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.
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.
roboSteven
2 months ago