being an axl main is awesome. everyone hates you and routinely skips past playing you for the simple crime of forcing them to play a bit of neutral. you prevent them from running their twenty second lockdown pressure drills for a bit and it’s the end of the world; they’d much rather go up against the litany of other rushdown characters who can all do that or the guy that can eat your healthbar in three decisions.

the game is fine. as far as its pace is concerned, strive is essentially rocket tag, and that’s a fine thing to enjoy. it just comes at the obviously infamous cost of representing a departure from xrd (or prior entries but i won’t pretend to be knowledgeable in this arena). this has invited natural comparisons to street fighter (super turbo in particular) and samurai shodown, but i think the core system mechanics manage to carve their own niche within the high damage subgenre. for all the debate around simplification, it seems clear to me that arcsys’s goal was to create a fighting game that the majority of people familiar with the genre can learn simply through relevant match experience, avoiding the confines of the training room and bringing the title in line with an older arcade experience. again, totally fine thing to be. i do think i prefer xrd’s brand of bullshit but not because it’s inherently more cerebral or anything - matches just tend to feel more dynamic. it’s an instance where strives emphasis on creatively using meter’s hundreds of applicable permutations to open holes in opponents defense is somewhat negated by the lack of opportunities to tap in per round and by how viciously quick some of these rounds can close out.

i strongly dislike the menus, user interface, and lobby system, but this aside it’s curious to me that strive represents an artistic departure from the rest of the series as well and this aspect has mostly been swept under the rug by the community. i assume this is fine for most because it’s pretty and because we will never escape the fondness gamers have for the metal gear rising/anarchy reigns soundtrack. still, its very much an intentional continuation of xrds aesthetic sensibilities - understandable given that titles landmark reception - but it feels worth mentioning that we are at this point quite far removed from the grungy, muted, and punk tone of earlier entries. but giovannas hot so who can say whether this is bad or not

I think what generally strikes me first about Ruina, when reflecting, is scale and balance. Most of it comes from sheer awe, jumping from LobCorp this whole work has a stark amount of awareness of the ramifications of LobCorp, while also choosing to make an ambitious goal to balance so so so much more on top. And yet, the scales do not tip over, the further I mulled over and dived into things, the more everything seems awfully well set. Lot of flowery words to say that Project Moon has read a significant amount of literature between games and has an incredible amount more to say AND manages to integrate it perfectly, stretching my use of the word 'ludonarrative' to its absolute limit.

Ruina runs out the gate dismantling the 'hero' of the prior story, burning its idea of redemption into beautiful flame before trying to work beyond him. It keeps the hands of librarians that followed him, resolute in their ways, alongside villains seeking vengeance, joining together against the systems that have confined them, constructing a tower of babel built upon lives hoisted out of the city, justified in the name of 'fairness'. Watch along with them as the city moves in clockwork, these gears set by hypercapitalist systems that turn along people until they are crushed under the metal and spat out as ground together puppets. Reprieve only in the hopes of the little bits of light that people cling to to try to change, sometimes ending up with distorted selves trying desperately to conduct their own symphony, until all of us self realize, progressing beyond the means by which defines human, gender, creed into something more. Full Self-Actualization, Manifestation, capture your E.G.O. to build your future.

It's all explored in intense clashes! Use cards you pull from the light you take, then spread them out into tactics that run an intense ebb and flow on the battlefield. As you stack the shelves with every story you face and people you brutalize, the potential of your use of this knowledge flies sky-high, until you've made 'decks' that swallow the next set of fights with pinpoint precision. Even if you were a master deckbuilder you still have to adapt though. Solve the puzzle that matches each new patron's pscyhe, or be forced to retool from the pushed over house of cards. Every level jump in reputation brings in a whole area of complexity that gives you more immense freedom, with the caveat that the game pulls not a single punch for you to learn it. You'll be walled over and over until fundamentals are rock solid, pushed into an understanding of the ways of the city.

The leftover roots of the corporation that stand in ashes beneath the spine of the library throw you into even stronger, more complex puzzles, boss fights that adopt the abnormalities' story directly into turn by turn gameplay. Then reaching further, becoming thorough contextualization for the characters, then RE contextualizing across central theming. The Kabbalah's Sephirot and christian allegory returns with a much more complicated and personal base that transcends the story into touching on the baseline recognition of compassion and empathy, down to fighting anthromorphized struggles. Finish off by fighting demonic reflections of each lesson you've learned, until you're once again back at the base of the light, trying to look upon that all too familiar completely hopeless massive scope of depressing systems that oppress life, and going, This Can Change. Even those with the darkest masks over them can decide to break the cycle and seek to dismantle the machine. We can keep going while everything around us is 'distorted', and

Become Star of the City, Facing the Past, and Building the Future.

The journey's a long one but not one step is misplaced, not a moment wasted. You might have cause to grind to backfill your mistakes but the progression is always continuous. If you've got the head for it, you might even break it faster under your feet. The City is not without its weaknesses, after all!

But really, this is a rocketing experience, practically irreplaceable after much time to think over it. If you're not at least considering getting it what are you doing hereeee.

Cosmo D: is simply a master of video game scenery. It reconfigures the aesthetic sense of visual collage through the architecture itself, leaving the seams that hold any video game level exposed, from textures and models to the Skybox, all mixed, with experimentation and without shame or desire to be impressive, pure architecture. digital surreal.

Nothing of coherent proportions or conventional spatial sense, something that, on the other hand, is quite common in the medium, much as contemporary AAA video games and their cinematographic and photorealistic ambitions want to deny. An observation room with a window to another room, with windows that show a landscape built like an old photograph. Representation of psyche and desire, also of memories.

- The pizza at the level of art, and the human activity of creating it at the level of any articulation and artistic practice, the result? At the delivery of each pizza, a semi-criticism between one or several characters of the piece created, with their counterpoints and their infulas written through small dialogues that float in the air of places sunk in music, full of sculptures, records, books and instruments that generate the sensation of being "bricks" to complete spaces rather than artifacts with an aesthetic and communicative function. A space so consumed by capitalism that there is no real aesthetic scale on practically anything.

100% new millennium Volatile and changing like our cultural and social dynamics.

Natsume kills it with one of 4th gen's best beat-em-ups. You'd think restricting movement to a single plane would make an oft-repetitive genre worse - and it did in the case of Taito's original Ninja Warriors, - but Natsume found a way to re-focus combat design through it. Like SoR, it's snappy-yet-methodical, doling out hits like beats to a drum. There's something infinitely appealing about stoicly walking forward, effortlessly downing assailants on your deathmarch ahead. It's chilling and powerful in a way that - again, reminds of SoR and its disciplined aura, in both the structure and mood of the world and the pace of battles.

I was mentally comparing this to Mad Stalker: Full Metal Forth - a similar single-plane brawler, and I like that both manage to do completely unique things with differing budgets and tools. This leans towards a high-concept adventure with simple-but-focused tools, while Mad Stalker is rougher around the edges but has higher adrenaline, lots of expression through combos, and a higher focus on 1-2 enemy encounters with more individually fleshed-out arsenals. Both are great - I like MS more for its mechs and music, but this is the more polished of the two.

Still commits those classic beatemup cardinal sins though - goes on too long, re-uses bosses as cheapshot grunts to tiresome lengths, etc. The tradeoff is that bosses are at least pretty good, I liked a lot of the early battles. The closed-in space makes it easy to deck enemies with successive throws, turning the much-aligned 'summon mooks' trend into a meaningful challenge. I just wish I didn't have to re-match the mid-boss enemies and such so often in the end-game. Appreciate the abundance of game-over checkpoints, but it kinda kills the pace to intentionally die so I can have enough health to gut the next boss.

not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of a decade's worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid twitchcore autoplaying bullshit that should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou ever again lest they face legally enforced financial restitution. just play nex machina man. or watch NFL. been a fun season for that. fuck the review man let's talk sports in the comments

A technical marvel of computer wizardry by Steve Wozniak. However, as I have seen it reiterated time and again, most recently in the (so far) excellent ATARI 50, I wish to stress that Steve Jobs had minimal (read: no) involvement with the development or design of Breakout.

I think it's an interesting enough tale that you should dive into it yourself, but here's the basic rundown:

Wozniak was working at Hewlett-Packard, and got a call from Jobs about the work he was doing at Atari. Jobs' job was to give Atari's games a final test for any tweaks necessary. Bushnell assigned Jobs the task of making a single-player Pong-like where the player would break bricks. Jobs was to receive a ~$750 bonus for every chip under fifty since Bushnell disliked how many chips Atari's games were using. Bushnell offered the job to Jobs because he had heard Jobs' friend Wozniak had made a Pong-clone using only 30 chips. Jobs only told Wozniak that there would be a $700 bonus for getting things under 50 chips, and $1,000 if they were under 40. Jobs told Wozniak they would split that $700/$1,000 fee. To meet the four day deadline, Wozniak worked four nights straight at Atari while performing his main job at Hewlett-Packard. Jobs would breadboard Wozniak's designs and wire the chips. Jobs and Wozniak ended up with mononucleosis. With a finalised design at fourty-four chips, Jobs paid Wozniak half the $700 he told Wozniak they would earn. The actual bonus earned was $5,000, and Wozniak wouldn't find out the truth until years later. In his own words:

"[...]we were kids, you know. He got paid one amount, and told me he got paid another. He wasn't honest with me, and I was hurt. But I didn't make a big deal about it or anything. Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don't really understand why he would've gotten paid one thing and told me he'd gotten paid another. [...] I never let stuff like what happened with Breakout bother me. Though you can disagree -- you can even split from a relationship -- you don't have to hold it against the other. You're just different. That's the best way to live life and be happy."

For further reading, I suggest Steve Wozniak's biography iWoz, this interview from the December 1984 edition of BYTE magazine, and this Q&A from Wozniak's website.

A seasoned understanding of the series strengths, Fatal Frame 3 contains some of the best scares of the trilogy, with a good dosage of effective and earned jumpscares and subdued moments of increasing unease and tension developed through the masterful environmental storytelling and its ever present voyeuristic fixed camera, additionally course correcting the lack of challenge from FF2 with a much more scarce availableness of ammo and health aids that hearken back to the last tense hours of FF1.

Taking survival's guilt as its core premise, FF3 is a more introspective journey than its more fetishistic predecessors, antagonizing its main character Rei with grief through unsettling hauntings that invade the player's safe space long after your wanderings inside the nightmarish Shintoistic mansion game world, in a similar fashion to what Silent Hill 4 succeeded with its titular room and ultimately the unique aspect that makes FF3 stand out from the remaining series.

It's shame that FF3 spends so much of its time with Rei out of the spotlight in service of other playable characters. It certainly benefits the now familiar setting of the series, as it creates some of the more understated hair raising moments from the mere act of opening a door to suddenly find yourself in an area from FF1 or FF2, while also elevating its dream mansion with a maze-like set of hallways and rooms that have a propensity to make you feel lost.

But the overbloated runtime plagues the game with patience testing backtracking that turn the dread of familiarity betrayal into exhausting fetch quests that have you passing through the same static corridors more than enough times, a feeling exacerbated for players who have done the FF song and dance before FF3. And the added characters introduced with the intent to connect all 3 FF games into one over-arching story rob Rei's inner turmoil of a more deserving focused storyline.

It doesn't contain the brevity of FF1 nor the cohesiveness of FF2, and it definitely starts to feel like a dead end to a series that would expand into even more polarizing and acquired taste sequels. But it ties the trilogy neatly with sorrowful bow, as it manages to combine the core themes of the series with a more grounded and personal ghostly tale that provides the series with a poignant and oddly satisfying happy closure to a series so defined by its tragic haunting tales.

In 2006, the first Silent Hill game was adapted into a feature film by French filmmaker Christopher Gans, and while it was an overall critical failure plagued by many of the same shortcomings that are seemingly inherent to the video game movie genre as a whole, what I found interesting was how many of the elements of the film seemed to foreshadow the eventual future of the franchise. The way the film utilized its source material was full of a passion for the series' style & sound, but failed to utilize any of the iconic iconography that it paraded around with any real substance; a frankly nonsensical and masturbatory worship of recognizable figures like Pyramid Head for audiences to point to and go "That's the thing from the one I like!", and a focus on the series' legacy instead of its influences that would lead to the cyclical repetition of the series' Greatest Hits without any thoughts for the future, and there is no better representation of this phenomena than Silent Hill: Homecoming.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is Silent Hill gone direct to video, a foreign pastiche akin to Spike Lee's "Oldboy" that's less 'psychological horror' and more 'creature feature', a story less interested in isolation and character studies and more in wisecracking black guys who go "Ah hell naaaah!" & "Shieeeeet!". It's a game more interested in letting our boot boy protagonist utilize his 'epic' military training to dodge roll & combo hordes of generic monsters rather than indulging in any feelings of powerlessness or vulnerability. It's a game that's afraid of ambiguity and subtlety, where the all-American hero has to cock his shotgun menacingly at monsters and walk into the sunset with his generic blonde love interest, where the abstract is downplayed for the concrete, so the main plot has to be about specific human error instead of any institutional trauma or individual failings. A game that can't bear to leave you alone, so humans are always a hair's breath away, whether it be the NPCs you're always encountering for cutscenes with dialogue wheel options to choose from, or the generic human cult members you face during the climax.

A story about a war veteran coming to Silent Hill was ripe with potential for symbolism and interesting stories to tell, and Homecoming does have its moments where its presentation almost reaches the heights of its predecessors, but in Homecoming's attempts to improve upon its foundations, it reveals it's true form: a vapid and misguided entry that doesn't have a single original idea in its bones. Unlike Team Silent's wide array of influences, stretching from Dostoevsky's "Crime & Punishment" to the art of Heironymous Bosch, Homecoming's only frame of reference is Silent Hill itself, a capitalistic ouroboros of concepts and ideas regurgitated wholesale to sell recognizability. Much of this game's imagery and backstory is lifted from the film, in a way that makes the whole experience feel like a game based on the film's mythos more than anything Team Silent established. Monsters like the Bubble Head Nurses and Pyramid Head are dolled up and wheeled out for the equivalent of a money shot, and even the plot itself is a simple retread of Silent Hill 2's in a misguided attempt to re-sell success, telling a story about grief & loss that's delivered in the language of a B-horror flick that's about as subtle as a brick to the dome.

But Homecoming's biggest failing is that even without the historic legacy of the Silent Hill brand dragging it down, it's just a fucking boring game. It's an utterly generic, buggy and tedious survival horror experience that's trapped in a Catch-22: A game that would never be published without the name of Silent Hill attached, but one who's greatest failings are due to being saddled with the legacy Silent Hill entails. A game trapped in a hell of its own creation made of Pyramid Head figurines and Bubble Head Nurse pin-up posters.

One of the things I love most about racing games, espeically arcade ones, is the feeling of being on the absolute edge of control. Taking all the risks, braking just before the limit, brushing against the walls, and entering this zone in your mind where all you see is the next apex.

And yeah, a lot of the time you'll eat shit, landing in the nearest hedge. But thats well worth the thrill.

Super Hang-On is a game also dedicated to this exact feeling, and very little else. It's far from the only arcadey racing game to incite the feeling - see Ridge Racer Type 4, Wipeout 3 - but the sheer ease with which it's able to achieve this mindset, in me at least, is remarkable. It only takes a few corners of blasting through traffic for the mindset to take hold. Push every corner tighter, boost as early as I can, see if I can shoot for a vanishing gap.

An awful lot of it is just in pure gamefeel. It's a bit boring to say, but the bike just controls super well - way better than the cars of outrun (partially because the way super scaler games do turning is way more appropriate for a motorbike). The sense of speed is also utterly incredible, especially when you boost.

And that boost is such a great gameplay addition. It has unlimited use, but can only be used at top speed and is incredibly satisfying to use. Which means the game heavily encourages carrying as much speed as possible through corners, and also abusing the boost button as far as you can take it.

The game is also quite difficult - clearing anything other than the beginner course being quite a task itself even if you knock the dipswitches down a bit. This only feeds more into the desire to push even harder, because those split seconds absolutely count.

On top of that, you get the great looking super scaled landscapes to blast through and some of Sega's absolute best music to choose. And that's about it. But who needs anything else?

Super Hang On is simple bliss. The problems I have with it are so miniscule - basically just that I think it's a little too punishing sometimes - that I think it's up there with Ridge Racer Type 4 and Wipeout 3 Special Edition in the Arcade racing stakes. It's an absolute joy.

The fact the same man designed this as Shenmue 3 terrifies me.

El que nació en el Caribe
Goza de una facultad
Al sentir su libertad
Se identifica y la vive
Al cambiar la que lo inhibe
Por su mar, por su palmera
Una eterna primavera
O un sol que nutre su piel
Va sintiendo que no es él
Y pierde hasta su bandera

Absolute dire writing in this one, yeah bite me I play this games for the story. What are you going to do? Wipe the tears off my face and tell me everything's going to be alright and that I should find my better self? Coward, I will destroy me in the most fashionable spectacle. I'm an absolute fucking dreg and I'm living it to the fullest, baby.

There's nothing much to say about the gameplay itself, it's the standard ubisoft FPS with dumb "guerrilla" aesthetic that translates to bottles being used as silencers and garbage around the weapons to make them look DIY. It's worth noting that the weapons you use are US made and based on models used by the americans, while the other guerillas and even the soldiers of the country use AKs and and other assortment Poor People Rooty Tooty Point and Shootys (tm). You also get to ride horses in this one and learn why people complain about FOV.

Turns out Ubisoft can actually be political when they aren't writing about white people's land and the results might be the single most offensive game I have played (that isn't actively trying to be offensive).

Every single character speaks as if they were auditioning for the main role of Spanglish with Adam Sandler and somehow failing misserably at it. Every single character, without fail, talks in the most obnoxious way in a mix of spanish and english, utterly destroying any meaning both languages could convey and making them biological weapons to any person who plays this and is able to speak both. "You have great Resolver" says the protagonist to a guy who's telling him how he commits war crimes daily and is supposed to be the good guy because he calls the americans yanquis, despite the fact the game states he works for them and is in Not-Cuba after a failed Not Bay of Pigs invasion, which is good because they were trying to overthrow a dictator that was elected by the people, but turned out to be evil because the US is doing a blockade on the country and people starve because of him and his plantation of....cancer curing plants, for which he uses slaves because he's evil and he's bad and he's the only explicitly black character in the game as far as I can tell a bad person who sends soldiers to capture more people to be slaves but they just kill them and he's muy malvado.

It feels like they went and asked each and every single cuban living in the US that was forced to leave because they either owned actual slaves or was in cahoots with Batista what they thought the country turned out to be, and then rewrote it to be even more dumber. One example I can throw is how the game uses red and white with stars to tell you when someone's bad and blue and white with stars to tell you when someone's a glorious guerrillero with cojones ready to overthrow the fascist dictator of Yara. My grandmother from my father's side lived in poverty and couldn't learn to read or write before Castro dismantled your fucking casinos, gusano.

After the tenth time this same character named Juan used spanglish to tell me about how he tortured people in a funny way I just couldn't outweight it with the fairly mediocre shooting and looting so I ended up uninstalling it. But please, if you actually finished this, tell me if it's all a cover and the game actully gets good, I genuinely want to believe you and try this in full, because I can't honestly believe this thing is real.

In conclusion, I'm from Cuba and I say kill 'em all.

This game is so fucking intelligent but I hate playing it.
Welcome to hell featuring:
-your mistakes constantly adding up quick and presented to you in crystal detail
-where as you get better the downtime increases and you relive small annoyances
-surviving tooth and nail for seconds at a time while you fight with your nerves and maybe a panic attack or two (it gets fucking ridiculous)

Not for the faint of heart because it will compound into you. Devilishly addicting game, avoid at all costs, holy fuck how did i spend several hours already.
(Managed to time 231 seconds, #10 of my friends. That's the best I can do atm)

Either the cumulative mindpower of the Backloggd intelligentsia is too weak to crack a simple four-digit combination lock, or this is a shitty failed attempt at an ARG. Considering the only people who claim to have beaten it apparently did so in eighteen minutes or less (an impossibility with how illegible the text is), or deduced the solution with the help of a 'friend' (that player being the dev's brother, their friend being the dev), the latter is more likely. As the game files do not contain content beyond this lock, we the undersigned parties declare this game to be a big piece of shit.

Fuck you,
Beach
Detchibe
Erato
Spin
Squigglydot
turdl3

Postscript: drigo figured it out three beers deep at random.

this game requires no introduction anymore so i'm not beating around the bush. drakengard has been on my mind a fair bit recently - on the off chance you'll forgive a second log i think it's worth examining some of what the title accomplishes uniquely well, or what it's able to achieve with respect to the various titles that it's in conversation with. first of all: there's nothing quite as flatline-inducing or revealing of the author's own tendencies as reading that drakengard was intentionally poorly designed, a commonly held idea in various hobbyist communities frustratingly stemming just as often from its supporters as from its detractors. not only is this a frightfully pedantic and dull reduction of the text - it's also just an elaborately constructed fiction masking deeper truths. for instance, i think it's plain as day our burgeoning critical language still struggles with titles seemingly antithetical to traditional enjoyment, and are only able to escape from suffocating evaluative lexicon through irony or genre labels. survival horror isn't normally 'fun' & people appear willing to understand this so the genre gets a normative pass en masse, although it seems worth mentioning that the longer they exist in the public eye the more their mechanical frameworks get totally demystified by the public, arguably reducing them to vehicles for pleasure and gratification anyways, resident evil being the prime example.

drakengard, of course, isn't survival horror. it's largely a musou with some horror trappings, but it's rather plain about its affectation. however, because the traditional 'game' part of it is in such conflict with its aesthetic, we end up with the idea that this dissonance is a result of intentionally languid, engineered dissatisfaction. oh wow that wacky yoko taro wanted you to feel bad so he made his debut game bad. bzzzzt. wrong. square enix wanted a commercial success with drakengard. if they didn't, they wouldn't have requested that a project starting out as a simple remix of ace combat (owing massive inspiration to electrosphere in particular, another game that combines peerless arcade bluster with bleak narrative proceedings) would incorporate elements of its contemporary blockbuster peer, dynasty warriors. none of this is to say that drakengard can't be an awkward game, but it's in large part due to a friction with cavia's inexperience/lack of technical expertise, their attempts at holding true to their initial vision for the project, and square enix being desperate for a worthy competitor to koei tecmo's success.

here's where i'll stake a claim on something potentially contentious and risible. on the basis of the title's struggles in production & development, it is somewhat shocking that drakengard is not just 'not bad', but is a totally competent musou game. given the milieu in which it released, you might even dare to call it 'good', or 'well-made'. i'll double down with something absolutely no one wants to hear: most people have no point of reference because musou is rarely put in its historic context, appreciated for its strengths, or even, broadly speaking, played. disregarding popular experimental offshoot licensed games which carry their own unique magnetism, dynasty warriors has an especially prevalent stigma in contemporary action game circles, and few seem willing to return to reevaluate the franchise. if we accept this as the case, we can begin to understand why nostalgia is the primary driver of fondness for early musou, and why you always hear dynasty warriors 3 is the best one. 'load of bull', you say, 'drakengard is not good', you say, 'dynasty warriors sold millions and is beloved for inventing the drama; surely it's better', you say, but take a look at these admittedly small sample sizes (evidence A and evidence B) and you tell me which is actually the niche ip at present. one of these broader game worlds got a FFXIV collaboration. it was not dynasty warriors.

anyways the idea that drakengard could be a respected peer to dynasty warriors - or even, perhaps, better - is not ahistorical. drakengard came out in 2003, only a few months after the release of dynasty warriors 4. by this point in the dynasty warriors timeline, your only sources of inspiration for the musou canon are dynasty warrior 2 and dynasty warriors 3. they're fine games for what they are - content-rich, pop recontextualizations of romance of the three kingdoms that fold the intense political drama, grandiose character dynamics, and poeticizing of feudal history intrinsic to the novel and morphs them into larger-than-life battles of one against one hundred. it works for that series, but having played dynasty warriors 3, it's also very simply orchestrated. DW3 is kinetic and energetic, sure, but form is not function. as a still nascent series, DW3 has yet to experiment with elements that would come to define later entries, such as a strong emphasis on field management - its presence in 3 is largely muted and, dependent upon your stats, can often be negated. it is mostly a game of fulfilling your objectives, grinding up your stats, and engaging in undemanding combat pulling the same strong combo strings against some unique generals and a multitude of carbon copy generic ones. and i happen to appreciate it for what it is, but there is no question in my mind if you slotted that exact same mechanical framework into drakengard's tone and setting, it would be similarly deemed bad on purpose.

other than its tone what does drakengard do differently from this purely mechanical perspective? honestly, not too much from DW3! archers are still often priority targets, because if you don't prioritize them you will get knocked off your horse dragon. mission structure is usually quite similar, arguably with a bit less back and forth. combos require virtually the exact same input. the camera in both games is kind of fucked up. aside from abstruse unlock requirements and a...unique, system of progression, the biggest differences are mostly relegated to additions rather than subtractions. there are more enemy designs than just grunt soldiers. you can dodge now. the game is weapon-driven rather than character-driven ala DW3, which allows for its own form of unique experimentation. the soundtrack is excellent, i'm not accepting complaints. to aid in breaking up the pace, there are aerial missions that play somewhat comparably to panzer dragoon on-rail segments which are actually quite fun; likewise, the hybrid missions allow for angelus to be used as a means of offence in ground warfare and rain hellfire from above. it keeps things relatively varied. there's no troops to manage because caim is fighting a losing war and willingly formed a pact with the only being capable of potentially turning the tides, and the game is content to use the musou form to communicate ideas about caim and angelus to great effect.

of course, it's the narrative which gives drakengard a lot of its greatest texture (and is also demonstrative of its greatest strengths and appeals as a DW clone), but we can save discussion of that for some other time; for now it's more important for me to say that it's not quite the outright condemnation of violence through ludology that so many claim it is (it's far more interested in more subtle forms of violence than the explicit and ceaseless murder it depicts anyways). really, this was just a self-indulgent exercise in placing drakengard in its historic context once and for all, away from all the retrospectives it's been getting as a result of nier's runaway success. drakengard is a game that won't be for most, but it's a game that's lingered in my memory long since i first played it. it takes an, at the time, relatively new genre, and through sheer passion and dedication spins it into a uniquely transgressive idea while still remaining an enjoyable title to let unfold. if it feels numbing or meditative, that's more or less the exact emotional resonance that something like DW3 is targeting - drakengard just uses it to achieve more things than a sense of gratifying white noise. it remains peerless because of all of its contradictions, because of how messy and thorny it is as a game, and because we'll never see anything approaching this utterly unique interplay of emotional rhythms and macabre, uncanny storytelling wearing the skin of its crowdpleasing predecessors ever again.