo, one playthrough is enough and besides the normal ending is the one the sequel follows.

Oynasanıza

(sırf bu öneriyi görün diye bu tarihte bitirmiş olarak gösterdim)

Dollar store Dynasty Warriors - didn't care for it.


1 of the best games made on the ps2

Desesperante, podría mencionar que es eso, y es cierto, con los problemas jugables que carga sumado al hecho de tener que repetir muchas secciones que son un tedio, en pos de, al menos, tener la oportunidad de ver el primer final.

Ahora, esto sería terrible, si no fuera por como transmite esa atmósfera tan pesada cuya historia cargada de tragedia y ciertos elementos turbios que hacen que todo el ambiente del juego se sienta acorde.

Claro, para disfrutar de esta historia, primero, tendrás que sufrir el horror de tener que pasar por extensas sesiones de juego, repitiendo niveles en pos de completar condiciones y que no son cortas, o lo mas infame, conseguir las 65 armas que contiene el juego que son obligatorias para uno de los finales mas importantes para las posteriores obras del autor.

Jugablemente mediocre y exhaustivo, pero si puedes hacerlo, te aseguro que al menos, te llevarás una interesante experiencia contigo.

A ver, ha sido una fumada de viaje, historia interesante, enrevesada y surrealista, pero me ha gustado bastante

Ahora, jugabilidad horrenda, si no sois de juegos antiguos con controles ortopédicos entonces no juguéis esto porque os desesperáis, este juego solo te hace sufrir, aunque si te gusta sufrir entonces este es tu juego.