| [Apr. 14th, 2008|10:02 am] |
I will not get into a snit over minor issues. I have more important things to do with my life.
Instead of being good and cleaning the entire apartment this weekend, I spent too much time replaying Drakengard and since I have nothing else to talk about today, I will babble about that for my own amusement.
Drakengard is a Squeenix game that was released back in 2004, and is a weird mishmash of Dynasty Warriors and Panzer Dragoon. I should say that I do not actually recommend this game--the gameplay is seriously repetitive, the camera controls are wonky and frustrating, the plot (which is full of nonsense about seals and pacts with mythical beasts and a Big Bad Empire) is underdeveloped, and the script was chopped up for the English release and as a result is nearly incomprehensible in places. It's not a great game or even a good one; 'mediocre' is probably the best it can hope for.
However, the reason I have kept this game around for four years, besides the occasional need for something that's pure hacky-slashy, is that it is one of the most depressing and nihilistic video games I have played in my life.
I ought to be complaining about how shabbily this game treats its female characters--there are only three of them, not counting the dragon, and they include 1) the main villain, a possibly suicidal six-year-old girl possessed by total evil and out to destroy the world, 2) an insane women with murderous and cannibalistic tendencies towards children, and 3) the protagonist's sister, who is thankfully sane but does very little besides sit around and wait to be kidnapped...plus she's in secretly love with her brother, and when he finds out her immediate response is to commit suicide. But really, no one comes out of this game looking like a particularly fine example of humanity. The protagonist himself is about half a step away from being a murderous psychopath, his best friend gets mind-whammied into working for the bad guys, and one of the sanest of the good-guy allies is a pedophile.
And nearly every action taken by the protagonist ends in failure; you can slice through a thousand enemies in half an hour only to find that not only have you not saved the world, but you've actually made things worse. The happiest ending is the one in which protagonist's entire army gets slaughtered, his sister dies, and the dragon he's bonded to decides to sacrifice herself to save the world. In the less pleasant endings, giant glowing babies come out of the sky and eat people. Or the protag and the dragon get transported through a dimensional gateway to modern-day Earth and are shot down by a fighter pilot. (Unfortunately they end up in Tokyo, not Antarctica, or it would make an amusing split-second Yukikaze crossover.)
So you see, this is exactly the sort of game you want around when you're feeling too lazily depressed to do anything else. You fight and fight mindlessly for hours, and the world goes to hell anyway and everyone dies, which means most of them are probably better off anyway, and then you turn off the game and go get a snack and think At least my life isn't that bleak.
Anyway, it was very good at distracting me until Persona: FES is released next week.
I am trying so, so hard not to write again. I realized this weekend that I miss it, but in the same way I miss swimming or dancing--activities I used to blithely adore long ago and which personal issues now make it almost impossible for me to enjoy on any level. How can other people do that?, I keep thinking. How could I have ever done that?
...maybe I ought to take up knitting or something. |
|