Drakengard

Sorry it has been so long (Seems I find myself saying that a lot), been involved with a girl recently and that has eaten up a lot of time. Literally every day for the past 5 days I have been hanging out with Ella or a friend from the time I wake up til like, midnight. Anyways, I finally got a chance to sit down and do some blogging and today we're doing Drakengard, a game I showed to my college friends for just how weird it is.

Oh by the way, Pandemic Studios (Known for the Mercenaries series and Star Wars: Battlefront series) shut down recently and some former employees made this Office Space http://www.giantbomb.com/news/pandemic-shutdown-leads-to-office-space-tribute/1768/ tribute.

Drakengard

Overall:

Drakengard is a PS2 RPG made by Square Enix who needs no introduction. In the game you switch between running around on foot killing hoards of soldiers and flying around on dragon back attacking ships and infantry. You play as Caim a man who made a pact with a red dragon to save his life at a critical juncture. In doing so he gave up the ability to speak (the game features a bunch of people who have made pacts and given up something in return.) but can ride around wrecking havoc with his bad ass dragon. You gain allies later on but can only play as them for a limited amount of time in each level and since each level is generally an exercise in persistence and patience with few bosses they don't help you too much. You are fighting an evil empire as part of "The Union", an army raised to fight for freedom and to resist the empire.

Pros:

The game does have a lot of weapons for Caim to use (+0.50) and they can level up so eventually you'll have quite a selection to choose from in regards to how you want to play the game (+0.25). It would take a lot of grinding to level them all up but all you need one good weapon of each type and you're set. You can bring a couple with you into battle so you can cover your bases in terms of having the right weapon for the situation (+0.25). As far as gameplay goes the dragon battles are usually pretty good with lots of explosions, a decent lock on system vs using a non-locked on but more powerful blast, and a bunch of enemies to fight (+0.75). They're also not too tough but you still have to try so the difficulty is about right.

I'm honestly stretching to think of other good points. The cut scenes looked really nice and were well done (+0.25). That's all I have.

+2.00

Cons:

The core gameplay here is the land battles where you fight on foot. The system is sorta interesting at first but quickly becomes really repetitive (-1.25). You don't have a lot of combat choices besides picking the weapon you use and whether you get a running start before you hit them or not (Charging in generally knocks over a formation of enemies and lets you pick off the survivors). You essentially run around in a circle until you get enough momentum and then charge into a group of enemies. And do that until you've killed the 100-300 enemies on the map. Since this is roughly 70-80% of the game this is a rather huge problem as you've seen all there is to the combat after 30 minutes and after 3 hours it has become really boring (if not sooner, I'm easily entertained).



Another problem is that the story is very very hollow (-0.75). You're part of this big rebellion but besides one or two story characters you literally never seen an Union soldier. I think you MIGHT hear one or two voices of an Union soldier during a cut scene somewhere. Even during a level that is supposed to be the ultimate clash between the Empire and the Union and you have to fight like 800 guys, you never see a single ally on the ground (-0.25) (it is a battle where you can go back and forth between the dragon) though you see the preacher guy NPC talk about what's going on in the battle you don't see squat besides a bunch of enemies. Usually they try to act like all the Union soldiers happen to be somewhere else for some reason, but there they couldn't hide it and didn't even try.

Another problem with the story is that it's a very basic evil empire type RPG story that has been done hundreds of times until the very end which is an Evangelion level mindfuck (-0.50). There are several endings and I'd usually count that as a plus, but they're all so crazy and nonsensical that they're only good to show to people for the WTF factor. I don't usually spoil endings but I would like to give an example. One ending has an armada of flying 8 foot babies descend from the sky and devour all of your party members before you fight them as they coo and giggle as you slaughter them. Then you fight a skyscaper sized pregnant woman who is apparently giving birth to these babies after being warped to modern day Tokyo. You fight her by completing a rhythm game. Then unlock a different possible ending that you complete by fighting a bunch of modern day jets firing missiles at you (-0.50). If that made sense to you, give yourself a pat on the back cause I am lost as hell. A different ending has you ending up falling in love with the dragon and wanting to fuck it (-0.25). I guess that's something for the scalies. Sadly GameFAQs/Spot didn't have a picture of the babies to show you.

The side characters they give you to switch between for a limited amount of time are rather lackluster and not very developed character wise (-0.50). They would be useful if you fought big bosses, but I generally only switched to them if I was running low on health and the level was almost done. The crazy insane chick killed babies pretty good but that was the only time I really used them.

-4.00

Overall Rating:5/10