Drakengard

This game is a bit like a throwback to Panzer Dragoon. And while it's just as annoying with some of the unnatural camera angles as Panzer Dragoon was for me, it remains rather innovative in mid-air flights with the dragon. You can dive, climb, or simply wade into enemies on the back of your extremely large red dragon who breathes big-ass fireballs. This creature's attack and HP both increase with enemy kills at the end of a level. The main character you will be playing as, Caim, works differently. His attack does not increase, but rather, the attack of his WEAPONS, which power up and change forms, increases, though his HP increases with level. However, there are quite a few annoying things. Archers. I HATE those little pissant archers. See, archers can hit you on the ground or in the air, where as normal soldiers just sit there and go "duhr" as you breathe fiery death from the heavens upon them. See, the archers wouldn't be so bad if they didn't put in this aggrevating in game function: you can't shoot fireballs after being directly hit by an archer, and worse, if you get hit a second time, your little buddy Caim falls right off the dragon's back to deal with it himself. For you see, you can mount and dismount the dragon at will... unless you're in an enclosed space, in which the dragon makes a lame excuse like "ME AM TOO BIG! SCREW YOU". You happen to get hit by an archer. And since they usually show in factions of four or more at a time, I'm sure you can see where this is going.

Something they could have done away with is the fact that they try to further and explain the plot while you're fighting. Apparently the game designers had no clue how annoying it is to have a bad voice actor gabbing your ear off about something you, honestly, couldn't care less about while you're trying to wade through a sea of soldiers. Yeah. We get it dragon. Humans = evil. Can I kick this guy's ass yet?

Of course, you'll buy this game mainly for the fighting. Depending on your weapon, you will inflict more damage, and with a certain number of kills, your weapon's attack increases, making you even more awesome. The mid-air battles, as I mentioned before, handle a little funny at the controls as they often switch perspective (I.E., do I press left to go left, or right to go left?), but despite this awkward handling of the situation, it gets better. You can dart aside to avoid cannonballs... To either side respectively, and even pull a U-turn on that sucker, which makes for easy clean-up whether you're high in the sky facing those annoying damn blimps or you're just breezing through and slaughtering soldiers without mercy.

The AI is rather limited in intelligence, though its main goal is to swarm you and overwhelm with numbers. With harder hitting enemies, this becomes troublesome.

Each level is marked with a 'mission', which must be complete in X minutes (no worries, X is usually close to an hour, while it will only take you around twenty minutes going casually). Missions are simple: Kill this enemy, or Go Here (at the end of a level). Of course, there will be multiple targets on the field at a time, and they're not too easy to get to more often than not. Trust me: you'll be spending a lot of time in Free Expedition mode, so start getting a feel for that field, because you'll need to level up CONSTANTLY more than the game flow would allow for.

A picture of the red dragon herself.

As stated before, the most annoying thing in the audio is that of the characters speaking (to your character) during a level while you're bathing in the blood of your enemies. The music is very crisp and fitting for the environment, though is soft and does not detract from the play itself. The voice actors could have been better... The red dragon's voice actor is more famously known as the voice of Taiitsu-kun from Fushigi Yuugi... Aka, the old bag. I wasn't too impressed with any of the acting and remain to believe that this game, like the movie Van Helsing, would have done much better without a vocal track.

The visuals are very stunning. Despite being a hack-and-slash game, the worlds are very full and large, and the characters, enemies, and objects are all finely detailed. Even down to the spurts of blood lightly sprinkling the ground, it remains to be a rather beautiful game when it comes down to it. But if I know anything, it's these same graphics combined with the play that give me those headaches... It's very fast-paced and characters move smoothly, but something about it simply causes the worst pain you can imagine. Something akin to an ice cream headache complimented with lack of sleep. I'm not sure if other gamers experience this, but I get this after an hour or two of gameplay. Of course, I probably can't really talk about the visuals that much. I spent the latter half of those two hours squinting at the screen.

This one could have been better. The plot (or potential for plot) was pretty big, but it was weakened by poor voice acting and poor execution. Most of it was explained, in text format, to the reader, as though we couldn't understand what was happening from the altogether boring and bothersome blurps characters spat out during battles or before main stages.

Overall, it wasn't a bad game, however it is the kind you pick up at a bargain bin used for $15 dollars or less, take it home, marvel at its simplicity, then sell it again for the next schmoe to play. I'll say it again: swords+dragon+medieval isn't always a recipe for an RPG. Come back when there's more role behind the playing game and we'll talk, Drakengard.

All names, images and logos are trademarked icons belonging to Square-Enix. This page was written without consent of the parent company, but however, seeing as it is the internet, I'm allowed to express my opinion willy-nilly. Drakengard is copyrighted Square-Enix. The Playstation 2 is registered copyright by Sony and a mighty fine system when it doesn't overheat.