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The Copied Cathedral: Drakengard 2

In September 2022, something odd happened. 

A group of talented NieR: Automata modders released footage of a church they added to the game on reddit and twitter. It was a pretty big accomplishment - Automata’s engine is difficult to work with, and many players with a cursory familiarity with it felt that this kind of addition to the game was unfeasible, so for something of this scale to be created represented a shift in the landscape of NieR modding. However, this achievement was practically rendered irrelevant by the way in which they chose to reveal their work: an arg/”hoax” wherein they pretended to “discover” the mysterious church in an unmodded copy of the game, presenting it as a long-hidden easter egg. 

This gained unusual traction. This kind of thing happens a lot, but I’ve rarely seen it gather the kind of steam the copied cathedral did. The collective practiced cynicism of the internet, as well as the increasingly white-box nature of our favourite games, reliably helps quash the kinds of rumors that would easily gain traction on the playground, when it was much harder for someone to definitively prove you a liar when you claimed to have climbed aboard a rocket and shot off into space to find Deoxys in Pokemon Emerald. And I think there’s a pretty clear reason for this: anytime anyone expressed scepticism over the church and its impracticalities, they were met with the same refrain.

“It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would do something like this.” 

This refrain remained intact even when how people engaged with the modders’ work changed. In the beginning, it was “It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would include an easter egg that people would only find 5 years later!” When it became clear that the cathedral did not, in fact, exist in the game, it became “It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would craft an ARG to tease future NieR content.”

As someone who has had a relationship with Taro’s oeuvre since playing NieR at 14 years old, this was all very confusing to me. Because the Yoko Taro that I thought I knew didn’t do stuff like this. None of his games were ever advertised with any kind of obscure ARG disseminated through social media. His games didn’t really have obscure secret content that remained secret for years after the fact. I thought Yoko Taro was a guy who directed games with sweary, murderous protagonists connected to each other through intricate lorebooks that never left Japan…and showed up to promote Drakengard 3 as a sock puppet. Without my realising it, what “Yoko Taro” was had changed, and he had become, in the eyes of many, a kind of mystical trickster, whose mad genius was simultaneously incomparable and unpredictable, whilst also falling into neat patterns that were easily and instantly recognisable. 

Did I miss where these collectively agreed readings of Taro and his work came from? And if not, where did this perception of Yoko Taro come from? 

When did Yoko Taro become Yoko Taro?

BRANCH A: ANARCHY IN THE UK (Drakengard)

BRANCH B: BAD MOON RISING (Drakengard 2)

BRANCH C: -------------

BRANCH D: -------------

BRANCH E: -------------

In The Copied Cathedral
Branch B:
Bad Moon Rising

No game is perhaps more important in establishing the legend of Yoko Taro as Drakengard 2, despite, and in fact largely because, it is the one game in the series that he does not have a director's credit on. As a result, Drakengard 2 becomes the place where Yoko Taro can be defined by his absence, the perceived holes left in a work he has been extracted from. Lucky for him, then, that the reputation of Drakengard 2 more than precedes it: an infamous botch-job of a sequel that absolutely no one likes and betrays every single interesting idea that Drakengard had in a quest to be a normal, boring video game. It was the one that Yoko Taro did not direct, and it is the Bad one. Quid pro quo.

Obviously, there's no way I'd type all that out if it were actually true. I am not here to absolve Drakengard 2 and declare it an unrecognised masterwork, but I am here to argue that it is a much, much more interesting game than its reputation suggests. Granted, Drakengard 2's reputation is so dire that it would not be difficult to clear that low bar, but not only does it manage that, I found it a compelling, if frustrating game in its own right. If part of the question of asking where the current image of Yoko Taro comes from involves dispelling myths and common knowledge that has clung to this series like barnacles to a ship, this feels like the first point where we must resolutely stand our ground: the game (supposedly) without Yoko Taro is emphatically not worthless.

Drakengard 2 has something. I don't know if it entirely realises it, and I don't know if I always see it. But it's there. I feel it.

Let's start with the question of authorship, because it is, in many ways, the least interesting one. A brief glance at the credits will indicate that, contrary to popular belief, Yoko Taro did indeed work on Drakengard 2. He wasn't the director - that position being filled here by Akira Yasui, lead designer on the prior game - instead, he's credited under "Video Edit". I've attempted to find out what exactly this role entailed and have not found a clear answer, but if we take it on face value, it means that, at the very least, Yoko was responsible for editing the game's pre-rendered cutscenes. While this isn't the same kind of role as sitting in the director's chair, obviously, it remains a significant one - just ask Marcia Lucas, whose edit famously rescued Star Wars after a disastrous rough cut. With many of the game's pivotal moments happening in cutscenes, Yoko has a lot of input in how these moments are presented, and therefore, the effect that they have.

While I don't think it can be entirely dismissed, Yoko's change of hats is, I think, insufficient to "explain" why Drakengard 2 is "The Bad One" and to do so I think speaks more to an approach that works backwards from the assumption that these games are good because of Yoko Taro. One could also explain it by pointing to the addition of Fuminori Ishikawa as co-writer for returning Sawako Natori, and whose writing credits consist of, in their entirety, Dragon Quest remakes and spin-offs, and also this game, constructing a narrative from this point that the game's differences are a result of it being co-written by a veteran of Square Enix's arch-traditionalist franchise. Or, one could offer the explanation that the game's own team has in interviews leading up to the release of Drakengard 3: that Square Enix requested a more mainstream game.

The reflexive response for situations like Drakengard 2 is often to imagine that the creatives we like are responsible for the bits we like, and absolve them of responsibility for the bits we don't. It's an ugly, self-aggrandising practice that comes from a desire to defend our own feelings first and foremost. The idea that Drakengard 2 is bad because Yoko Taro didn't direct it is ultimately just a narrative that exists to support the idea that Yoko is uniquely a genius solely responsible for these games being good, one based more in pre-existing feelings than in the slim records that exist of this game's development. Similarly, if I were to make a claim that the stuff I like in this game is solely the result of Sawako Natori's influence, that would be equally speculative, based on little other than my positive feelings for her writing. Pick one to believe, if you like: just be aware that it's for your own benefit, more than anything else. All we have is what we know: Yoko Taro isn't directing, Squeenix wanted a more normal game, Natori is working with a Dragon Quest writer, and Drakengard 2 feels very, very different from the first game, and the nature of that difference is infinitely more interesting than speculation on how that difference came to be.

Drakengard 2 does not introduce you to its hero, Nowe, with him in the midst of slaughter on the battlefield with discordant noise playing. It introduces him strolling towards his final exam to join The Knights of the Seal, defenders of the land of Drakengard a conspicuous 18 years after the events of (something very like) Ending A of the first game. Nowe takes part in a trial given to him by his childhood friend, Eris, takes the exam, and flies off on his blue dragon grandad, Legna, to help the Knights do their Knightly duties. After Nowe meets the rebel leader Manah, the evil little girl from the first game now grown up, he becomes convinced that the Knights are up to no good, and goes on the run to break the seals and free the people with her, with Eris in hot pursuit.

What's changed here is not the story on a macro level: as we discussed in another timeline, the broad strokes of Drakengard 1's plot were deeply rote. Evil empire, magic seals, and a cult trying to summon evil gods. It was the cast that inhabited that plot, and how they were presented, that added the spice. The plot of Drakengard 2 is no more rote than that of the original game, but what has changed is that the characters aren't as immediately unhinged. Nowe is a naive, wide-eyed youth with a great destiny before him. Eris is his childhood friend with an unrequited crush on him. General Gismor of the knights is a moustache-twirling villain who usurped the Good King Oror, who helped raise Nowe until he died 3 years before the game started. Each seal is guarded by a one-dimensional boss with some kind of thin, ironic punishment they have paid for their power. Cliches like these don't necessarily lead to bad characters all the time - I actually like Eris a lot, as her seething jealousy towards Manah for Nowe's affections leads her to some delightful moments - but it's hard not to resent this comparatively bland cast for taking up so much of the air in the room: especially because this game does have sauce, it just asks quite a lot of patience from the player before it starts to reveal it.

After you've gotten through a few chapters and settled well into the rhythm of the game's structure, Caim, the original's protagonist, violently carves his way back into the narrative, in what surely must be one of the most memorable cutscenes of the series, bringing the style and tone of Drakengard 1 with him, like an invasive parasite.

(sidenote, the shot that reveals Caim's dopey sandals from the first game is so fun)

Caim was fun in Drakengard 1. He was memorable for a reason. However, I don't think he became truly special until Drakengard 2. Placing Caim as such a violent contrast demonstrates what the relative normalcy of the game up to this point buys you: the ability to portray a returning character from Drakengard is a legitimately alarming presence, a thorn stabbed right in the heart of what the game has been that can never quite be removed. From this point on, Caim becomes this nigh-mythic figure of violence that everyone in the conflict is afraid of, a returning spectre of the past that everyone was eager to paper over with claims that the hero of the war of the empire was not, in fact, an unhinged mass-murderer.

If this were all Drakengard 2 did, it would be effective, but only ever in the way Drakengard 1 mostly was: shocking and loud, and ultimately shallow. But this isn't all Drakengard 2 does. Caim gets genuine pathos; his love for Angelus is brought to the front and centre of his character, motivating everything he does. The relationship between the two is treated with immense earnestness. Angelus' longing for Caim despite not being able to fully recall him after two decades of endless torture as the Goddess of the Seal hits surprisingly hard, as does the death scene the two share, passing on together after finally reuniting.

Drakengard 1 was not devoid of sincere, emotional moments, but they were relatively few and far between, largely because the game's investment in the characters was...inconsistent. Even Caim and Angelus, the two characters closest to that game's heart, were treated disposably enough to allow Ending C to happen apropos of largely nothing. By contrast, Drakengard 2's sincere investment in these characters, in treating their feelings and desires not as aberrations to shock, but as coherent parts of a character that exist within a contradictory human being, just makes for a much more interesting story. Far from being a retreat from their ambitions, here we see a team that is maturing in their sensibilities, and recognising that there's more to discover in a song when you aren't playing it on max volume all the time. Drakengard 2 understands that dead baby jokes can indeed grow old. Unlike...never mind.

I just wish the game were better at convincing you to stick with it through its boring first half. It's one thing that General Gismor is a complete bore, and everything to do with the conflict between Nowe and him is utterly rote and tedious - the greater crime is the area where Drakengard 2 lives up to the fandom myths of this series more than the first game ever did: it pretty much sucks to play.

The macro structure of the first game remains: ground combat missions, air combat missions, and blends of both, where you can Legna in to bombard enemies from the skies. Nowe is much more mobile than Caim was, with faster attacks and movement, along with far greater mobility and dodge options, but fundamentally, you're doing the same kind of thing as the first game, but with the "quality-of-life improvements" one comes to expect from video game sequels, and like that phrase often implies, as much or more has been lost as gained.

Case in point, the way new party members are handled, as fully controllable characters you can switch to at will, each with their own movesets, strengths and weaknesses, would seem to be preferable to Drakengard 1 treating the extra party members as, essentially, temporary power-ups. In practice, however, it ends up being much less interesting. To encourage you to use the entire party, each enemy will have a specific character that they are weak to, and will take much less damage from attacks by the others. Nowe can easily handle the rank-and-file, for example, but struggles against spellcasters, encouraging you to swap in Manah, and they both do negligible damage to large monsters, so that's when you call in scythe-wielding Urick. This rock-paper-scissors system of hard counters doesn't create interesting decisions as much as it removes them: rather than looking at a situation and working out which character is best suited to handling it based on how they play, you just change to the "correct" character for each enemy that appears. The approach here isn't wholly without merit - I really like the moments when characters leave your party and you have to struggle against the enemies they are designed to beat without them, really making you feel their absence - but it makes for a game that is more arhythmic and frustrating than rewarding.

The bigger victim is, unfortunately, the air combat stages. There are fewer of them than were in the original, which is a blessing, because they are far worse. Gone is the heft that made Angelus such a wonderfully tangible beast to control: Legna has all the weight of the idea of a feather, zipping across the skies at speeds controlled entirely by the player, with practically nonexistent momentum. And with that momentum gone, so too are the satisfying dives and rises and bombing runs that were so satisfying to pull off with Angelus. Instead, Drakengard 2's air missions are mainly about parking yourself in front of an enemy and spamming the dodge and attack buttons. It's certainly easier. It's also shit. Frankly, if one wanted to argue that a Drakengard game was being deliberately abrasive to make a point, they would have a far easier time doing so with this game. But, no, unfortunately, much like I think Drakengard's gameplay is common to those in its genre at the time, the weaknesses of Drakengard 2 here are far more likely the depressingly common problems of the typical video game sequel, which are so often eager to mutilate themselves of their own texture, and call the wounds left behind "quality-of-life features".

I can't find it in my heart to blame anyone who gives up on the game because of this. Even by the time I started to sit up for the cutscenes (especially the ones that are presented as a series of still images with posed character models, like a voice-acted gmod screenshot slideshow. Utterly baffling aesthetic choice. I love it.) I was completely fed up with how this game played, and had to force myself through to the end. And while I'm glad that I did, I still long for a version of this game where the gameplay felt like it spoke to what the narrative was doing, rather than acting as a barrier in the way of it, because there are moments, rare moments, where it really does shine through.

Early on, when Nowe is still working for the Knights of the Seal, the scene that really begins to shake his faith in the organisation is when a group of prisoners on the fantasy equivalent of death row attack him while trying to break free. The game then cuts to regular gameplay, and you combo and air juggle these practically defenceless prisoners screaming for their lives, just the same as you would for any other goblin or ogre you face in the game. This is, plainly, an echo of Leonard's child-soldier slaughtering sidequest from the first game, and would in turn be echoed by...pretty much every successive game in this lineage, becoming more and more tedious and annoying with each reprise. But here...not only does it work, but I think this might be its best showing. The key is that the person doing the slaughtering isn't ignorant or uncaring of what's happening, or even just enjoying it like Caim would. Nowe is responding with clear distress to the situation, but does the job anyway, and as a result, comes out with some truly vile lines of dialogue, begging the people he's butchering to stop resisting and stop making him hurt them. The audible cognitive dissonance is not subtle, but it is nasty, curt, and good. One might even argue that it's the first bit of multi-dimensional satire in this series. Y'know. If they were so inclined.

It doesn't really stick the landing, of course - the great impact of this scene is about how it made Nowe feel bad, like American Sniper in Midgard - but it represents a maturation in this team's approach that I find difficult to ignore. Drakengard 1, for the most part, worked. But it worked on one level, for the most part. Drakengard 2 is trying for something different, something more ambitious, and it is floundering as much as it is succeeding. But in so doing, not only does it create moments like these that do work, but it lays the foundation for all the strongest stuff in the games to come, far more than Drakengard 1 ever did.

Once Caim enters the picture, and Manah suffers a PTSD flashback upon seeing him, it becomes clear that Drakengard 2 is a game concerned chiefly with parental abuse. Turns out, between games, Caim adopted Manah and spent a few years emotionally torturing a child to exorcise his own bad feelings around Angelus being taken from him. When she finally escaped him, taking his eye in the process, she repressed her memory of this time, only for it to all come flooding back as soon as Caim reappears. This too causes her to flashback to her pre-Drakengard self's contact with the Giant Stone Babies, or Watchers, as they groom her (and I used that word very deliberately; this game is quite clear that that is what is happening) and prey upon her need for affection. It's another instance where Drakengard 2 fleshes out a character that the previous game was content to largely play on a singular note, and while, again, I don't think the game nails it by any measure, engaging with this character earnestly rather than playing it as a joke is clearly the right move.

At the same time, Nowe's own foster father Legna becomes increasingly irascible as the back half of the game stretches on. While his grumpy grandad tendencies are played largely for charm and laughs in the first half, he becomes more and more possessive, controlling, and demanding of Nowe as the game reaches its climax, even outright insulting him at points. Eventually, it's revealed that Nowe, the biological son of Furiae's corpse, Inuart, and one of the white Seeds of Resurrection/Destruction from the end of the first game, has been raised by Legna purely so he can be used as a weapon for his own purposes. It's a bit more, uh, lore-brained horseshit than Manah's, but it's not without its moments, almost entirely coming from the sheer venom Legna spits Nowe's way.

I'm mixed on how the parental abuse theme resolves. Manah, for her part, undoubtedly gets short-changed by the script. Her brother Seere reappears for the game's final stretch, and despite the history the two share and the potential for drama there, they barely say a word to each other. It's clear something got cut here - there are a couple of lines that refer to events that didn't occur - but whatever happened, there's a conspicuous gap in Manah's already thin character arc. I've heard unsubstantiated claims that Seere was going to be the main villain of the game until that was cut, which honestly would have been perfect, but they are, as I say, unsubstantiated. What we get instead is Manah's trauma being used as a prop to motivate Nowe to jump into her mind and beat up her own inner demons, and save her. It leaves a very bad taste in the mouth for Manah to be completely without agency in the climax of her own character arc, especially since Nowe's spent the entire game up to this point yapping on about how much he wants to "save" Manah, an impulse not a million miles away from how the Watchers treated her.

All of this is just...kind of a mess. It has its moments, and has moments where it falls flat on its face. It's not helped by Manah's vocal performance, which stands out as poor even in a very weak dub overall. But again, it's worth noting that this is the kind of thing that NieR and Drakengard 3 would be drawn towards exploring over anything in Drakengard 1's approach. It marks Drakengard 2 as the crucial bridge between the two, a point where this team's style begins to solidify into something noteworthy.

Nowe, for his part, resolves his familial trauma the good old-fashioned way: turning into Super Nowe thanks to the power of True Love's Kiss and also genetic engineering, and flying off to fight his Dragon Dad's final form while Live and Learn plays. Well, I tell a lie. Of course, that doesn't happen. The actual song that plays is, of all things, Growing Wings, from Ending B of Drakengard. Yes, the discordant banger about Furiae's incestuous feelings for Caim is remixed here into an earnest, sad piano rendition, whilst keeping all the lyrics intact.

It's unexpected to hear the Fucked Up Incest Song reformulated into the Earnestly Tragic Incest Song, but I can't say it doesn't fit. After all, it's not necessarily obvious, but Nowe and Manah are technically cousins, and that doesn't stop the game from investing wholeheartedly into their romance. While not necessarily hugely notable within this genre as long as Fire Emblem still exists, it's still a clear shift from the prior game: treating with care and earnestness what the original game played for shock value, and as a result, having a much weirder perspective than the original's conservative and normative one.

This strangeness-in-the-skin-of-normality extends to the ending, which, despite ending with the big epic boss fight against Bad Dragon Dad, is strikingly bleak and cynical, even after 4 successive Drakengard 1 endings where everyone dies in horrible ways. After all the countless people who died over the course of the game, everything is put back the way it was. The system of sacrificing human lives to keep the seals intact remains, and another friend is made to endure the endless pain and chastity that is the Seal of the Goddess. Manah's revolution has failed, and the only thing different about the world at the end of the game compared to how it started is that it is a little bit emptier. Even when the world fell to the invasion of the Giant Stone Babies in Ending D, a player could take solace in the flattering notion that it was their fault that happened, that they did all that. Here, no such balm is offered. Nothing was accomplished. Game over. Thank you for playing! There are two alternate endings if you play the entire game over again on a higher difficulty, but already these feel like obligations, included out of the expectation that Drakengard should have alternate endings. The original ending is all you need, and it is as bleak as anyone could ask for. I really like it.

In fact, I like quite a few things in Drakengard 2. I don't know if I could stretch as far as to say that I like the game in its totality, but I undoubtedly feel a strange fondness towards it that grows with time. It's a game that doesn't always succeed, but it has the right ideas, and its heart is, generally, in the right place. It isn't for nothing that the abusive parents within are cast members from Drakengard 1: it is a game that views its own legacy with scepticism, one that implicates its predecessor, its perspective and limitations, within the violence that drives the narrative that tries to carve its own path for itself, and even if it failed, I cannot help but admire it. In fact, I might admire it all the more for having failed.

I don't know if I have any new explanations for why Drakengard 2 has the reputation it has. But I do have one thought, if you'll indulge me. One of the strangest parts of the ending sequence has only really become so with time, and it's captured my thoughts ever since I finished this game. See, it turns out that the target Legna has in mind for Nowe, once he's successfully been raised into a boy-shaped missile, is the Giant Stone Babies from Drakengard 1. The dragons want to reclaim their dominion over the Earth from the Watchers, and they're going to use Nowe to do it. There is something deeply striking about Legna demanding the cast engage with the Giant Stone Babies, because...this is how modern Drakengard/NieR fans talk. The Mysterious Watchers are the beginning and end of the lore entire - everything begins with them and ends with them, all speculation must be supplicant to them, and there is nothing more exciting to a NieR lorehead than a hint that the Watchers/Grotesqueries/Gods/Giant Stone Babies are involved. Caim and Legna already represented the past, and all the ideas it has for the present, in Drakengard 2, but with Legna in this moment, that narrows into a very specific idea of the past, an idea that has come to consume Drakengard in the public consciousness. The game’s penultimate chapter even sees Legna take Nowe through a spaceship, describing how his past and his future have been written by the Dragons in their plan to conquer the world and overthrow the Giant Stone Babies. Even if no one else wants to, Legna demands that everyone sit and listen to his lore explainer video. Whether through serendipity or observation, an extra dimension of discomfort is added to his blunt Bad Dad lines about how Nowe needs to shut up and obey him when his desires rhyme with the desires of much of the audience. In 2025, in a world fixated on that very same engagement with the Lore of the Giant Stone Babies, it questions the audience - the actual audience - more subtly and pointedly than any sequence of a protagonist massacring innocents ever could.

Maybe that was the real problem, all along. More than the less effective play, more than the frustrating story, maybe this is what really made people reject Drakengard 2 so completely. In a series that is often praised by fans for its willingness to reject conventions, it took a necessary step into the future, but in doing so, it necessarily rejected something that Drakengard fans held completely sacred: Drakengard itself.

If Drakengard 2 must be buried by history, then let that be its epitaph. Drakengard 2: the boldest, most subversive game in the entire series.

in the copied cathedral
ending b
this [b]e the verse