Ranking every character from King of Fighters: Kyo from least to most homophobic:

S Rank (Salvation)

These characters not only were portrayed as not having prejudice against gay people, but are also implied to be active supporters of LGBT+ rights as a whole:

- Shingo
- King
- Terry
- Shermie
- Daimon

A Rank (Angel)

These characters were shown to not display any homophobia and seem to always treat gay people with due respect:

- Yuki
- Ralf
- Clark
- Leona
- Kim
- Benimaru
- Andy
- Yuri
- Mary

B Rank (Bearable)

These characters joke about sexuality likely more than they should, but when gay people who they don’t have intimacy with are around, they’ll stop making them entirely to not make the conversation uncomfortable:

- Saisyu
- Mai
- Heidern
- Ryo
- Robert
- Takuma
- Chang
- Yashiro

C Rank (Controversy)

These characters often make dubious jokes and comments regarding sexuality that are kinda hard to tell whether they were joking or not, likely hold some prejudice deep inside:

- Kyo
- Chizuru
- Chris
- Joe
- Choi
- Mr. Big
- Yamazaki
- Chin

D Rank (Despair)

These characters are plenty vocal about being homophobic and seem oddly proud about it when a gay person is around:

- Iori
- Geese
- Billy
- Kensou

The Athena Tier

This bitch will follow you around, stare at you like this and say shit like “I just don’t think it’s natural”:

- Athena

Drakengard is so fun to talk about. Regardless of their content or quality, Drakengard is filled with more ideas than most games dare dream. I completely understand the reviews on this site that award 5 stars with text that reads “worst game ever!”, and vice versa, because quantity and juxtaposition alone can make discussing incoherent ideas fun. Drakengard is not coherent. That lack of coherence makes Drakengard highly susceptible to a form of mythologization in discussion, as the abstraction necessary for communication brings coherence not present in the work itself. But more coherent communication can unintentionally rewrite or recast memories of Drakengard as a played experience. In short, I find it very important to distinguish between the quality of discussion about Drakengard for the quality of the work itself.

So let me be clear. As a work, and as a game, Drakengard sucks. Suuuuuuuuuuuuucks!

What is Drakengard actually like as a game? I could say that it's split between sword slashing, dragon riding, and cutscenes, but that description alone dolls up the experience by virtue of how cool those words sound. Because playing Drakengard achieves its moments of high impact by being, most of the time, dreadfully dull.

If I were to faithfully, proportionally, emotionally convey the slog that is Drakengard’s grounded sword combat, I would need to write out an itemized list of each of the 63 obtainable weapons and their upgrade requirements (each requiring multiple hundreds of kills per level per weapon) for pages on end, without jokes, before returning to a writing style interesting to humans. If I started doing that right now, even as a lame meta joke, I’m sure anyone who respected their time would immediately leave. That impulse was something I felt in the opening minutes of the game, after I realized Drakengard was an aggressively non-flashy 1-vs-100 Musou-style combat game. Dozens of staring soldiers, barely with idle animations, swarmed the player character. Not to flank and murder, but to set themselves up as bowling pins so I could kill them a little bit faster. Every enemy’s existence was tediously teleological for their death.

To advance the plot, it was often faster to run past each map’s hundreds of enemies than to actually engage. But without enemy deaths, weapons don’t strengthen, and the maps that demanded trial by combat would become more insufferable. The game regularly made recommendations to play maps separate from the story for the explicit purpose of level grinding. Which begged the question - if the game was aware of its own terrible grind, (which, let me be clear, is NO FUN), why couldn’t the game adjust its own numbers so there would be no need to grind?

Answer: Because when you hop on your dragon and roast those suckers in seconds, it feels awesome.

Drakengard’s magic trick is to purposefully turn on its head the tedium of ground combat as a means to articulate the speed, power, and terror of a dragon. Instead of spending minutes chipping away at each individual health bar of 20 knights, you can ride on a dragon and fire blast them to death in one shot. The boisterous soundtrack, too loud and calamitous to fit the slog of repetitive, resistance-free sword swinging, is recontextualized as the blaring anthem of player destruction. Every element of this reversal works together so well that it also plants an idea within the player: if something about this game sucks, maybe it sucks on purpose.

That idea is very alluring, because there’s so much about Drakengard that, when described, sounds indefensible. Make no mistake, Drakengard is very intentional. Even when the execution is terrible, its ideas are far too specific and interwoven to be generated at random. Drakengard has goals, goals so atypical from most mainstream swords and sworcery narratives that Drakengard invalidates many frameworks for conventional criticism. Is the ground combat bad, because it's no fun and a waste of time, or does it successfully build up the importance of the dragon? To play and engage with Drakengard requires at least some revaluation of one’s expectations of the game.

But also.

Why is there a pedophile? And a woman who eats babies? As my party members? As playable characters? Like, what does that add to the experience? Was moral disgust a useful ingredient in spicing up this terrible gameplay? What possible set of purposes are we reaching into with these taboo topics?

I mean hey, great conversation material! I’ve never played a game as a gay pedophile before! Love me a game of firsts! But here’s where I’m at - if a game is not giving me an obvious answer to the very obvious question,

“Why in the sam hell FUCK am I playing as a gay pedophile?”,

maaaybe it's a bad game! There are some topics, some events that occur in human experience that lack subtlety. Where you cannot split their meaning into nuanced fragments that can be sequestered into hidden angles within a work. I’m not going to pretend I know that full list, but I feel pretty confident gay pedophelia is on that list. So throwing that kind of element in, unexamined by the text, unchallenged by the cast, feels pretty irresponsible! It feels like the only person who is supposed to have a reaction to our gay pedophilic friend is me, the player. And if a game is going the extra mile to rely on my reaction to some element as the sole means of justifying the inclusion of that element? Without developing that reaction into something purposeful within the text? That sounds like a good definition of shock value!

There’s a level where the ground soldiers you normally fight are replaced with child soldiers. Your dragon friend and the gay pedophile both plead with you to please spare them. The child soldiers all scream and cry and beg for mercy. But mechanically, you have no other options to progress besides killing them. You cannot finish the level without doing so. You earn the ire and judgment of your companions, but that has no bearing on future gameplay or narrative. Meanwhile, I still earned +40 exp for every child slain.

What am I supposed to be feeling here? Guilt for doing what the game wants me to do? Irony at a dragon, who hates humans and has killed hundreds, suddenly feeling morally superior? Doubtful of the motivations of a pedophile for not wanting to witness children being murdered? Is the presentation ridiculous on purpose, and this scenario is supposed to be the game taking the piss out of itself? Or is the presentation bad on accident, and this was meant to be morally harrowing for the player?

There are no guideposts that help me answer the question of “what am I supposed to be feeling here,” because the game does not have the time or depth to contextualize or even self-reference its own contents. The fact that player character Caim has killed a couple hundred child soldiers just… never comes up again, ever, relegated entirely to concurrent voice-over work from our party members Star Fox 64-style. Pedophilia, cannibalism, incest - all topics introduced just subtley enough the official English release intentionally and unintentionally softened or censored their inclusion - are treated in similar ways. None of these ideas are developed, and many exist in separate parallel endings, their juxtaposition the only possible form of context.

For me, after seeing all five endings, all the content the game had to offer, I was left with the question, what was the point? Failing an easy answer, what is the possibility set from which this game could have a point? That possibility set, from my perspective, must include some form of player-inferred metatextuality. Which raises my suspicions, because such artistic territory is densely populated with hacks.

Art that draws attention to the viewer’s role in creating the work’s meaning fosters a dynamic I dislike. Because once the viewer accepts a work’s invitation to join a dialectic with the work as an element of their own conception of the work, a subtle sleight of hand has occurred. Now the validity of the viewer’s emotions have been tied to the validity of the artwork. Now everything the work makes the viewer feel is a mark of the work’s craft. Because now the quality of the discussion of the work is built into the quality of the work itself. If you like the joke of a game wasting your time, then the game is good! Or if you hated the joke, the game made you feel something real, so it’s also good!

This is where art runs the dangerous risk of getting lost up its own ass. Because yeah, intratextuality and metatextuality exist as tools, but tools by definition are in service to some other goal. So if a work only performs the aforementioned sleight of hand solely as proof of its ability to do so? While being actively unpleasant, apathetic, and antagonistic towards the player? To me, that’s like firing a gun at random to prove you know how to hold a gun. Which does not impress me, as I expect a gunslinger to actually hit a target.

So good try, Drakengard. You are a unique and memorable experience that has thoroughly enriched my vocabulary for talking about games. You are an excellent frame of reference for many future musings regarding your medium. I’m glad I will have common ground for talking with your fans and defenders, and am curious how your DNA changed to spawn the famous and lauded Nier series.

But as a game, I hate you, you disrespectful waste of time, you monstrous amoral troll, you boring, incomprehensible disaster. Every word of contempt I have falsely aggrandizes your worth as you become elevated in the glow of my righteous indignation. Every accurate description of my emotions falsely exaggerates your space in my heart, as you are too dull and incompetent to command true staying power. It takes more effort to analyze or talk about you than I have found worth within you.

I believe the knowledge I have gained is useful, and would not discourage anyone from seeking that same knowledge for its own sake. But Drakengard is not to be cherished. To anyone who puts in the time to understand Drakengard: it is woefully unworthy of your love.