Calling games that try to push back against the standardization of the medium "pretentious" is lazy. (Although I actually quite enjoyed most of it) Drakengard is bad, tedious, unintuitive and not even internally coherent at times. Yet, its uniqueness and the fact that nothing like it has been made (or will be made anytime soon) makes it hold a very special place in my heart.
A lot of people seem to think this game is a great story with gameplay that makes it hard to enjoy, I believe that the janky gameplay goes hand in hand with the depressing themes and the subversion of gaming tropes that the game expresses.

That said, fuck whoever designed the ending E fight, I feel like I lost years of my life trying to complete it.

the final few hours are really good, but the stuff leading up to it is Bad, the characters have layers of complexity that make them somewhat interesting if you decide to go beneath the surface, but the sturface is really obnoxious. That's for sure by design but I was groaning through most of the dialogue, I think it's a tad overdone. The constant sexualization of all the female characters is icky too (I'm sure it's there to deliver some sort of point, but it's not clear what that point is and it just ended up feeling uncomfortable.)