I somehow missed a sad bit of news last week: cavia [sic] ceased to be a going concern. Happily, most of the developers are still employed, as it sounds like the majority of the studio's employees were absorbed into parent company AQ Interactive. While this isn't the most shocking studio closure in history, considering cavia's uneven (to put it kindly) track record and general profitability, this is one that hits close to home.
Cavia took a lot of contract work, pumping out Playstation 2 games with suspect anime licenses. This kept the lights on and the capital flowing into their original intellectual properties - not entirely unlike WayForward, a studio whose profile rose significantly after Scribblenauts' surprising sales. Cavia, alas, had no surprising successes, critically or commercially. I guess Neir seems to have attracted a cult following - deservedly so, considering how wildly ambitious and varied it is - but no developer can survive on cult hits when the HD console space's cost of entry is stratospheric.
So why mourn the passing of this studio? Why should those responsible for Bullet Witch and Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance get any postmortem respect?
A lot of my feelings are divorced from reason, I'll admit. They stem from a simpler time in my life, when all a game needed to impress me was a sweet dragon. As a child, I just loved dragons. I no longer carry such passion in my everyday life for the mythical creatures, but if I see a $4 copy of some game I'd never heard of that obviously is about dragons, I'm buying it. Cavia developed exactly that kind of stupid impulse purchase dragon game, and it was called Drakengard here in America. Maybe I got it in 2005? In any event, to me this PS2 game was an unknown, mysterious thing, dangerous and enchanting. I had no idea what kind of game I was to be playing before I slammed it into my system, and I still don't know what I had gotten myself into.
Seeing the SquareEnix logo cheered me immediately - there's a company that releases high quality games, usually. Formulaic, yes, but quality. And then the cavia logo found its' way onto my television. I liked the name of the studio - even a usually infuriating affect of a company not capitalizing their title, flying in the face of how I expect proper nouns to be presented to me - and I liked the logo: clean, with a stark black/white/red color scheme.
The game is a Dynasty Warriors knock-off. I say this with no enmity - Dynasty Warriors is hugely popular in Japan, and any sane company would try as hard as it could to exploit the market. No matter how much we clamor for innovation, a well made knock-off is what we will spend our money on. This Dynasty Warriors knock-off takes place in some fantastical world with dragons and civil wars and faeries and boulders and lute playing ninnies. There's a princess, who might be a god, or something, and you control her brother (I think he's her brother, but they also imply something incestuous between them, or maybe they're related by marriage... it was all very confusing). About ten minutes into the game, Caim (our protagonist and playable character) merges his soul with that of a dragon. This costs him the use of his voice, further complicating matters of exposition and plot development. The dragon talks to Caim using some kind of telepathy, but everyone hanging around the dude can also hear what the dragon's saying, so maybe sounds are being produced though the magical markings on Caim's tongue, maybe? Oh, and once the dragon starts talking, it sure doesn't shut up. Much of the conversation is philosophical in nature: the dragon asks Caim 900 times why he is such a murderous bastard. Because Caim cannot answer, the discussion grows tiresome. Very, very tiresome.
Drakengard tries to spice up the hack-and-slash-and-hack-some-more repetition common in all Dynasty Warriors clones by inserting a motherfucking dragon into the fray. At nearly any moment, hitting select will summon your flying friend. Caim can mount the dragon (heh) and fly across these preposterously large maps to another area lousy with evil, just incinerating legions of enemies ill-equipped to handle a goddamn dragon. Later in the game, magicians and trebuchets will provide overpowered countermeasures to this death from above, ruining a lot of the braindead fun.
Breaking up these large scale battles, some flying sequences happen. These are reminiscent of those open boss battle levels in Star Fox 64, filtered though Panzer Dragoon's lock-on mechanic and general love of dragon riding. The game, surreal enough as it was, achieves a sort of transcendent nonsensical atmosphere here. My personal favorite moment: when the dragon is attacked by what appear to be flying dressers or silverware cabinets.
I would have loved Drakengard had it not been for one absolutely crippling flaw: the game is sloooooooooow. This fantasy universe must have tremendously heavy air molecules. Caim, a fit young warrior by any standard, is not much of a runner. The glacial pace of this game, a game that absolutely requires some serious manic energy to work, slaughters much of the potential fun.
Which is a shame, because -- dragons! And magic! And a story so confusing it entertains on a basic, campy level! Also: it was clear an insane amount of work went into constructing this bleak, nihilistic fantasy world.
There's something like 80 weapons Caim can acquire, each with a lengthy backstory you can read in between missions. If there's a thing you can do in the game, chances are experience can be earned by doing it. The RPG elements are laid on inelegantly, but with such enthusiasm it doesn't matter. Caim levels up. The dragon levels up. Each individual weapon levels up. The spells associated with each weapon level up. It's impossible to keep track of all this, and ultimately futile - the default sword is about the only thing to use, because by the time the rad lances and maces are acquired, these new, sexier weapons are too underpowered to be of much use. Momentum is the utmost concern during the Dynasty Warriors bits - chaining a few hits together will grant Caim the ability to unleash a powerful thrust capable of knocking to the ground foes nearby. The default sword, having been in use for more of the game than any other weapon, will inevitably be the most momentous weapon available.
Drakengard 2 significantly sped things up - yay! - whilst gutting much of the intriguing story elements - boo! Crucially, the game engine and graphics were not updated or improved up one iota in the intervening 3 years between the games. While the budget for the first game must have been at least moderately large (there's quite a few impressive CG cut scenes), it's pretty clear almost no money was spent making the sequel.
So Drakengard (called Drag-on Dragoon in Japan, which is a much more amusing name if nothing else) holds a weird place in my heart. So does Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a fully functional PS2 third person shooter from Japan that most definitively does not hold up today, but had wonderful pacing and some neat mechanics for the time.
The greatest product cavia produced, however, wasn't exactly a game - it was a tool, a fairly powerful and affordable tool, for the Nintendo DS.
The KORG DS-10 is a fully functional synthesizer modeled after the MS-10, complete with four different emulated drum machines and the ability to use the touch screen to simulate the KAOSS Pad, all for $30 bucks. There's some serious limitations to the software: the step sequencer is basically Fruity Loops, only not as good; while the program emulates two synthesizers, each one is monophonic, so chords are out of the question; because the DS is not a multi-touch screen, the KAOSS Pad is not fully functional; the interface, while classy and modeled after the MS-10, can prove slightly more cumbersome than one may desire; you can't change sequences while they're playing, which is a huge bummer... it's still just $30, one tenth of the price of an entry-level KAOSS Pad. And the emulation of the MS-10 is unreal, coming from a DS cart. While I haven't personally found much use for it in my own musical compositions, mostly because I don't know how to properly deploy flanger effects on the busted ass drum programs I hesitate to say I "compose," it's still a lot of fun to play around with.
So yeah, cavia. I have more things to say about both Bullet Witch and Neir, but those need their own posts, written at a time when I'm less tired.
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