These Japanese game making people are strange men and women really, aren't they. Their imaginations must be fuelled by hat-stands and tuning forks, for their ideas are just a little bit out there when it comes to creating characters, visuals, storylines, and, well, anything really. Lets look at the evidence: Anime. Anyone who has seen Demonseed, Devil Man, Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend, Read or Die, The Guyver, Evangelion, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Perfect Blue, Ghost in The Shell, Akira, Metropolis, Golgo 13: The Professional, or even Bubblegum Crisis, Dominion Tank Police and The Fist of the North Star (to name but a few) will notice that they're not quite…normal.

Games are no different. The Japanese come out with some seriously bizarre and original games, some of them great, some of them legendary, some of them just plain weird. Drakengard looked like a normal enough game; dragons, armies, swords, kind of like Final Fantasy meets Dynasty Warriors. In fact a lot like Final Fantasy meets Dynasty Warriors. It's not really surprising when you find out that the developers are fundamentally the same as those who make the Final Fantasy series (Square Enix, previously just, er, Square). The result of this unholy marriage is an epic game of both battlefield hack 'n' slashing and soaring through the skies on the back of a dragon, mixed in subtly with a hint of RPG.

For those of you who never played the first one, there are two main modes of play. Air missions involve flying your trusty dragon, Legna, through open skies shooting down anything from airships to giant floating cubes that fire laser beams at you. Dragons have heat seeking fireballs, as we all know, and a simple targeting system allows you to select several enemies before unleashing a torrent of flaming magma that automatically home in on their prey. The dragon itself is surprisingly nimble and can parry left or right to avoid fire, turn 180 degrees (very handy in a dogfight) and thrust itself forward at great speed. As you progress, the dragon evolves, giving you more powerful attack, defence and magical abilities, as well as being able to lock onto more enemies in one go. As your dragon evolves its appearance also changes, although that can only be a good thing, as it starts out looking like a genetically disfigured creature created when a giant rat got drunk and in its confusion made love to one of Boy George's old hats.

Ground missions involve running around battlefields, caves or citadels and cutting down enemy soldiers like an angry, starved beaver in a pine forest. As you frantically bash a combination of two buttons, you guide the sword swinging form of Nowe through countless victims. There are dozens of different weapons to unlock, each one complete with a different set of movements to tackle your enemy with. Long swords tend to come with longwinded attacks but have devastating range as you swing them around your head in a cyclone of doom. Short swords are better for quickly breaking an enemy's defence, getting up close and personal and performing a frontal lobotomy. Other, more exotic weapons include scythes, pole-axes and pikes, and as you use them they increase in power, unlocking more combinations.

If you find yourself under too much pressure in the field, as long as there's open air above you, simply summon your dragon and from your privileged position reign a fiery death upon your foes. This does sound like a rather unfair advantage, but magi and archers will make life very difficult for you. There are also magical attacks that you can perform in this situation, causing your dragon to swoop down on pathetically overwhelmed soldiers, tearing the life out of them much like the Nazgul attack on Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King. You know, with the swooping, and the killing, and the maiming of the helpless victims and the, oh never mind.

Visually the game is gorgeous. The design of the characters, the costumes, the weapons and the dragons themselves are all stunning, and the pre rendered videos are tantalisingly good. These are all hallmarks of Square really; if you look at any of the Final Fantasy titles they are all synonymous with great storylines, FMVs, characters and battle systems. So when they made this, they were obviously going to bring a lot of those elements to the table. The way the characters are animated on the battlefield is really cool and light effects that come from the swinging sword and magic attacks fill the screen with intensity. It's what keeps you hammering the buttons and praying that the wave upon wave of hapless soldiers is never ending.

This game has tried, since its predecessor, to take the game away from simply hammering the attack button to perform countless combinations and tackle your foes. Instead, it mixes the gameplay up a little, forcing you to block more and engage certain enemies in a much more tactical fashion. Certain soldiers have a very high defence and very powerful attacks; the key is to spot the opening in their armour and strike at just the right moment. The characters themselves can dodge, parry, lunge and thrust their way through a mission and certain enemies will test them in every conceivable way before the game is done. Various magic spells combined with infuriating archers, huge monsters and hundreds of sword fodder foot soldiers throws numerous tactical conundrums at the player, making it far more involving.

As far as the plotline goes, I'm still undecided. It borders between the epic you would expect from Square, and well, complete ridiculousness. Set some 18 years after the first game, the land has dried up and a deadly poisonous mist hangs across the districts, each of which is controlled by a magical seal, the seals in turn protected by a society of knights. The lieutenants that control the respective ranks of knights at each district were recruited, it would seem, from the various lunatic asylums that dot the land; as you meet them they become more and more excessive and flamboyant. It wouldn't matter too much, but the actors employed to do the voiceovers, through the medium of which most of the story unfolds, are terrible. They may well be talented and I don't want to insult their families, but some are far too over the top and some of them deliver their lines with all the poise and grace of the cast of Days Of Our Lives. The female lead sounds vacant, the male lead sounds pre-pubescent and the dragon sounds like a geography teacher. It's a struggle to bond with and support the characters, and they're not bad enough to be entertaining in that capacity, so you follow along more to find out what happens next in the madcap storyline and to see the next pre-rendered video.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope. The lead character from the first game, a gentleman called Caim, who lost his voice and apparently an eye, returns. As the story unfolds, so does his role in the events yet to come and it becomes apparent that his intentions are not what they were 18 years ago. Gone is the smouldering, silent hero; instead we confront a grinning psychopath and in the silence is his dragon, calling to him from the darkness of her prison. It gets pretty intense and those who played the first game and who know the power that Caim had and the fate that confronted him will be perched firmly on the edge of their seat to find out what he's up to and when he's going to unleash proverbial hell.

I had mixed emotions about this game when I first played it; I was expecting the epic ferocity of the last quarter of the first game and having that pace reduced to the crawl of the tutorial stages in this sequel was painstaking. I almost put it down. In fact, if I didn't have to write this review, there's a good chance I would have done. I'm glad I played through that though, because once I did, I began to remember how addictive this game is. It's more than the sum of the elements that make it, it's the overall spectacle you experience when you play it for long enough. It's just so different and refreshing and varied. The balance between the RPG elements, bashing the buttons, watching your character decimate legions of soldiers, flying a dragon at high speeds through what seem like hundreds of deadly flying cannonballs whilst launching a tirade of flame in return, a spectacular (if somewhat convoluted and badly acted) storyline and superbly directed and animated short FMVs; it's enough to help you overlook the appalling dialogue, the long-winded speeches and the outrageously outlandish characters. Admittedly, it helps if you're a fan of the Final Fantasy franchise and Dynasty Warriors (and its clones) because it pulls no punches on the far reaches of fantasy stakes. It will stretch your ability to suspend disbelief to the very limits, but if you stick with it, it'll take you on one hell of a ride.

I know Drakengard 2 won't be for everyone; hell, I'm a bit of a sucker for Japanese craziness, but those of you reading this in the hope that the sequel lives up to the original know who you are. This game does live up to the original and expands on the universe in a way that won't disappoint. It's more of the same plus one - you've just got to stick with it for a while until the action really picks up. For those of you looking for a new action RPG to get your teeth into, this is a great game, but if you want to get into the series, then play the original first, as it will disappoint you if you play the sequel and then go back. For those of you who are lost and are looking for the Halo 3 review, I'm afraid you're far too early and in entirely the wrong section, but not long now, eh.

Reviewed by Jim Powell for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).