drag-on dragoon 2
a game by square-enix
a review by tim rogers
06292005


The first Drag-on Dragoon was a misunderstood game. "Misunderstood" is a critical vocabulary tool that means "it sucks." What was so bad about Drag-on Dragoon? The title? Yes, the title is terrible. I can't think of any context in which the words "drag" and "on" would be seperated by a hyphen unless we were talking about something being long, and boring. Drag-on Dragoon was misunderstood, yes, and it did overstay its welcome on many levels, and many stages, at that, and I'm certain many people bought it and wound up giving up after chapter three, which was about where it started to feel like it was dragging on too long.

What was wrong with the game, that made people give it up so easily? Perusing old reviews makes it harder to understand. Most say that the game gets tedious, and that killing monsters repeatedly can be boring. Yet the game scored an average 7.9. What gives? Well, a half an hour with Drag-on Dragoon 2 reveals exactly what was wrong with Drag-on Dragoon, exactly what needed to be fixed -- it was too damn slow.

The hero of Drag-on Dragoon was a man named Caim, who ran like he was underwater, even though he wasn't underwater, and flew a red dragon, sometimes, that flew like it was flying underwater. His quest was to fight evil, essentially, in a fantasy world full of sinister monsters and even more sinister medieval politicians. At the end of the day, no one really cared about the story; this was a game for people who wanted to kill things, and as such a game, it failed to keep people involved, because it was too damned slow.

Drag-on Dragoon 2 takes place in the same dark fantasy world, several years later. We play the part of Nowe, who has a giant blue dragon named Leguna and is enlisted in an elite battalion of knights who, for the first couple missions, rely on Nowe to fly ahead to the battlefields on Leguna's back, torching the hell out of the little ant-like goblins way down there. This is the game being exuberant about its Dragon Mechanics, and it's also teaching you a thing or two about how to manipulate the crosshairs and work the lock-on breath and the special mauling dragon moves. The back of the box brags on about the dragon, too: beneath a screenshot, we see the words "Yori SPEEDY na DRAGON BATTLES!!" Roughly, "FASTER DRAGON BATTLES!!" This is curious indeed; so strong is the stereotype that we put things like "MORE MORE MORE" on the back of videogame boxes that doing so has become taboo. Furthermore, no one was complaining about the speed of the dragon battles in Drag-on Dragoon, probably either because this is Japan and the game is by Square, whose very name is an ace in the hole, anyway. I'm guessing it was fledgling-yet-veteran development house Cavia, a veritable mutt of underpaid refugees from all of Tokyo's finest game-making houses, who insisted on letting people know the dragon battles were faster this time around. They probably had to convince a board room full of people that it'd be a good idea. Whether people noticed that the dragon battles in Drag-on Dragoon were boring because they were slow or whether they enjoyed those dragon battles anyway because they're Square fans and thus easily entertained, it didn't matter -- Cavia has every right to be proud of its fast dragon battles.

They should have said something about how fast the ground combat is, too. Nowe must run five times as fast as Caim ever did. In fact, I saved and turned off Drag-on Dragoon 2, turned on Drag-on Dragoon, and basked in the slowness. Yeah, I'd say about five times faster is right.

It's amazing what a little speed does. This is not 1990; this is not Sonic the Hedgehog running faster than Mario because speed is cool with the kids. Nowe in Drag-on Dragoon 2 runs as fast as he does because he simply has to, because the slowness of the hero of his game's predecessor combined with the scope of the battlefields combined to form an experience that was pretty much unbearable after a few hours had passed. In making its hero run fast (and with the curious, impossible leg-scrambling animation that seems ripped directly from Cavia's Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) and in making its dragon fly fast, Cavia has made a game it is possible to both play to the finish and enjoy all the way through.

Luckily, Drag-on Dragoon has a genre (if it didn't, it's the kind of game that'd be in trouble, given its low production values), and that genre is the dubious one of "3D Melee Action Brawler"; its sub-genre is that of the "War Brawler," meaning that its levels are mostly battlefields in which your one hero runs around, dominating. Cavia have leveled-up significantly from the first installment with regards to combat; they have their experience crafting Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex to thank, most likely. Everyone knows that, in baseball, a pitcher can't bat well because he spends all his time practicing pitching; similarly, the platforming segments in a game like Kingdom Hearts have no cause to work even halfway well because the developers were too busy painting the walls and rendering all the Disney personalities. Judging by the blandess of the cutscenes -- slowly panning camera looking over flat-shaded buildings in very brown cities, or else a still screenshot of two characters looking at each other, with big face portraits and subtitles running under voiced dialogue -- all Cavia wanted to do was make a game you could play and enjoy, which is noble enough. I once wondered, how much fun would Final Fantasy X be if I could make the hero jump with the fluidity and polish of Super Mario from Super Mario 64? Of course, the developers weren't ready to put that kind of unnecessary polish into an RPG, and they still aren't. Cavia, however, has appropriated exceptionally fluid, first-person-shooter-like camera controls to the right analog stick in Drag-on Dragoon 2. Why did they do this? Because they liked the camera movement in Stand Alone Complex so much they decided to reuse it in a game with a hero who runs twice as fast as Motoko Kusanagi? For the first couple of missions, it takes a little getting used to: the hero is curiously located just left of the middle of the screen, his giant sword trailing out to his right so that its tip touches roughly the exact place you'd imagine the camera is pointing from. Once you've blocked a few attacks, it feels like second nature.

Oh yes, blocking. You'll need to block; just as Gran Turismo repeatedly defeated players who refused to use the brake because no other racing game had required the brake before, Drag-on Dragoon 2 will frustrate anyone who's play Dynasty Warriors and refuses to believe any 3D melee game is different. You'll be surprised to see how violently the enemies on the radar are running toward you. These enemies don't just stand around waiting for you to hit them like the guys in Drag-on Dragoon. They surround you, and then, miraculously for a melee action game, they start swinging. You have to hold that L2 button at prudent moments, and when there are so many hundreds of monsters and evil knights in one game, those prudent moments come fast and furious. So there's a lot of clashing metal going on. The most intriguing part of the blocking system has to be the required use of the right analog stick. If there's an enemy on your right and you're blocking while facing the front, if he's maybe an ogre swinging his giant club, you'll have to do a quick pivot with the right analog stick to turn your body around so you're facing him, ready to accept the blow. When you're face by six guys, and each of them is swinging a ragged weapon of some kind, you'll need to moved that analog stick a lot. The enemies' weapons tend to all have some kind of horrible weight to them, and they'll be dead frozen after the slightest workout, which is your cue to kill them.

Tap the square button and start hitting them back. Nowe swings his sword like its made of tinfoil. He can swing it six times in a second if you can hit the button that quickly. And this is just his first sword, a two-handed behemoth. Just wait until he starts getting the one-handed swords, and you'll see how fast a sword can be swung. The triangle button does a slower vertical attack which can juggle the enemy up into the air, only to be pummeld by a square-button assault on his way down. You can use the triangle button in mid-air to slap the ground fiercely with your sword, which does more good sometimes than it seems like it has reason to do. R1 and L1 make Nowe sidestep either left or right in the most dramatic fashion. The problem is, while he's swinging his sword, he can't be bothered to sidestep. If you just pressed that square button five times, and initiated a blade-twirling combo, and that wizard ten meters away has got you in his ice-spell sights, you're going to be praying to god that the combo ends allowing you enough time to hit one of those trigger buttons. If you're lucky, you'll end up rolling just as the spell explodes up out of the circular white crosshair where you were just standing. If not, well -- the spell is going to carry you up with it. However, this iis your last chance -- in mid-air, press the L2 button (that's the block button) to do a quick back-flip and re-order yourself in mid-air. You'll land on your feet, avoiding extra damage. Yes, apparently, your biggest enemy on Drag-on Dragoon is the earth itself; the majority of attacks that aren't aimed directly downward at the top of your skull (the attacks that can be blocked with an upper horizontal sword position, you see) have a tendency to scrape you, cause a tiny amount of damage, and then throw you up into the air. While in the air, all you have to do is press the L2 button to flip yourself back onto your feet so you don't crash down and cause serious bodily harm. Having to press the L2 button every time you fly up into the air would be boring in a game as slow as Drag-on Dragoon; Drag-on Dragoon 2, with its fierce speed, wherein you're only flailing through the air for a split second should the enemy land a successful attack, carries this mechanic nobly, and at its best it feels like a colorful element in a puzzle game. When you're fighting twenty guys at once, and managing to successfully block only eighteen attacks at a time, those two attacks that land are mild disturbances. Should you be properly zoned into the game and slap the L2 button, setting the situation right, you'll feel quite satisfied with yourself, like you just scored a line in Tetris. By far the most satisfying thing to do in melee combat in Drag-on Dragoon 2 is the guard deflect. Much like in Soul Calibur II or Street Fighter III, this requires serious timing. While holding block, press the attack button to juke your weapon just as the enemies attack comes crashing down. Depending on the strength of your character and the integrity of your weapon, you might send the enemy's attack flying back, and the enemy staggering backwards, perhaps knocking down some of his friends in the process. Harness the edge you've just gained in timing, and you can swing your sword back around into a special, more-violent-than-usual combination attack, and take out half the whole enemy rabble. Some enemies, like the giant armored elite knights, practically require you to deflect an attack before they'll open up to "civilized negotiations", as we call them.

This exciting little element alone makes Drag-on Dragoon 2 something that Drag-on Dragoon was not, and that is, long story short, a 3D melee action game that does something notable for the genre. As I say in my review of Sakura Taisen V Episode Zero, 3D melee action games are, essentially, the kinds of videogames most old Famicom action games aspired to be. It wasn't until Shigeru Miyamoto hit upon the perfect way to execute a two-dimensional perspective in Super Mario Bros. that most developers acquired their creative license to make games. 2D saw a lot of tweaking and communal development and redevelopment over the years, and at present, there are people like me, who have played all the latest, greatest, biggest 3D games and still wish for no more than a multiplayer, online, two-dimensional Castlevania game. I think it'd be more fun than any first-person shooter, and I think this, probably, because 2D is, at present, so refined and completed. The side-scrolling perspective is a gaming archetype, is what it is. Though some 2D games require players to jump on enemies, and some require players to shoot, or punch, methods of defense are usually the same: you duck, or you jump. 3D, in more closely resembling what we know as our real world, makes it evident why human beings generally don't run around jumping everywhere; it simply neither feels nor looks (videogames, remember) natural. This is why blocking is important in a melee action game. Cavia has hit on something intriguing with their right-analog-stick-"aiming" block system, something that feels like it wouldn't be out of place in an online setting, maybe while wearing an Xbox Live headset. This hunch is reinforced when the game starts throwing more and more talented warriors at you; the smarter of them will turn tail and run toward the next big group of enemies, knowing you'll follow, and just get yourself embroiled in another big mess. The smartest of them will attack you with as many blistering slashes per second as you've just attacked their buddies, and you'll stand there, blocking, aiming your blocking hand, and counting the slashes with a tiny hope that you'll soon be able to deflect one of those slashes and get an opening. And then you do deflect a slash, and you attack, and -- he deflects it right back! It starts to feel like a good Street Fighter III match, and I don't use those words lightly. Or unawesomely. There are even parts of the game where you have to jump across platforms, and these typically don't feel stupid. A lot of times, you use magic to thin the ranks of enemies before they can reach you. This is fun -- you stand there, having just gotten a gaggle of enemies' attention, holding down the circle button to charge a magic attack. The magic attacks vary depending on the weapon; weak weapons might have valuable magic attacks. Level a weapon up (some weapons require more experience than others) to level up its magic (and standard combo) attacks as well. Hit the R2 button to change out your weapon, then start that magic charge. When the enemies are within range, you let go, and the bastards go flying. The longer you hold down the button, the stronger the spell, and the more magic points it drains. And guess how you refill those magic points? No, come on, guess.

Did you say "blocking"? Well, aren't you clever.



There's a telling moment early in the game, where the grizzly, bearded leader of the knights of the evil country poisons the hero, and then, as the poison takes effect, tells the hero "I killed your father." This results in the hero lashing out against the old man. Then Eris, the spear-wielding girl who was your alternate player-character (just change your weapon from a sword to a spear, and there she is) for the first six missions or so, comes in, and misunderstands what's happening. Nowe runs away, fighting those pesky knights -- who he'll soon become quite familiar with -- for the first time. Soon, he's outside, and he calls his dragon, Leguna. What follows is a flying stage wherein we escape from the evil empire.

The most puzzling element of this stage is that, well -- we're fighting against the imperial air force. Giant balloons capable of dropping bombs, blimps and airships with a dozen cannons mounted on each side -- golden-gleaming biplane-like corvettes screaming at us mach 3 with machineguns blazing. The player might, for a moment, wonder: wait, didn't these guys need me for the aerial assaults just an hour ago? weren't they freaking out at the dragon breath, calling Leguna a "demon" and a "curse" and a "devil"? Leguna's breath looks like Mario fireballs next to the screaming machineguns on the golden imperial flying corvettes. Still, it's only a temporary confusing, one that has every right to turn around into a chuckle. It's apparent that Drag-on Dragoon 2's story was written as carefully as its music was composed. "So the hero starts out as a knight, and he was, get this, raised by a Dragon in the valley of dragons, and then, as a knight, he's really different because he has a dragon, and the empire exploits his dragon power, and well, we need some emotion, and we also need to set it up so the knights of the empire become the enemies, because that'd be really badass to have to fight the knights, so how about the leader of the knights is like, 'I killed your father!!!!!1!' and the hero freaks out." One of the other programmers says, "Well, what will we do with the dragon for the rest of the game?" The first programmer snaps his fingers -- "The empire can, like, grow an air force." This is, essentially, a dark fantasy story written by talented computer programmers, and that's both a bit of a ribbing and an affectionate summation.

A love story has been programmed into the mix as well. There's a girl named Manah, a high priestess of sorts from a city in a valley where the people are oppressed, probably because the empire has a thing against valleys. Manah is positioned to be burned at the stake when her people -- creepy cultists in capes and hoods -- stage a daring escape, which is only slightly hinted at in screenshots that hold still under the sound of a rumbling earthquake and much voice-acted screaming to "stop her!" Manah eventually opens Nowe's eyes to the ways of love and humanity, much to Eris's jealousy. There's a stretch where Eris is a bad guy, though she soon forgives and forgets because the designers know that they need to insert someone into the party who can use all these spears Nowe's been finding, and they'd rather not pay to have another character designed. The fourth party member is a guy named Eurich, who is one of those guys who has an "Oh my god this is the coolest game character ever" moment three minutes after his introduction; he then reports to duty and stays out of sight except when we're using him to swing his axe. He's strong against monster-type enemies, which is helpful at this stage in the game, because the empire is apparently in league with the monsters now ("hey! nice working with you!") and epic battles keep pausing to show gates opening and giant Ogres (hack the legs, sidestep and deflect the club, hit the legs until he falls, deliver a combo for maximum damage), Skeleton Knights (go toe-to-toe, block like in fencing lessons, sidestep, get behind him, go!) and Fucking Fearsome Minotaurs (three words: stand your ground!! then dodge his charge!!) shambling onto the fields of battle. Any one of your four party members can defeat any opponent, actually; it's just that some of them have advantages. Eurich, should he get a dig in on a minotaur, will do astronomical damage. Eris's spears tend to have holy properties, which make easy work of skeletons. Manah's magic powers are morbidly stronger than any other attacks in the game, and when annoying wizards start popping up and spitting out fireballs, she can absorb their spells, earn magic points for doing so, and then retort with spells of her own. She also has a tiny life meter. Nowe is just a machine, plain and simple. He has quick "sonic"-themed (interesting choice) magic attacks that send enemies flying back and screaming, ready to be carved up.

Faced with all these options for running around and killing things, you'll find that the actual killing of the things is about as fun as videogames get. The problem is the context; if Drag-on Dragoon 2 had a great story, if it told a great tale worth telling, I'd have no trouble recognizing it as a triple-A game. It doesn't do this, however; to use a movie analogy, it's one of those summer blockbusters that was just thrown together because someone had a really good idea and no one at any studio knew what to do with the idea; out of fear that someone else might do it first, they wrapped the idea in thhe easiest package and pushed it out the door.

What more does Drag-on Dragoon 2 need? Well, for one thing, it needs more money; Cavia have not yet proved themselves to any of the companies that publish their games. The only way to prove themselves is to make games that make money. Once they make enough money, they'll have the freedom to experiment. At the moment, there's a leash on every game they make. Their producers and directors are talented people yearning to try radical new ideas. The problem is they can't do this without taking a risk. If their name was as known as, well, Square's, they'd be able to release anything (like Kingdom Hearts) and, regardless of quality, they'd make big money off it. Brand-loyal customers, is what they lack. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex sold for reasons of brand loyalty alone in Japan, where a shooting game of such execution wouldn't sell for any other reason. Only it wasn't Cavia's brand -- it was Bandai's.

Can Drag-on Dragoon become Cavia's brand? I don't think so. I think it's probably best to just make one more and then let it be. The ideas sound good on paper -- a 3D melee action game with strong emphasis on blocking and dodging and occasional flying dragon battles, produced by people who's worked on Ace Combat and Panzer Dragoon. The problem lies in the execution. Every moment spent playing the game is fun, and I personally get quite zoned-into the dragon battles; if asked to elaborate, I'd say that, on a raw gameplay level, the dragon battles are about five times more fun than Panzer Dragoon Orta. However, there's a crucial problem -- Drag-on Dragoon 2's dragon battles take place in open airspace, with enemies flying in from behind the clouds. The camera is rotatable, and the dragon animates well and smoothly. However, when playing this -- when shooting the little cubes that spit fire at the dragon -- we don't really see any of the background. We're just sweeping crosshairs and aiming. The movement dynamics are lovely -- we can turn on a dime, flap the wings faster, and circle around the giant blimp we're fighting at the moment, all while charging up another lock-on attack. We can let go of the attack, sending fireballs streaming toward nine unlucky targets; the problem is, there's no ground. Like I said, the ground is the player's biggest enemy in the sword-slashing sequences. You'd figure this would carry over to the flying levels as well; yet it doesn't. Though Drag-on Dragoon 2's dragon battles are fast and quite absorbing, someone else might walk into the room and see the game and say it looks boring. They'd be right -- it does look boring. Even Panzer Dragoon Zwei managed to fit eerie context into its on-rails shooting stages. The game had a mystique, and a passer-by would probably sit next to you on the sofa just to stare at it for a bit. In Orta, even, there are stages where herds of beasts run along the top of a mountain ridge while waterfalls stream and giant insects attack our dragon. In Drag-on Dragoon 2, it's all business.

I'd like to think of Cavia, generously, as a kind of Alternative Treasure. Treasure, as you may or may not know, is a game development house formed out of disgruntled Konami employees; they are responsible for a good dozen and a half games that I would probably put on a list of the fifty games I'd keep if I could only have fifty games for the rest of my life. Treasure's games have reveled in the three dimensions of two-dimensional gaming for years. Ducking, jumping, standing. Shooting straight, up, down. Running right, jumping, running left. Ikaruga allows us to shoot white bullets while absorbing white bullets and dodging black bullets or shoot black bullets while absorbing black bullets and dodging white bullets. Radiant Silvergun encourages us to build combos on red-, yellow-, and blue-colored enemies. Astroboy can press B to punch, press up and B to use a laser, and press down and B to kick. Always with the threes. Treasure videogames, with their sets of three and visually player-rewarding game dynamics -- we can see through the windows that the ship we've boarded Gunstar Heroes is crashing -- taught me, as a teenager, why kids played videogames.

Cavia merely needs work on the dynamics department, and this is evident because Drag-on Dragoon 2 does so many damned flat-out intriguing things with 3D game dynamics. The most amazing one is in the full-scale 3D battles, where all you need to do is press the select button (or switch your character to Nowe and press the select button -- slight frustration) to hear Nowe scream "LEGUNA!" and be swooped up by his dragon without a pause or a load and carried into the air. Now we can fly over the battlefield, roasting enemies. Ahh, yes -- the ground. We are flying a dragon, and we can see the ground. It gives a nice impression of height, though in the end, as the enemies are all just running around helplessly down there, it takes on the eerie feeling of Dynasty Warriors 2, you know, the first one on PlayStation2, where all the enemies just kind of stood around, waiting for you to rip through them.

It's not until the fourth chapter of the game that we fight our first spectacular boss. It's Hanch, an elite girl-knight of the evil empire, flying on her dragon Kelpie (both a kind of Irish demon and an Australian sheepdog, I know from earlier experience). Hanch is voiced by that girl from "Kill Bill" and "Battle Royale," keeping up with the game's tradition of wasting good and expensive voice talent -- Koyuki, the girl from "The Last Samurai," voices Manah, which I find wrong; no girl who's kissed Tom Cruise and allowed the act to be filmed should be caught dead anywhere near a videogame in which the cut scenes aren't even animated; then again, she does appear in a new tampon commercial every other month, and is half-naked in a new HDTV ad on Tokyo trains. Anyway. "Kill Bill" girl's voice is kind of annoying; she keeps spewing this masochistic "HURT ME MORE" nonsense and giggling and squealing and diving her dragon beneath the water. You're fighting her on top of a giant dam. Her dragon has the ability to freeze the reservoir, and form a huge ice wall on the rim of the dam. If you happen to be hovering outside the dam when she makes the ice wall, you have to charge up some dragon breath to break down the wall. Sometimes, she'll summon up some wizards to ward off your dragon's breath. This is your cue to fly flow and drop Nowe off atop the battlements, where he can rush forward, blocking the deflecting magic spells (while sidestepping Hanch's Kelpie's ice-breath crosshairs). Take out the wizards, call Leguna, and fly to the next battlement. Kill all four wizards, and it's back to the dragon skies, mouth-breathing the masochistic little girl to death. Eventually she summons more wizards. Repetitive? Well, maybe! Still, it's kind of fun!

This is about twelve hours into the game, just past the point where it's revealed all its secrets, well beyond the point where the axe-wielding dude whose voice actor, a famous comedian named Roorii, played the talking fire in "Howl's Moving Castle" is absorbed into some magic vortex that keeps absorbing the villains, and that Manah probably has something to do with. Drag-on Dragoon 2 is a game informed by, aside from its predecessor, the entire history of videogames; it knows that it's easier to plausibly bring villains back in the end if they don't get blown up or dismembers. Games like Megaman were always able to explain why the robots come back in the last stage without explaining it at all -- they're just being put back together! Dr. Wily made these robots, of course he can put them back together.

What's wrong with this first, big, dynamic boss battle? The battlements are narrow. It's really hard to drop Nowe down onto them. You need to be at a painful angle. Or else you get this pop-up text message saying "You can't disembark the dragon here." At times like this, a player might get frustrated upon seeing the message the tenth time in a row, in the midst of a lambasting by flying ice magic, and he might say something like "THIS FUCKING DRAGON HAS A MASTERFUL COMMAND OF CLASSICAL AKIRA KUROSAWA JAPANESE; WHY DOES HE EVEN NEED SOMEONE TO PILOT HIM ANYWAY? CAN'T HE AIM HIS OWN LASER BREATH?!" Piloting the dragon in this level and the succeeding levels involving castles with dynamic battlements made me really appreciate Halo. Halo. There's another game that gets misunderstood as repetitive. I'm personally the kind of guy whose favorite stage is "The Library," the one everyone complains about being too long and boring. Come on, people! You're shooting plenty of shit in there! That's why you're playing this game, right? To shoot stuff? The thing Halo does right repeatedly is that shooting things is fun, just as slashing things is fun in Drag-on Dragoon 2. What Halo has that Drag-on Dragoon 2 doesn't, however, is a strict, damn-near-angry attention to detail. Vehicles move just as they should. Piloting a flying vehicle around towers in a valley feels smooth as butter. In Drag-on Dragoon 2, Leguna's wings keep dragging against the walls of the castle we're trying to cleverly manuver around; this is the first level of the game a bystander might be accidentally impressed by, and the collision detection makes it potentially hokey-looking.

This is the first time Cavia has attempted such dynamics in a vehicular setting. That's why the game takes so long to introduce any really interesting environments -- because it knows if it puts them all out in front, people might get caught up on the mechanics. The vehicle stage in Stand Alone Complex was blest with enjoyable movement and flat terrain. The deeper stages in that game involved paths through an aerial train station, onto some catwalks, leading down to a veritable mountainside of cement steps, fences, and rooftops, and eventually into an office building, climbing stairs and boarding elevators all without a single stop to load. It's safe to say that Drag-on Dragoon 2 sacrifices these kinds of dynamics in the name of allowing the player to summon a giant dragon and fly far above its most expansive stages. The interior levels, where the dragon is not an option, tend to be dungeon-slags, which is all right. I can't help feeling, though, that if the game had some more context, and some more interesting -- maybe iconical? -- characters, we'd have dungeons that feel like Zelda or Dragon Quest, plus some fierce, defense-heavy melee fighting. This would be like asking the game to let us walk around the towns instead of just picking "weapon shop" or "leave town" from a pop-up menu that floats over a still shot of cubical, flat-shaded buildings. This is a pipe dream, perhaps; pitchers can't hit homeruns, you see. At least Drag-on Dragoon 2 pitches well.



The music in this game sucks. I don't know who did it. It sounds like a guy listened to Hitoshi Sakimoto's Radiant Silvergun and Final Fantasy Tactics soundtracks and tried to recreate the same thing with a small chamber orchestra. It's full of brassy, pounding, squealing instrumental shenanigans backed up by men opera-singing "WAAAA" in such a way as to make you imagine they're cartoon characters and that little tear-drop-shaped thing in the top of the throat that some people think is "a tonsil" is vibrating back and forth really fast until a champagne glass explodes somewhere. Before battles we get this little "we're going to fight a battle now" march, which is the game's most successful emulation of Final Fantasy Tactics. Every once in a while, when a battle is supposed to be poignant in some incomprehensible story-related way, this ambient music plays, and that sounds so much better than the other stuff. Luckily, there's an option to turn the music down and just leave the voices and sound effects on. The sound that accompanies a guard-deflect is just plain great. It's like thunder, plus clashing metal. It's a rock and roll kind of sound. The voices are all right; Koyuki does a good job of sounding like a Japanese spaced-out blonde in an alternate medieval age when dragons totally existed. The hero sounds like a rube. He is always breathless, though I guess he has a right to be, because he's running so damned much, and so fast, at that. Yet when he's reading the title cards that come before every new chapter -- it gets a little irritating. Says Hideo Kojima: "People like that. It makes the guy sound vulnerable and . . . in-touch with the common people. Notice we used this voice for Raiden." Is this really the coolest tone of voice a man is allowed in Japanese pop culture? I mean, how is that cool? How is it cool for a guy to have to pause every three words to catch his breath? Anime culture is a slippery slope. Then again, I've known that for years.

At the end of the day, the highest compliment I can pay Drag-on Dragoon 2 is that, like Treasure's games repeatedly teach me why people play videogames, Cavia is beginning to teach me why kids don't play with action figures anymore. In the dead center of this game, there's a battle that begins outside an enemy stronghold in the mountains. Starting on dragon-back, we blast down a gaggle of knights who come pouring out of the guard-towered gate at the bottom of the hill. Breathe on them, and watch them go flying! There are archers positioned on the tops of the guard towers, so hover higher and get rid of them before they hurt the dragon. Then hop off and go running into the thick of things. Progress up the hill, beneath a cough-syrup-purple sky, fighting off hordes of bad guys in shining armor, going from checkpoint to checkpoint, until you're almost at the gates, and suddenly -- surprise surprise -- giant ogres and skeleton knights and minotaurs come stomping in. Earlier in the game, you were helping the knights defeat these same kinds of beasts. Now, the tables are mystically turned, like that one day we decided to have the Autobots and Decepticons form the "League of Transformers" to take on the Go-Bots, who had joined up with the Thundercats, their Thundertank, and a big rubber Godzilla doll. Halo makes me feel like I'm playing with solid, unbreakable Tonka trucks. Drag-on Dragoon 2 makes me feel this way -- similar, yet distinctly different. Though in earlier battles I was commanding squads, now it's just me and my men. In other melee fighters I am the strongest man by far on the battlefield, so strong that other fighters stand and stare as I swoop in and destroy them with impossible moves. As I scramble under a purple sky and destroy this unholy union of knights and monsters, I detect that I'm just as strong as all of them, only I'm smarter and luckier, and I can do the guard-deflect better than they can. In a first-person-shooter, it takes only a headshot to kill or be killed; I like to think the same justice applies here, and that I'm able to kill these giant beasts without being hit because I've killed a couple of them before, and this particular one hasn't killed me even once yet. It makes me think the game would work online, with another player. Maybe the game is just bullshitting me and making me feel cool; either way, it is perhaps the game's greatest charm that a moment after we wonder if we've bit off more than we can chew (always "we" -- the characters aren't the ones playing), and if this is going to be the end, we experience a complete change of heart, and are dead-on convinced that this army of six hundred men in full coats of armor, carrying tower shields and longswords, backed up by archers in guard towers, wizards casting spells from a distance, four huge skeleton knights with the power to scream and slash at the speed of sound, six ogres with clubs that could bat a Boeing 767 out of the sky out of the sky, and three minotaurs that could rape and maul dinosaurs stand absolutely no chance against a weird-haired guy with a sword, a girl with a wooden staff, a masked man with an axe, a girl with a spear, and one laser-breathing dragon.

--tim rogers, 06302004

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tim rogers will return to review genji