Drakengard 3

I had a dream a few nights ago.

I met an old man by a road I had frequently crossed as a child.  He was a kind man, wearing a bomber jacket with a sick dragon on the sleeve.  No, a cool looking dragon, not a physically sick dragon.  I approached him.  What do you want, old man.

Give me your fucked video games.  I blink, and am about to speak, but he interrupts.

No, not edgy.  I don't want your gritty reimaginings, your oh so wacky this girl's a slut but she kicks ass too XD, your boring anti-hero that murders innocent bystanders because of Tragic Event X.

Give me your fucked video games.  I try to speak again, but the dragon comes to life within the jacket, and cuts me off.

No, not surreal.  Too well written, too much symbolism: I read enough thank you, your video game will never compare and it saddens me to see it try.

Give me your fucked up video games.  I raise my hands, my voice a beautiful contralto.

No, not dark.  I fucking hate rainstorms and piano solos.  Why are you showing me that.  Jesus.

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Fucked up video games are a rare thing.  They are the products of a creative process gone horribly wrong.  They are rarely, if ever, something that would be called "good" in the sense that an average player will actually enjoy playing it in the hopes of a stimulus/response model.  Indeed, good gameplay usually mars the process, allowing the player another avenue of enjoyment rather than "LOOK AT THIS RETARDED SHIT."  They lack any sort of internal consistency, usually consisting of the developer sticking in as much random cool concepts as humanly possible, regardless if any of it makes sense if you take even one step back from the endless sensory overload.  The rareness draws from the fact that very few video game people have genuine creativity, and even fewer have an inability to corral that creativity into manageable form, and even when that happens, most studios have the uncanny ability to kill that psychotic spark so it becomes merely edgy, or dark.

There's only a few real examples of beautiful disasters in games.  Killer 7.  Xenosaga.  Alot of the more recent Modern Warfare games, once you realize that they embody the fever dreams of a million right wing conspiracy theorist, rolled into a deceptive "press X to stab terrorist" pastry.

Of course, the true embodiment of the fucked up video game catastrophe is Drakengard.  Released in the early 2000s, it is a dark fantasy tale about horrible people doing horrible things.  Most of the horrible people are your comrades, defined by "pacts" with various magical creatures that give them great powers at the expense of some human attribute, like "aging," or "sight," or "your womb."  The main character is a humongous asshole whose sister wants to bang him, and forms a pact with a dragon, depriving him of his voice.  Bad things ensue.

I played part of the game in college, but at the time did not make it very far.  The reason for this is that you could charitably describe the gameplay as "Dynasty Warriors 0.2."  Your guy runs around and murders hundreds of dudes in the exact same way.  Sometimes you get on the dragon and shoot fire at those dudes before random bullshit ranged enemies force you to stop using the dragon.  Repeat this for 20 hours.  Hi, I'm Drakengard.

As a result, you're forced to acknowledge everything else in a desperate attempt to justify the money you spent on the game.  In this regard, Drakengard does not disappoint.  The game's plotline was the product of a bunch of different people that clearly had wildly varying ideas of what the ultimate theme was supposed to be, so it's impossible to predict what the hell the game was going to throw your way next, unless your prediction is just "something bad."  This is especially true of the endings, which all fuck your hero over in various hilarious ways, especially the final one, which I won't spoil because your obnoxious hardcore nerd gamer friend probably sent you a youtube video of it five years ago.  It's unfortunate that the Western release of the game cut out the most surreal and 3dgy aspects of the game (such as your boring blind paladin actually being a HUGE PEDO), but honestly, the game we got was still insane enough to get a massive cult following.  This spawned the direct sequels of Drakengard 2, featuring the same awful gameplay and a far less ridiculous story, and Nier, which I haven't played so NO SPOILERS DICK BREATH.

Enter Drakengard 3.

You play the nerd boy fantasy magical girl Zero, a gal with a low cut outfit, uncomfortable fuck me heels, and a mysterious flower in her eye.  Her objective is to kill her five sisters, helpfully named Five through One, with the help of Mikhail, the childlike reincarnation of your previous dragon that was mortally wounded in the prior fight with your sista sistahs.  Unlike the hero of Drakengard, Zero can talk, and talk, and talk, usually about how much she hates everything and how she wants to fuck something.  Mikhail (whose english voice actor was so fucking bad that I had to install the Japanese voice pack) acts as her wacky foil.  Additional wacky foils are found as you murder each sister, in the form of the sisters' male disciples, all of which have one bizarre sexual hangup after another.

As you might assume from this brief summary, Drakengard 3 really really wants to return to old screwed up ways of the original, but one can tell that the various CRAZY TWISTS that happen through the story are less the result of the director and producer just making up shit as it goes along, and more a careful, deliberate attempt to make a game that's just messed up doooooooood!!!  Put another way, if Drakengard was the strange antihero that came out of nowhere and warped the minds of a bunch of nerds, then Drakengard 3 is the shadowy SQUARESOFT organization attempting to genetically engineer a superior version of the original duder.  Unfortunately, as any cheetos encrusted otaku can tell you, the vat-grown mutant clone of a hero might be able to put up a fight, but ultimately it's just gonna melt into a big hunk of goo and bones.

So this, I ask the beings on high:  what made Drakengard 3 melt?

The good news is that the game finally has workable gameplay!  Sort of!  Controls are definitely more responsive and fluid, and there are actual combos and weapon combinations!  You can use a sword, spear, chakram, or PUNCHFIST, and different weapons within each subset have different moves and attributes, so it's actually fun to experiment.  Dragon flying is better, and feels less like being the world's shittiest World War I pilot and more like Star Panzer Dragoon Fox 0.8.  Ranged enemies remain fucking horrible to deal with, and now you have lots more giant monster enemies whose combat patterns consist of "do obvious telegraphed attack, take ten second break."  If you ever get in trouble, you have INTONER MODE, which Drakengard 3's "oh shit" button, where you have ten seconds to mash on all the buttons and do big damage to all the bads around you.  There's a shit ton of boss fights, but mostly boil down to either 1) fighting a giant monster by headbutting them with a dragon until they reveal their weak spot, or 2) fighting an evil woman by cheesing them with whatever overpowered weapon you have at the time.

The biggest issue, gameplay wise, is that despite having enough time to release ~$30 DOLLARS~ worth of DLC, Square-Enix clearly didn't have enough time to release a game that was actually optimized for console.  It's been awhile since I've seen a full-price game with the array of technical problems that Drakengard 3 boasts.  Bizarre game glitches?  Framerate that drags down to the single digits if something more than a swung sword happens?  Cripplingly long loading screens after every major fight?  WE GOT THEM ALL.

There's a bevy of other issues, mostly related to the game's obviously slashed development time, but what really matters here is the story.

As stated above, the developers of Drakengard 3 really wanted to replicate the surreal, car-accident magic that was Drakengard.  And for a little while, it almost works.  The characters are almost entirely horrible, if not right malevolent, people, and there's enough death and destruction of innocents to make me smile.  A little.  There's also a shitload of my favorite meaningless video game feature, "bad guys screaming about how you're gonna wreck their butts."  I was hopeful, I admit it.

But after awhile, you start to realize that what you saw in the opening hours is pretty much all you're going to get.  Zero whines and verbally abuses her dragon, the soldiers yell about how unstoppable you are, a big monster appears and you whine about how much you want to kill it and leave this area.  A large part that made the original Drakengard was a glorious mindfuck in that it subverted your expectations of what the game was going to do next, plot wise.  Drakengard 3 plays a fairly pleasing tone at the start, but aside from a slight wrinkle in how it explains the differing endings, it's all painfully predictable.  Even when the game does a BIG TWIST, it's the sort of twist where you shrug and go "gasp, yeah, I guess."

A good example for this is the disciples.  Each of the four sisters has a male disciple that joins you once you murder them.  Gameplay-wise, they're supposed to be combat helpers, but I am not exaggerating when I think they killed one enemy during the entire playthrough.  So really they exist as an endless source of banter during the game, and at first they're pretty funny.  There's the innocent-looking boy that wants to murder everything, the old perverted guy with a big wang, the pretty boy that's an obnoxious awful idiot, and the good natured dude who also happens to be a complete and total masochist.  This leads to some decent exchanges at first, but ultimately they're so one-note in their motivations and reactions that you just roll your eyes when the boy says for the 500th time that he loves the look of gore on a decapitated head, or the old man says that Zero needs to bathe in the healing light of his cock.  The only character that remains amusing by the end of the game is the masochist, and while yeah it's partially because the Japanese VA's "unnnngh" sound whenever someone threatens to stomp his dick is hilarious, it's also because he reveals other character traits throughout the game besides "I like being hurt," which places him heads and shoulders about the other talking fetishbags in this game.

The diminished returns get worse once you beat the game for the first time, and alternative plot paths start to open up.  The downer alternative endings of Drakengard were the best part of the game, and while the designers clearly wanted to emulate that, the way that they're done is just so limp and unappealing that I had staked all my hopes on the final ending.  The game knew this, of course, forcing me to find all the weapons and suffer through what can only be described as the "Drakengard 3 anime-style beach filler episode" in order to unlock this path.

I'm going to describe this path.  Needless to say, ***big spoilers for both Drakengard 1 and 3***






The true final boss for Drakengard 1 was a two minute rhythm section where you had to nullify white and dark rings of energy coming at you from a lady statue with like colored rings from your dragon.  Needless to say, of course Drakengard 3's true final boss is also a rhythm section/lady statue!

That is seven minutes long!

Which forces you to hit a shit-ton of rings in a half second window of time!

And the camera is constantly obscuring your dragon and/or the lady statue, so you're utterly reliant on a laggy, unintuitive rhythm!

That's bad, because if you fuck up EVEN ONCE, you get to restart things all over again, including the simplistic three minute opening section that you won't have trouble with after passing it the first time, but will still force you to pay attention and boy will your eyeballs and hands hurt!!!!

Oh yeah!~

I forgot to mention that once you manage to get past all of this, the screen fades to black, and there's three more timed prompts you have to hit which have no rhythm market at all, including a final one WHILE YOUR DRAGON IS TALKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is me at age 14, little did i know i had perfectly anticipated my reaction to this fucking boss fight

The designers no doubt believed they were making a WACKY STATEMENT about the nature of super hard final bosses.  We live in a world of broadband internet and youtube, and so it was so no big surprise a user on Nico Nico immediately released a video that demonstrated each time you needed to hit the button.  With all that in mind, I still feel the need to say "fuck you, that was horrible."  There's nothing iconoclastic about testing your player's patience so far that even the proudest man is forced to get online to figure out how to cope with your bullshit rhythm mechanics.

So what is the TWIZTED reward for this?  For all intents and purposes, this:

I had expected some big cursory "SCREW YOU PLAYER" ending in the form of everyone dying a horrible death like the previous Drakengards, but no, it was basically "yay you saved everyone it's the ULTIMATE HAPPY ENDING ^_______^"  In a sense, it took an entire game to set up the payoff, but Drakengard 3 finally subverted how a vidya game should work, and destroyed everyone's expectations and hopes in the most smug, pug-pissy way possible.

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Congrats, Drakengard 3.  You're a fucked up game after all.

The old man smiles, and walks into the distance.