Drakengard 3 is an experience like no other and in so many ways it's a downright masterpiece.

The way that it tells its story and how it strangely makes you care for the characters through the different routes & endings is something special. How all those branches come together to give you small pieces of information on this world & this story. From the bigger picture stuff with Accord and the connection to the other DrakeNier titles, down to the smaller scale, self contained story of Zero, the intoners and their servants. It was an amazing experience and was also enhanced even further by the incredible soundtrack. Keep in mind, the story isn't perfect, as some characters are a bit underdeveloped (the DLC apparently fixes this but I didnt play that yet...), but it's still an extremely impactful narrative with a thematic throughline that hits all the emotional peaks that it needs to and it does so in a way that can only be done within this medium, while also trying things that I've never seen before in a game...

But talking about the medium, it is still a game, and sadly it's not great to play.
I still found myself having fun and it's a major step-up from the original drakengard but it's still lacking. The level design is extremely repetitive, the combat is clunky, there are awkward difficulty jumps, it feels unbalanced with some weapons being completely useless, the sidecontent is just repetitive missions inside reused areas, your companions feel useless in battle, and I could go on but in conclusion, it kinda just plays like shit. Especially because on top of all this the game has terrible performance with a ton of screentearing and you're lucky if it hits 30fps for more than a few seconds. (it somehow never crashed tho)

But despite the gameplay issues I'm glad that I played it myself, I doubt that this game wouldve impacted me in this way if I just watched it. So even with the flaws, and even if it's hard to recommend, this game is pretty fucking incredible... but it has a few too many flaws for it to get 5 stars

Played on RPCS3 at 4k 60fps, so no performance issues on my end.

The gameplay's better than Drakengard 1, for sure. The lock-on is more competent, but because of the increased size and movement of enemies, and the way they're mixed and match, you'll probably have a harder time seeing. There's also a perfect-block thrown in, and certain encounters basically force it to be mandatory. Bosses won't sit still for your combos without doing one, and it instantly puts an end to the ridiculous poise and defense-buffs possessed enemies get. Normal combat escalates quite a bit in difficulty. The side-missions unlocked in branch D all but necessitate the infinite blood outfit (which in turn gives you infinite use of the game's powered up mode which speeds you up, slows everyone down, and increases your attack quite a bit).

The weapon system returns, but getting them is quite easy this time. Instead of having to hit arbitrary and cryptic sub-mission goals, they're in chests lying around at all times, given for side-missions, or bought in the store. Upgrading them is a monstrous chore though. Instead of it just being based on kill count, it requires an unnaturally high amount of gold. You will be grinding for a long time if you want this done.

Dragon combat, I'd say, is a downgrade. Instead of the flight-simish combat of Drakengard 1, you're either in basic rail-shooter stages or in simplistic faux-action combat with a generous lock-on.

The story, once again for a Taro game, reveals itself as secretly interesting if you can stick it out. The first branch was rather miserable to me as it was just antisocial anime-dialogue getting spewed by a bunch of stupid people for hours. It made me appreciate the dull medieval fantasy storytelling of the first game in hindsight. Eventually, you find out a weird robot can manifest hypothetical branches where things turn out differently, and this robot basically trial-and-errors you into branch D so you can actually succeed with your goal. This kinda meta-storytelling renders every ending equally valid in a way other "open to interpretation" stories don't by highlighting the divergences so literally.

I did want to go over the rhythm section that closes off Branch D. It's weird to compare it to the similar section that ended Drakengard 1. It's "easier" as far as the patterns go, but it's grueling as far as its length and timing those inputs. I thought it was pretty fun, but I like rhythm games a lot. YMMV

I don't think it gets interesting enough to justify the curious, but there are certainly worse B-games to play through.

2/5

Acho q esse é um exemplo perfeito pra mim do que é um jogo meio merda, mas que eu amo demais, acho que ele é mais divertido do que o primeiro drakengard, mas a narrativa não chega perto de superar, talvez porque a proposta também não seja a mesma e no geral eu prefiro um dark fantasy cabuloso memo HOWEVER ainda é interessante, o jogo vai construíndo aos poucos as relações dos personagens e demora bastante pra simpatizar com eles (isso não é um defeito pq eles são todos uns imbecis mesmo), exceto o Mikhail, infelizmente o jogo não roda tão bem e continua repetitivo (apesar que todo musou que eu joguei foi repetitivo), e tem alguns fanservices que eu não curti, o humor é de cabaço e tem uma hora q só resta rir mesmo pq é um humor bem merda, mas consegue comover com suas partes mais sérias e principalmente no último final, quero um novo drakengard p ontém make it happen

Just finished Route A, so far I fucking love this game. Besides the enthralling story, and charming elements of insanity, the music is top tier, and the art style helps make up for the lack of detail in the world and graphics. Game runs smooth on emulation, and it elevates the combat to be much more engaging. Despite the simplicity of combos, the system of switching between weapons, dodging, and hitting rewarding parries makes for a pretty fun, mindless gameplay loop. The side missions are pretty dog though.

The story. Fucked up ending, almost made me tear up some, but I know it's only just getting started. Found myself extremely attached to Mikhail and Zero despite their fucked up relationship. I know there is more to Zero's mission so I am excited to learn about how fucked up this game can get. Gonna play through the sister prologues and other routes, come back with a final review. Would love to learn more about Four, and I heard Two's was pretty fucked.

So I played Drakengard 3 for about 7 hours when I was sick and in bed... and it is chaotic in the best sense of the word. I liked the pre-rendered backgrounds and wish there were more of them. I also liked the facial animations, and I think the game would be better if it had more close-ups of the characters.
In the end, I got tired, but I thought a lot while playing. From the moment I started the game, I liked the violence that the main protagonist inflicts on his enemies. It's chaotic violence, reflected on screen by the same kind of chaotic violence that's input on the controller: left trigger, square x4, triangle x2, jump, left trigger, right trigger, dpad up, change weapon, jump, triangle, square x5-7, triangle, left trigger, right trigger... and that's how a fight usually goes. It's a mashup of musou and hack'n'slash. It's so convoluted, and even at low framerates it's fun and it works, because the combos are simple but effective, and sometimes the enviroments adds to them.
But since the game's mythos is based on songs... I kept thinking about songs and where the ending could be heading to. So somehow I started to wander into what my intentions would be in writing or making a work of art. This problem has a name and it's motivation: "Why am I writing for? Is it because I want to open everyone's eyes by force or surprise?" No, I don't have any desire to be a self-imposer. I don't want others to hear a song that contains what I desire or what I've seen in the past - a song like that would make others want something, anything, and that's not my intention. In the end, I resolved that the kind of art I would like to make is the one where I try to prevent an image, to make a gaze avert or look for an image or vice versa, to actually take something into the future, or to make others dream or wake up... That's not always clear.

I've become quite the Yoko Taro fan over the past year or so, even more so than I already was after beating Nier so many years ago. Drakengard 3 was the last of his console games I had not yet beaten, and given that my significant other also wanted to start up this game recently, I had the perfect opportunity to both play through it and also compare notes with her~. I didn't end up getting all four endings (for reasons I'll elaborate on later), but I got three of them! It took me about 35+ hours to beat all but the very last stage on the Japanese version of the game.

You play the role of Zero, an very powerful fighter on a mission to kill the five Intoners who brought peace to the world with their appearance some decades ago. Or did they? During the opening, almost Zelda-like introduction to the game's world, the scroll you're being read from is stopped by a blood-stained sword piercing the heart of the narrator, also known as Zero's first (on-screen) kill. The other Intoners are named One, Two, Three, Four, and Five, and Zero is their older sister. They call her a betrayer, and she's clearly a bad person, but the Intoners themselves don't seem exactly like good guys either. Drakengard 3 is a story that begins with an unreliable narrator and takes quite a few twists and turns in how it leads you through the game's several endings.

Though it's called Drakengard 3, this is both technically a prequel but also an ultimately totally self-contained story. It's also a Yoko Taro game, so of course it has multiple endings, and it also plays with the multiple endings in a variety of ways similar to other Yoko Taro games, but most similarly (I'd say) to Drakengard 1. Unlike Nier (the original), there isn't really much replaying of content, and it's more like there are branching paths the story can take, and you'll see those branches effectively displayed as extra chapters once you beat the game's main 6 chapters (with branches B, C, and D effectively being chapters 7, 8, and 9). They do reuse old maps, but you go through them in different ways and the enemies in them are different and much tougher, and they also include new bosses to fight as well.

The writing itself is the foremost reason to show up to just about any Yoko Taro game (I'd argue), and this game doesn't disappoint. Zero and her growing band of weird, sex-obsessed followers are quite the motley crew as far as RPG protagonists go. They start off seeming like a simply cynical world-ending anti-hero brigade, but as the other branches go on, you'll see other sides of them as well as more sides of Zero's story that cast the adventure thus far in much different lights. This game, like Drakengard 1, also ends with a rhythm game that's unlike anything in the game thus far, and it's also VERY difficult (far more difficult than D1's was), to the point it was simply too much for me to beat it, but looking at the ending online, I do appreciate its presence in the narrative. Where D1 uses its final rhythm nightmare game as the final mountain you the player must climb in your quest for completion and destruction, D3's final mission is meant to portray the suffering of the character doing it. It's a metaphor for the incredibly difficult task they have to go through to actually end the adventure and make all the sacrifice thus far worth it, and I respect its use in that way, even if it is Yoko Taro going back to a familiar favorite.

Drakengard 3's story is ultimately a hopeful and positive one, and although its weird cast of characters did grow on me over time, this is probably my least favorite-written game he's made. That's not to say it's poorly written, because it's not. It's just that the themes at play get a bit too lost in all of the lore and witty dialogue, and I think Nier, Automata, and Drakengard 1 do a bit of a better job of staying on track in a way intelligible to the player. Though you aren't replaying that much content, the replaying or re-viewing of certain scenes (whether the same or altered) in both Nier games gives the player a lot more time to take in the deeper metaphor behind those scenes, and I think Drakengard 3 isn't actually helped all that much by not making the player re-view many story beats. This game is definitely a stepping stone between what Nier was and what Nier Automata would be, but it doesn't quite stick the landing quite as well as its more complex successor or its comparatively more simple predecessors.

Gameplay-wise, Drakengard 3 is also very clearly a stepping stone between Yoko Taro's past and present. While there ARE dragon-riding segments, the old all-range-mode stuff that fills Drakengard 1's (and Drakengard 2's) chapters are completely absent, and instead you have only a couple rail-shooter levels on the dragon's back (which are quite well done) and a few more levels than that where you're fighting on the ground but on the dragon. Even those are well executed though, as they're a great blend of flashy action and simple yet difficult combat.

The normal levels play a little bit like a Musou game in how you have special chests full of upgrade cards, money, and new weapons to find (as well as new weapons and consumables to buy between levels), but the enemy counts are nowhere near high enough to compare to Musou games or the earlier Drakengard games. The weapon combo structures and UI are certainly Musou-like in their presentation, but the actual level and enemy designs make this feel much more like a traditional stage-based 3D character action game than a Musou. You have four weapon types that you get throughout the game, swords, spears, melee gauntlets, and chakrams (of which I favored swords) which have a variety of archetypes among each type as well as varying strengths, and you also have a pretty good pool of normal enemies to fight, many of whom will not let you pass so easily. It's certainly not the hardest 3D action game I've played (God Hand this most certainly ain't), but this will likely give you a fair bit more trouble to beat than the original Nier did.

The presentation is as stellar as you'd expect a post-Nier Yoko Taro game to be, but also definitely shows the trouble of its development cycle. The graphics look very nice, the voice acting is good, and the music is absolutely excellent, but the devil lies in the details, and in this case its the hardware. This game just isn't very well optimized for PS3, and while it is far from unplayable (I never found that it impacted my ability to play the game any time outside of one weird visual glitch that was fixed with a software reset), this game has a consistently troubled framerate that will likely bother those sensitive to such things.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Unlike something like the original Drakengard, which shows its age a bit too much and hides its deeper themes a bit too deeply to be easily recommended, Drakengard 3 (like both Nier games) is a genuinely fun game to play that isn't hard at all to recommend. Top that off with how good the writing is and you've got a really excellent game on the PS3. While the writing may not be my favorite, it did have me very engaged and giggling quite a bit as I went through, so it's clearly doing quite a bit right. If you're a fan of Yoko Taro's work at all, or just games with unconventionally presented stories, this is absolutely a game you should not miss if you think you can stomach the price tag and the framerate issues~.

Beneath layers of hilarious humor and an unusual list of characters with unfiltered interactions lies one of the most beautiful and impacting stories ever told showcasing many themes that are rarely touched upon correctly in media
Yoko Taro games usually tackle subjects not so different from each other but every single one of them does it in a very unique way that never feels repetitive and always feels like it has Yoko Taro's signature on it
tackling the subjects of self-acceptance and questioning the sets of beliefs and drives people have and human nature
I don't subscribe to the idea that dod 3 is "bad on purpose" or whatever many people throw around
in fact, the moment I was thrown into its world i was interested
the game starts off with a clean plan and blueprint and you are nothing but a spectator trying to understand the reasoning/meaning behind the drive of the main character and the setting of this insane world and it ties it up perfectly with a cathartic ending that left me stunned
know the game has some inherent shortcomings because of its age but beyond it all is genuinely one of the most impactful stories ever.
the structure and branching and narrative of the game are incredible it's sad that this will always be an underappreciated gem
to talk about every single theme this game conveys and how Yoko Taro's themes and how he tackles them are always the greatest ever would take too much and I still have much to learn from all the side content. i just loved the game and that is all that matters to me

Oh hey, I started out actually really liking this! And then it kept going.

Video game narratives exist in a weird realm where sometimes the writing doesn’t need a plot so much as a pretense. What would pass as thread-bare justification in passive mediums can exist as crucial context for hours of a game experience. Because invariably, whatever time spent in the plot is dwarfed by whatever buffoonery the player will engage in.

The previous Drakengard and NieR games have bounced off of me because their balance between pretense, plot, and presentation have been all over the place. They’ve been full of fun and crazy ideas interspersed with experiences that are bafflingly terrible. I’ve never known what I should be taking seriously and what I should be rolling with, what’s intentional and what’s coincidence.

So imagine my surprise when Drakengard 3 opens with the dumbest, most irreverent set-up yet almost immediately won me over. Our main character, Zero, is a goddess, on a mission with her pet dragon to kill all the other goddesses. Not for any noble reason. She’s just greedy. She wants to be the only goddess in the world. And so she’s gonna murder a million dudes until she gets what she wants.

There is something so refreshing about a concept so stupid that immediately elevates the stupidity of the anime cliches of all the one-dimensional supporting cast. We know how this game will flow from the word go - we’ll kill a bunch of goons and then have a boss fight and kill one of the sisters and then on to the next world. How can it matter how well written those characters are? What better way to make use of their screen time than to lean into their irrelevance to give the voice actors a chance to chew the scenery for a couple minutes and earn their paycheck?

If the whole game had just been Zero as a sexy anime lady version of Wario, I was ready to love this game.

Unfortunately, Drakengard 3 couldn’t leave well enough alone and started getting wrapped up in its own lore, quickly losing its core appeal and turning into everything I hated about NieR.

Where NieR started serious and then got absurd, Drakengard 3 started as farce and then tried to turn into drama. This Yoko Taro Team must be obsessed with the idea of the Grand Recontextualization™ - of having a twist so epic that it makes you think about the whole game differently and proves how smart and cool they are for being so clever.

I really think they should stop.

Because I thought they had finally learned that having a serious story was getting in the way of their strengths. They’re not good storytellers! They are pranksters and comedians!

In my notes from my first session with the game, I used the character Dito as a great example of why these characters haven't been working for me in previous games. Take Kaine from NieR: she’s supposed to be hiding markings on her body, but her outfit is a battle bakini with lace that does not conceal her ass crack. So every part of her body that she wants to hide she covers in bandages. It’s so stupid when she could just - wear long sleeved clothes like a normal person! It’d be one thing if her character was comedic, but everything about her backstory and functioning in the plot of that game is played straight and tragic. But the game and characters also can’t help but make pot-shots at how stupid her choice of clothing is.

Back to Dito. He’s a disciple of a sexy lady whose personality is that she has big boobs and loves sex. But the game goes the extra length to take that character dynamic to its conclusion - he’s her unwilling sex slave. Not implied, directly stated. He eventually kills her for it.

He should be traumatized. But he immediately turns around to be an inert sex pest against Zero. But then later its stated that he and Zero have definitely fucked. Once things are taken to their conclusion, they’re inverted again, because the whole point of everything is the joke. We’re working entirely in pretenses. He’s as dramatic or stupid as the moment needs him to be, and that never changes over the course of the game. But the characters believe it’s all real, keep marrying the joke, and thus it all works.

And everything in Drakengard 3 is like this. Of course Zero wouldn’t wear clothes to get warm in the snow level because ~ aesthetic ~. Of course the in-universe reason for why she doesn’t ride her dragon all the time and we don’t dragon blast everything is because she thinks the dragon smells bad - a reason that is funny regardless of whether it is 100% fixable or not.

What elevated the presentation to me was Drakengard 3’s intentional use of video game menus and structures to elevate this feeling of farce. Levels end in really anti-ciimactic ways. Horrible cutscenes with multiple characters dying get interrupted with the least satisfying Mission Complete screen. It’s hilarious! I laughed out loud when Zero and team get drowned in a snow drift, and the title of the game appears as if the credits will start playing. Then Zero punches her way out of the snow and back on screen. Her goal is stupid, her game is stupid, but they exist to play off each other and be fun.

I felt like this dude had finally hit his stride in realizing that having a serious story was getting in the way. If your interest is in anime bullshit, and you’re not dumb enough to give it to me unironically, then at least don’t ruin the fun by accidentally doing the serious parts of the story well. Drakengard 1? Too edgy without messaging, bite, humor, or point. Nier? Too good at getting me to buy in to its characters to enjoy the twists of what the developer thought was more fun and interesting, when I thought their interests were dumb and bad. Drakengard 3? No content, only filler, A+ love it.

And that’s where I WOULD have liked to end the review if there wasn’t MORE OF THAT SAME STUPID LORE DISEASE.

I thought as a prequel to everything else, Drakengard 3 would be safe - but no. There is a prequel novel. There is a prequel manga series. Hours of context not in the game that attempts to humanize or justify these charcoal sketches of anime tropes. To explain why there’s time travel and robots and magic and angels and dragons.

And without any of that, the second half of the game stops being fun! It goes full drama in ways that could only possibly be cathartic if I was invested in all that auxillary material that was never officially translated!

So, so, so disappointed, and that’s before getting to the ending.

I’m glad I found a video explaining to me how this final boss was supposed to be mean, separate from a character action game ending with an 8 minute rhythm mini game. Because knowing when something is fair makes a huge difference in my mental stamina for trying to win. This was not a duel, but a battle of spite. Of a devloper who turned the joke from the game taking itself seriously to the joke being that *I* was taking the game seriously enough to get all the weapons to see the final ending.

Like, what is the point of that.

I wrote in my review of Drakengard that some ideas lack nuance. That was in the context of subject matter, and how some forms of evil do not have enough depth to be mined for meaning. Here, I have to acknowledge that video games present a unique opportunity for creators to spite their audience. And I think with enough intentional malice, that same lack of potential nuance emerges.

I beat it. I hated it. It took hours. I screamed so loud when I won I made my roommate slip in the shower. I was shaking during the final credits. And the overwhelming emotion I felt was release, while my mind contined to chant “i hate this i hate this i hate this i hate this i hate this i hate this…”

But did I realize anything profound for having done so? No. My respect for this team went down again. But I have a theory as to why this series and this game and this ending can resonate with people.

Because games are such collaborative projects that it is really, really hard to feel like a human made them. To feel like you are in conversation with a creator who had anything to say. To make games functional to play requires meticulous sanding, and binding their myriad systems together results in many unintentional experiences. Think of how the menu layout of Ocarina of Time turned the water temple from a simple puzzle concept to an infamous example of tedium for the medium, because it took too many clicks to put on a pair of boots.

So when an experience like this can solidify behind a unified front, laser targeted at the player, and the message is a giant “Fuck You,” some people are going to be happy to be spoken to. The novelty of being reached out to is so highly valued that it eclipses the insult.

I cannot respect that. Good video games are in conversation with the player all the time. But good game design that isn’t abrasive is invisible. Because the possibilities of what an author can add to an experience by drawing attention to themselves are not many. You can make jokes, you can make metatextual commentary, or, as is the case here, stick your finger in the eye of your audience.

Well. I don’t think that’s very cool, and while I don’t know if its intentional or not, I think this guy is a hack.

I am growing concerned as to why people praised NieR: Automata so much since that is next on the docket, but maybe it was the rare case where someone grew the hell up.

3 stars, B rank, wish it had stayed as good as it started.