MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
If you are a fan of Nier, have you ever thought to yourself "I've heard of the Drakengard/Drag-on Dragoon games and know Nier is a result of the last ending of Drakengard. Nier is a cool albeit flawed game, I wonder what its predecessor is like?"
Well, curiosity killed the cat. Now when I went into the game, I knew the two things everyone knows about Drakengard.
1. Ending D involves gigantic babies coming down from the sky during the apocalypse
2. Ending E involves you taking a portal to real world Tokyo and destroying the world after fighting the worst boss ever, and this leads to Nier
And the game does indeed go completely insane starting at Ending A. It devolves into some really, really, really surrealist horror shit. Not just flying baby monsters, but giant demon children. It makes the weirder parts of Nier and the second half of Bloodborne look tame. This game is on the level with some Illbleed or Phantasmagoria, where the game is pretty fuckin' bad but you want to keep playing just to see what the hell happens next.
While playing Drakengard, you are likely to think "Well it can't possibly get any worse" in regards to story and gameplay and then be proven wrong very fast. Now I'm known to like some pretty bad games like No More Heroes 1/2 or Deadly Premonition but I'm going to scratch Nier off this list because Drakengard's gameplay makes Nier look like Bayonetta. Drakengard came out a full two years after Devil May Cry 1 but has more in common with crappy PS1 games like Nightmare Creatures. Drakengard isn't designed to be fun. This isn't the only game I can think of thats like this - in No More Heroes 2 there is a very long, very poor level before the Alice boss fight and a 45 minute long arena before the Margaret boss fight where you will think your game has broken because it just keeps looping new enemies in. I fully believe those were designed to be crap on purpose. Undertale's genocide run shares some of this DNA, where the final boss is so absurdly difficult that he appears impossible to beat at first glance. The difference is that those games have good moments at times. Shooting dudes in Deadly Premoniton sucks and so does the driving, but walking around and doing quests can be enjoyable. No More Heroes has awesome boss fights. Drakengard is never fun. Never good.
Drakengard takes this to sadistically cruel levels. There are two different types of stages in Drakengard - on foot and in the air. Well, there are Diablo-like isometric levels but they are so easy I'm not even going to count them. Neither of them are fun. On foot I would describe as "Dynasty Warriors 2, but worse" and in the air as "Lair, but worse." You may be saying to yourself "But neither of those games are very good to begin with." And you'd be correct because Drakengard is way worse then either of them. Drakengard starts out as a simple game (that runs very very very poorly) where you just hack down hundreds of dudes. When you get the dragon you shoot things out of the air. I would say the dragon levels are slightly better because they are shorter, but you still have to wrestle with the absurdly awful controls. If that wasn't enough, every level is 5x longer then it needs to be. You will mindlessly cleave your way through thousands (and I actually mean thousands, I think I ended up at around 30,000 enemies killed) of soldiers on your quest because Caim is a psychopath. Caim is the most interesting part of the game to me because eventually you lose the duality of good and evil and just turn into a force of nature that can't talk and can only proceed by slaughtering everything. As the world turns more and more hellish it doesn't effect you because there's still shit to kill in front of you and I guess thats me playing this game because I'm only beating it cuz im so pissed off and spiteful that I have to win.
Now the game doesn't start out fun, but it likes to mix shit up by getting worse as you go on. First its the magic immune enemies, to rob you of dealing with the hordes as easy as possible. Then its annoying flying enemies like the reaper or anything that blocks your attacks. Then its guys with two shields that just run you over and knock you on your ass all the time. This is the main difficulty point in the on foot missions, enemies that knock you on your ass constantly. Then they get magic immune later. Then its the giant Manah boss fight. To be fair, Manah isn't that difficult but until that point in the game I was not aware that you could shoot single bursts as the dragon and not lock-ons that are far weaker but better for more enemies. I got so mad trying to kill Manah with just the bursts. Then its the dragon vs dragon fight. Then its you vs the dragon. Then its giant flying babies. Then its the babies again except they kill you in 4 hits now and you have to avoid all their bullshit. Then its the actual final boss. The game never stops getting worse. Right when you think you're at the bottom of the barrel its revealed there's a false bottom and theres more bullshit. Did I mention the part where to get the last ending you need to collect every weapon with such fun requirements as "Stand still like an idiot for twenty minutes" or "beat this bullshit level in 3 minutes with 75% hp left" or my favorite "examine these four paintings in order by running up to them despite there being zero indication that this does anything and being the absolute only time in the game where you need to do this." You absolutely need a guide for this game. It's Simon's Quest levels of nonsense at times.
But lets talk about the final boss for a second. Yoko Taro, I fucking hate you. It's not the actual worst final boss ever despite what I had heard because Sonic Generations exists but holy crap is it a tedious piece of work. The actual boss is not a real encounter that you fight like other bosses. You fly on your dragon in a circle around her gaping mouth in the center of a black and white Tokyo with a bell ringing. She will erupt out white rings and black rings, and you must match them with your own. This sounds really simple, and it is most of the time. You must keep this up for three minutes. However there are 3 or 4 times when the game just punches you in the dick with extremely difficult sections. You are allowed to screw up normally, but in these rapid fire sections if you fuck up even once you have to start over. So the vast majority of the fight consists of tedium that a toddler could do until the game decides to be an asshole and blast you with a metric ton of bullshit. Once you do beat the boss the Japanese Air Force shoots you down with fighter jets and you die, which is pretty awesome. The entire Ending E sequence is really cool, except for the part where you fight the boss. If you do the free expedition mission after you can turn your dragon into a jet which is a really cool easter egg.
Did I enjoy Drakengard? Absolutely not. As I said above as a game its terrible. But as an experience where you just sit there and wonder what the FUCK is going on its pretty cool. Is it worth shifting through hours of tedium and garbage so you can see some weird shit? No. Would you be better served just watching the game on YouTube? Yeah probably. There are really cool things about it, but I came out of it with the feeling of wondering what the game would be like if it didn't suck.
But I'm going to continue to Drakengard 2 (unless I am convinced otherwise) because I've heard some shit about 3. If I need a guide for the weapons for those two like you do for the 1st, I'd appreciate someone linking the best ones.
Magic!), but some of these weapon stories were just like "WE GAVE UP". Like I think there were about 2 where instead of writing the 100 words, 4 paragraphs for the story, they just give up and write a 4 line poem that makes no sense and that is the weapon story :lol
