Drakengard

Drakengard began in 2003 as a grim, dragon-riding action game with branching, deliberately upsetting endings, and it has spent two decades growing into something stranger. Its real legacy is the NieR offshoot, which director Yoko Taro spun out of one of Drakengard's bleakest endings into its own acclaimed series.

This collection stays entirely within games, but it captures a single authorial obsession: melancholy worlds, unreliable narrators, and stories that reward replaying to see what you missed. NieR: Automata is the breakout, a philosophical action game about androids that reached far beyond the cult audience the earlier titles attracted. Read in order, the lineage shows a creator refining the same morbid, meta ideas across falling sales and rising reputation, until the spin-off eclipsed the series that birthed it. It is one of gaming's clearest cases of a B-tier oddity maturing into something quietly major.

The Drakengard franchise spans 8 games in the CrossBinge catalog.