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~.
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~.