The first exposure to Square Enix this year was actually in a movie theater and not on a console. Sitting through the preview commercials before 21 Grams, I saw the trailer for Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on the big screen. Only a day or two later, a preview disc of the company’s spring lineup rolled in, featuring two playable levels of Drakengard and trailers for Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time and Final Fantasy XI. So, uh, let’s look at what the Drakengard demo has in store…

In Drakengard, the young Lord Caim learns that his kingdom is under attack from the Empire, who wish to capture his sister Furiae for some sinister purpose. Backed up against a corner and greatly outnumbered, Caim finds the only means of fighting back against the Empire is to form an alliance with the Red Dragon, a member of the species that killed Caim’s parents and have caused great hardships throughout the land. In this unholy alliance, Caim gives up his voice and his soul in return for the Red Dragon’s help, who needs Caim just as badly to stay alive, although he won’t admit it. Together they slaughter thousands of troops in the two levels available to play, although sampling just two levels with a single character doesn’t explore even a quarter of the final characters, events and modes that will end up in the game.

Players start out on the Red Dragon’s back, firing flame projectiles, occasionally busting out a super move (a very impressive swirling flame attack) or using maneuvers to dodge the troops’ attacks. Controlling the Dragon feels much like Panzer Dragoon, with the same general maneuver skills, but the emphasis seems to be placed more on action than graceful flying. Enemies try to kill you from the ground and from the air, and in order to provide the gamer with a different experience, you can do the same thing; tapping the Select Button dismounts Caim from the Red Dragon and sends him falling down to the battlefield, where the gameplay switches into more of a Dynasty Warriors mode. Lead enemies are marked as principal targets, but massacring everyone leads to more experience points. Caim can use a whole host of selectable weapons to slice and dice; when the going gets very tough, he can also use some magic or simply press the Select Button again to re-mount on the Dragon and fly off to relative safety. This provides an interesting variation to the gameplay, since fighting on the ground goes far slower, but sometimes is necessary in order to assassinate specific, hard-to-reach targets.

The game is being produced by Cavia Inc., an upstart featuring employees from several successful franchises, and distributed by Square Enix. Although they aren’t directly developing the title, Drakengard curiously features a graphic style very similar to the Final Fantasy games. The characters have the same wispy, somewhat effeminate appearance, including mysterious tattoos and a penchant for peculiar weaponry. More whips appear in the CGI cutscenes than Ben Affleck’s bedroom. Also, since the game carries an M rating, it can afford to get stylishly bloody and uses this gore to great effect during the many battles.

Within the context of the demo, Drakengard showed off its epic proportions but also revealed a few things that will hopefully be improved on before final release. I doubt the voice acting will change much, but right now the voicework is more in line with other Japanese-to-American ports, meaning sometimes awkward casting. On the visual side of things, massive battles often left enemies popping up as the Dragon soared closer, since the draw distance seems pretty limited. The story also was missing from these two levels, but piecing the plot together from the Japanese art book and various press releases leaves me assured this won’t be the case in the final release. Over an hour of CGI movies have to tell some story, right?

In a bit of random news, here are some Square Enix release dates fast approaching:

2/9/04 Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles – After a long wait for Square Enix to get reattached to Nintendo, the company shocked the gaming world several years ago with the announcement of an exclusive RPG for the system. You can bet we’ll have a review soon after release in some shape or form.

3/2/04 Drakengard - While the preview disc says ‘Spring 2004’ for the release date, EB Games had a bit more specific date for the game previewed above. Hopefully this date sticks, but ‘Spring 2004’ contains several more months the release date could possibly shift to without Square being dirty, rotten liars.

3/23/04 Final Fantasy XI - The game already landed on PC’s to moderate success, and for a while it seemed like the PS2 Hard Drive was doomed to vaporware. But a real release date has been posted, and the bundle of FFXI and the drive for $100 might be low enough to drive Sony’s new addition into many new homes.

6/08/04 Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time - Meanwhile, another game listed as ‘Spring 2004’ on the preview disc seems to have slipped into mid-summer. Then again, the preview was in video form only, and still had Japanese text and interface, so perhaps this doesn’t come as a surprise.

That’s it for this edition of The Square Enix Report. The company did some great things last year, including the surprise hit Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy X-2. With any luck, this year will follow suit. In May, E3 2004 ought to provide some large clues as to what franchises in the Square and Enix vaults get the next-gen treatment, now that the two RPG titans have combined forces. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this might be a new action-RPG along the lines of Vagrant Story, but we shall see.