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.
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.