In a lot of ways kindred to Nolan's Tenet — all existing frameworks are in place to tie our ever slipping minds together to comprehend all the phenomena around us, at any cost we need to keep it moving forward. Ending A is the "policy is to suppress" path, in which the existing order is kept alive through true neutrality and disregard of all suffering it may entail, as liberalism does. On this path of the game we win the world by literally ignoring all the side characters and missing most of the richness of the world, instead going more or less on just a straight path of repeated murder. As we move further down the rungs of the ladder we see the ruins of trying to expose ourselves to the pain of the world and the folly of not doing it to the necessary extent: saving the world while helping everyone along the way requires excoriating the sins and personal horrors of everyone you know (and every possible unforgivable taboo is present, down to putting the player in the shoes of a complete psychopath, and you just have to live with it) because after all the world is bound together by these avoided and coped with evils, but if you want to go that far it is worth it. If you want to think about what makes up the compositions of everyone's sins you need to go so deep that you break the fabric of your reality. Every aspect of Drakengard has an unfathomable depth being held back flimsily, this is the aspect that makes it unique in games, it makes complete thematic use of its ontology as a video game. The soundtrack sounds like it's stitched together from bits and pieces of a thousand bombastic scores. The 'game montage' as it were relegates us to experiencing the characters' emotions through very strict viewpoints, we can hear their voices during the restrictive ground and aerial levels, and from time to time we see their character models stuck gesticulating with bobbing faces from fixed angles. The cutscenes are effectively a relief from the unforgiving existence foisted on the player at all other times, and even these scenes are too horrible to witness. Playing it at all full stop was too much for me and I eventually just watched everything I missed out on. The only logical way for it to pan out is in Ending E where all this generic action fantasy game detritus breaks through reality into real world Tokyo, where all the myths and game systems and fictional morality plays are just a existential abomination, but one crafted by the hands of man, and in the end destroyed by man. Only fitting that the acid rain and fog of the dead digital reality dragon would lead into a new story in which men's bodies are torn from their souls.