So, putting this here in regards to the call to “let us know” about playing Drakengard 1 on stream. First of all I would love this, but it’s hard to explain how utterly unpleasant the act of playing this game is.
Though the aerial combat is cool (but more like a mech game than a fighter game I’d say), the ground combat is incredibly tedious. Emulating for infinite health wouldn’t help much, since the difficulty already isn’t that high (you have a dragon), and the lag from emulating easily takes the game from ‘unpleasant’ to ‘unbearable.’
For Patrick, saying they’d be there for the story and the music: oh, you mean this music?
This is one of the more listenable tracks in the game. One of the game’s producers described the music as “…an accompaniment that gives them those negative feelings. The negative feeling of one whose loved ones have been killed…” The whole game sounds like an anxiety attack, with characters yelling disconnected musings on violence over the top
Yoko Taro's take on the music is as delightfully hard to understand as lots of his quotes, but included here in full, just for the sake of it.
“It would be difficult to explain the music of Drag-on Dragoon in a single paragraph. I want you to imagine the following: on a morning without school or work, a carefully selected egg has been lying on the table since the previous night at room temperature. You lightly pluck the egg off of the table and crack it over a bowl filled with cooked koshihikari rice, adding a dash of katsuobushi, finely shaved on a wood block. To top it off, and here you need to be careful, you add a few drops of light-colored soy sauce. You take your time to lightly stir in these ingredients. Filtered amidst the grains of cooked rice, part of the egg cooks, and part remains raw. It must not be mixed in too thoroughly. If it is possible, it is best to leavetwo to three clumps of white rice completely untouched by the egg, sitting like clumps of marble. Combined with the raw egg, this rice, which is as hot as possible, will make the perfect temperature. We calmly debate the merits of our respective ingredients as all of this spreads inside your mouth and fills your empty stomach. Then, the song as we kill each other.”
For Austin: if you like terrible characters, you’ll love* these characters. What other games give you a pedophile and a cannibal as playable characters (plus the implied/explicit incest thing with Caim and Furiae)? Seriously, this game needs so many content warnings any attempt to play it on stream would struggle with that.
Also, there’s the element of ableism that’s core to the original Drakengard, that the mass violence games depict could only be the work of someone “insane.” This is something Yoko Taro has talked about getting wrong, and has iterated on with all his subsequent games, so it’s fascinating to see such an unpolished attempt here, but it is still deeply ableist.
*won’t actually love
