An angry and brutal deconstruction of rpg and action game tropes, but like a punk song it quickly reveals itself to be little more then a simple 3 note ditty with a lot of rage. Once you get past the shock of how awful each character is and the beauty of the surreal imagery, you are left with a barely functional, esoterically padded action game populated by one note characters in a frustratingly unexplored world.

Years earlier Moon: Remix RPG Adventure tackled many of the same concepts with a lighter touch and more nuance. Years later many more games (including those by Yoko Taro) would explore many of the same ideas in more depth) yet there is something to be said about how bleak and direct this game is. The music and visuals have a very avant garde and ethereal quality which is lacking from Taro's future work on Nier which visually is a snooze fest in comparison to the boldness on display here. Drakengard said what it needed to in the time it came out and paved the way for many future games, but I'll be damned if I touch it again any time soon.

This is the culmination of all of the past Mr Driller games into one updated collection. There is the classic game mode, a drillstone based one, an item based one, and two new game modes all wrapped up in an appealing UI and OST. Ultimately though the classic Mr Driller game mode remains the best which is why i have to score this game relatively low. Classic game modes like endless or time attack are locked behind grinding out and completing the other game modes meaning if you dont like them I cant even recommend this just for the classic game mode. The controls also feel ever more so sluggish compared to the OG which makes it hard to recommend at full price.

I've come to the conclusion ideologies are a sort of mental poison which utterly stifled any actual thought in its victims. Case in point this slapdash discord rant masquerading as an essay. In this case it seems the primary game design ethos of the author is escapism. They want to escape and exist in another world and mechanics serve as a barrier to that. This betrayed in the cliche 2000s teenage girl writing style which show a desire to exist as someone of a different age in a different time (your wannabe 2000s cringe culture is dead sparkle dog bimbo brainrot disease aesthetic isn't unique its an epidmic).

This leads to some baffling claims like talking about how comfy the world of the half life games, a military installation and eastern Europe respectively, are. None of the locations except the alien planets are particularly unrealistic in half life the author could always just fly over to eastern Europe and see some brutalist architecture. Ultimately its not the locations in games OP wants to escape into but into the simplistic feeling of a game. An abstraction of reality where hunger, drinking, insecurities, ugliness, and complexity don't exist. Where cutting grass and slashing slimes can give you enough honest days pay to keep you going. The pixels and polygons smooth over so much of the harshness of reality making even a dystopian world like half life seem comfy in comparison to the real world. Its like Japanese anime where a common plot trope is someone killing themselves and being transported to a magic world just like mmorpgs and jrpgs the protagonist/watcher are familar with. Its not an escape to a new an unseen world (like many past fish out of water stories) but instead an escape into a simple and familiar world. Its creepy and shows a lack of imagination (I seriously question the normalization of suicide and sexually charged fanservice in a country with a high suicide rate and gender segregated train cars) . You have only one life and one chance in this world don't waste it wishing you were something else in a world of 5th gen polygons. I promise the real world is not as scary as your toxic online communities and brainrot ideologies have made you think.