I've been slowly but surely working through the Best of Show List that I made after this year's E3. So far, my #3 Rise of Nations was an Editor's Choice here, Final Fantasy X-2, my #6 was alright, and my #8 Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has been bringing the funk, too. Now it's time to take a look at my #5 Drag-On Dragoon, and knock another 10% off my list.
Everyone loves Dragons. Dragonlance, Bruce Lee, Trogdor...for some reason, Dragons just rule. It's written in the Constitution or something. XBox fanboys had been quick to point to Panzer Dragoon Orta as a crown jewel of their's console's exclusivity. That you wouldn't be able to play PDO without breaking down and getting an XBox, and how they felt sorry for you. Well, time to feel sorry for them...because Drakengard's (I'm going to refer to this by the US name for the game, because Drag-On Dragoon sounds stupid.) the PS2 gamer's answer to Panzer Dragoon.
Burninating the Countryside...
Something to point out real quick. Drakengard’s not a very deep game. If you’re hoping to get something out of this Square Enix project that’s as engaging as Front Mission 3, or even Final Fantasy X-2, you’re looking in the wrong place.
If you’re happy with a game that’ll give you a great beat’em up experience, then this is the place you want to be.
You control Caim, a soldier for the Union Army. You’re cutting and slashing like you were O.J. Simpson, when your sword gets stuck in a pesky enemy and someone smites you from behind. Upon seeing the castle’s flag set aflame, you charge your way through the main gate to save your friends inside. (your sister, Frei, pronounced "Free-eye" and her fiancée.)
Before you bust into the main gate, you encounter a young red dragon, chained down and devastated by arrows. Since a dragon apparently munched down on your parents when you were a child, Caim’s ready to finish him off, but he offers Caim a deal...merge your glowy, sparkly heart with his, and both of you will become completely rejuvenated.
Now with Caim and the Dragon in league with each other (a la the Evil Bad Guy and Sean Connery in Dragonheart), they cut a blazing swath through the enemy forces, immolating and decimating whatever stands in their way.
This Dragon Handles More Like a Pegasus...
The game is almost divided into 2 seperate games, a Dynasty Warriors style large scale conflict game, and a Panzer Dragoon style shooter. I'll go over the gameplay for each of the two halves.
Ground Missions
To anyone who's played Dynasty Warriors, this part of the Drakengard interface will be very, very familiar from the get go. You will encounter groups of men. Kill them. When I say "kill" that's precisely what I mean. Men bleed in this game when they are slain (it's an option you can turn off, though.) and kills are referred to as "kills" and not "KOs". You'll start building up combos as you hit individual men. When you build enough hits (17), they start dropping health bonuses and combo extenders. If you get an 100-hit combo going, a sphere that will send you into a rage mode will appear. This greatly increases your phsyical and magic damage.
Once you accomplish goals within the mission, you'll start acquiring different weapons, and you can switch through these with the R2 button. These different levels will have different magic attacks; poison wards, fire attacks, stone spikes, etc. A certain number of kills will power up the weapon through each of its 4 levels, giving it a faster swing time, a longer string of attacks, and higher damage.
If you hit Select and you aren't in an area with a roof or heavy forest, the dragon will swing by and you'll jump far higher than you ever will in the game (I'm of the opinion that the jump button is completely useless in this game.) and hitch a ride. The dragon does a hefty amount of damage to the groups of men, who have very limited avenues of recourse. The only things that will hit the dragon in these missions are archers, and magic users. If you get hit twice in rapid succession, you'll tumble from the dragon and return to fighting on the ground, up close and personal.
After certain story events, you'll encounter other generals, who you use in combat by summoning them with O. They have unlimited magic, and their magic attacks will even take out enemies who are magic reflecting. They'll stay summoned as their life bar gradually drains, and you have 3 General summons per mission. These guys are REALLY powerful, though some of them have some...er...mental problems.
Sky Missions
Piloting the dragon is pretty nice. The controls are inverted like they should be, which is important. The L1 and R1 keys will allow you to evade left and right. And everything feels pretty solid. In terms of attacking, Square by itself will fire a dumb-fire projectile. Holding Square down will allow your dragon to lock onto a number of targets and hit them with seeking projectiles. Triangle will unload a magic attack.
The big problem I have with the flight controls is that for boss fights and such, you have a really annoying auto-lock function. When you try and attack and evade, evasion is a LOT more difficult because it'll try and keep the target on-screen in addition to keeping it locked on to them. It feels a lot like when you try and evade something in Rez. You can do it...it's just not what you're optimized for. In addition, there will be a lot of instances where you'll be circling, just trying to get your crosshairs back onto the screen because the lock on the target takes priority over your actual control. You have to hit O to knock yourself out of this feature, and it re-engages whenever you bring the reticle to bear on any target.
Graphics
The CG in the game is a return to a time when Square put CG in everything, and it always rocked. There is some really, really fine work in this game.
As far as in-game goes, you have some minor quirks with texture jigglys and some issues with clipping. Everything manages to look pretty nice, especially the animations. You and your enemies have a nice varieties of moves, and Caim will have a different set of moves for whichever weapon type he's using. The effects for spells and attacks are very, very nice. You will however, notice Drakengard's engine's shortcomings in the draw distance and enemy pop-up. It's worse than it is in any Dynasty Warriors game with the possible exception of DW2.
Level design is mostly uninspired, and you'll be playing on each map for 2-3 levels, and different missions in Free Mode. They aren't terribly impressive, but aren't really letdowns either. Not a whole lotta detail in most of what's there...either your sparse forest environ, or desert, or some big open field. The maps are bigger than the ones in DW, but they aren't any better.
The other issue I had with the graphics isn't so much in the "graphics" area, but in the opening movie, the game tries to make a sentence by using every letter in the word "Dragon". Only they failed. They spelled "Dagon" instead. Hopefully someone catches this and fixes it before it gets to the US.
Audio
Quite simply, the worst musis ever in a Square game. They have a loop that's maybe 2-3 seconds long that they just loop for then entire level, with some short "chorus" breaks where they loop a different set for maybe 3 runs, and then go back to the original loop. I don't know if this was because they had maxed out the processing ability of the system, and adding a full song would have dropped frames, but it sounds horrid, especially considering how repetitive the game will become.
The loops themselves aren't even GOOD, though. There's one point where the song uses a sample to fill the role a keyboard-type instrument would fill...except you can hear an artifact at the end of the sample, so the effect sounds like a CD skip made into a melody, and that certainly wasn't what they were going for.
I do have to give them kudos for the excellent voice acting, though. There are a lot of characters in the game, and they do a LOT of talking. The possessed 6-year old with the voice alternates back and forth from disturbingly evil to a little kid is done very well...like the Master from the first Fallout. Hopefully, once the game gets over here, the English voices will be comparable.
Gripe Session
The first gripe I have is with the AI. You'll run into a group of guys, and if you're not within a certain "bubble" there will be guys nearby watching you cut their allies to ribbons and they won't help. Archers won't fire at you, etc. The only time they end up display any sort of intelligence is when they're trying to cheap you. For example, there are these guys who are magic resistant, and their weapon is a big 2-piece spiked shield that they close up and then run at you like a movable spiked wall. The only time they're vulnerable is when they're standing still, and then they'll try and make sure they're in pairs so if you start whuppin' on one of them, the other will rush you and knock you off of him. For a bunch of guys fighting an army battle...they sure aren't very excited.
The other complaint is that the game gets repetitive. I appreciate all the stats I get during the game. They tell me that I've hit the attack button somewhere close to 40,000 times...and it doesn't count the times you hit it when you're the dragon. The game's pretty long, and actually his a nice story to it...that I pretty much can't really understand. But with a little bit more editing, or perhaps, proper game balancing so I didn't have to continually level my weapons in Free Mode, and this game goes from a 15 hour game that's an 8 in terms of gameplay to maybe a 10 hour one that's maybe a 9 and actually leaves me wanting to go and play it more to go an pick up those extra weapons and those extra story sequences. (I've beaten the game, but am only registering 59% complete storywise, and 15% as far as weapons go.)
Overall
If you dig Dynasty Warriors, this is a must buy for you. If you dig Panzer Dragoon Orta, this is a possible buy for you. (there are less Dragon specific sequences than there are DW style sequences. While you can use the dragon in most of them, you're generally trying to level your weapons.) If you're the average gamer, I either advise you to rent this game, and plow through it for a week, or, if you have the cash, buy it and then beat the first two or three missions. Then multi-task it with another game. Play an RPG until you're stuck or lose a boss fight, and switch back to Drakengard. In that way, you won't get bored of it from playing it in long stretches, and will be more likely to see the process through until the end of the game. A 9.0 experience to start winds its way down to an 8.0 gameplay experience because the game keeps giving the exact same experience for so long without offering me enough that's new to keep me locked to my controller.
