One of the decisions Yasui made was to make Drakengard 2 far more colorful than the previous game, wanting to do something that was the "opposite" of Drakengard. In contrast to the previous game, the game contained far less of the mature themes found in the original. Shiba, speaking in a 2013 interview, said that the reason for this was that Square Enix, the company's Japanese publisher, wanted that aspect toned down to make a more mainstream game. It was designed to keep some dark aesthetics from its predecessor, with the previous game's theme of immorality as one of the key character and narrative themes, as well as themes of war and death. Other themes explored were love and hate, and the ambivalence represented in the world's prevalent factions (the Knights of the Seal, and the Cult of Watchers). Highlighted aspects of the story were the father-son relationship between Nowe and Legna, and how Manah had matured since the events of Drakengard. To promote the game in Japan, Fujisaka created a light-toned joke advertisement under the name Angelegna, referring to the original names of the two dragon characters. While Square Enix published the title in Japan, they entered an agreement with developer and publishing company Ubisoft to publish the title overseas. Ubisoft also handled the game's localization. Character design One of the main concepts for main protagonist Nowe was surpassing one's father. For the fight between Nowe and Legna, special gameplay functions and mechanics needed to be created for Nowe. Shiba had mixed feelings about the final fight between Legna and Nowe, which he saw as a drastic change from both the first game and the series mechanic of the protagonist riding a dragon. Shiba ended up writing their dialogue to emphasize their relationship and the difficulty of them fighting each other, paralleling earlier scenes between Caim and Angelus. The deaths of Caim and Angelus was intended to be "short and ruthless", but Yasui had it changed to the more sentimental version present in the game. Dialogue from Caim for the scene was cut from the game due to it clashing with his previous portrayal as a mute. Urick was created to be the supportive "big brother" of the party. Although the main characters were designed by Fujisaka, the character Legna, previously known as the "Black Dragon", was designed by Taro Hasegawa, who was also monster designer for both Drakengard