Drakengard 3

Drakengard 3 is a narrative-driven action game that shows some promise at the beginning, when it presents intriguing characters and mysteries with a striking, aggressive tone, and a serviceable combat system. As the game goes on, however, it gets dragged down by repetition: characters never evolve beyond their initial characterization, levels are reused ad aeternum, and the combat boils down to using the same combo over and over again.

The game – which serves as a prequel to the first two Drakengards – opens with a narration typical of the genre, the one that functions as an introduction to the fantastical world where the story takes place. The narrator talks about the sudden coming of deities called Intoners: goddesses that came to his worn-torn world to bring back peace and order with their magical songs. The tone of the text is one of reverence, as the narrator seems enamored with the Intoners, stating how everything became better with their arrival and “mankind enjoyed an age of sweet reverie.” But suddenly the narrator stops his account, as he’s fatally wounded by the protagonist, Zero. “You murderous savage,” he accuses Zero, who promptly replies, “Savage? I think you mean Intoner.” She then proceeds to slaughter every soldier in front of the building.

This contrast in tone, which goes from reverent to gore in a span of seconds, is a perfect introduction to Drakengard 3, whose narrative is built upon this device. The contrast serves to deconstruct everything that was explained by the narrator, painting him as an unreliable one: he talked about peace and harmony, but the protagonist is now being seen soaked in blood, which is also splashing onto the screen. He talked about the people revering the goddesses, but he’s quick to call Zero – an Intoner – a savage, and she’s quick to point out the irony.

As a result, the worldbuilding in the game is presented to us indirectly. Instead of the narrator explaining to us that the world is under authoritarian rule and that the Intoners are violent, tyrannical beings, he tells us the opposite. But since the following events contradict the characterization, descriptions, and overall tone of his lines, we are left with a huge red flag that may point out that the opposite of what the narrator said is true.

Zero’s motivation is one of the core questions of the story: she claims that she only wants power, that she’s killing her sisters to be the only Intoner in the world, but her actions betray any pragmatic excuse she might make for herself. We can guess there’s something more to her actions because she seems hellbent on murdering her fellow Intoners. For example, when she defeats the first one, she keeps attacking the body, mutilating it, while screaming in anger: if there’s anger, she’s emotionally involved in the situation; it means that it’s personal. But if it’s a matter of revenge, justice, or something else, we are left to wonder at the beginning.

Her companion, the dragon Mikhail, doesn’t buy her practical explanations either. He’s a dragon, but he’s also a kid, speaking with the voice of a very young boy. We are first introduced to him in a cutscene that shows Mikhail rolling over some mud, happy as a dog. Zero constantly has to scold him for eating maggots, being impulsive, or repeating sentences, as kids usually do, since they learn by repetition.

While she’s crude and sadistic, Mikhail is innocent and compassionate. He frequently questions why she can’t just talk things out with her sisters, which makes the protagonist’s violent actions even more pronounced – in the same way Zero’s white clothes and hair make the blood that splashes on her stand out even more. This contrast also makes for some moments of humor: during a conversation with one of her disciples about their night activities, Mikhail interjects to ask, “What’s a kink?”

Violence is also used for comic purposes: Zero murders even characters that promise to help her if they’re being too annoying about it, and there’s a scene in which Mikhail’s reaction to the murder is played out for laughs – as he can’t understand why she would do such horrible thing without thinking twice.

The first disciple that Zero gets – Dito – lives up to his name and mimics her predisposition to violence, frequently rejoicing at the fate of their enemies. His sadism is so manifest that even Zero gets a bit bewildered by it: “You’re a sick puppy, aren’t you,” she observes after he happily laughs at the prospect of Zero mutilating some soldiers.

Sex is a major theme in Drakengard 3, as Zero’s disciples are marked by their “kinks”: there’s the sadist, the masochist, and the nymphomaniac. The problem here is that these characters are defined by these traits; sex is all they are and it’s the only thing they ever talk about. Dito will rejoice at the violence, thinking about causing it, the masochist will moan, because he’s putting himself in the victims’ shoes, and the nymphomaniac will talk about how his penis is hard at all times. All the time. Only the fourth disciple breaks the pattern, but he’s still a flat character, being limited to one or two repeated traits.

Since the disciples are basically the only characters in the game – not counting Zero, Mikhail, and the Intoners – their characterization being limited to sex and questions of loyalty – mainly the lack of it – makes the narrative fairly repetitive. Banter during missions is always the same: Mikhail pleads for a peaceful solution, innocently, which contrasts with the disciples’ constant talk about the erotic appeal of violence, while Zero says she doesn’t care about anything or complains that she’s pissed off about something.

Zero is not that fascinating of a character either. Her more emotional scenes are about how she cares about Mikhail despite the harsh words she often gives him, which constitute the few moments when she shows some humanity. Tara Platt, who provides the English voice for Zero (and who would give a much more nuanced and heartbreaking performance with Edelgard in Fire Emblem: Three Houses years later) doesn’t have much to work with here, as Zero seems perpetually locked in a state of anger, saying things like “I’m pissed off” all the time.

Her motivation is also put under wraps for no special reason:  before the last mission, she basically says “ok, it’s finally time for you to know everything” and just explains things that she could have very well explained missions before. And the revelation itself – besides being contrived – also fails to make her more complex, since it doesn’t change anything: it doesn’t shake established relationships or play with perspective, making us see things from another point of view. It just provides a reason for all the killing and one that’s as one-dimensional as it is random: the narrative’s refusal to talk about certain elements, like the flower that protrudes from Zero’ right eye, is the key problem here, as this makes certain plot points come out of nowhere with little build-up and foreshadowing.

The structure with multiple endings is also problematic – the game divides its story into “branches” A to D –, as everything that happens between A and D is just more of the same. With some slight alterations, the ending of Branch D could very well have happened in Branch A, without making us go through five to ten hours of the same levels. The nature of the branches – and the strange character that is linked to them – also feels incredibly out of place, as it doesn’t connect thematically to anything that came before. These branches serve only to confer a dose of fatalism to certain deaths that keep happening, which means that they at least use the resulting repetition for something useful.

Another major problem of the story lies in the antagonists themselves. The intoners are paper-thin characters that never go beyond one or two quirks that are quickly presented and forgotten in their brief cutscene before the big fight: Five is crude and likes sex (original in the game’s context), Three is gloomy and likes riddles, Two exists in a bizarre “dream-state”, and so on. They are supposedly fleshed out in the overpriced DLC (in Brazil, the bundle costs almost three times the price of the base game), but we are analyzing the base game and not the DLC.

The narrative doubles down on the bizarre, sometimes even breaking the fourth wall. When Zero is repeatedly stabbing the body of one of the intoners, the game suddenly shows a cute title card censoring the moment, which is repeated in a slightly different way right after Dito – living up to his name – does the same thing to the same body. Meanwhile, the revelation about the disciples makes all their sex talk even more uncomfortable and disturbing, and the randomness of the worldbuilding at least serves to makes the events even stranger.

On the gameplay side, Drakengard 3 is much less ambitious and interesting, but equally problematic. Levels are mostly linear corridors interspersed with arenas where Zero must defeat a bunch of the same enemies. Think the Musou games, but take out the bases to conquer, officers and mobs to kill, time-based objectives, and the several different weapons with different combos and playstyles. Leave just the “square-square-square-triangle” combo that now just extends the attacks, instead of changing their nature (in the Musou games, some combos are better against mobs, while others are better against officers).

In Drakengard 3, you have a strong attack (triangle)  and a weak one (square), but weapons have just one or two combos attached to them, where you use the weak attack a few times and then the strong one. This means that, despite having fifteen different swords of different sizes, which affect attack speed, all swords play just the same. Since you don’t have a great variety of combos and enemies that push you to think differently, combat becomes a repetitive affair, redefining the concept of “button-mashing”.

You have four types of weapons in the game: the sword is the standard one; the combat bracers serve to unleash quick, but weak attacks with almost no reach (useful to defeat Undead enemies that require multiple hits to die instead of raw damage); spears are heavy and serve to break shields, and the chakram is used to hit distant foes – and only that. Weapons beside the sword, then, are designed to be used just in specific situations: if you try to win a level just with a chakram, for example, you’re going to get seriously frustrated, dealing almost no damage.

The game also punishes experimentation. God forbid, you decide to keep upgrading your weapons, as this requires huge amounts of money, leaving you with nothing to buy new ones: the game blocks the final branch if you haven’t acquired all of the weapons, but only warns that when it’s already too late. In other words, the game wants you to keep buying new weapons, but not upgrading them to be viable in battle. Because if you do upgrade, expect hours of grinding to acquire more money, as you have to beat three standard side-missions to unlock the “money grinding” one – a design decision that just wastes your time.

This means that for most of the game, you will be using the sword that you decided to upgrade – ignoring all others – and smashing the attack button until it’s time to dodge away from an enemy blow. And this will repeat until the game’s last mission. To balance things out, there are some terrible on-rails segments where Zero pilots Mikhail, which are thankfully brief, and one larger area where you have to walk in the shadows projected by objects because sunlight deals damage. But since the game continues after the ending of Branch A, even these ideas are repeated to exhaustion.

When you have dealt or received enough damage, however, you can activate “intoner mode”, which makes Zero quicker, deadlier, and invulnerable. In the side-missions, where you have to break some chests in time, this is a must to break them, as the regular attacks take a while to do the job: receiving damage to activate this mode faster is actually a viable strategy.

Besides all that, combat in Drakengard 3 suffers from technical problems. The lock-on feature is akin to Russian roulette when you are surrounded by enemies, as it can decide to ignore all the nearby foes and lock on a distant archer, making Zero dodge and block facing the wrong way. The camera also decides to activate an intoner mode of its own when you are fighting giant enemies (like centaurs and titans), moving and turning too quickly and without a pattern, making the action unintelligible. Frame rate usually tanks during these frantic moments as well, turning the whole experience into a chaotic mess.

Finally, there’s the final boss “fight”. Here, Drakengard 3 abandons any school of game design and provides a final boss that is structured nothing like the rest of the game. It’s not a last, final challenge that tests everything that you’ve learned so far, or one that provides the biggest spectacle in the game. It actually changes the game’s genre altogether and makes you learn new things in a punishing system where you can’t make a single mistake. Since failing means a black screen stating… that you’ve failed, and then a game over screen where you can choose to continue, and then a loading screen, and then a cutscene you have to skip, and then a cutscene you can’t skip, which shows “the boss” appearing, the whole thing becomes a tedious ordeal after the fifth time you have to repeat it. The “boss” itself is visually interesting and the shift in genre makes sense in a game about magical beings called “intoners”, but the execution is frustrating.

Drakengard 3 is a flawed game that tries to use its most bizarre elements to make up for its lack of depth. In the end, it indeed provides a memorable experience, but also a shallow and frustrating one.

August 03, 2021.