If it weren’t for the dreadful performance issues and the prior knowledge of who was at the helm of this project, I would have had a hard time differentiating Drakengard 3 from the countless mid budget Japanese games that populated the 7th gen. It is kinda fitting, and in some ways admirable, that a game coming at the very tail end of the ps3 lifespan, a console notorious for lowering the bar for acceptable framerate and optimization, would achieve the worst performance that ever graced the cell processor. But take away the obvious elephant in the room, and Drakengard 3 is actually a pretty serviceable and enjoyable hack n’ slash that hardly inherits the DNA from its predecessors.

Drakengard 3 carries itself with a whiff of resignation from the outset, an apathetic conformity to the whims of an industry that was slogging on forward to its demise, long after Nier’s final gasp for air. The world didn’t really care for what Drakengard 1 had to say, and while I don’t think Yoko Taro ever expected it to listen, Drakengard 3 is his most indifferent and defeatist work, with a constant self awareness that points out the absurdism of videogames, without ever trying to engage with it for most of the runtime, and while I am certain that the terrible performance issues are just a symptom of rushed development and a nonexistent budget, the 10 FPS drops do lend a certain intentional hilarity to the game at the player’s expense.

Despite not reveling in the misery porn of Drakengard 1, it somehow manages to be an even uglier game, in all senses of the word. The cast gleefully express from the get-go their propensity for violence and murder for comedic effect, the character designs are bloated with generic anime-isms and garish colors that clash with the medieval tone of the environments, the combat is now sufferable and standard musou fare that no longer provides the unique boredom present in Drakengard 1, filling the screen with shallow stylized blood splatter and DMC combos, and the game manages to be unpleasant in wholly new ways thanks to a plethora of explicit and depraved sexual innuendos that decorate most of the script. And yet Yoko Taro manages to find some life in this corpse of a videogame.

In contrast to Drakengard 1, the more you play, the more the game is willing to open a breach and extend its hand to you, regardless of how restrictive its polygon walls can be, and the jaded psychotic nature of its characters manage to somehow open up to reveal a sad, broken world pleading for death and change, of any kind. Even if the only language these characters can speak through are murder and sexual desire, they have the power to change the status quo, no matter how childish and naive that sentiment might be or how badly the cards they have been dealt are. And once again, Drakengard asks that you drop your weapons and everything you learned thus far, devote yourself and your time to its insanity, and struggle through one of the most infuriating and mesmerizing final bosses ever conceived. Bashing your head into a wall to the point of despair and defeat might not seem like the optimal way to communicate such messages, but like one character says after sacrificing itself in a bout of inspiration: “This was more human, wasn’t it?”

Drakengard 3 to me is Yoko Taro’s most impenetrable work, and a big part of it is due to the baffling decision to spread a lot of backstory and lore that drastically changes interpretation of the source material through a bunch of paid DLC, novellas and mangas, context that should have definitely been present in the game itself and would have made this a much more accessible and comprehensible entry in his Drakengard oeuvre. A lot of the ideas from Automata seem to have been conceptualized here first, such as being trapped in an endless death and rebirth cycle of bloodshed, a near impossible final boss that has you fighting against the game itself, or a meta-textual force interfering with the outcome of the story, and it functions like an inevitable bridge between Nier’s sorrowful epipath and Nier Automata’s existential rebellion. Drakengard 3 is the perfect 7th gen game, both a symptom of and a response to the dark age of japanese videogames. It just embodies that ethos a bit too much for its own good sometimes.

And yeah, this review was just an excuse to say I beat the Final Song. I did it. It took me 5+ hours to do it, but I fucking did it, and I did it without syncing the game to no video guide either. Hitting that final invisible note by pure intuition after going through hell is the most beautiful thing ever in videogames, and I’m so glad I never have to go through it again.