This is one of those games that “gamers” never shut up about, but here’s some more words about it:
- A persistent theme of these games is the inscrutability and often outright hostility of the “gods” of the setting.
- For example, one of their heralds, the Grotesquerie Queen.
- Multiple characters across the shared universe of this and other, related franchises (specifically Nier) complain that the gods hate them/humanity and the events of the games reinforce that.
- Most of the games revolve around actual or barely averted extinctions of humanity and other species suffering the more they approach becoming “human.”
- At the end of the first game, the protagonist travels to “the land of the gods” which is… Tokyo?
It never clicked for me before, but it seems like this running theme is also a bit of a running joke: being a Japanese game, the “gods” of the universe that hate their own creations are the creators/programmers/etc of the Drakengard video game itself.
An inspiration for the very first Drakengard game was one of its creators pondering how the main character of a violent action game would interact with other people. To explore that, you have to create a game that is largely hostile towards said main character (or at least one that the character perceives as hostile). The entire Drakengard series is predicated on a universe that wants to kill its characters: the musings of the cast about their gods being hateful makes total sense!
(I don’t think this is anything new, but trying to get into the swing of regularly posting)