#416: drakengard 2
yoko taro largely sits out this relatively more conventional sequel — but is it really as conventional as it seems?
drakengard 2 (2005, PS2, cavia): well, what can i say?
yoko taro has built a reputation as an auteur, and a particularly weird one at that (he’s almost never seen without his trademark mask, and has even asked that there be no photography of his private professional appearances where he ditches the mask to talk to his colleagues in the japanese gaming industry.) when he burst onto the scene with drakengard in 2003, audiences didn’t really seem to know what to make of it, and neither did the higher-ups at square enix.
there’s evidence to suggest that the direction drakengard 2 went was mandated by square enix; after all, a game as willfully weird, dark and incoherent as the original probably is going to scare the hell out of the people whose job it is to look at sales charts. yoko taro himself was mostly detached from the sequel’s development, being busy with other assignments, but he frequently clashed with the project lead, akira yasui, over the direction of the game. still, though, he found time to take over editing the game’s CGI cutscenes, which is why, as “conventional” as the game is at times, we’re still treated to the classic yoko taro staple of an opening video full of contextless spoilers.
most fans of the series like to talk shit about drakengard 2, but if you’re not familiar with drakengard (or, indeed, the spinoff series nier) it can be mystifying as to why. the obvious answer of course is the noticeable absence of yoko taro, which to some is enough of a dealbreaker regardless of the game’s relative quality. in place of yoko taro’s surrealist vision of the apocalypse and commentary on the absurdity of the musou genre is a significantly more straightforward, conventional game employing a number of popular jRPG tropes of the time.
gameplay-wise, drakengard 2 is a step above its predecessor. the combat just overall feels better, feeling less clunky and allowing for more variety; the weapon leveling system isn’t as demanding (which requires less grinding to max out a weapon, and the physical vs magic damage system has been tweaked. the party member system has also been changed; aside from a collection of characters markedly more likeable than the first time around, party members no longer have a de facto timer that reverts you back to the main character, but are instead player characters in their own right, with their own weapons and abilities. they also join and leave the party at various points in the storyline, though one is gone for so long it’s almost not worth leveling her weapons. these characters also have their strengths and weaknesses against certain enemy types — towards the end, one character can knock out mages in one hit, while the others may have trouble.
while we can forgive the original drakengard for having clunky gameplay — the PS2 era was not a good one for any sort of gameplay that holds up today —it really behooves us to just be honest about its storyline and plot, which is pretty incoherent. things just kind of happen in drakengard, often with no real rhyme or reason, and its disjointed structure and branching paths can leave the player confused as to just what the fuck is going on. drakengard 2 suffers no such problems, as the story is much more conventionally told.
in short, 18 years after ending A of drakengard — or rather, a version of ending A that doesn’t exist, due to slight retcons — we’re introduced to nowe, a young man who was raised by a black dragon named legna (yes, that’s “angel” backwards, yes it’s stupid, and yes legna is by far the worst member of the cast, coming off as a discount version of sean connery in dragonheart, complete with connery’s misogyny) and now is a member of the knights of the seal, an order of knights under the rule of the union, victorious over the villainous empire from the previous game and now dominating most of what’s presumably still europe (the world map is a bit vague.) nowe’s mentor and father figure died some time ago, but he still soldiers on, looking to graduate from his training and become a full-fledged knight. early missions bring him into contact with the darker side of the union’s plan to keep the apocalypse from happening again; it doesn’t take long before gismor, the leader of the knights, betrays him and sets him on the run from the very knights he worked so hard to serve. he soon runs into manah, the one-time child priestess of the cult of the watchers, though she’s since grown up, ditched the microsoft sam voice and works to help those living under the heel of the union boot. manah winds up nearly executed by eris, another knight of the seal who’s drunk the union kool-aid and harbors a special jealousy of manah, resulting in a chilling scene in which she smiles as manah is about to be burned at the stake. on the run from the union, nowe and manah work to destroy the keys to the seals that require sacrifices of lifeforce to function.
it of course gets so much worse from there.
while the game’s plot follows a largely conventional jRPG structure, it’s interesting to note just how much a game that was pitched as divorcing itself from the first game is an utter failure at that goal. caim and the red dragon from the original game both return, in deeply tragic fashion, and indeed caim is contrasted somewhat with the morality of our young protagonist. while caim existed as a pointed commentary on the musou genre, in other words a bloodthirsty psychopath, nowe is more reluctant, as he was once on the side of the knights he now slaughters by the dozens, though the game offers no real judgment on the irony of that. in short: is nowe meant to be a straightforward video game protagonists with no thought as to the amount of violence that such characters uncritically dole out, or is he an attempt at a response to caim’s characterization? it’s unclear which option is the answer, and i’m hesitant to make the kneejerk response of insisting it’s the former.
interestingly enough, the game still features multiple endings, but the branching paths have been done away with completely. instead, to get the new endings requires not one, but two subsequent “new game+” style playthroughs, which feature increased difficulty and a few extra scenes. ending A is bittersweet, as nowe sort of gets what he wants, but not really. ending B, after several hours of replaying a game you just beat but harder, rewards your perseverance with a rather mean-spirited finale. but if you keep going and tackle the even harder third playthrough, you are finally rewarded with what in any other game would be considered the objectively best ending, but feels… saccharine? but again ambiguity rears its ugly head: is this an overly optimistic ending where everything is resolved cleanly and nobody has any trauma over it, or is this the ending worth earning after playing through the game three times?
aesthetically the game is largely conventional fantasy, but towards the end, the abstract, marathon-esque aesthetic of the original game makes a reappearance, as the plot threads drawing from drakengard come to a head — and, indeed, it’s at this point where the plot begins to go a little off the rails and back into the surreal nightmare of the original game, almost as if most of drakengard 2 has been a pleasant dream and the illusion is quite literally shattered in one of the more arresting moments in the game.
most yoko taro fans talk shit about this game. but as someone who came rather late into the yokoverse and has only played a couple of the games in it, i have no particular attachment to drakengard (and, indeed, i thought it was a mess, if at least an interesting mess) and find drakengard 2, while perhaps not compelling enough to play through three times, worth playing through at least once, due to its better graphics, better gameplay, more likeable characters, and more coherent plot. it’s an unpopular opinion, but i’m an iconoclast — i like to find the good in games that everyone dismisses, like aliens: colonial marines and fallout 76, and i often see the naked emperor behind all the games everyone praises. (wait’ll you hear my opinion about the original mafia!)
so while drakengard 2 doesn’t have quite as much to say as its predecessor, it’s still arguably superior in the way that matters most: it’s fun.
