The Man With the Grin and the Boy Raised by Dragons

There is a cutscene in Drakengard 2 where a man steps out from behind a line of guards and cuts all of them down in a single slash. He does not announce himself. He does not explain who he is or why he is there. He simply appears, moves through the guards as though they are not especially relevant to his day, and grins. The grin is the whole character — not the satisfaction of someone who has won something but the expression of someone who finds this particular kind of work genuinely enjoyable, who has been doing it long enough that the guards are not even interesting anymore, just necessary. I watched that cutscene and needed to know who this man was. That need sent me to a different game entirely. It is perhaps the most effective thirty seconds of character introduction I have encountered in the genre.

The man was Caim — the protagonist of the first Drakengard, appearing as an antagonist in its sequel. I am writing about the sequel because that is the game I played first, the game that made me curious about its own history, the game most associated with this series on this site. Coming to a franchise backwards — through the sequel, through a character who belonged to an earlier story — turned out to be a specific and interesting way to experience a world that was built on exactly that kind of layered history.

The Series That Came From Nowhere

Drakengard was released in 2003, developed by Cavia — a small Japanese studio that had worked primarily on support roles for other developers and had not previously made a game of this ambition or darkness. The director was Yoko Taro, whose subsequent career — Nier, Nier: Automata, Drakengard 3 — would establish him as one of the most distinctive voices in Japanese game design, a developer whose games used the medium's specific properties to say things about violence and meaning and the player's complicity that no other medium could say in quite the same way.

Drakengard 2 arrived in 2005, made by the same studio with a partially different creative team — Yoko Taro directed only under supervision, and the result was a game that softened many of the first game's harder edges in favour of accessibility and a more conventional hero's journey. Fans of the original largely considered this a failure. For someone arriving at the series without the weight of that comparison, it was simply a game — and a game with specific things to recommend it that the criticism had obscured.

The Boy Who Learned to Be Human from a Dragon

Nowe is Drakengard 2's protagonist, and he is genuinely unusual in the specific way that protagonists who arrive with an unusual premise occasionally manage to be — not because the execution is flawless but because the premise itself carries weight that survives imperfect execution. He was raised by a dragon named Legna after being found as an infant. He grew up in the dragon's company, learning what it meant to exist in the world from a being whose relationship with existence was fundamentally different from any human's. He is, when the game begins, a young knight who carries the specific quality of someone who has learned to perform humanity rather than simply live it — who knows the rules and follows them because the dragon taught them to him, not because they emerged naturally from years of human community.

This gives Nowe a sincerity that most action RPG protagonists lack. He is not naive in the way of characters who have simply been sheltered from difficulty. He is naive in the way of someone who has been given a framework for understanding the world by a source that was genuinely trying to prepare him for it — and who is now discovering that the framework does not account for everything the world contains. The dissonance between what Legna taught him and what the world actually is drives the game's best character moments, and the dragon's own relationship with Nowe — protective, complicated, carrying an agenda the game reveals slowly — gave Drakengard 2 an emotional centre that criticism of its conventional plotting had obscured.

On Dragon Back Across the Battlefield

The dragon flight stages were the first thing Drakengard 2 offered that felt genuinely different from anything else available on the PS2 at the time. Not technically — the hardware was showing its age, the enemy sprites were repetitive, the stages were wide but not visually complex. What they offered was scale. Flying across a battlefield on dragonback, watching the formations of enemy soldiers resolve from the height and then breaking through them in a single pass, produced a specific feeling of consequence — that you were not a person fighting in a war but a force that could change the war's outcome by being present.

Most RPGs begin you as someone slightly above average — stronger than a common guard, weaker than the first significant enemy, gradually accumulating power across a long progression that ends with you being capable of fighting gods. The dragon stages of Drakengard 2 inverted this. From the opening you were riding something that could incinerate armies, that moved through the battlefield with the specific physics of a creature that had never needed to worry about the things on the ground. The power was not earned across the game — it was given immediately, and the game built its identity around what it felt like to have it.

The Ground Combat and the Weight of Crowds

What kept the game interesting between the dragon stages was ground combat that did something most action RPGs of the period did not — made crowd size feel consequential rather than merely numerical. Fighting dozens of enemies simultaneously in most action games produces a kind of management problem: which enemy to prioritise, how to avoid damage from the ones you are not currently hitting. Drakengard 2's ground combat produced something closer to momentum. Moving through a crowd with the right attack rhythm created a chain of impacts that built on itself — each enemy knocked back or cut down creating space for the next attack, the whole sequence feeling like a single fluid action rather than a series of discrete engagements.

The satisfaction was physical in the way that good action game combat is physical — felt in the timing, in the visual feedback, in the specific connection between your inputs and what happened on screen. The enemies were not tactically interesting. The challenge was not intellectual. But the experience of moving through them correctly produced a pleasure that was entirely separate from strategy — the pleasure of a system working as intended, of the gap between your character and everything between you and your objective closing with satisfying efficiency.

The soundtrack was part of this. Each stage's music was calibrated to the combat's rhythm in ways that became apparent only after several hours — the specific escalation of certain tracks matching the escalation of crowd density, the quieter moments of traversal accompanied by something that suggested tension without delivering it yet. Drakengard's series had always taken its music seriously, and the second game's score was one of its clearest inheritances from the first — an element that the change in creative direction had not compromised.

The Grin and the Game It Led To

Caim's appearance in Drakengard 2 is brief and deliberately incomplete. The game assumes you have played the first — his history, his pact with the dragon Angelus, the specific darkness of what he is and how he became it — and offers none of it to players arriving without that context. What it offers instead is a character whose presence communicates everything through behaviour alone. The way he moves through the guards. The absence of hesitation. The grin that is not triumph but something closer to recognition — here is the thing I am most at home doing, here is the version of myself that requires no effort to maintain.

Playing the first Drakengard after this appearance meant experiencing Caim's story in reverse — knowing the endpoint before the beginning, watching the game build toward a person I had already met at his most reduced and most honest. The first game is darker than the second in ways that become legible only gradually, that require a tolerance for discomfort that the second game's more conventional heroism had not prepared me for. I did not finish it. The brutality accumulated past the point where curiosity was sufficient motivation, and the stage I could not complete became the place the journey stopped.

But the curiosity itself — sparked by thirty seconds of a man with a grin cutting through guards in someone else's game — was worth the journey. Not every game needs to be finished to have meant something. Not every character needs to be your protagonist to leave a mark. Caim did not belong to my story. He belonged to an older, harder story that I glimpsed from the outside and could not fully enter. That glimpse was enough. It was more than enough. It was the reason I came to understand what Drakengard was, and what it was trying to be, and why a boy raised by a dragon and a mute warrior with a grin existed in the same world — one the last remnant of what that world had required, the other the first attempt to imagine what it might become instead.