For the love of all that is holy... I feel absolutely insane.

I've been playing Drakengard 3, and having a pretty good time! I've played Drakengard, and NieR, and have been told they intersect in some way, and that maybe there'll be Easter Eggs for NieR: Automata if I play through these games. So I'm trying to go through things in order. And there are many helpful guides and posts out there! People who love this series of series are very sincere in wanting to provide the best potential accomodations to new fans! They go out of their way to include fan translations of pamphlets, novels, chronological orders, release orders, suggested orders, thematic orders - all to say that I found my answer of when to play which of the DLCs in relation to the main game of Drakengard 3. Without spoilers! Super commendable! I felt very cared for.

And now having played this, I feel fucking lied to.

Because not once in any of the couple dozen posts or so that I consulted to make sure I was following a sense of consensus and not falling for the terribleness of Google's 2020's algorithm did anyone say how completely, utterly disposably garbage this is. That is true love right there.

I cannot help but think how much this highlights the importance of art criticism for preservation purposes. I've heard this game is great on an emulator, but even then, how many people are going to go through the effort of experiencing this for themselves. What will be preserved of this experience are the cryptic, helpful messages of fans, saying that you'll "learn more about the personalities of the sisters" if you play these DLCs, or see them as list items in timelines that makes it seem like Something Important Happened within them. That's why I bought them! Because the PS3 store's days are numbered, and I didn't want to miss out!

Instead, Drakengard 3: Five's Prologue is none of those things. Look at the poster on this website. Do you see her boobs? Do you think her personality is "boobs?" Because you are right. Her personality is boobs. That's what her personality was in Drakengard 3. Did more screen time on her own "flesh her out"? No. It just reinforced exactly how much her personality is boobs.

This DLC is, in essence, a new weapon that you get to try out over the course of four (recycled) levels with some new voice work for boob lady and her twinky sex slave. Where we get to hear him complain about all the sex they have, and how annoying it is to carry around her extensive collection of clothes, delicacies, and sex toys. Where the "story", the pretense for getting to try out this new weapon, is boob lady keeps hearing about new food she wants to try and murders a bunch of dudes on her way there because she keeps getting duped into going to dangerous places.

I had similar thoughts when I played NieR's DLC, of how bizarre it is that art objects too obscure to procure casually come to live entirely by how other people talk about them. What're the chances I'm in the first 99% of humans who will ever experience this anime trash? What if my take-down of its exitence is the most in-depth look that ever survives of this 2010's gaming artifcat, when expectations for DLC were different, even if maybe they haven't changed all that much since then?

I feel slightly odd giving this DLC 1 star when I like Drakengard 3 a lot so far, and this is... well, more of that! The sense of humor is the same. What it's going for isn't really different. It's a crass project that exists in the same realm as the Kingsman movies, where it takes an implied joke so far as to make it uncomfortable and then funny again. Like, if a woman had Boob Lady Personality, with all the trills and coos of a poor voice actress trying to make eating crab sound sultry, then yeah, she probably would own a lot of sex toys! And if she was a goddess, she probably would have a boy toy around who'd get bored and resentful of it eventually! But also, in the base game, he murders her! So was he actually being harmed by their dynamic? Or is the absurdity that someone could be resentful of having regular sex with a literal sex goddess supposed to be the joke part? I'm not taking a position, and I don't really care, I'm just saying that I know the ballpark this game's energy is coming from.

But ultimately, Drakengard 3: Five's Prologue, and the other three prologues I played tonight, get 1 star because they are just complete wastes of time to experience. (I purchased the Japanese voice pack, and that apparently only works on the base game! So the incompleteness of the package already made my eye twitch from the word go!) Drakengard 3 gets away with many elements being stretched thin by having so many elements to juggle - taking a gag character with the shallowest of gimmicks and throwing them into gag situations places the onus entirely on the writing and the comedic timing, and there just isn't the budget or care to make anything work in a 2014 DLC episode's amount of time.

So for posterity, for the curious internet explorers of the future: NO YOU DON'T NEED TO PLAY THIS TO UNDERSTAND ANYTHING ABOUT DRAKENGARD OR NIER OR ANYTHING. JESUS TAP-DANCING CHRIST.