My first exposure to Drakengard was watching a LP on youtube to catch up with the series in preparation for Nier Automata. I sat there fast forwarding the missions until the cutscenes came up, chuckling at the overacting done by the cardboard characters, and finding some brief amusement as the plot got progressively more fucked up, culminating in a "I get it" from me and moving on with my day. Turns out that, no, I didn't get it. Unless you actually sit down and go through with it, you have no idea how life draining and excrutiating this shit can get.
From the moment you first swing your sword at the endless spawning enemy soldiers in a wasteland of early ps2 environments and you feel how kinesthetically unpleasant it is to control Caim, you have at that point every reason in the world to shut off the game and never pick it up again. What follows from then on is one of the bitterest and most incisive condemnations of the videogame industry and its propensity for using violence as its main language. After spending 20 minutes boringly killing hundreds of enemies for no seemingly apparent reason, and having characters off screen constantly chastising and belitlling you in disgust, while a cacophony of classical symphony samples assault your ears, it honestly doesn't get any better.
You are then greeted by the most bizarre set of cutscenes that have the characters wallowing in self pity and agony, with a bird's eye view camera that never allows us any chance to sympathize or get comfortable with these muppets. The main character even has his ability to speak taken away, giving him no concrete way to express himself other than murder and gladly passing that torch to the player. As I finally completed the story by killing a giant possessed kid after a slog of grinding and repetitive sword slashing, I was more than happy to have my Drakengard experience over with. But 4 endings remain, the game taunts me.
Subjecting yourself to more of Drakengard, the story does indeed open up itself to reveal more. And what it reveals is even more despair and bloodshed. Searching for answers and a better resolution, what you get instead is your allies sharing the gruesome skeletons in their closets, the inescapeable truth of Caim's lust for violence, and the total annihilation of humanity in every shape or form possible. Shit, I'm playing Undertale before Undertale was even a thing.
These characters are forever trapped in this universe conceived purely for eternal war and death, it's no wonder that they are all mentally scarred and can only express themselves through senseless violence and the abuse of others, what can you expect them to do when these are the walls we devised for them? It's only fitting and brilliant then that at the end of it all the universe of Drakengard has no other way of resolving itself besides breaking through our own world to fight a ridiculously challenging final boss that in no way resembles any of the mechanics we spent the last 30 hours wrestling with, only to get annihilated by the people and machines that would have the capacity to create a game such as this one.
What's disturbing is that you eventually learn to compromise with Drakengard. You quickly figure out that you can ignore 90% of the enemies and just dash for the actual targets and you fall into a senseless stupor of boredom that allows you to disengage from the grind. And maybe that's part of its point, but I do wish it was more excrutiating and near impossible to beat. Or maybe i'm just fucked up, who knows. It's one of the best examples I have seen of consolidating a message of anti-violence with the actual act of playing, a narrative that is only fully conveyed if you are the one actually behind the controller. I just don't want to ever play it again, and if you are to get anything out of this review, is that you shouldn't either. Watch a LP.
P.S.: The true horror of Drakengard is coming to the realization that somewhere out there is someone that truly enjoys the ground combat for what it is and isn't remotely aware of the message the game. I shudder at the thought of it.
From the moment you first swing your sword at the endless spawning enemy soldiers in a wasteland of early ps2 environments and you feel how kinesthetically unpleasant it is to control Caim, you have at that point every reason in the world to shut off the game and never pick it up again. What follows from then on is one of the bitterest and most incisive condemnations of the videogame industry and its propensity for using violence as its main language. After spending 20 minutes boringly killing hundreds of enemies for no seemingly apparent reason, and having characters off screen constantly chastising and belitlling you in disgust, while a cacophony of classical symphony samples assault your ears, it honestly doesn't get any better.
You are then greeted by the most bizarre set of cutscenes that have the characters wallowing in self pity and agony, with a bird's eye view camera that never allows us any chance to sympathize or get comfortable with these muppets. The main character even has his ability to speak taken away, giving him no concrete way to express himself other than murder and gladly passing that torch to the player. As I finally completed the story by killing a giant possessed kid after a slog of grinding and repetitive sword slashing, I was more than happy to have my Drakengard experience over with. But 4 endings remain, the game taunts me.
Subjecting yourself to more of Drakengard, the story does indeed open up itself to reveal more. And what it reveals is even more despair and bloodshed. Searching for answers and a better resolution, what you get instead is your allies sharing the gruesome skeletons in their closets, the inescapeable truth of Caim's lust for violence, and the total annihilation of humanity in every shape or form possible. Shit, I'm playing Undertale before Undertale was even a thing.
These characters are forever trapped in this universe conceived purely for eternal war and death, it's no wonder that they are all mentally scarred and can only express themselves through senseless violence and the abuse of others, what can you expect them to do when these are the walls we devised for them? It's only fitting and brilliant then that at the end of it all the universe of Drakengard has no other way of resolving itself besides breaking through our own world to fight a ridiculously challenging final boss that in no way resembles any of the mechanics we spent the last 30 hours wrestling with, only to get annihilated by the people and machines that would have the capacity to create a game such as this one.
What's disturbing is that you eventually learn to compromise with Drakengard. You quickly figure out that you can ignore 90% of the enemies and just dash for the actual targets and you fall into a senseless stupor of boredom that allows you to disengage from the grind. And maybe that's part of its point, but I do wish it was more excrutiating and near impossible to beat. Or maybe i'm just fucked up, who knows. It's one of the best examples I have seen of consolidating a message of anti-violence with the actual act of playing, a narrative that is only fully conveyed if you are the one actually behind the controller. I just don't want to ever play it again, and if you are to get anything out of this review, is that you shouldn't either. Watch a LP.
P.S.: The true horror of Drakengard is coming to the realization that somewhere out there is someone that truly enjoys the ground combat for what it is and isn't remotely aware of the message the game. I shudder at the thought of it.
6 Comments
Fucked up.
welcome to my sick and twisted mind
I believe that all LPs and summaries for Drakengard should be removed from www dot youtube dot com forever and ever.
What an awful thing to say
nobody hates video games more than gamers
KB0
2 years ago