A lot of my video game reviews take cult classics or marginal examples of the medium and inject enormous meaning into them in a way that is bound to read as satirical or sarcastic. There is some limited and specific truth to that, but nonetheless, today’s review of Dragon Rage is different. It is an unfinished PS2 game originally set in the Might and Magic franchise setting but pushed out to the console despite successive rounds of hobbling. It is not good, it has no particular vision, and the few places where it engages with subjects of value it does so thoughtlessly. Nonetheless, it is interesting. We can learn some things from it. So I will be exploring it.

The central idea: In Dragon Rage, Dragon’s have been subject to slavery and butchery for over a thousand years. The way this is presented rhymes with Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey somewhat, except here the dragons have been known to be most useful in death since 1000 years before the start of the game, rather than this being discovered at the immediate start of this game. This is somewhat incoherent simply for what it implies about the resource management skills of their captors, but we will get to that.

Aesthetically and thematically, chattel slavery, concentration camps, King Leopold level colonial butchery, and other very extreme threats to the existence and welfare of a people are invoked here. It is not earned. One can absolutely address these themes within the aesthetic limitations of a cartoon or other vulgar medium. The Last Unicorn is one of my favorite western animations of all time, and expresses an abstract version of this through the plight of a mythical species without ever risking bad taste. Samurai Champloo, an anime that aired on Adult Swim, competently engages with the plights of both the Ainu and Ryukyu people in present day Japan. Neither of these works fixate permanently on melancholy or sobriety, and Samurai Champloo in particular is pretty consistently slapstick.

But here the handling is bad. People are not having fun despite themselves, by tapping into primal viciousness, as an act of defiance, or to provide contrast or anything like that. The writing and voice acting just doesn’t appreciate that the opportunities to have fun in this scenario are contextually limited and could only ever take a few, very specific shapes.

Aesthetically this game is also just bad. If it had been directly, concretely about any real troubles, it would be offensive on this basis alone. When people have an intense relationship to suffering, they want that suffering to be beautiful. This can edge into unhealthiness of course, but it is intensely understandable, it is worth honoring. One therefore thinks that to the extent an abstract representation of this general sort of thing is sincere, it should be invested with that kind of energy, and it is not here.

But back to the setting itself: the game speaks of 1000 years in which dragons were farmed for a magical mineral in their blood, being used for forced labor in the interim. 1000 years is about three times as long as most civilizations on earth. Of course, races of humans have much more longevity, with Italians outliving the Roman empire, the Chinese outliving imperial China, Egyptians outliving the Egyptian Dynasty, and so forth. Nonetheless, the longevity of this in-game brutality is noteworthy, and risks forcing us to invoke and examine the Chomsky quote about how some slaves in the Antebellum south received more value in compensation than their free descendants. (I also looked up the longevity of species. It is quite a bit longer, tending to last at minimum one million years).

It is strange to imagine brutality lasting longer than civilization. It should not be strange. But then, if a Hobbesian state of nature, red in tooth and claw, is our frame of reference, the fact that a species tends to last one million years within it’s natural conditions of liberty, such as an animal has them, is a strange thought. Here we have an “Orc Bureaucracy”. It is not well managed from what we see. It has lasted three times longer than most human civilizations. It has done so while being based entirely on systemic violence. The possibility of anything like this in real life is abjectly terrifying and in my heart, absolutely real as a risk, requiring eternal vigilance. Yet the conditions that could cause it are obviously very narrow, if they are real, because a casual invocation of the idea as seen here is catastrophically incoherent.

It’s my own baggage, but dragons as outsiders consistently lends itself to projecting certain demographics into the dragon semiotics for me. When the only other main character is a scantily dressed Pixie, that narrows things down slightly further, or adds some intersections. But this work is not worth claiming (The Last Unicorn conversely is obviously, immediately ours).

The main dragon character, Cael, does not speak until the very last scene of the game. He does so after ensuring the perpetuity of free dragons, and in the presence of dragons. This could be chauvinism, but he speaks to someone of another race when he speaks. He has had a bad time for a very long time though, and as an outside viewer it is quite meaningful and correct to note that speech often comes after healing. The events of the game also involve immediate betrayal by another race. There is no way in hell this is textual, but the one trace of meaning that could be externally assigned here is the catastrophic labor of learning to trust and to speak after living entirely within trauma since birth.