After playing drakengard 1 and 3 and getting ending a and b and mostly being frustrated and bored I dont think I want to continue that much. I have a lot of disjointed thoughts on these games but in short I'm at a point where generally I think yoko taro is kind of a hack. I will say wholeheartedly more games need to just straight up have novels in them like no visuals just words and a black screen maybe some music, I actually really liked those parts way more than I think this game should allow but books are generally my favorite medium so probably biased when the boring gameplay is interrupted with words. Makes me wonder if I'll actually like drankengard 3 when I read story side in 300 years when my japanese is functional or it gets a full translation.

Does something crazy and unlike drakengard 1, which has neither characters nor story, this one has a vague semblance of characters and a story. For real though, most people who hate the gameplay even concede "the story and characters are good" but I don't know? It's all boring? Plot threads kind of just show up and end without a second in the oven. Zero's novella is really good, probably the best moment in drakenier that isn't music, but she is straight up a different fucking character in the game so it doesn't matter because why would anything. Music and character designs were good, that was nice. I probably wouldn't have actually gotten through it except for the fact that seeing zero get covered in blood as you fight looks really good.

I dunno if this version takes away the entertaining stuff from the pc version but I did the first route and a bit of the second then called it quits because I just sadly couldn't find myself caring about any characters or any of the mysteries or whatever. Like, it answered questions I did not care enough to ask so it just felt meandering. Which sucks, this so could've been my shit with literary references to old japanese books I haven't read and the jazzy taisho setting is objectively the best setting that can be chosen. The art is beautiful even if this has one of the worst cases of same face syndrome I've ever seen took me a while to figure out who was who ngl. I absolutely loved every part I saw with the kids I found their personalities and stories extremely fascinating but they weren't enough to make me want to finish. Still really excited to play uuultrac when I can if only because that one also has the other objectively best setting of 70s tokusatsu shows.

Goes so hard idc. The themes it brings up about alienation and how people deal with what that entails are explored in such fascinating ways, like the only things that come close for me in that regard are sayaka murata's books and (maybe) cows by matthew stokoe. I don't think I can actually say anything fully coherent about this game that gets across how much it means to me but it's probably the most influential anything on my own work. This isn't for everyone, hell I'd probably say that it isn't for anyone, but that's the whole point of it and if it tried to defang any of its transgressions I don't think it would work as well as it somehow does.

Theres still a lot I haven't actually done yet but I have completed the main story and I did enjoy it but, like... 6 years? I really don't think there's that much that really makes this feel new. One of the main advertised gimmicks, the sky islands, are sick until you find out the one you start on is like 20x bigger than the rest of the others and there aren't that many other ones. And if you thought hyrule in the first one was just walking through empty planes simulator, wait until you see the depths in this one oh my god. If you're lucky you'll see some lava or water. There really is a lot I liked about this game, some moments nearing the end of the main story had me fully invested, and there's a few side quests that were really engaging, but this game does less to be different from it's predecessor than pretty much any other direct zelda sequel. Hell, I'd argue the oracle games have more fundamental differences than these two. It just pains me that it does pretty much nothing to be fully it's own thing, I'd say the glorified DLC worry was right. It's not that I even wanted a more traditional zelda, I just wanted a new zelda.