This game is absolutely insane. Everything and everyone is miserable, your character is a creepy invincible psycho, your party is filled with pedos and racists, nobody succeeds at anything, the music stinks, the color palette is several different shades of drab, the gameplay is mind numbing. Even though it's a bad game objectively, it was such an odd and unforgettable experience for me. I have no desire to ever play Drakengard again but I'm glad I did. Yoko Taro really came out guns blazing with this one.

Games are often limited by their need to be “fun.” Despite video games being the only medium with interactivity—an aspect that should be ripe for all kinds of exploration—we are mostly limited to things that are entertaining on some level to our brains. Games are not designed for sadness, hatred, anger, or a litany of any other emotions as their primary motivators, as these are antithetical to the “fun” designers desperately need to find and the conventionality that audiences crave, despite their protests otherwise. Further, games are often heavily concerned with coherency and reaching standards of “good”-ness. That is: a story should be mostly understandable on some level; production values should be high and apparent; and said production values should contribute to the player’s enjoyment in some way. Games desperately want to be liked, and so they cling to these ideas in the hopes of audience validation.

Drakengard cares not for any of this. You roam through gray hazes of environments, cutting down endless hordes of mindless enemies, in the hopes of increasing in power until the very act of playing the game becomes meaningless. Broken music accompanies your rampage while characters shout vague probings of human nature and desperate attempts to contextualize the battles you fight. Your brief respites are inscrutable cutscenes that are meant to tell some semblance of an utterly hopeless and miserable story as you are flung wildly from beat to beat with little in the way of build-up or logic. You descend further and further into this hellish nightmare of absurd imagery until, miraculously, it ends. You awaken from your fugue state and attempt to comprehend what you’ve experienced.

Well, here’s how I see it: Drakengard has the unique ability to radicalize the player so that they completely reconsider what video games are and what they value from them. Whether this is intentional or not on its part is entirely irrelevant—although its brilliant soundtrack lends some credence to that vision—because it is such a fundamentally bare and broken experience that the only option is, ultimately, to project onto it. Drakengard martyrs itself in order to question the very construction and presentation of video games. It hands you the scalpel and then slowly brutalizes itself to death in front of you, with the hope that whatever conclusion you come to in the autopsy is a valid one. There’s a disturbing smile on its face that invites you to revel in its self-destruction.

I remember reading a biography book (Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait) back in college about fascinating/interesting man. Who committed Seppuku at Japanese's governments camp. After failing an coup & at restoring the Japanese's empire, who stated in "quote."

"We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.”" -Mishima

Know I understand what Mishima, meant by that and I have seen it. Thank you. Yoko Taro, for creating one of the most "prolific" gaming experience I had yet.

Drakengard 1 is a blast, the shocking themes, of which some have been censored in the english release, give this game a uniqueness no other jrpg had. The thought of a mass killing protagonist actually having something seriously wrong with him should have been toyed with a lot more like this. Caim and his raggedy team of horrible people plus a child and a priest really sets this game apart. That and its horrendous but extremely loveable gameplay and music. Each ending is a fun ride, from fighting a giant child to fighting giant babies to falling in love with your dragon companion to dooming the humanity of a normal earth in a different universe, many different flavors of WHAT? to go around. the story is decent, Caim and the Union fight the Red Eye infected Empire quickly leading to discovering that there are higher forces above that aid and direct the Empire, for the destruction of the world. I would ramble further but its been awhile since i plaayed so i dont want to let my memories cloud me. All in all a great game!! Easily my favorite PS2 game and though i havent played Drakengard 3 yet i have a hard time believing itll top Drakengard 1 for me, but we'll see.