Let's Play Drakengard - 28 - Companion's Eternal Farewell

Channel:

Rants of Oz

Subscribers:

34

Published on August 28, 2021 8:00:02 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjyTXVyuI2s

Game:

Drakengard (2003)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 25:23

19 views

3

Let's play of the 2004 cult... classic? Drakengard! The progenitor of the Yoko Taro madness that eventually came to spawn Nier Replicant and Automata. Here we see where it all started, and can perhaps gain an appreciation for how far this series has come... If we manage to endure the experience while maintaining our sanity. Make no mistake: that is no easy task. Drakengard is not for the faint of heart, or the overly critic of gameplay mechanics. Join me in this wild ride to have our spirits crushed and our minds broken! No one stops now!

In this episode we get the head-canon ending and stumble upon controversial opinions.

Hey viewer! What's up? How about we have a terrible time and discuss game design... and value judgement! This is a pretty difficult, and contentious, topic... but I'll try my best to bring my opinion (and that's what it is, an opinion) across in a coherent way.

To start things off: My time is INFINITELY more valuable than any game designer's intention. Time is the only factually finite resource in our lives, and games that don't respect my time don't respect my existence, and therefore don't particularly deserve my respect in return. If you can't extend an olive branch to this first principle, there is nothing else I can say that will mean anything to you; feel free to start writing your rage comment and calling me a scrub and demanding that I "git gud" or that I took a shortcut and gained nothing. Have a blast.

I didn't always think this way, but as I walk my steady way to being 40 years old, my appreciation for how my time is spent and how I have to divide it among work, family, responsibilities, relationships, being a functional human being, pleasure, and everything in between, gets increasingly discerning. I respect my own time a lot more now, as opposed to when I was a teenager and thought it was super cool and satisfying to spend 7 hours trying to clear a stage in the highest difficulty of Devil May Cry using only a level 1 Ifrit (the fist weapon).

The other cornerstone of my general attitude against game difficulty is something that I mentioned briefly in the video, but would like to expand upon: For me, for something to be "hard", for it to be "difficult", it has to be worth something. Getting a PhD is hard, raising a child is hard, becoming a proficient musical instrumentalist is hard (or dominating any other profession, be it either physical or intellectual). Things that take years of discipline and dedication and upon completion bestow upon the world some sort of benefit are hard. Games cannot, by my definition, be hard. Something that you struggle through for 5 hours or a couple of days is not difficult, it is a minor annoyance in the overall grand scheme of life. Moreover, I don't believe there is any intrinsic value to being good at games. It is a thing that does nothing. And if a thing does nothing, is it ever really a thing? I love games, and I'm a vehement defender of games as art, so to say that playing them holds no value at all might be a weird thing to say, specially given that games are primarily an interactive medium... but I mean to say that they have no intrinsic value to any given player a priori. They have value to their creators, obviously, and we as players attribute value to them once we are engaged. I love Drakengard. I love Nier. I used to love Final Fantasy before Nomura took over and fucked everything. I love engaging with those games. But I have no attachment to, say, Call of Duty, Watch Dogs or Fortnite. These games simply EXISTING means nothing to me. It would only hold value if I attached it to it. And I also think it's worth pointing out that, in general, I don't play games to be annoyed... But then again I am doing a Let's Play of Drakengard, so there is some deep irony here.

Regardless, this attribution (or not) of value to subjects that are external to us is a debatable topic. Do we change as humans? Are we changed by our perceptions? Are our tastes inherent? Is taste even an actually subjective thing? This is not about answers, but about understanding the question. Do you value games because they are actually valuable to you? What is the value that they bring? If every game stopped being difficult would you just stop playing? I'm actually really curious about that last one. Let me know in the comments!


---
Series playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1j6AHk2E-1Oq2pahNUABcqHVy98HWuE

#letsplay #drakengard #yokotaro

Other Statistics