Yoko Taro Revealed. Part 1: Drakengard
The text version below is at your service, and for the rest – enjoy your viewing!
We live in a reality where few people are surprised by Japanese outrageousness, and any game from the Middle Kingdom is perceived with approving condescension. Yoko Taro is a new (and probably already 4 years the brightest) star of Japanese game development. The star is unique. He doesn’t even need to make good games to support his popularity. No matter what, he doesn’t have to release games at all. It’s enough to give witty answers in interviews once every six months and don’t forget to appear in public wearing the mysterious Emil mask. Oh, and also throw in a funny provocation in the style of “I’m only here for the money” and implicate the corporate ethics of Square Enix – tricksterism in the style of Morgenstern. His past is mysterious and legendary, like the story of his friend who fell from the roof, at whom little Yoko and his comrades reflexively laughed, looking at the poor man’s corpse. The ideal role model for an otaku of the 21st century: all this hidden and asocial recluse, into whose head brilliantly crazy thoughts come at night fueled by booze and anime. If you play his games, then you are ALREADY strange, not like everyone else.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to make Yoko look like a dummy right now. I myself am a fan of his, and even once wrote a naive, pretentious article about the “brilliant madness” of the Japanese Lars von Trier. It’s just that the media and fan circles have created an image so undeniably mythical that I wondered:
Why people love his games? They’re… weird? Standout? Postmodern? What are postmodernist? Okay, my point is that in this series of articles I will try to step beyond the established role of the creator himself and look at his games from a new, more detailed side. I watched all of Yoko’s GDC lectures, read several dozen articles, seven interviews and, of course, bought and replayed the entire NieR-Drakengard series. Each chapter will feature a new game and a new level of immersion in the life and work of the Tarot. It all starts, as usual, with Drakengard.
Drakengard
If we imagine the NieR: Automata hype explosion as a star, then Tarot’s debut game will be in the farthest orbit from it, in the very last rays of attention. No re-releases or at least immortalization in memes. Which is logical: the game has the reputation of being the nominal freak in the family – boring, clumsy and just old. There are very few materials on YouTube dedicated to Drag-On Dragoon (the original Japanese title), and in the Russian segment there is only one – this is an excellent review by RJ Reviews. So I will arrogantly take upon myself the burden of completely dissecting the game and, importantly, Yoko’s role in it. I will prove that Drakengard is good and self-sufficient, and it’s worth checking out even in isolation from much more successful sequels.
Let’s start with the pre-release stage. At the turn of the century, two Japanese game designers, Takamasa Shiba and Takuya Iwasaki, decided to make an Ace Combat clone, but only with dragons. Fortunately, the Cavia studio employed a person who had once worked on a flight simulator. The idea is not new, the Sega Saturn already had Panzer Dragoon – a rail game, but essentially very similar to Drakengard: at least take a look at the footage and compare.
Looking at these shots, you’re more likely to respect the time when the leap between console generations really meant something.
Anyway, Drag-On Dragoon remained in the state of a medieval flight simulator until the explosive success of Dynasty Warriors 2 – the first ever musou (or “kill a thousand Chinese”) game. The developers were delighted with the combat system of their colleagues and decided to implement it in their game. This turned out to be a rather fresh hybrid of a slasher and a flying game. Iwasaki was supposed to take the place of director, but due to his busy schedule, he nominated a young employee of the Cavia studio named Yoko Taro.
All that remains is to add the dragon and Caim skins – and Drakengard is ready!
All that remains is to add the dragon and Caim skins – and Drakengard is ready!
Taro initially had the position of art director. He was responsible for the dark tone of the game, which was supposed to be its trump card against the friendlier Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Having taken the post of director, Yoko decided not to waste the opportunities given to him and pumped up the plot of the game with his own vision. And this vision was a mix of fresh impressions from Berserk and Evangelion, love and hatred for the anime Sister’s Princess and interest in the series “24” with its non-linear narrative system.
The spirit of pranks began to penetrate into the game: when the Square Enix logo appeared, the voice of one of the characters pronounced the company name out loud; in the intro, a dragon swooped down on a crowd of knights, making the sound of a fighter jet. After the intro, the player was waiting for a talking start screen, shown at the beginning of the video. And this is all just before pressing the New Game button.
Under the leadership of Taro, the game became richer in terms of working with characters and script, and at the same time acquired selected shock content and provocative themes in the code bins. Fate decreed that the manager from Sony was too lazy to check what Cavia was brought to him for trial, and therefore the censorship of pedophilia, incest and cannibalism for Western players had to be censored after the end of development. Before we get to the fun stuff, let’s start with a basic understanding of the game’s plot.
The plot (or rather its basis)
The plot is ridiculously simple and, as they say, generic. On a fictional continent there is a war between the evil Empire and the good Alliance. The Empire’s goal is to destroy the MacGuffin artifacts called "seals". There are four of them in total: three are scattered around the world, and the fourth is hidden in a young girl named goddess. This girl (her name is Furiai) is also the sister of the main character, Kaim. Kaim is a stern warrior copied from Guts, taking revenge on the Empire for the death of his parents. One day, while defending the castle where his sister is hiding in battle, Kaim is mortally wounded. Bleeding, he encounters a dying dragon in the middle of the battlefield. The warrior has a special hatred for dragons, because it was the winged monster that once killed his family. The defeated lizard, in turn, despises people as stupid and powerless creatures. At such a critical moment, the two decide to give up their principles and make a pact with each other and thereby survive. The essence of the pact in the world of Drakengard is simple: a person exchanges hearts with a magical creature, after which both receive incredible power. There are, however, several nuances. Firstly, now the lives of those bound by the pact are interdependent, and if one dies, the other will die too. Secondly, the person makes some kind of sacrifice as the price of the pact. In Kaim’s case it is his speech. This is an elegant way to save money on a voice actor.
In the context of a mute hero, the dialogue mode of the game looks very good: in the character’s window, during his remarks, there is not an anime avatar hanging, but a fully animated face, either pronouncing phrases, or, in the case of Kaim, responding with facial signals to the remarks of his comrades. Cavia is definitely not the first to come up with such a system, but it looks appropriate in Drakengard. You begin to appreciate this little thing after the launch of the sequel, which has lost even this minor zest.
An animated window allows you to display even small nuances of facial expressions, such as sticking out your tongue. Drakengard 2 with dull anime avatars can’t afford this.
An animated window allows you to display even small nuances of facial expressions, such as sticking out your tongue. Drakengard 2 with dull anime avatars can’t afford this.
For the rest of the game, Kaim and the dragon fly around the world and unsuccessfully try to protect the seals. On the way, they meet a prude priest named Verdelet and suffer the betrayal of a friend, Inyuart, who, like Anakin Skywalker, was lured by the Empire to their side with the motivation “work with us and save your beloved.”. His beloved – Furiai. The girl herself faces an unfortunate end – through the hands of the maddened Inyuart, the Empire kidnaps her and kills her in order to break the last seal. Already in the first passage, the Tarot begins to slowly break the pattern, demonstrating its contempt for the “damsel in distress” archetype. In the end, the team of outcasts witnesses a partial end of the world, but still defeats the Empire, defeats the mystical Cult of the Observers behind it and, in order to save the world, the noble dragon sacrifices itself, becoming a new seal, and before dying, calling its name: Angelus. This is ending A, marking the end of the first level of perception of the game. Within these 6-7 hours, Yoko was restrained by the producers, but brought a template-breaking, albeit straightforward, but interesting story. Before we step through the credits, let’s talk about the gameplay, because its essence is revealed quite fully within one playthrough.
Gameplay (or rather an attempt to justify it)
Despite the fact that we are analyzing the game of Tarot, whose works are judged purely by the plot, I want to talk in detail about how Drakengard is played, and that it is played well. Seriously, if you read reviews from 2004 or modern reviews from newly minted Yoko fans, you can create in your head the image of a completely unplayable monster. But after two full playthroughs of the game I came to the following conclusion:
Remember the thesis that Yoko Taro’s games are examples of postmodernism? I didn’t say it as a joke or to show off. One of the most striking features of postmodern works is the lack of integrity. They are created by not creating from scratch, but by synthesizing various fragments of culture, references, borrowings, ridicule, etc. d. Drakengard’s gameplay mechanics are cobbled together from Dynasty Warriors and Ace Combat, as I said before, but this framework has been very thoughtfully modified. Not to be an idle talker, I played Dynasty Warriors 2. A unique experience. The game is more like an arcade game, albeit an addictive one. Still, musou gameplay is not my thing. Cavia isn’t shy at all about how much she’s "inspired" by Dynasty Warriors. With the mechanics of a casual two-button slasher, where one hero fights an entire army, everything is clear. But they even copied the interface with a natural kill counter and a timer, which the game doesn’t need at all.
Let me explain: for each battle in Dynasty Warriors, the player is given about one hour and forty minutes to encourage him not to fool around and complete the task. In Drakengard, any mission can be completed in a maximum of 30 minutes, but the pause menu will constantly remind you that the player only has an hour to complete it. This appendix can be attributed to references, probably. It’s like they forgot to remove it.
Even though Drakengard is just a copy, it plays better.
Firstly, Kaim can carry about a dozen weapons with him and change them directly in battle, and with each class of weapons, sword/sledgehammer/spear/dagger, you need your own approach and your own tactics when fighting enemies. Dynasty Warriors is literally played with three buttons, and the game hides any depth of its mechanics somewhere behind the long hours of gameplay. In Drakengard, from the very beginning, although timid, there was a hint of diversity. In the first hour you will run around the ground (from different angles), fly on a dragon in the sky and over the heads of enemies, wander through the corridors of the castle.
Secondly, the game has a dragon. You can fly around even the largest level in a couple of minutes on your indestructible lizard, simultaneously bombing crowds of knights until they scatter like insects.
In general, we must accept the fact that the character has only one form of interaction with objects on the level: murder. You basically have no other tasks. I won’t deny that after the first hour this rehearsal gameplay will begin to stifle, but it seems to me that Cavia did everything possible to make this carnage enjoyable to play. Try to accept the rules within which the gameplay exists, and gradually you will begin to like it. For Drakengard to pass, “you must first love it,” and I’m not talking about self-deception now. Having accepted the fact that you only have a hero, his dragon, weapons and a crowd of enemies, appreciate the opportunities that the developers have given you.
1. Try different weapons and upgrade newly found spears and hammers on weak privates. As I already said, each weapon really implies its own pace of combat and interaction with different enemies.
The weapon roster is available at the touch of a button. Each weapon has its own magic technique – there is room for experimentation.
2. Try to score a big combo, because here for a long chain of blows you will receive not abstract ratings, but tangible first aid kits, explosive spheres that will scatter enemies, and when you reach a combo of 100 hits, Kaim doubles his damage. And now an additional challenge appears in the game, forcing you to fight not only meaningfully, but also with interest.
There are rumors that https://nongamstopcasinosites.co.uk/review/aztec-paradise/ when you get a combo of 150+ the biggest bonus appears, but I couldn’t do it (
3. Feel free to resort to the help of a dragon – he is great at clearing large crowds, while giving the player a break from ground battles with their mundane scale.
4. Don’t forget to call for help from the partners you meet in the story – you can play as them, which adds additional variety to the combat system.
The partners have rather boring combos, but very strong magic techniques, and even with special effects!
The partners have rather boring combos, but very strong magic techniques, and even with special effects!
The partners have rather boring combos, but very strong magic techniques, and even with special effects!
But will you get used to the camera a la Resident Evil 4 – the question is. It works like a typical crappy 3D camera from an era when developers still haven’t figured out how to work with two joysticks. As someone who has completed Resident 4 about five times, I greeted this crutch like an old friend. It has some of the classic charm inherent in many games of the 6th generation of consoles. And during a pause, you can rotate the camera – a small thing, but nice.
Despite the fact that Taro and the team took Dynasty Warriors as a basis, they did not forget to make fun of it. In an arcade slasher game, grinding hundreds of bobbleheads does not evoke any emotion, but in Drakengard the plot context appears. Kaim’s comrades constantly comment on his cruelty and do not understand why he would kill so many people. Yes, this can be perceived as an application for military issues in the style of Spec Ops: The Line, but here I see open mockery of the situation when the gameplay of musou is placed in a more or less adequate context. Yoko himself spoke about this in an interview:
“I was looking through a lot of new products and constantly came across messages like “You defeated 100 opponents!“ or “Finished off 100 enemy soldiers!“There was something subtly malicious about them. That’s when I realized that being proud of killing hundreds of people is strange. That is, you are already a serial killer if you have killed so many people! This seems crazy to me."
As a result, despite the fact that Taro’s creations are associated with the expression “purely Japanese arthouse”, Drakengard turned out to be much more accessible to us, a westernized game in the musou genre in terms of its spirit and mechanics.
As for the dragon flying gameplay based on Ace Combat, the changes are much less radical, except that Cavia still tried to show the difference between a fighter and a living creature, much more flexible and mobile. The dragon can turn on the spot, quickly dodge, and accelerates by repeatedly flapping its wings. Otherwise, no one bothered to break what works. If you reach the very end of the game and open one Easter egg, you will see how close dragon flight is to airplane flight.
Yoko Taro and his madness (and an adequate approach to game design)
Actually, this is why people come to Drakengard and NieR. In the first two parts, I told the stages that you have to go through on the path to the cherished revelation. Despite the fact that in his debut project Yoko was in the position of a controlled executive element, he was able to get the most out of his pretty crazy head, filled with fetish ideas. In order not to expose his idea to the auditors from Sony and Square Enix, and also not to scare away a random player, he accelerates the author’s vision to its fullest only after a conditionally good ending A. This approach was inspired by Evangelion, which in its first half seemed like a standard mecha anime with fan service only to deconstruct the genre completely later.
Tarot began by reworking character archetypes. Originally intended to be a standard power hero, Kaim was turned into a madman. For a simple reason: a person who lays down 50 corpses per minute cannot be adequate, as we talked about earlier. Furiai, a typical girl who must be protected and received at the end of the game as a prize, from the very beginning of the game seems to be deliberately uttering mocking phrases like “I shall not die”! I am the seal!", but in the end he still dies. After the first ending, it turns out that Furiai is in love with her brother, just like in a typical anime. One of these inspired Tarot for this move – the Sister’s Princess harem. I hope everything is clear from the title. Inyuart completed the Anakin Skywalker story arc two years before Revenge of the Sith.
If the base for the main characters was created by Iwasaki, then the partners are entirely the creation of Yoko Taro. The first is the good-natured villager Leonard, before whose eyes his little brothers were killed. Not only does he turn out to be a pedophile, but he also enters into a pact with a stand-up fairy who makes jokes about the deaths of children. By the way, the second partner, Ariosh, dreams about killing children. The evil elf was once an exemplary mother, but after the death of her family she found a new goal in life – to shred every child she sees. The boy Sira, her third partner, becomes her desired victim. His mother died at the hands of the Empire, and his twin sister became possessed by the head of the Cult of the Watchers. Sira as a character seems to me the most profound – he is consumed by a guilt complex due to the fact that his parents loved him much more than his sister. Most likely, it was because of this that her heart opened to universal evil. On the one hand, Leonard, his fairy and Ariosh give me the impression of types created purely for the sake of pretension and showing off. Taro seemed to create them with the goal of being “different from everyone else,” in the spirit of a student director who wants to become great and films provocation for the sake of provocation. On the other hand, pedophilia and infanticide are phenomena of our world, not a fantasy one. And what can I say, in the end the truth turned out “not like everyone else”. By the way, the characters’ lines still came out a little weird. Screenwriter Natori later said that she cringed wildly when she heard the actors voicing the phrases she and Yoko had written.
I won’t retell endings B, C, D and E so that it would be more interesting for you to go through it yourself. I’ll take a look at how to get them. The segmentation of a postmodern work is manifested not only in borrowing, but also in its structure. In Drakengard, like Joyce’s Ulysses, a single plot is replaced by fragments, from which the player is free to put together a picture or not. The game is divided into chapters, and chapters into verses, and some verses have alternative versions that open under certain conditions and lead to new story events. The narrative takes on a spatial form – between chapters of the game you can move around the map, and the passage of time becomes quite conventional. After ending A, the linear movement of the story ends, and the player has to collect the pieces of the plot puzzle in the form of alternative verses that appear. This is the only way you can get to all the content that is in Drakengard. This approach is wonderful in its versatility: if you don’t want to bother, beat the game to ending A and don’t stress. If you are interested in diving into the world of Tarot, you still have half a game ahead.
You can progress through the plot shards in the style of a cartographer or archivist.
You can progress through the plot shards in the style of a cartographer or archivist.
I was a little surprised when I found out that Yoko Taro gives lectures on not only plot, but also game design. Constantly being within tight financial limits, he perfectly mastered the art of creating creativity from limitations. In his games he always strives to create a feeling of freedom. I will go into more detail about the thesis of freedom in subsequent videos, but the principle of Tarot game design is already observed in Drakengard. What is freedom in games? The ability to go anywhere? Huge worlds filled with content? In part, yes, but for Yoko, freedom in the game lies in the feeling when the player discovers possibilities in the game that he himself was not initially aware of. For example, secret levels in the very first Mario or the entire map of New Austin appearing in the second half of RDR 2. Let me explain with a diagram.
Imagine that the circle is all the content that is originally in your game. Freedom lies not in the volume of the circle, but in the ability to step beyond its edge. Good developers understand this and give the player this opportunity, be it a secret level, a new location, or a second campaign for a different character. Yoko Taro doesn’t have the money for such an expansion. Therefore, he proceeds more simply, creating the first boundary of perception already inside the finished circle. Now the game initially looks more modest, but crossing the cherished edge brings the same cherished feeling of freedom.
Imagine that the circle is all the content that is originally in your game. Freedom lies not in the volume of the circle, but in the ability to step beyond its edge. Good developers understand this and give the player this opportunity, be it a secret level, a new location, or a second campaign for a different character. Yoko Taro doesn’t have the money for such an expansion. Therefore, he proceeds more simply, creating the first boundary of perception already inside the finished circle. Now the game initially looks more modest, but crossing the cherished edge brings the same cherished feeling of freedom.
Drakengard, being originally a 25-hour game, places the primary limit of freedom within the first ten hours. The player thinks that he has seen and tried everything in terms of plot and gameplay, but stepping over the first frame, he finds himself in a world of new opportunities, new locations and new story content. Drakengard is based on truly wise and thoughtful game design, which only evolved in further Tarot creations.
Music
Music is the most irrational and arthouse thing in the game. There is no melodic biblical tragedy of Okabe yet, here is pure sampled madness, constructed by composers Nobuyoshi Sano and Takayuki Aihara. The intro also sounds like a banal heroic melody, another trap from Cavia. The cutscenes play, although psychedelic, very pleasant synth sounds, reminiscent of Yamaoka. But the speed recorded for the gameplay sets the mood of infernal monotony worse than the permanent game mechanics. It’s also difficult to listen to him, he literally echoes the clanking of steel and the tramp of soldiers. As time passes, the soundtrack begins to wildly glitch and break into samples. If you are looking for an unusual musical experience, this is the place for you.
Nobuyoshi Sano fits into the role of a madman much better than Taro. This is a photo from a concert where he played random samples for half an hour and fell into a trance from what was happening.
While watching the credits, one of the reasons for this sound is revealed: the music is actually sampled from the works of Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mozart, Wagner and Mussorgsky. It turned out to be a real experimental miracle. Yes, it’s impossible to listen to this apart from the game, but there is definitely cultural and historical value here.
And the OST also has very beautiful covers! And they are not in good quality.
And the OST also has very beautiful covers! And they are not in good quality.
As a reward for fucking your ears, Ending B features the game’s theme song, Growing Wings. Be sure to listen – this is an incredible combination of melodic female vocals with accompaniment from the same torn samples and reversed audio effects. The song creates an impression similar to the game itself: such an unusual approach can cause confusion, but in the end it is very difficult to break away from the overall beauty. And this is another stone in the garden of the sequel – they rewrote Growing Wings, making it a regular flat cantilena to the accompaniment of piano and strings. Handsome guys, you can’t say anything.
It seems that this is all I could find and think about the first Yoko Taro game. A strange game, but beautiful in its own way. You don’t have to be crazy to play Drakengard, just have good taste. I think this is what Yoko meant when he said his now legendary phrase about “strangeness”:
“I make normal games for normal people. However, in the end, these games are liked by strange people, who call my games strange."
Drakengard is simply a good game that hides a non-standard approach to history and game design. It was created by people who clearly love their work and give their best.
Even the publisher worked on Drakengard, albeit motivated by potential profits. The game may not have a “final” budget, but it clearly has an adequate budget. Distribution at the same level: the same localized manual is not only useful to read, but also pleasant to look at. By the way, don’t be too lazy to find it at least on the Internet and read it before passing it – you’ll learn a lot of useful things about the characters and game mechanics. The game was even advertised on TV – I found the trailer in the archives. And yes, I don’t know if you are aware or not, but the first Drakengard actually had a mobile version, in the style of a typical Gameloft craft in Java, of course, but this is an excellent indicator of how much the publisher invested in the game. This Square Enix bet resulted in a neutered Drakengard 2, but we will talk about it in the last spinoff video.
The mobile phone even has an original soundtrack, only compressed into 16 bits.
The mobile phone even has an original soundtrack, only compressed into 16 bits.
Thanks for reading! Next time I’ll talk about the "real" Drakengard sequel, how Yoko Taro grew older and wiser, how he met one of the best Japanese composers and how he stole all the ideas from the best game ever.
You can blame me for the poor quality, but the very fact that I found a fap pic of the first Drakengard deserves respect XD
Best comments
I was expecting some kind of pass-through blog based on the name, but it turned out quite well. I don’t agree with everything, of course. The gameplay in Drakengard is still a little stuffy, and the music does have a certain effect. The only thing I would like to highlight that was not mentioned (perhaps the respected author will tell you this later) is the mood of the game. Drakengards (I can’t vouch for Nir, I just passed it automatically) like to envelop me in some special, unusual state. And talking about the first DoD, he makes you get stuck in the atmosphere of Caim’s madness. Repetitive gameplay, strange music, the plot structure itself. And honestly, I’ve only seen something like this in Drakengard 3.
Thanks for the article, it was nice to read, despite the rather boring vision of Tarot games, but maybe it’s just me, living in this community for the second year. I’m looking forward to the next part and in particular the conversation about the threequel “Drag the Dragoon”.
I offer for your acquaintance!
Finally found out who this Yoko Taro of yours is and why everyone is talking about him. I didn’t know about the series that the respected author talks about and didn’t even suspect such an interesting world and characters. I hope to learn more on this blog.
Mower in the studio!
Drakengard is simply a good game that hides a non-standard approach to history and game design.
I would disagree a little. Drakengard is an extremely impressive work, especially if you open all the endings, but here’s how the game is… My first game is still in the top 1 of “games that I really liked, but that I would not recommend to anyone”. Because the gameplay there is very amateurish. It is more captivating not because of its gameplay, but because of its darkness and atmosphere. Well, and more music. The musical mayhem at ending E is still one of the most out of tune things I’ve ever heard.
Certainly not what is written here. And definitely not this game. And this is a plus, because at its core, postmodernism is a simple show off and laziness to work through anything. Yes, very often this results in a lack of integrity – due to the lack of cause-and-effect relationships.
Kaim was turned into a madman. For a simple reason: a person who lays down 50 corpses per minute cannot be adequate, as we talked about earlier.
Such reasoning is alien to postmodernist authors. It is precisely the attempt to rationally imagine (and explain) a person stacking enemies in reality that is the antithesis of postmodernism.
They are already doing stuffy stuff, but there is no deep meaning in it)
I don’t agree. The first DoD is a stuffy game. Stuffy and rehearsal. But this is the case when these descriptions are a plus, not a minus. Or rather, it’s a plus if you are ready to accept the rules of the game and, so to speak… suffer.
The game has a very unpleasant atmosphere, you are in the company of unpleasant characters who do unpleasant things in an unpleasant world. And the stuffy gameplay contributes to this.
Quite a strange experience, of course, not everyone would want to do something like this. But for me personally, a person who tries to get an experience from games that no book or watching a movie can give, I really like this approach.
Tarot has said more than once that games provide unique ways of conveying experience that are impossible in any other media format. These methods should be used. It’s a shame that so few developers understand this.
Great blog, I’m really looking forward to the continuation)
Friend, for an interesting blog, keep the pics in good quality (;
Last author: ラスペ (@akin999)
It’s a shame that so few developers understand this.
Well, that’s good, otherwise they would have made something stuffy.
Gorgeous. I’m looking forward to the continuation
That is, Yoko has money to draw butts, but he creates everything else “out of limitations”?
And what does wise game design mean?? Complete the game ten times on the same levels with minimal differences? This is not smart game design, this is an attempt to stretch out the passage time.
In general, if a game doesn’t give you all the content in one playthrough (I mean story content), it’s a bad game.
