Drakengard: thoughts with branching endings
I’m going to do something a little bit different this time. I recently finished Drakengard, and honestly, it was a struggle. It’s certainly a grind to get all of the endings, and three separate times I was convinced that I was done with the game. First, when I reached the final boss for ending B and realized that I did not have a good enough grasp on the janky air combat to win that fight with anything close to my level of attack/hp at that point, and that I would have to grind for that if I wanted to see the game through past that point; and then twice more when I was doing that grinding by collecting all the weapons I knew I would need to get ending E. Each time I was convinced I was done with the game, I sat down and worked on a post about why it didn’t click for me in the way that the nier games did. So, in the spirit of a series known for its branching endings, here’s what I wrote then. I’ll add my thoughts from finishing the game at the end.
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I’m really having a difficult time coming out and saying this, as 1) I adore the nier games and have encouraged multiple people to stick with them long enough to see all the endings through, and 2) I also am on record as saying that I don’t think games are bad just because they’re old and limited by what was possible at the time; but: I’ve dropped Drakengard without getting all the endings. I just couldn’t get myself to do the necessary grinding, and the characters weren’t so compelling as to make me want to see it through.
And I don’t want to just say that it’s bad. It really isn’t. It has the root of a lot of things that I love about the nier games. Its tone is fantastic. It’s very clever about how it plays with your expectations of the RPG genre. Its pre-rendered cutscenes are incredibly charming. It has some really cool moments where the gameplay really rises above its limitations (the one on one fights in the sky against another dragon and its rider were incredibly cool). And like, it’s not even entirely unique in some of its flaws. As much as I’ve played the nier games, I wouldn’t call any of their combat “fun” or “exciting.” Mostly it’s just kind of there. But here you see the ways in which ideas that would later be developed in the nier series were not as fleshed out as they could have been here.
The draken-nier games do a lot of work exploring cycles of violence. They take our expectations of their genres and of real life, and challenge them in a ton of interesting ways that I can’t fully explain here without getting way, way off track. And you can see the beginnings of this in Drakengard. But it never reaches the heights of the nier games. For the most part, the furthest it goes is having characters regularly remark at Caim's bloodlust, pointing out that he’s "more interested in ending lives than saving them," or trying to get him to show some mercy to his enemies. But this only ever comes from the characters who are telling you to kill the enemies, and who are often participating in it themselves, so it never feels like that strong of a critique. You never really feels like you're being for your actions, and since your enemies are rarely humanized, beyond maybe Manah, the little pushback the other characters give never lands particularly well. It never left me questioning what I had just done in the way that the nier games did.
Even the combat itself isn’t as effective at supporting this theme. While neither nier nor Drakengard have exciting combat mechanics, to me at least, nier’s remain more thematically appropriate. In a game that challenges how easily we resort to violence, the frictionless Platinum Games combat is actually remarkably appropriate in nier Automata and Replicant 1.22. Forgettable combat is kind of the point, whereas in Drakengard, the dread of needing to grind relentlessly through its rough edges was enough to make me stop it entirely.
The gameplay never feels elevated by its role in the story either. The game leaves you feeling like you have very little agency overall, so not only is the fighting tedious, but you never really know what you were fighting to accomplish in the first place. Whereas in the nier games, the bad endings feel like the consequences of things that you had a hand in, in Drakengard, most of what you play feels like wading through the results of others’ actions.
The characters are never as developed as in the other games either. The bleak worlds of the nier games are a lot more effective because of how much you care about the inhabitants of those worlds. In Drakengard, there aren’t really any characters with which you have that level of connection. At most you feel sorry for them, but most never feel real enough to garner even that.
Even after going through all of this, I’m still struggling to figure out why it didn’t click with me. I’d still recommend trying it out if you’re curious or have the chance, though I guess there aren’t many games I’d actually tell you not to play. But for everything I’ve said, there are games I love where you could say just about all of the same things to criticize them. Metroid 1 and 2, Zelda II, Mother 1… All games that could be written off as janky old games with ideas that they weren’t able to fully realize until later sequels. And yet, I would go to bat for any of them. Maybe I’ll come back to Drakengard sometime down the road. Maybe it’ll join that list yet.
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And that’s what I thought after ending A. And, truth be told, I think most of my complaints remain accurate. The combat is still rough; the grinding is relentless; the characters never get any deeper than they were at the time I wrote any of that; you still never feel like you have much of an impact on what happens, and at best you feel like you’re chasing around the people who do, or ferrying those who might have an impact around towards their ends… But ultimately it left me with a much better impression than I had then.
Part of it is that I think its thesis is stronger than I initially realized. I was going in expecting it to be much more in line with that of the neir games, and the way they point to even violence with good intentions leaving lasting harm. Instead, Drakengard looks at all the violence you enact, and asks what that really changed. You can fight and fight and fight, and you will still not feel like it changed anything. I still don’t think that is as strong of a thesis, but it’s still certainly worth exploring. And in that light, its gameplay and grinding definitely does work better in tandem with that than it did my initial expectation.
Additionally, the more bizarre the setting became, the more I enjoyed it. The apocalyptic setting of the final chapters really set it apart from a generic dark fantasy story, and the deeper I got into that, the more the game stood out to me.
Though there are new complaints I had as well. The way the branching paths were implemented wasn’t nearly as effective for me in Drakengard as it was in the nier games. The way that some had requirements going back several chapters, which would then rejoin the main path, and then branch off again later, meant that after A and B, the rest of the endings didn’t have as much of a narrative drive. It felt a lot like you were viewing their endings outside of the context of the big lead up to them. The endings themselves were cool, and were one of my favourite things about the game, but they could have been worked in such a way that it felt more cohesive for the player.
But, in the end, I’m really glad I stuck with it. I’m still not sure if it’s worked its way into being a game I loved in the vein of the games I brought up as I wrapped up my initial thoughts, but it definitely was worth my time. I’m sure it will stay on my mind for a long time to come.