#606: Drakengard 3
What the fuck, Yoko Taro?
Initial release: December 19, 2013
Platform: PlayStation 3
Developer: Access Games
Well, what can I say?
Yoko Taro has spent years cultivating a reputation for being Japan’s weirdest video game director. He’s certainly not alone in being weird, with folks like Hideo Kojima and Tetsuya Nomura, but I think — and this is despite knowing how unhinged Nomura is — Yoko Taro outweirds them all. I think there’s a place for auteur game directors in the industry — where would we be without Warren Spector or, for good or ill, Neil Druckmann? — but the truth is, much like in the film biz, being an auteur doesn’t necessarily mean your work is good, or marketable, or even comprehensible. Drakengard, Yoko’s 2003 directorial debut, was none of these things… but that’s okay, we have Drakengard 3 now.
Drakengard 3 is many things: a numbered sequel that builds on its predecessors (and Nier, which predates it;) a prequel to the entire series (and again by extension Nier;) and something that attempts — attempts — to tie the whole thing together. Maybe.
I’m gonna have to explain this, aren’t I?
Okay, here’s a quick recap. In 2003, Drakengard 1 came out and was a big middle finger to the musou genre. That part’s not important here, but what is important is that it had five endings, A through E. Ending A is more or less what leads to Drakengard 2, which Yoko didn’t direct but he did have a role in. I say “more or less” because it’s actually an alternate version of Ending A that doesn’t exist which leads to the sequel. The sequel itself just kinda doesn’t go anywhere, Yoko has generally ignored it. Drakengard’s Ending E, meanwhile, has the main characters travel forward in time from the year 1099 — a period itself marked by a sinister alternate history that diverged from our own in 856 AD — to modern-day Tokyo (or, perhaps, the Tokyo from the world of Ending A,) triggering a chain of events that leads to an apocalypse and the near-total-destruction of humanity (Neir) which itself leads, from what I think is Neir’s Ending D if I’m reading the timelines I found on the internet right, to Neir: Automata. And the whole thing is a timeloop, apparently. Which takes us back to Drakengard 3, in which a version of Ending A leads to a side novel loosely similar in plot to Drakengard 1, but not the one we know; and in which the ending that actually leads to Drakengard 1 is not actually in the game, it’s in the novelization.
(So much for “quick.”)
Of course, these games are more than just convoluted timelines. They’re also defined by a brutally bleak and surrealist tone, middling-to-awful gameplay, and an almost incoherent internal structure. Drakengard 3 attempts to mitigate some of these, but at heart, it’s just as much a spiky and weird game as the rest.
The game starts off simply enough, with the audaciously-dressed Zero — a woman in white with silver hair — stabbing her way through a ruined city that almost resembles a post-apocalyptic medieval Manhattan. She is an Intoner, a goddess whose existence brings magic to the world… or something like that. Her goal is to murder her sisters, all Intoners and named One through Five, and she’s enlisted the aid of a massive white dragon, Michael. In the end, her attempt fails, she loses an arm, Michael dies, and we skip ahead a year later. She awakes in her cabin, somewhere on the coast of what used to be England. Michael has reincarnated as Mikhail, an underdeveloped — but still powerful — dragon with the voice and optimism of a young boy. And Zero herself now has a beautiful flower growing out of her right eye, and a mechanical left arm. Her goal remains the same: kill her sisters. As we go through the game, and the various endings, we meet the other Intoners, their Disciples (always male, and always possessed of some quirk or other: bloodthirstiness, extreme masochism, an outrageous sex drive, or vanity), as well as Accord, a mysterious girl who narrates the game and is apparently here to “observe and record,” and we ultimately learn the motivations behind Zero’s drive to kill her sisters. (Spoiler: it’s horrifyingly tragic.)
This is not a game with a lot of likeable characters, at least at first blush. Much like Drakengard 1, nearly everyone in the game is either an asshole, or a horny asshole. The dark tone is often deliberately undercut by bouts of sexual humor and extensive profanity; Zero’s expletive-laden frustration at jumping puzzles and seemingly-pointless fights is a regular part of her dialogue. One notable moment early on has Zero brutally murdering Five while a “please stand by” screen pops up — thought you can still hear Five’s diminishing cries of pain, and we’re still treated to a shot of her corpse. (This is immediately followed by her Disciple, Dito — who looks like an evil Catholic Sora — joyously kicking her carcass while muzak plays over what’s apparently a stream of profanity. Yuri Lowenthal needs to play more bloodthirsty psychopaths, to be honest.) Sexual innuendo and outright horny talk in general is a defining feature of the game’s script. The Intoners are outright stated to be extremely sexually insatiable — even the sweet and prudish Four is just repressing herself for the sake of image. (She’s also a genocidal racist.) Even Mikhail, sweet and boyish, goes full “Make the Intoner Empire Great Again” whenever confronted with wyverns. One of the only exceptions is the Disciple Decadus (voiced by Cam Clarke of all people); he’s actually really nice and mature, just, you know, he’s also an unhinged masochistic weirdo.
Gameplay-wise it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Gone is the wide-open musou gameplay of the first game; in its place is a more direct and linear “character action” game. To recap: “Musou” games are basically hack-and-slash games where you control a character and fight huge hordes of easily-killable enemies in a large open space using flashy, but repetitive, combos and moves — you might consider it a cousin to the “slaughtermaps” you see in boomer shooter circles. What’s “character action?” Think of games like Devil May Cry or God of War. Drakengard 3 sort of sits between the two genres in that its gameplay is a narrower in scope to the point of extreme linearity, but lacks a lot of variety. While the controls are better than they were in the previous games, it’s still quite stiff, to the point that the game often feels more like it was intended for PlayStation 2 than the PlayStation 3. This carries over into the game’s final ending, which is a rehash of the infamous rhythm game ending of the original, only even more infuriating (complete with a truly dick move as a single final note plays after the screen fades to black and dialogue starts up. Miss it and you start over. The whole song is like eight minutes long.)
Unlike previous games where secondary characters were either special modes, or player characters in their own right that you could swap to, the disciples actually join you for the fight, with you having the ability to pick two to follow you around (though dialogue and cutscenes assume that all four are in tow.) They don’t do a lot of damage, but they’re good for distracting enemies, useful when you’re facing multiple ogres or other big, tough enemies. You do get a special mode called Intoner Mode, which powers you up to do tremendous damage while invincible (unless you’re fighting a fellow Intoner, who also can power up and damage you.) Intoner Mode seems to work off the game’s blood system; as you kill enemies, Zero will get more and more bloodstained, and the more blood on her there is the more your Intoner gauge fills. Once it’s been exhausted and Zero de-powers, her outfit is clean again.
In addition to the standard Branch/Verse structure there’s also Accord missions, quick little mini-missions usually involving collecting enough of some item within a time limit. Some of these are quite bullshit, others are a cakewalk. You’ll have to do at least some of these to make money and to get new weapons. There are a lot of weapons to grab, and most of them you’ll have to either buy between levels, earn in an Accord mission, or find in one of the many chests scattered around the levels. Most of them have their uses, but unlocking Branch D requires collecting them all, which does cost a fair bit of money. They come in four varieties: swords, spears, gauntlets, and chakrams, and there’s a lot of variety in the various weapons for each category, in terms of moveset. Upgrading them requires money and materials, both of which can be found in chests, and materials can also eventually be bought outright. If you do the DLC — one for each of the Intoners, though I’d caution against doing Zero’s until you’ve at least reached the Final Verse — and find all the chests, you’ll rack up quite a bit of cash which will help a lot. (Are the DLCs any good? Well, they’re about as good as the main game, which you can take however you want to, but only Two’s, One’s, and Zero’s have any real bearing on the story. Zero’s DLC also has a flying stage that is far more irritating than any of the ones in the base game, so watch out for that.)
Would I say Drakengard 3 is a good game? That depends on what you mean by “good;” while I think it’s an improvement over the original overall, it’s still kind of a hot mess. If you’re playing it on original hardware it’s got some of the most notorious performance issues you’ll ever see in your life — anything you do with Mikhail alone will tank the framerate into the single digits. I played on RPCS3 and it runs like an absolute dream, which says a lot about the state of that emulator these days — and it’s better than blowing six bucks a pop for six DLC that adds some much-needed characterization that’s otherwise absent. Which is why I think there’s room for a remaster of this game and all its DLC, and its predecessors as well; after all, we finally got one for Nier.
My ex loves these games and I can see why. Aside from the gameplay being more her thing than mine (not to say I don’t enjoy this kind of thing, I just tend to default to boomer shooters and survival horror) they’re aggressively weird, very akin in tone and surreality to Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is certainly a selling point for me but I don’t know how other people might feel about it. While I certainly wouldn’t call the original Drakengard good, I can see what Yoko Taro was trying to do; Drakengard 3 is Yoko trying something else instead, moving away from the pointed criticism of games like Dynasty Warriors with their guilt-free massacres to a character-driven story that invites the player to look past the vulgarity and bizarre quirks and get to know these weirdos as people with their own motivations. In an increasingly hyper-sanitized world Drakengard 3 is a breath of fresh air, a game that dares to be vulgar and yet meaningful. You might make comparisons between the Japanese and English dubs and say the English dub is far more unhinged, but Yoko has always used the world of Drakengard to push boundaries, and even the Japanese script had a few jokes too hot for Anglophones like something about the relentlessly horny Octa (who I should note is a short, elderly man on stilts who never, ever stops talking about his dick) and a horse. It’s just that kind of game — and then it flips it all around on you and gets you caring about these unhinged maniacs. It’s not for everyone, but it might be for you. Just know I won’t blame you if you watch the Final Verse on Youtube.
I did my best to give this game a review, but games like this are really hard to actually review. Reactions to Drakengard 3 aren’t just mixed, they’re downright polarized — some people love it, some people hate it. I think I’m in the love it camp, but it’s definitely not for its gameplay. It boils down to the fact that nearly everything you could criticize it for — from its bizarre structure to its one-note characters to its middling gameplay to its obsession with sex — are also things you could praise it for, to point at and say “that’s the point.” But is it? The real question is, who cares? It’s Drakengard, you get what you get when it comes to Yoko Taro.
-june❤
