Why I Stopped Playing Drakengard
Actually it's a very simple reason this time: the disc was irredemably scratched--you could literally see through it. I did not notice this when I bought Drakengard and made it through most of the chapters required for the first ending when the game plain refused to load.
This sucks, because Drakengard is emphatically not a good game, even though it's a relatively beatable game. I wasn't enjoying the experience, though it wasn't so horrible that I stopped playing it, and the fact that I didn't even get to see the ending was a little slap in the face.
I kind of knew this--I'd rented the game when it came out and got about an hour in before giving up in disgust. One of my friends, over the years, periodically insists that it's the most fucked-up game I'll ever play...and I like fucked-up. So I figured, hell, I'll give it one more shot.
Up until the ending, I can't honestly say it's particularly skewed or anything--storylinewise, it's an extremely dark fantasy--we're talking Song of Ice and Fire-level dark. I've seen videos of the ending, and while I don't really have any context...damn, I really wish I could have seen it through to the end. I went to the store to get another copy but they were sold out; I picked up a copy of Super Paper Mario with my credit, and I'm enjoying it immensely...maybe I'll pick up Drakengard again when I can be bothered to find another copy. It's indeed creepily surreal. I'd been told to expect "gigantic floating babies"...but didn't realize how literally I was supposed to take that.
But what I said goes: it's not a particularly good game. An hour in you've seen all it has to offer, and it's not much. There are three modes of play: typical action-RPG "hero mows down an army of mooks," an aerial flight on a dragon, and a combination of both. All three have their flaws.
The aerial mode is perhaps the worst: while there is nothing resembling a good camera anywhere in the game, this tends to whip around vertiginously. Targeting is weird: you're always semi-locked-on to one target, and pressing a button will turn you slooooooooowly to face that target. Holding down another button and sweeping your cursor will let you lock on to a few targets at a time in addition, so it quickly devolves into holding down square, sweeping the screen, and releasing. There are a couple of one-on-one fights, and those are the worst: the enemies tend to move extremely quickly, way too quickly for your dragon to turn around. Your cursor finds itself behind the borders of the screen while you hope the enemy hovers long enough for you to turn around.
Hybrid mode is also a bit difficult in that the dragon's flight speed isn't really controllable; while you can do a basic thrust, she always crawls forward. You'll target a group of enemies on the ground with fireballs, then find you're too far ahead of them and have to turn around. It's tedious. There's a quickturn combo--hit L1 and R1 at the same time--but there were many times it didn't work right away; hitting one of the shoulder buttons on its own makes you fling yourself to the side about a hundred feet, and I often found myself off target. (I'm open to the possibility that it was simply a controller issue--I play with a cheap third-party wireless--but I've never had problems with any other games, so I'm assuming that the programming on that action was slightly off.) If you scroll the enemies offscreen, the game apparently does not save the status of their health--there are thousands of enemies in a level at any one time, so that's somewhat understandable--and their health bar resets to full.
The ground melee mode is the most successfull and is pretty satisfying--run to any group of those thousand enemies and bash away. While there's a combo system, it's pretty perfunctory. There are 65 weapons to find through the course of the game--please, do yourself a favor and get a guide for that, because it's a Square game and therefore completely nonintuitive for most of them--and each handles differently. YOu'll have your favorites; I tended to prefer a katana. Each weapon has a different magic spell associated with it, and I rather enjoyed that feature.
But due to a combination of hardware issues and the programmers being idiots, melee comes off as extremely frustrating. It's related to draw distance--you don't see enemies unless you're practically on top of them. You'll find yourself in an empty field wandering about, so you click a button to bring up the map, which takes a second, then locate the enemies and click to bring back the battle screen, which takes another second, and meander to that area, at which point the game's shitty camera will reveal that it's tricked you and you've been going in the opposite direction. I speak about two seconds of delay, which may not seem like much--but when you consider that you're literally bringing up the map screen two or three dozen times in the course of a mission...it gets boring. There is a radar screen, but it's next to useless; if enemies show up on-screen when you're 20 feet away from them, they show up on the radar at about 40 feet. The radar also shows no terrain features, so it's next to useless.
There is a jump button. I am not opposed to jump buttons; quite the opposite: I rather like jumping. (Grew up on Nintendo platformers.) However, I am honestly not sure why they bothered with it. Drakengard is one of those games rendered in three dimensions that's actually two-dimensional. The entirety of the action takes place on one plane; it could--and probably would have worked well if this were the case--have worked with top-down sprites. You can do some awesome things with sprites. Your character *cannot jump over rocks*. There is some vague tiein to attacking, I believe, but I never figured it out, never needed it. It's a tease that plummets the gameplay into the uncanny valley; don't give me a jump key if you won't let me do anything with it, it's jarring.
Cutscenes are skippable but not pausable; another sign of lazy programmers.
I enjoy the way chapter selection is handled. You have basically a master save file, and can auto-save at the end of every level. The game will progress linearly until you tell it to stop, at which point you can revisit any area you've played already--both cutscenes and levels--in order to level up or gain treasure or whatever. There are also several side missions which don't affect the storyline at all but merely provide an alternate set of goals. There are a few side chapters which are tied to the game's various endings, available when you complete certain conditions. The game tells you EXACTLY what you need to do to unlock side chapters--"unlock Alternate Character B and beat the dragon fight within 4 minutes"--and that's appreciated, it really is.
I did find interesting the way the game treats two givens of RPGdom--the fact that the protagonist is basically committing genocide, and the Non-Speaking Hero. Many people parodying RPGs will mention the fact that, by the end of the game, your character has killed thousands of enemies--particularly egregious in games such as Final Fantasy VII that have environmentalist undertones--but no one really does anything about it. Killing thousands of enemies--human or otherwise--is in itself the sign of someone mentally unhinged; even if someone's doing it for duty, he's bound to get a little loopy after seeing so many die by his hand. This is very much a part of Drakengard; all of the characters comment on how bloodthirsty our hero Caim is, how he's insane with his desire for revenge...and many of them find him kind of scary.
But we never get to hear Caim's side of the story beyond the first chapter, because after a level or two in which he does speak (or yell or grunt), he becomes a nonspeaking hero for plotline reasons--the pact he makes with the dragon causes him to sacrifice his voice. (Several characters make pacts throughout the game, and they're all extremely symbolic--according to the manual, one loses his sight, one loses the ability to age beyond childhood, one loses her fertility, and one loses...his hair...) And that's powerful. Most games silence the hero so we can more easily enter into his role, but--hopefully--we aren't expected to identify with Caim because he's craaaaaazy. Having him lose the ability to speak, rather, seems to stress how swept up in events he is.
Unfortunately, and somewhat paradoxically, it violates the "show, don't tell" rule. We're shown a lot--Caim snapping and threatening the bald guy, Caim killing mook after mook after mook after mook (10K kills by the point where I started)--but his motivations...remain clear, and this is not a point where ambiguity would work. Characters tell him every five minutes, "Gee, you sure love killin'," but the fact is, Caim is in the unusual situation where his sociopathic tendencies are completely validated by the world he's in. The enemy soldiers are either inhuman or vaguely possessed, and they're trying to destroy the world. He's given a free ride. And he's under stress. The man is snapping as we play him...and he can't tell us how he feels. Vaguely waving his sword around during cutscenes isn't enough.
I also kind of wish there'd been some sort of explanation about what the world was like before the game started. It opens on Caim's castle under siege by The Empire; Caim belongs to the Union or the Alliance or some such conglomerate. What is the government like here? Do they control opposing territories? Is the Union the bunch of rebellious upstarts, or is the Empire? Who rules each? Does Caim have any political power? What is his average day like? There's something to be said for opening up on a tense scene...but then again, Good Morning Crono isn't the worst opening either for a game like this. Whether it's missing the point or not, I want to know what the world was like before everything went to crap, and the game never seems to feel the need to show me.
Voice acting is a mixed bag, as most games are, but I have to give big ups to Mona Marshall who plays the dragon; it's a tough role but she does it wonderfully. The dragon is arrogant, powerful, desirous to save the world, contemptuous of Caim even as she's growing fond of him, and raspy--and she pulls in an excellent performance. Other actors in the game aren't as good, but I like to point out good things when I see them.
This sucks, because Drakengard is emphatically not a good game, even though it's a relatively beatable game. I wasn't enjoying the experience, though it wasn't so horrible that I stopped playing it, and the fact that I didn't even get to see the ending was a little slap in the face.
I kind of knew this--I'd rented the game when it came out and got about an hour in before giving up in disgust. One of my friends, over the years, periodically insists that it's the most fucked-up game I'll ever play...and I like fucked-up. So I figured, hell, I'll give it one more shot.
Up until the ending, I can't honestly say it's particularly skewed or anything--storylinewise, it's an extremely dark fantasy--we're talking Song of Ice and Fire-level dark. I've seen videos of the ending, and while I don't really have any context...damn, I really wish I could have seen it through to the end. I went to the store to get another copy but they were sold out; I picked up a copy of Super Paper Mario with my credit, and I'm enjoying it immensely...maybe I'll pick up Drakengard again when I can be bothered to find another copy. It's indeed creepily surreal. I'd been told to expect "gigantic floating babies"...but didn't realize how literally I was supposed to take that.
But what I said goes: it's not a particularly good game. An hour in you've seen all it has to offer, and it's not much. There are three modes of play: typical action-RPG "hero mows down an army of mooks," an aerial flight on a dragon, and a combination of both. All three have their flaws.
The aerial mode is perhaps the worst: while there is nothing resembling a good camera anywhere in the game, this tends to whip around vertiginously. Targeting is weird: you're always semi-locked-on to one target, and pressing a button will turn you slooooooooowly to face that target. Holding down another button and sweeping your cursor will let you lock on to a few targets at a time in addition, so it quickly devolves into holding down square, sweeping the screen, and releasing. There are a couple of one-on-one fights, and those are the worst: the enemies tend to move extremely quickly, way too quickly for your dragon to turn around. Your cursor finds itself behind the borders of the screen while you hope the enemy hovers long enough for you to turn around.
Hybrid mode is also a bit difficult in that the dragon's flight speed isn't really controllable; while you can do a basic thrust, she always crawls forward. You'll target a group of enemies on the ground with fireballs, then find you're too far ahead of them and have to turn around. It's tedious. There's a quickturn combo--hit L1 and R1 at the same time--but there were many times it didn't work right away; hitting one of the shoulder buttons on its own makes you fling yourself to the side about a hundred feet, and I often found myself off target. (I'm open to the possibility that it was simply a controller issue--I play with a cheap third-party wireless--but I've never had problems with any other games, so I'm assuming that the programming on that action was slightly off.) If you scroll the enemies offscreen, the game apparently does not save the status of their health--there are thousands of enemies in a level at any one time, so that's somewhat understandable--and their health bar resets to full.
The ground melee mode is the most successfull and is pretty satisfying--run to any group of those thousand enemies and bash away. While there's a combo system, it's pretty perfunctory. There are 65 weapons to find through the course of the game--please, do yourself a favor and get a guide for that, because it's a Square game and therefore completely nonintuitive for most of them--and each handles differently. YOu'll have your favorites; I tended to prefer a katana. Each weapon has a different magic spell associated with it, and I rather enjoyed that feature.
But due to a combination of hardware issues and the programmers being idiots, melee comes off as extremely frustrating. It's related to draw distance--you don't see enemies unless you're practically on top of them. You'll find yourself in an empty field wandering about, so you click a button to bring up the map, which takes a second, then locate the enemies and click to bring back the battle screen, which takes another second, and meander to that area, at which point the game's shitty camera will reveal that it's tricked you and you've been going in the opposite direction. I speak about two seconds of delay, which may not seem like much--but when you consider that you're literally bringing up the map screen two or three dozen times in the course of a mission...it gets boring. There is a radar screen, but it's next to useless; if enemies show up on-screen when you're 20 feet away from them, they show up on the radar at about 40 feet. The radar also shows no terrain features, so it's next to useless.
There is a jump button. I am not opposed to jump buttons; quite the opposite: I rather like jumping. (Grew up on Nintendo platformers.) However, I am honestly not sure why they bothered with it. Drakengard is one of those games rendered in three dimensions that's actually two-dimensional. The entirety of the action takes place on one plane; it could--and probably would have worked well if this were the case--have worked with top-down sprites. You can do some awesome things with sprites. Your character *cannot jump over rocks*. There is some vague tiein to attacking, I believe, but I never figured it out, never needed it. It's a tease that plummets the gameplay into the uncanny valley; don't give me a jump key if you won't let me do anything with it, it's jarring.
Cutscenes are skippable but not pausable; another sign of lazy programmers.
I enjoy the way chapter selection is handled. You have basically a master save file, and can auto-save at the end of every level. The game will progress linearly until you tell it to stop, at which point you can revisit any area you've played already--both cutscenes and levels--in order to level up or gain treasure or whatever. There are also several side missions which don't affect the storyline at all but merely provide an alternate set of goals. There are a few side chapters which are tied to the game's various endings, available when you complete certain conditions. The game tells you EXACTLY what you need to do to unlock side chapters--"unlock Alternate Character B and beat the dragon fight within 4 minutes"--and that's appreciated, it really is.
I did find interesting the way the game treats two givens of RPGdom--the fact that the protagonist is basically committing genocide, and the Non-Speaking Hero. Many people parodying RPGs will mention the fact that, by the end of the game, your character has killed thousands of enemies--particularly egregious in games such as Final Fantasy VII that have environmentalist undertones--but no one really does anything about it. Killing thousands of enemies--human or otherwise--is in itself the sign of someone mentally unhinged; even if someone's doing it for duty, he's bound to get a little loopy after seeing so many die by his hand. This is very much a part of Drakengard; all of the characters comment on how bloodthirsty our hero Caim is, how he's insane with his desire for revenge...and many of them find him kind of scary.
But we never get to hear Caim's side of the story beyond the first chapter, because after a level or two in which he does speak (or yell or grunt), he becomes a nonspeaking hero for plotline reasons--the pact he makes with the dragon causes him to sacrifice his voice. (Several characters make pacts throughout the game, and they're all extremely symbolic--according to the manual, one loses his sight, one loses the ability to age beyond childhood, one loses her fertility, and one loses...his hair...) And that's powerful. Most games silence the hero so we can more easily enter into his role, but--hopefully--we aren't expected to identify with Caim because he's craaaaaazy. Having him lose the ability to speak, rather, seems to stress how swept up in events he is.
Unfortunately, and somewhat paradoxically, it violates the "show, don't tell" rule. We're shown a lot--Caim snapping and threatening the bald guy, Caim killing mook after mook after mook after mook (10K kills by the point where I started)--but his motivations...remain clear, and this is not a point where ambiguity would work. Characters tell him every five minutes, "Gee, you sure love killin'," but the fact is, Caim is in the unusual situation where his sociopathic tendencies are completely validated by the world he's in. The enemy soldiers are either inhuman or vaguely possessed, and they're trying to destroy the world. He's given a free ride. And he's under stress. The man is snapping as we play him...and he can't tell us how he feels. Vaguely waving his sword around during cutscenes isn't enough.
I also kind of wish there'd been some sort of explanation about what the world was like before the game started. It opens on Caim's castle under siege by The Empire; Caim belongs to the Union or the Alliance or some such conglomerate. What is the government like here? Do they control opposing territories? Is the Union the bunch of rebellious upstarts, or is the Empire? Who rules each? Does Caim have any political power? What is his average day like? There's something to be said for opening up on a tense scene...but then again, Good Morning Crono isn't the worst opening either for a game like this. Whether it's missing the point or not, I want to know what the world was like before everything went to crap, and the game never seems to feel the need to show me.
Voice acting is a mixed bag, as most games are, but I have to give big ups to Mona Marshall who plays the dragon; it's a tough role but she does it wonderfully. The dragon is arrogant, powerful, desirous to save the world, contemptuous of Caim even as she's growing fond of him, and raspy--and she pulls in an excellent performance. Other actors in the game aren't as good, but I like to point out good things when I see them.
posted by R. Goodness at 7:01 PM
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