chuckro | Drakengard 2 review

So, I just finished playing through Drakengard 2. I commented on Drakengard a ways back, but I was mostly commenting on the difficulty level and gameplay. And I’ll give the designers credit: The gameplay in Drakengard 2 has some improvements: A somewhat-useful combo system, an item inventory, more enemy variety, much more interesting boss fights, tweaks on the dragon controls, and a retry-but-keep-your-experience option. The character-switching is a bit problematic, but overall, the gaming experience is stronger.

(Which is not to say it’s that great, especially compared to something like Dynasty Warriors. There’s no multiplayer; the puzzles are few, far between, and generally easy; and the levels tend to be very repetitive “run here and kill these 50 enemies, then run here and kill these 50 more enemies”. Dynasty Warriors at least makes an effort to add some sense of urgency and tactics to the killings.)

A problem that makes Drakengard 2 weaker than its predecessor is that it seems the designers ran out of time and money halfway through. The FMV cutscenes are beautiful, but there are relatively few of them, and most of the exposition is character portraits and text/voiceovers over freeze-frame pictures of the characters against nondescript backgrounds. You visit a lot of the same areas repeatedly, and tend to fight a lot of identical monsters. There are a number of places where it looks like they had bigger ideas, but had to slap something together at the last minute. It feels like they wrote a basic script, made the FMVs, battle system, and boss battles, then had to rush the level design and slap together the rest of the cutscenes.

The biggest difference between the two games was the plot. Like I talked about with the "angst decay" in the Wild ARMS games, we went from a really dark, serious, bloodily-realistic, world-is-half-empty first game to a white-haired bishonen shouting "Please stop! I don’t want to kill you!" before he demonstrates the Power of Love and the Power of Friendship.

Drakengard’s protagonist, Caim, is a right bastard. He doesn’t particularly mind slaughtering people—he hates people. His parents were killed by a dragon, but he’s forced to form a soul-pact with another dragon to attempt to save his sister from being sacrificed by an evil cult. Assisting him in this are four other people in soul-pacts, each crazier than the last (the women whose mind snapped when she watched her children get killed who likes to cackle hysterically while she slaughters things is a fun example). There are five endings, and the good ending leaves most of the main cast dead, and Caim’s dragon sacrificed to keep the world from falling into hell. That’s the only one where Caim survives, and one of only two where it’s implied that civilization survives.

Drakengard 2’s protagonist is a whiny bitch "chosen one". He spends the first two-thirds of the game doing the villain’s job for them, and never stopping to ask why. He spends entire stages apologizing to the people he’s slaughtering in droves. He has no particularly strong motivations. (The rushed nature of the cutscenes doesn’t help, either—chunks of the game feel like filler, probably because that’s what they are. There’s even a stage that takes place inside the mind of a supporting character, with no build up or even attempt of explanation of how you got in there.) And even when the world starts going to hell, the feeling of "cosmic horror" never really arrives. (The first game’s designers knew how to make horrors that were actually disturbing. This one uses the same character models as previous enemies with a green “goopy” skin on them.) All three endings are up-notes, the first two being moderately bittersweet, the third being genuinely happy.

Overall, Drakengard 2 just feels really generic, like just another Japanese RPG. Find the five keys, save the princess, kill the [evil] dragon, blah blah blah. The reason the original worked was because it was so dark, depressing and, well, different.