When Silence Speaks Louder Than a Trailer
Square Enix has not said a word about Drakengard in years. No teasers, no anniversary posts, no cryptic tweets from a producer hinting at something “exciting.” Just silence – the kind that fans of a franchise learn to interpret in their own way. And right now, that interpretation is sending a noticeable wave of players back to NieR: Automata, the 2017 action RPG that sits at the spiritual and narrative edge of the Drakengard universe.
It is not a coordinated campaign. Nobody announced a replay drive or organized a community event. The drift back to Automata is organic, driven by a mix of nostalgia, boredom with the current release calendar, and the particular psychological itch that comes from loving a franchise that shows no signs of moving forward. When there is nothing new to anticipate, the instinct is to return to what already exists – and what exists in this case is one of the most emotionally punishing games of the last decade.
The Drakengard Family Tree, Briefly
Drakengard launched in 2003 as a dark fantasy action game on PlayStation 2, developed by Cavia and published by Square Enix. It was strange, violent, and deliberately uncomfortable – not the kind of game that chased mainstream approval. Its 2010 sequel, NieR, branched off one of Drakengard’s endings and built something tonally different but equally bleak. Then came NieR: Automata in 2017, directed by Yoko Taro and developed by PlatinumGames, which turned the series into a global phenomenon. Automata sold millions of copies, earned a reputation as a rare case of video game storytelling that genuinely earns its philosophical ambitions, and introduced a generation of players to the broader Drakengard lineage.
The last mainline Drakengard entry was Drakengard 3 in 2013. That is over a decade of quiet. NieR: Automata received a remaster update and a stage adaptation, and NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139… arrived in 2021 to revisit the original. But the Drakengard name itself has not moved. No remaster. No sequel. No spin-off. For a franchise with the cult following this one commands, that absence is loud.
What Sends Players Back
Franchise silence is a specific kind of fan experience. It is different from a game simply being old. When a series is actively dead or officially concluded, there is closure. But Drakengard and NieR exist in a liminal state – Yoko Taro is still at Square Enix, still active, still occasionally speaking in interviews through his signature mask persona. The franchise is not dead. It is just… waiting. And waiting with no visible endpoint produces anxiety that manifests as engagement with existing material.
NieR: Automata is unusually well-suited for this dynamic because it is built around multiple playthroughs. The game actively requires players to complete it several times to access its full story, and each run recontextualizes what came before. That design means returning players are not simply replaying – they are often catching things they missed the first or second time, reading environmental details differently, or sitting with endings that hit harder on a third visit. The game rewards the kind of obsessive attention that franchise anxiety tends to produce.
Community spaces on Reddit and Discord have seen a steady uptick in posts from players announcing they are “going back in.” The tone in these threads is consistent: someone finishes their current game rotation, looks at their library, remembers they have been meaning to do another run of Automata, and dives back. The absence of a new Drakengard announcement is not the stated reason in most of these posts, but it hangs over the conversation. Players discuss what they want from a new entry, what they hope Yoko Taro is planning, and what the silence might mean – all while running through the Copied City again.
This pattern is not unique to this franchise. Namco’s silence around Tekken has pushed fans back to Tag Tournament 2 in a similar fashion – franchise loyalty with nowhere forward to go tends to loop backward. The mechanism is the same: when anticipation has no object, it converts into retrospection.
What Square Enix Is Probably Weighing
The business case for a new Drakengard or NieR entry is not straightforward, even with Automata‘s commercial success. Automata worked partly because PlatinumGames handled the action design while Yoko Taro focused on narrative and world construction. That collaboration was not a given – it required the right partnership at the right time. Replicating it, or finding a comparably strong development partnership for a Drakengard revival, is a resource and scheduling decision that Square Enix would not make lightly.
Square Enix has also been in a period of internal restructuring, selling off several Western studios and refocusing its portfolio. Where a Drakengard title fits in that recalibrated strategy is genuinely unclear. The franchise is beloved but niche, and niche requires either a modest budget with appropriate expectations or a prestige commitment that justifies the investment. Neither path is simple.
Yoko Taro’s own public statements have been characteristically evasive. He has mentioned ideas and expressed interest in continuing the world, but nothing that constitutes an announcement. His communication style makes it nearly impossible to read franchise direction from interviews – he is as likely to claim he wants to retire as he is to hint at a new project, often in the same breath. That ambiguity is part of his persona, but it does not give fans anything concrete to hold onto.
The Waiting Game Has Its Own Value
NieR: Automata does not suffer from being revisited. Its themes – cycles of violence, the weight of memory, what it costs to feel something in a system designed to suppress it – do not wear thin with familiarity. If anything, returning players tend to find the game sadder on repeat runs, not less so. The story is structured so that knowing the ending changes how the opening feels, and that recursive quality gives the game a staying power that most action RPGs cannot match.
The fan art, the analysis threads, the YouTube essays, the speedruns – the community around Automata remained active long after the initial release window, and it is showing renewed energy now. Whether Square Enix is watching that engagement and factoring it into decisions about the franchise’s future is unknown. What is clear is that the community is not waiting passively. They are keeping the fire going themselves, and the question of how long that sustains without a formal announcement is one the publisher will eventually have to answer.
