Bloody Elegance... Or Something

User Rating: 8 | Drakengard 3 PS3

Let’s get this out of the way; this game is very, very… Japanese. It’s designed to appeal to a Japanese audience as well as anyone who enjoys Japanese games, and wastes no time alienating everyone else. If you’re not interested, than stop reading now because this game is not for you. This game is bloody, vulgar, profane, more more often than not, outright tasteless.

And I love the ever-loving crap out of it.

Drakengard is a series that I’ve never gotten around to; it certainly looks interesting, but I never had the chance to play it. I’ve seen gameplay footage and have heard the story is amazing, and that’s helped to peak my interest in this game, thankfully, Drakengard 3 is a prequel to the first game and doesn’t require prior knowledge of the previous games, which is good news for me since I don’t have the time to hook my PS2 back up. But as for the story of this game, well let’s just say it got my attention.

Drakengard 3 takes place in a world governed over by six songstresses, known as the Intoners. They keep order with the power of their music, at least until the eldest Intoner Zero takes a turn for the nihilistic and decides to kill all of her younger sisters. But she fails, and in the process loses her eye, her arm, and her dragon companion Michael, and when the game starts proper, she has a prosthetic arm, a flower growing out of her eye socket, and a new, younger dragon named Mikhail whose extremely immature, like playing in the mud and is prone to pissing himself. As I said, this game is weird. Japanese weird. Expect to hear plenty of cursing, sexual innuendo, and tons of bizarre dialogue. And if you play a lot eastern influenced JRPGs or watch a lot of anime, than it’ll be a lot easier to take all of this in. that happens to describe me pretty well, so I found most of this charming, funny, and surprisingly compelling, to the point that I began to really get invested in Zero and Mikhail, as well as the overarching narrative as a whole.

.

In terms of presentation, Drakengard 3 won’t impress on a technical level; the pre-rendered cut scenes are beautiful, but everything else feels lacking; textures are muddy, audio mixing is way off, and the game is prone to slowdown and screen tearing. Thankfully, Drakengard’s overall aesthetic helps to pick up the slack; area layouts often sport an excellent view of the surrounding landscape, voicing acting is on-point and overflowing with character and the music is absolutely incredible. It helps to sell an immersive world with its own lore and mythology, and when you’re not taking all of that in, you'll making a bloody mess.

Drakengard helps sell the action in an action RPG; Zero will often be up against innumerable enemies and slice them up with a wide variety of weapons. It’s similar in execution to Dynasty Warriors, but I feel like it’s more disciplined than that; each weapon type has its own set of moves that can chain dazzling combos together, but doing so burns up your stamina bar, requiring you to pace yourself. You can bring up to four different weapons into battle with you, and they will help you bring down different types of enemies. The game boasts a rather impressive enemy variety; some carry shields requiring you get behind them to deal damage, some will be perched on unreachable ledges requiring you to use a ranged weapon, and some of them are shaped like giant penises (seriously). And as you cut them down, you’ll spill gallons of blood in the process. Slicing up enemies will cause blood to splatter on screen (you can turn it off if it gets distracting) and will splatter all over Zero herself, if you walk out of a battle covered in blood, you know you did a good job.

That blood also serves its own purpose; as Zero absorbs blood, she will be able to activate Intoner Mode, this state renders her temporarily invincible and ramps up her damage output exponentially. It feels empowering, and helps to deal with some of the tougher fights in the game. If all that weren’t enough, she can also call on Mikhail for aerial support, I rarely found the need to do this, but it helps to make you feel all the more awesome as you dominate your enemies. The game also features aerial combat aboard Mikhail, in a fashion very similar to games like Panzer Dragoon or Crimson Dragon. I would consider these the weaker of the combat scenarios, but the help to diversify the gameplay. When the fighting is done, you’ll be able to level up, purchase new weapons, and upgrade weapons. The money you earn after a chapter is dependent on how thoroughly you explore the environment, and you can find new weapons that way as well. Putting all of the together, you have a rock-solid action RPG with decent gameplay variety and a strong sense of progression, assuming this is your thing.

I’ll say it again; Drakengard 3 is meant to appeal to a specific audience, namely fans of the first games obviously, but also anyone who enjoys Japanese game, and all of their quirks. If that’s not you, than you’ll probably want to look elsewhere, for everyone else, a bloody good time is waiting for you in Drakengard 3.