the second best-selling game of June behind Sega's GBA port of Mushiking: King of the Beetles. It eventually sold just over 206,000 copies by the end of 2005. The game was eventually re-released as part of Square Enix's Ultimate Hits series, re-releases of high-selling titles. Drakengard 2 received a score of 30/40 from Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu. The game received "average" reviews, according to video game review aggregator Metacritic. The story received mixed to positive reviews. IGN's Ed Lewis said it "admirably [continued] the bizarre and fantastically medieval world that was established in the original game.", while GameSpot's Greg Meuller called it "Interesting [...] with plenty of twists and turns". Eurogamer's Simon Parkin cited the story as being very good, though he found Nowe "a little nauseating to watch as the weighty, dark (and pretty good) plot unfolds", and VideoGamer.com's Adam Jarvis called the story "one of the highlights of the package". The 1UP reviewer called the "clear undercurrent of "maybe the good guys are the bad guys,"" one of the main reasons to keep playing the game. In contrast, the reviewer for GameTrailers called it "a cookie-cutter RPG plot" where players could "predict nearly every plot twist the game throws at [them].", The graphics received mixed reviews. Lewis called them "more interesting than the first game, but marginally so", and Meuller called them "dated", with environments seeming "bland and drab, and the enemies [looking] generic". The GameTrailers reviewer praised the character animations, but cited the environments as bland and felt that there were too few FMVs and too many game engine-driven cutscenes, which he described as "awful". Parkin criticized the game's graphic capacities, commenting that players would "stop watching the main screen instead fixing upon the little map in the corner to guide your character towards hostile red dots that only materialize polygonal just seconds before you lock swords.", while Jarvis said that it had not improved from the previous game and called the colors "very murky, drab and dark". 1UP said that the graphics "[don't] hold up to the visual quality of Cavia's other titles like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex [or] Naruto: Uzumaki Ninden". The gameplay was universally criticized. Parkin called the battle gameplay "lightweight" and the balance between ground and aerial combat poor despite a good character leveling system, while Lewis described it as being without strategy, with the game "just dumping in more