This game sucks and that's incredible. There is so much bad here that alone could warrant a 1/10 score for a lesser game, but here I genuinely just adore the whole package, and those familiar with Yoko Taro's other games know full well that the bad design is just part of the experience. It's repetitive, maps suck, some of the music makes me want to burn my ears and it repeatedly overstays it's welcome, but proceeding through it just nets you with a sense of satisfaction I have hardly experienced elsewhere. You might love it or hate it but I would definitely say it's worth at least a try from any gamer who enjoys character actions and j-media in general.

If I could sum up my thoughts on my Drakengard/Nier playthrough so far, I could honestly summarize every game in the series with the sentence "Kinda shitty and unfocused game that's frustrating to play but eventually brings it all together at the last minute". Graphics look awful, the characters are all annoying (we get it, you fuck and you kill people, please talk about literally any other subject now thanks), and gameplay is really only marginally better than previous entries. I was fully ready to give this game below 2 stars before the ending, but the execution really does come together better the further you play on. Unfortunately we all have a limited amount of time on this Earth, and if I'm going to recommend a game to anyone, I'm going to suggest titles that are fun to play the ENTIRE way through.

Also I'm going to have to pay like $36 dollars to get the story DLC for this game which is.......definitely a mark against it, considering I'll have to also navigate the headache that is loading money onto the PS3 store.

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 the addition of a perfect-block, and certain encounters basically force it to be mandatory (which is good). A regular block drains your stamina-meter which is also used for "special" attacks. Bosses won't sit still for your combos without doing stunning them with perfect-blocks, and perfect-blocks instantly put an end to the ridiculous poise and defense-buffs possessed enemies get. Normal combat escalates quite a bit in difficulty, which was surprising as there are no difficulty-settings in Drakengard 3. 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).

There's a bit of platforming, and a tiny learning-curve of trial-and-erroring which ledges can be grabbed and thinking to do a special attack in midair to extend a jump slightly. There are jumps you cannot make otherwise.

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 in missions, given for side-missions, or bought in the store. The game makes it easy to track down chests as it shows which chests have been grabbed already in order of appearance, so you can replay specific verses to pick up something if you miss it. Upgrading weapons is a monstrous chore though. Instead of it just being based on kill count, it requires an unnaturally high amount of gold. Both to buy them, and to buy all the upgrade materials you need. 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 action stages where most attacks are guided by 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. This robot also steps out of its meta observational role to help you directly in branch D, which fits with NieR's tradition of self-sacrifice to make the ending happen.

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 that's from the perspective of someone who played Drakengard 1 and both NieR games. This game would be wild to someone who hadn't seen a narrative like it before, but I can't really judge it from that perspective now.

2/5

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~.

MIGHT be my most insane review yet, i don't know what is it with this game, but drakengard 3 is an experience like no other, if you play drakengard 3, there'll not be a single game out there like this one. it isn't NECESSARILY a good thing, however. but to me, Zero is one of my favourite characters in media. I just love her so much it is insane, this game is either someone's favourite game, or someone's most hated game. to me, it is almost undeniably an unique experience like no other- if it's a good one though? despite the combat being kind of sluggish, to me, it is an amazing one

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