2010-09-24 - - 2:11 p.m.

At this point, since I really don't have any idea how to structure this, I should explain a little about Drakengard/Drag-on Dragoon - a previous product of Cavia and the closest thing to Nier's prequel.

When I heard Nier had something to do with Cavia, alarm bells started going off. Oh no, why did I buy this, etc. When I heard it was actually the successor to the first Drakengard game, it seemed like an even worse choice.

Drakengard was a horrible, evil game. Fighting on the ground was boring and tedious.

Aerial fights on the dragon weren't much better.

What Drakengard had going for it, however, was a particular kind of intensity. Everything was dull and brown. The soundtrack consisted entirely of the scariest remixes of classical music I have ever heard, which just degenerated further and further into blenderized dissonance. Every single weapon had a backstory involving people dying horribly, killing their loved ones and then killing themselves, sacrificing humans, bludgeoning the heads of their neighbors in while singing lullabies, etc. etc. The way you leveled your weapons up was to kill hundreds of enemies with them and feed them blood.

If I had to say that game was about something, it's basically about hate. It's saturated with terrible people doing things for awful reasons. The only kinds of love shown in the game are twisted and unnatural, or in Inuart's case, kind of pathetic and incompetent. It is all about showing how humans are driven to save themselves even if they aren't worth saving at all.

The main character is a mass murderer - a deposed royal-turned-soldier who almost accidentally goes on the quest to save the world for two reasons. 1) the other side intends to kill his sister, which seems not to be cool with him and 2) he gets to kill an entire empire full of people which was already on his agenda, so why the hell not. He almost dies at the beginning, but is able to survive after making a pact with a dragon who is also dying, in exchange for his voice. Having clung to his life of slaughter and gained his own personal flying WMD, he gets back to business.

His allies are worse. It's really something that, in the game, Caim actually is the hero in comparative terms. I mean, he kills anything on the battlefield with great relish, but it seems almost charmingly straightforward when compared with the rest of the cast. No seriously horrifying sexual deviance or anything. Though it kind of seems like he eventually falls in love with the dragon it's not as bad as, say raping and eating kids.

The one with the least repugnant personality is a pedophile who only escaped the massacre of his town because he was off in the woods raping some boy. He has a really brief crisis afterwards when he fails to kill himself and then goes blind in exchange for a pact with a fairy.

They find another ally locked away in some dungeon. She has given up her fertility for her pact and constantly yells insane shit about her children while fighting. She's also a baby-eating cannibal.

Even the sister, who is the "goddess" and seems pretty normal at first, has her own set of

problems - she's in love with her brother. When he finds out about this, he's utterly repulsed. I could go on but you kind of get the point. Even the gods are hateful; all they want is for everything to be destroyed. Drakengard is pretty much nihilism on a ps2 disc.

So, despite the fact that Drakengard was a steaming turd when it came to actually playing the game, it has a following just because it's so uncompromising and nightmare-inducing. Definitely a shocker when it comes to games; when I think about it I have to wonder who the hell approved it for development and whether they had massive balls or were just insane. Cavia have a thing for turning expectations on their heads. The "hero" loves killing. The "beauty" is a baby-eating psycho. There are endings in which the gods come to earth, and they are gigantic babies with mouths full of teeth who are birthed from a giant pregnant creature the size of a skyscraper. It's hard to describe the horror of the visuals.

Anyway, in Drakengard things start off kind of standard sword-and-sorcery fantasy bullshit, if uncommonly gloomy. By the time it ends it's gone bug-fucking insane. It's almost like the world is degenerating to match the internal hideousness of the characters.

If Drakengard is a game all about saving the world out of hate, NieR is about destroying the world out of love.

Also, Cavia are completely fucking sadistic, and it's the "fuck you, we're the JSDF" ending of Drakengard that forms the basis of NieR.

So, on one hand, there is the authorial confidence that somehow let Drakengard go - not off the rails - but on rails to a hell-dimension that crazy people built.

Years later, that same team makes a concerted effort to research the structure and idioms of Shounen manga. . . and release a game that is big and shiny and appealing to the mass market.

AS IF THAT'S POSSIBLE FOR THESE PEOPLE.

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