And yet he wrote multiple mangas for it and a novella for all 6 intoners and made 6 of some of the best female characters in games of all time all in one swoop.
You'll understand why Drakengard 3 is the way it is if you were only aware of a few important facts: 1) What Yoko Taro was going through at the time the game was being developed. 2) The office politics at Square Enix at the time the game was being developed. Don't forget, 2009 to 2013 was a low point for SE on multiple fronts. 3) What was happening in Japan at the time 4) Yoko Taro had a pretty screwed up childhood and this effected his outlook on life, DoD (D3) is a reflection of some of his darker thoughts and expressions manifesting themselves. 5) The English localisation went very overboard with the direct translations. The original Japanese version, although just as equally vulgar was more tasteful in the vulgarity. In the time between him making this game and now, Taro got his mental state together and also made Automata, which is a reflection of that. He also thanks to being good friends with YoshiP, who has an executive position on the SE board, he has gained a high level of respect and power within SE and with that came the responsibilities to be more mature, he has also matured *a lot* in the past decade. As he said on Twitter when a fan said they liked D3 "sorry" he genuinely means it, he regrets making that game in hindsight. But still believes people should still be able to buy it and play it if they want to.
"The original Japanese version, although just as equally vulgar was more tasteful in the vulgarity." That's debatable, and there are cultural & linguistic differences that make it very difficult to translate certain ideas into English from Japanese 'politely', or into English that somebody can read with a straight face or that conveys the intended emotion/meaning. (I listen to a lot of Japanese dub tracks with subtitles, and even the most faithful translations are 'massaging' the text quite a bit. Even at the most basic level, like Japanese often putting the subject at the end of the sentence while English does subject-object-verb order and wants the subject at the beginning of the sentence. There's also the cultural/localization element - "kuso", which translates roughly to "crap" is the default Japanese swear word, and the one you'll be hearing over and over, but in English usage ...sorry, but hearing someone say "crap!" fifteen times in a row while mutilating a corpse is going to make me laugh, not have the reaction I'm supposed to have to the scene. English has words more appropriate to that moment to an English speaker. "Kuso" is possibly THE most replaced words in all JP->ENG translations/localizations simply because the two cultures swear, and escalate their swearing, differently - and unless you're listening to the Japanese audio, you probably have no idea how common that is.) Speaking of audio, one massive additional factor in Drak3 is the voice acting: for instance, Zero's Japanese voice actress just sounds ...bored and sad. She's doing what she feels she has to do, with a certain grief behind it that she's trying to assuage with sex, which foreshadows several lategame reveals. The English voice actress plays Zero as a continuously angry monster with two things on her mind: killing and fucking. That makes those lategame reveals more massive shockers, and I do like both performances, but the impression one gets of the MAIN CHARACTER varies significantly depending even on what audio language you select, let alone your impression of everyone else.
@@cyberninjazero5659 Something that if I posted it here in detail it would get deleted by UA-cam. It involved a friend who self removed who after doing so had a tent and Yoko found the tent funny.
From a japanese Interview about Drakengard 3: "I'll digress with a short story, of when a friend was misbehaving, at the shopping district's arcade I was walking with my friends across a tall roof, and one of them fell from the roof, causing him to die. So, the fallen boy wasn't twitching nor moving, yet his "thing" was getting erect.... Seeing that, despite the horrific circumstances everyone started to laugh, the story is left me with a disturbing memory." So yeaaaaaaah. This story explains this contrast of heavy violence and sex in the game.
I would have never given the game a second look if it wasn't for the fact that it has probably the most soul-wrenchingly beautiful song I've ever heard in a game: I believe Chihiro Onitsuka was in need of some kind of major throat surgery around the time that they recorded "This Silence is Mine," and it gave her weakened voice this gravelly, raspy quality that fit the context of that song so unbelievably well that it haunts me as the most perfectly imperfect thing that's ever been recorded. Just my opinion, but man... It's in a class of its own.
“I struggle to formulate coherent sentences because of how much this game drives me nuts.” Maybe something’s wrong with me, but you’ve fully convinced me to play Drakengard 3.
Drakengard 3 is my favorite Yoko Taro game. It's so fuckin sad and resonates so much with me. I would say Zero being reprehensible is intended, most Yoko Taro characters do horrible things but Zero is the only one who does knowingly and being completely honest about it.
Have you read her novella backstory? Being a former unalive attempter really helps me like Zero. She ends up being forced into immortality despite wanting to end
I don't know if this will be brought up later, but fun fact, Accord shows up in the Nier series too. Yonah mentions her as a merchant in a diary entry between loading screens in Replicant and she's a weapons dealer at the Resistance Camp in Automata. I'm pretty sure she also shows up in Reincarnation, hence why Reincarnation leads to a loop connecting to Drakengard 3 Edit: She did actually show up in the anime! My GOAT
She is mentioned in Reincarnation, but doesn’t show up. The loop doesn’t seem to connect to Drakengard 3 though. It seems to be self contained to the NieR timeline itself.
I don't know if this link will work but at 24:15 of "NieR Re[in]carnation Longplay (Part 16 - Act 3 The People and The World)" by @TheSamUtari, Accord does sort of appear. ua-cam.com/video/LtSInODSUts/v-deo.html Also, the DrakeNier loop is just a theory, but there could be evidence of both Drakengard 1 Ending E starting it, or the appearance of Cathedral City before Drakengard 3 starting it. The Watchers also appear in NieR Reincarnation, when 10H fights them in her Hidden Story and that's how she's able to be there at the end of the game.
I cheated and used a timing guide and it still took two weeks for me to beat the final boss. After every shift of work, I would come home and try the final boss again and again, dying in the same spot. Fortunately, my perseverance gave me my break through, and also fortunately, I knew about the final note. No game has made me feel so empty before. Also, fun fact: Octa is in his 20s. Do what you will with that information.
@@djinnxx7050 Have you heard of the book "Fatal effects of Masturbation, a 1844 French Guide to death by onanism prevention"? (yup, I'm serious, look it up), that was probably Yoko Taro inspiration for that, which honestly, it's funny if you know about the book existence.
Separate comment for a separate issue, as apparently you haven't heard this take before. I am one of the overwhelmingly many that has failed to achieve Ending D. I am one of the many who felt it was frustrating and nonsensical to achieve. I am, however, one of the few who will unreservedly support the decisions behind it, and find it to be something beautiful. From the very start, it was never designed to be fair. It was designed to be hard. To achieve what it asks of you is to successfully invalidate *all* of the works that come after. Ending D is the one and only truly happy ending for everyone involved in any of Yoko Taro's work. To succeed means there is no grotesquerie queen. Nier never happens. Our world remains blissfully ignorant to Maso and contract magic in general. Ending D singlehandedly overturns *every* great tragedy that has befallen or likely ever will befall the world of Yoko Taro's work. If such a thing were something easy, then it'd make no sense the other lines ever existed to begin with. Ending D itself is something tailored around only a very select few ever attaining it. For Accord, and by extension to me, Yoko Taro himself, if even one person achieves it, that's good enough. It's good enough that such a world exists, somewhere out there. First, I will say that in art, it's rare to so wholly get rid of accessibility and embrace exclusion at such a level. The message beyond that gate will feel tailored and special. The sacrifice Nier asked for Ending D, having *you* the player, give up something very real and important to you to wish for something better for those you've come to care about is one of the strongest feelings I've ever had evoked in a game. This ending is doing something similar. To me, it asks: "Do you care about this world and these characters? Are you willing to make a sacrifice for their wellbeing, even if it will be hours upon hours of painful and grueling loss? Even if your opponent will not play fair, and the very world itself is against you?" If a single person can answer "Yes" with honesty, and achieve that ending, then Yoko Taro's work has reached them. If it reaches and resonates with even a single person so strongly, even if the rest of the world reviles it, that will be good enough.
Yep, i do wish some would realize that Ending D is not just a meta-joke intend to make the player frustrated and stop playing what the game calls itself "a blooming rose from a puddle of blood". It's supposed to symbolize how hard and painful it is to try and achieve a real change, to really fight with yourself and your instincts to earn the right to fix... not really the world itself, but rather you. The game being yoko's frustrations in life given form into a game, it's surprising that he even pulled back in the end to have a ending like this, and not just end on a cynical note (look at the original Nier ending.. not Replicant's extra scenario). It's not the only game he made to have an overall hopeful ending, sine Automata exists, but both Ending D in DD3 and Automata's E Ending are the only two endings that actually manage to break off this Taroverse timeloop without dooming everything (or atleast, partially dooming everything) In reality, Ending D is just an allegory to fighting to break out of self-imposed depressive mindset, something that Zero as a character, has reached the explosive terminus of, literally.
The entire main cast starts making a lot more sense, and becomes even more heart breaking, when you learn that Zero, original name Rose, was a prostitute that had to go through all sorts of vile crap. Before dying and getting revived by a parasitic alien plant, which not only doesn't allow her to die, but also resulted the "birth" of her "sisters" if she tried to end her days. All of them more or less a part of Zero's own psyche and personality. All of which she then assigned Disciples to literally hold back their craziness and powers... essentially their counter parts. And very likely molded in the image of those she used to... "serve" during her past life, quite likely against her will at worst.
That's neat n all but that detail is barely in the game proper and very little is actually done with it even with extra materials. More unrealized potential.
but again, like he says in the video, that's all supplement material. None of that is in the game. All you know from the game is that Zero is the Sister of the Five and that's it.
The characters being so unhinged is part of the charm for me, i love this game, but it's definitely one of those games i wouldn't recommend to anyone lol
I think it's extremely important to remember exactly when Drakengard 3 came out (god, it's been over a decade now): having characters casually discussing sex and joking about various aspects of it to the degree and explicitness Drak3 cranks it to was still a taboo for a game from a major publisher. That was important. Most other games outside the indie (or doujin) scene had buried and/or implied their sexual content, confined it to a few jokes, or perhaps restricted it to certain optional scenes (which usually followed very standard romance story tropes), but Drak3 got right up in your face with it in a way that no other title from a major publisher had the balls to do. For all the shit this game gets, and despite the fact that aspect pissed you off, it was an important watershed moment simply for that: its characters talked about sex the same way I and my bros did, and somehow got away with doing so, despite being published by a massive AAA company in the industry, in a time where that simply wasn't a thing companies like that published. Yes, the game looks, and plays, like an end-of-life PS2 title that happened to be an end-of-life PS3 title. It's clunky, it has framerate drops for days even on the original hardware (which is kind of an impressive feat, really, considering that programmers had been able to pull off feats like Metal Gear Solid 4 as near launch titles), and parts of it get quite repetitive. But I think it did something very important in normalizing explicit dialogue about sex in videogames. I may be extremely biased toward it because watching a skimpily-clad woman with white hair get covered in the blood of her enemies is kind of my thing, but although it's one of Yoko Taro's weaker works, I think it has a broader significance than many give it credit for.
That describes me pretty well. I was initially confused by the juvenile dialog and plot points. Years later after playing "No More Heroes" I see this game differently. Drakengard 3 has an irreverent sense of humor, but it also has serious messages behind the humor. It comes off as crass at first, but when you look past that it actually has some interesting insights into the human condition.
@Yoshemo1 I see what you did there. :* And at least with me it definetly is true that this game grows with time. Its humor beyond comparison, the timing of it alone, the very open conversations about sex, the sheer refusal to be in any way scaled back.
Someone did an entire 40 minute (iirc) video only on how evil the ending D is, even a QA for the game showed up to comment how evil it is, that ending is just brutal edit: commented this before finishing this video, Max mentions it at 24:19, oops
Taro has spoken his intentions with Drakengard 3's tone in several interviews, and iirc what he said went opposite of what your theory states. He said something along the line that he feels like the fans of D1 won't feel at home with D3 and that he wanted to undercut D3's "Dark Tone" with humorous moments.
This makes more sense to me. I don't care what anyone says, Drakengard 1 is scarier, and more perverse. Drakengard 3 feels more like satire, despite both of them being satire. Drakengard 1 is peak darkness for Square Enix games, and D3 only gets about 70% of the way there. Nothing can match the existential horror, and depravity of D1.
don't underestimate how many fans have written essays on this one game alone. under a lot of it's gross dialogue is an okay story about someone who wanted to die with the knowledge that the one thing important to her survived after she was gone
@@youtubeenjoyer1743 It's canon-canon. The novella spells it out. Zero was dying from illness and exposure in the stocks/pillory. She'd had a miserable life, had done terrible things, and wanted nothing more than her life to finally end. The flower took that from her.
Zero is possibly one of my favorite characters in all of fiction. Super well-written, really intelligent, and what a heartbreak of a story. This game's story is in a lot of ways one of the most important in the entire DrakeNier universe. And an important feature of it is that it takes very seriously the lesson that Yoko Taro learned from Hideaki Anno: more, more, more, until you can't bear it any more, and *then* it hits you with an emotional freight train. Compare this to the ending of Evangelion, the End of Evangelion, and Evangelion 3.0+1.0: I was crying in the theater when 3.0+1.0 had its US run because it just piles so much on you and really expertly uses sensory overload so that when the rug gets pulled out, you have no more guards up.
Out of curiosity, would you have said that Zero was your favorite character even if you didn't know about her backstory from the novella? If so, awesome! I’m just curious.
"all the lore should be in the game" - while I normally agree, this is a yoko Taro game. I wouldn't be surprised if there's important canon lore in a live action pr0n some time in the future. To that end, Nier Reincarnation, a now defunct mobile game, expands on the flowers. The characters affectionately called Baldy and Wife, as well as Noelle, are all super soldier clones from the far future fighting extinction at the hands of the flowers. It's all connected, and I love it.
Yoko Taro literally did this. There is a series of highly difficult 24-player raids in Final Fantasy XIV’s 3rd expansion, Shadowbringers, that are fully canon to the DrakeNeir franchise. You need to play over 500 hours of FFXIV main story to even gain access to said raids. They make zero sense to FFXIV players that have no experience with Taro’s work, but left most Taro fans extremely satisfied. And again, they are very difficult.
Heads up: Drakengard 2 is canon to the timeline according to the World Inside book and Yoko Taro considers it just as legitimate as the other entries, he's said that he loves the idea that other people can create games in his world. Hopefully, you see this because there's a lot of misinformation-fueled hate directed to 2 and this information isn't exactly easy to find.
This game to me has always been a dark comedy. Like a combination of Madoka Magica and Panty & Stocking. It’s incredibly cynical, even in how it presents its game design. It’s almost like he knew that this game wasn’t gonna be good in the first place, but went forward with it anyway with a mentality of here we go again I guess, lol. Actually, look up the video where Yoko Taro talks about the game. Something definitely happened in development I think to make this more of a cynical joke rather than a serious piece of art until at least the ending. It has its seriousness, but it coats everything in a childish sense of humor. I don’t know if it’s considered a bad excuse for liking a really messy game, but I’ll take it. I still get emotional when listening to the credits theme plus zeros attitude and characters actually really inspiring when you get to the end of the game and realize the context of everything but unfortunately context is very sparse in this game isn’t it? Lol
Accord is Best Girl in DoD3 simply because she's the only mentally healthy character out of the entire main cast ...which may or may not have something to do with the fact that she's a robot
Bit of old internet lore for the curious. Back when Let's Plays where done with screen shots and before Minecraft and UA-cam were huge there was a guy who did LPs of all the Drakengard games and added his own character dialogue to add a bucket of flavor to the games. He turned the original into a buddy cop movie where Caim REALLY likes murder and is responsible for 'Drakengard!' becoming a punchline similar to 'The Aristocrats!' between my brother and I. If you're interested you can find them still up on the Let's Play Archive.
“Their only purpose is to make a ‘segs’ joke every second or third sentence that comes out of their face hole.” Bro just described 90% of Hazbin Hotel’s characters 💀😆
5:28 ehh, that is a bit debatable back when drakengard 1 was made Musou was still trying to figure out itself and was leaning more towards an arcade-ey stage based mount and blade where your player character was surprisingly squishy and you had to keep actual track of morale, allied troops, and enemy troop types to avoid dying, as well as enemy ranks (as in military ranks) since higher rank enemies tended to have more mooks, and defeating them would either weaken or full on lead their subordinates to retreat... but trying to power fantasy your way directly to them was suicide. (archers in those early games are as deadly as cutscenes tend to show them to be, dealing tons of damage and stunlocking you, so trying to face an archer formation head on is begging to die, as an example) And there were full on battle simulations going on in the background with troop number, type and morale all deciding how well your allies did all over the map Its only as the franchise and overall genre went on that it became more of a power fantasy (with DW 5 / SW 2 being the final drop before the genre just fully embraced the power fantasy aspect; Though even 5 still called back to its roots with a mode in the extreme legends expansion where you started off as a common soldier and it took most of the campaign before you became able to cut through armies alone) The more simulated combat aspects giving way to heavily scripted story stages where you basically have to do everything alone (unless a plot event says otherwise) or generic no story side modes... where you still basically have to do everything alone. BASICALLY, the point I am trying and failing to make is that Drakengard 1 is actually one of MANY musou clones of the era (and even later) that kind of missed the point in a weirdly prescient way, being weaker versions of what the franchise they were copying would eventually become. 8:00 I cant speak for others, but I would not say its entirely that... at the least in regards to the originators; A lot of what I like is how characters react to how well you do, but then again I am the odd one out who actually likes the (well written) musou games... In that regard, Spirit of Sanada has a great final stage where you are playing an absolutely broken powerful character... but against impossible odds that will wear you down no matter what.
Yoko Taro is NOT a man who does things on the nose. Calling it Drakengard 0 would have been obvious. Why would you want someone to "get it right off the bat". Finding out that it's a prequel through gameplay and lore is part of the ride.
Funny because I finished Drakengard 3 a few days ago after Drakengard and NieR, and honestly it might be my favorite Yoko Taro game thus far. It's an endlessly fascinating work of art that defies every convention about what makes good or bad art. In my personal review of it I compare it to Picasso's Guernica, an equally ugly and grotesque painting that shines in its deliberate chaos. For about 75% of my playthrough I thought that I didn't like the game very much, but there came a time around branch D where I just thought about what the game was trying to say. Suddenly, all of it clicked with me and I somehow did a complete 180° on it. It's no NieR insofar as the quality of its story, but I don't think a game has challenged my way of thinking this much before.
I found myself so confused at why the ending of nier replicant was so tragic until I heard about the lore. Important story details should not be hidden behind some book that hasn't even been translated into English. It honestly kind of soured me on the ending to the game because so many important plot points were left vague or just taken out entirely . Now that I know all the lore, it makes me even more mad because I know just how much better the story could have been.
Grimoire Nier is what you want to check out. There is a fantranslation of the original release. In 2023 released a wonderful hardcover version of it in english (which is the updated version that talks about the remaster and adds new things). It explains everything in the lore.
This is why I hate cross-media stories. It's so annoying when you have to buy 3 different comics, watch a movie, read website ARGs, play DLC, read wiki, watch UA-cam videos AND watch an interview with the creators to get the full story.
Some stuff could have been explained a bit better, but you still should have gotten the main gist of what was going on just by playing the game. Drakengard 3 is really the only game by Yoko Taro that suffers from not having all of the story in the game itself. The multi-media stuff for the other games are just nice extras for the most part.
DrakeNier is the perfect encapsulation of what happens when an IP becomes popular. While it's usually an annoyance when it happens to other IPs, I've honestly loved watching it happen here. Everyone hopped on during Nier Automata because big butt android lady, and got all the existential dread with a little of Yoko Taro's raunchy humor. Nier Replicant veered a little more into the raunchy with Kaine's existence, but was still mostly a philosophical romp. Then everyone goes "What's Drakengard about?" and it feels like everyone who didn't play Drakengard 3 before Nier Automata has the exact same reaction. It's like you're all reading Taro's diary starting from the end. You read the part filled with all the deep thought and want to know what got him there. But, much like every wisened old man with years of experience, you figure out he was once a horny teenager with every kink imaginable. I replayed the game in 2020 before Replicant's rerelease and still found myself howling like I did at its initial release. I know Taro himself isn't the biggest fan of the game, but I still love it. I got the special edition with the little red book, and I honestly consider Zero one of my favorite characters in fiction. Even though I'm older now and I realize not everyone likes the dirty humor (which was admittedly overblown in the dub), it's a time capsule of sorts for me. I don't know exactly what Taro went through in his own youth or what specifically led him to make Drakengard 3, but 2013 was not a good year in my life. A game about a pretty woman running around murdering her sister/daughters with a quartet of guys that talked like my high school friends was ~$80 of concentrated rebellion for me. I'm not the same person I was in 2013 (I hope no one is), but it's nice to look at this game and think to myself "Yeah, I made it through that." It's definitely not the best game in the overall canon, but it is my favorite. I adore the renaissance architecture, I love playing as the "bad guy" for once, I love the monsters, I love the mythology, and I still like the humor to this day for the sheer audacity of it even existing. If Drakengard 3 never released, and the next game from Taro after the Replicant remake was Drakengard 3 in its entirety but with a stable engine, there would be riots. 2024 SquEnix would never let a Drakengard 3 exist, and I don't think the most of the industry would allow it either. I can't help but respect it for that alone.
Branch D boss is the worst boss "fight" in history. It's atrocious! Edit: 4:47 That'a nothing new. Both DMC3 & MGS3 are prequels in their series. One thing this video failed to mention is the EN localization. This shit of a game is a totally different experience when you play it in Japanese. Granted you need to know JP for this. Shout-out to fellow JP enthusiasts out there. Let me say this, it's not as vile and degenerate as EN scripts.
I agree, characters like Zero barely exist in games because the player will feel off being put in this position. It's like playing as an actual anti-hero, and realizing that you would rather prefer reading about this character than actually be the driving force behind them. And it's just one of the reason i adore her.
lol filtered It's a shame you couldn't enjoy the funniest game in the franchise. I myself couldn't stop laughing. You can tell Yoko Taro was having a ton of fun while making this game. I also don't agree that it's as meaningless as you believe. I found it sold the characters and the world they live in. I'm also surprised you were so amazed at the Invoker transformation. It's just the stereotypical Devil Trigger mode present in most action games since DMC1. Maybe even earlier.
Only character action games. And it's more meaningful than Nier Automata. Automata is just nihilism. Dod3 is what the vsauce video talks about in "the greatest honour" similar to The Boss in Metal Gear 3
@@Godzilla_Star_Eaterautomata is nihilism? Wth are you talking about, buddy? Have you played past route A? Even then, it has oodles of depth and meaning. Nihilism is not just "the sads".
@@Godzilla_Star_Eater Automata literally doesn't let you beat it unless you admit that life is meaningful. I'm not sure how you got nihilism from that.
I really, desperately hope that this isn't the beginning of 'misinformed, badly scripted rage-bait Max.' Like, I don't love his videos partly because of their woodenness, but I would hate what he'd become if he took this video as a signal for the channel's future content plans...
I'm not actually so sure about that. Drakengard 3's main narrative trick (don't worry, it's got others) is that it initially presents its protagonist as a psychopath propelled to kill her sisters out of some hideous mixture of hatred, bloodlust, and regular lust (she does take their men, after all) - but the lategame reveal is that she's arguably a real heroine doing what HAS to be done for the sake the world, not just a deranged killer.
I disagree vehemently, as someone who loves drakengard 1 with their innermost soul, I despise drakengard 3, it's not a return to form, it's something different.
I completely agree. D1 has nothing to do with violence in videogames; it's about what compels people to engage in violence and the consequences of succombing to it. The scene where you are fighting child soliders is meant to show the horrors of war, and what people will do to achieve their goals, because you have to kill them otherwise they will kill you as is true in the real world; child soliders are essentially weapons used by corrupt leaders because their innocent appearance betrays their ability to kill without remorse. Children are too young to understand the consequences of killing and haven't developed empathy and reasoning against it; this is why children have a natural psychopathic streak to them until they are taught out of it.
I feel like the vulgarity of this game does have a point, though... It's not pointless just to be pointless, and pointlessness is not the point... We expect there to be a reason for everything, but sometimes the real reason is something stupid and irritating, and there's nothing to be done about it. That is to say, the vulgarity is meant to make you uncomfortable and piss you off, and to reflect on yourself if you aren't made uncomfortable by it. The protagonists are villains to make you look at yourself like you might be the real villain...
When you brought up the numbering, I was reminded that I read a decade ago that Taro said that the game was originally going to be called Drakengard 4 and the plot would have been about what happened to Drakengard 3. Which makes the numbering in this seem much more reasonable.
I loved the ending fight all the way through. Yes, I am the odd one out and I unironically enjoyed the progression of misery it brought on me. I even launch drakengard 3 sometimes just to play the ending again. I feel like this is a singularity that's not really going to (be allowed to) happen ever again. I never played another game which took me nearly a week of playing 1-2 hours every day to clear a single boss fight and I don't think I will ever will again. This is the ultimate way to show the absolute disintegration of a world in front of your eyes. Never have I ever actually felt the hardship of a character on a similiar level, a level that made me truly connect with their sorrow. Sure, Drakengard 1's pain of boring combat was also a way to burden the player with mundaneness, to make them feel something, but it didn't throw out literally everything out of the window. Here, the world around you collapses and it all turns into a numb void with only one voice echoing through it and you can feel your spirit breaking. And yet somehow you don't give up, just like the main character certainly wouldn't. They took every rule of the already established game design ruleset and broke them. All of them. They knew what they were doing, a beginner could make a mistake or two, but they intentionally turned the whole sequence on it's head. It takes insanity, and courage to do so, and that's why I fear this kind of a "no-f's-given" attitude towards a game won't be repeated. And that's a shame in my opinion, because I love when the developers aim to break out of the "normal". One thing I wonder about is whether this fight is the exact reason why Yoko Taro seemingly doesn't want to remake this game; I feel like it either won't represent the true spirit of the original, or it will be ill-received by people, who are not like you, and can't appreciate a game and it's strengths even though they didn't like some parts of it. Thank you for this video, I really enjoyed it, even though I don't agree with everything you said:)
Absolutely. Darksouls like games suck. This is the real deal. I can go on dod3, start the final song, and sometimes just beat it first try, now. I play it so much just for fun.
I think it's one of those works of art that you either absolutely hate or absolutely love. No in between. I see it's appeal as being attracted to ugliness and finding beauty in it. Something like Danse Macabre art being ugly, but at the same time appealing.
After seeing everything related to Drakengard 3(game, DLCs, manga, book), I can easily say that Zero is the best, and most complex character, created by Yoko Taro.
I love your content, and I really appreciate your calm and level-headed analysis, as well as your drive for positivity in said analyses. I really feel like I'm being engaged with on an intellectual and philosophical level when I listen to you expound about games, stories, philosophy, alchemy, psychology, etc. ...That said, hearing you get truly unhinged is a rare but entertaining treat. Personally, I've never played Darkengard 3, and I honestly don't have any immediate plans to change that (not totally from lack of interest or anything, I just have so many other games I need to play, I still haven't gotten around to playing El Shaddai yet since college started back up recently), but I've heard a lot of mixed opinions about the game itself, lore notwithstanding. And yeah, ending D looks utterly horrifying, and that last note is just one of the most diabolical things I've ever seen in a game. Truly this game was the peak of Yoko Taro's villain arc, the point where he 100% lost whatever marbles he had left and became the kind of guy who would put a canon event in someone else's game (but it's okay because the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse FFXIV raids are *PEAK* and I will be accepting no challenge to this statement). I'm only partly joking of course, the inner machinations of his mind do terrify me to consider, but I can also see that Drakengard 3 was a game with a lot of soul put into it. Nothing about it feels phoned in from what I can tell. For better or worse.
I've another theory on the depraved nature of the characters that adds to yours. During the later half of the 2000s and start of the 2010s we saw an increase of edgy characters in rpgs and action games. Characters that "fuck". Characters that cuss and that do some pretty horrible things to their enemies. Drakenguard 3 came out a whole 10 years after Drakenguard 1 and the indutry had only become more hyperviolent. The Devil May Cry series features a larger than life, balls to the wall "awesome" main character that takes no shit from anyone or anything leaning more on an anti-hero than a real hero. The No More Heroes series sees the player play an outright anti hero that goes on a mass murder spree just to get laid. Metal Gear Rising Reveangeance, Anarchy Reigns, all of the Gears of War series. Even in Rpgs you saw a much more serious Final Fantasy 13, the Mass Effect trilogy where you can be an absolute monster AND get laid (remember how the romance was a selling point?). I could go on. I feel like Yoko also wanted to tap into this by making the characters be completely ridiculous and psychopathic. Almost as if saying that we, the audience, have learnt nothing since Drakenguard 1.
As much as I like Nier, I absolutely dispise it's transmedia projects, god how much I hate having key lore elements hidden behind novels, movies and anything other than the games themselves. Kingdom Hearts is on the same train, but at least we have everything neatly recorded for fans to see, in all the games and youtube videos os mobiles games, meanwhile having shit like plays and novels not avaliable in english suck so much ass in the Nier "verse", and don't get me started on Taro's gimmick of deleting the save at the end of the game, that was genius the first time you see it, but having it used so many times does take away the impact
I love the outside manga offerings like 1.3 and utahime 5, theyre a lot of fun to read. 1.3 is especially interesting because it ends up going all the way back to Caim and the Drakengard 1 events.
Then there’s Xeno-series. Which resonant arc just released an episode that explains how every series inadvertently connects to each other in the first hour. Perfect works is, at the very least, consistent.
11:45 - Oddly I am tempted to give this game a try because of music. Not just the music within the game, but because of my own experience with Japanese Industrial Noise like Merzbow, minimalism in the vein of Philip Glass, and experimentalism à la John Cage. Also because of the pun that came to mind when you mentioned the genre. Musou vs Mousou. :D A Peerless Delusion.
To preface, I haven't played this game, but I think that characters being vile and reprehensible is something that I find quite enjoyable as opposed to being annoyed by it. When media portrays certain characteristics that go against morality it showcases that absolute morality does not exist. A vile person may save your life. A kind person may kill you. There is something profound that CAN be said utilising characters such as these with the right storytelling techniques. Just wanted to throw it out here. Great video, thanks.
I had a chance to speak with Yoko Taro at a conference where I said Drakengard 3 was my favorite game. He thought I was joking and acted awkwardly, so we quickly changed topics to the then upcoming Replicant remaster, but the thing is I wasn't joking. It's crazy to me that the man himself doesn't like this gem. I mean it's pretty common to see people online screeching about it because they don't get the raw art of it, but the guy himself isn't into it. Eh, what are you gonna do.
0:25 Lol Yup... Most definitely. Yoko Taro got some EXTREMELY dark and messed up shit in his head. He's actually rather infamous for it. The Drakengard series is pretty much representative of this fact.
I haven't even watched the video yet, but I just wanted to say: I saw the title and immediately just said out loud, "I love Drakengard 3!" with a big smile on my face. Okay, time to watch Max talk about a game franchise I absolutely love. EDIT: watched the video. I am truly forever traumatized by experiencing the ending section we'll call "Ending D". It might be the single worst gaming experience I've ever suffered through and I've experienced some truly awful, completely self-inflicted insufferable gaming experiences before that I wish on no one. Ending D might be the most cruel, sadistic, horrible thing I've ever put myself through to see its completion. I love Drakengard 3.
Loved the game. I watched some LPs of the game and the only people I found who disliked it (Game Play) where those who refused to buy/upgrade gear or didn't try different types of weapons. Those who didn't ended I saw they kept complaining about how long fights take and were bored. Also liked the jokes.
Drakengard 3 is all about you fighting against fate to try and set right what will soon go very horribly wrong (the end of the world in Drakengard 1). Par for the course of a Yoko Taro game, everyone dies. But this time, you're fighting tooth and nail to make sure it actually ends up as a heroic meaningful sacrifice, instead of being senseless and dooming the world regardless like in his other works. Also the fact that every character was revelling in being a deviant psychopath was hilarious to watch. It was so funny.
I don't think I've ever heard you be anything but calm or enthusiastic in tone, at least for the opening few minutes. I still find anything that can annoy, enrage or make me care enough to comment anywhere online at minimum did something. . But then I remember while the subject distracted me , your being so invested that you got angry was what I am most caught off guard by.Thankyou for an always entertaining & interesting video.
Definitely the best drakengard game glitches/bugs and all hahaha the sex jokes and vulgar were there for a reason and i loved every filthy minute because none of them except for maybe one or 2 of the sisters were your common cliche
Sometimes, some people need to just stay away from certain types of games. That's a harsh lesson I had to learn, and keep relearning. Granted, even as someone who likes "Drakengard", "Drakengard 2", and OG "Nier", I didn't like "Drakengard 3" much at all. But that's more due to how much it completely screws with the whole combined setting of the series. I have no issues with the raunchier parts, I've genuinely played and second-hand experienced much worse, though I admittedly am not a fan of how cynically juvenile the game feels. On a side note, geez, I don't think I've ever heard anyone rail on about how "Drakengard 3" is a musou...despite it being just standard hack-and-slash. Think "Lollipop Chainsaw", "Gundam Breaker", or, well, "Nier".
Honestly, we need far more villain protagonists if you ask me. I LIKE being made uncomfortable, and I LIKE being made to reflect on my own actions as a player, especially in super violent scenarios where I am effectively the reason the horrific protagonist gets their way. Yes, even when it's up front from the get-go or as a left turn plot hook (although I prefer a slow reveal, just sayin' I can like both). Postal - as in the first one, which is definitely a psychological horror game disguised as a shooter - is an example, especially with the "high score" ending... Edit: Just to be clear, it's not a defense of this game, which I never played, and it does look... "Meh" at best. I just have a feeling, subjectivity in mind, I'd have a higher tolerance for the main cast being so awful is all.
The characters generally make sense and are well written, it unfortunately is a case of you having to delve into their motives, backstories, and individual personalities as based on that. (yes, a lot of which is supplementary media, but that's genuinely just standard fare for DrakeNieR, and to be expected). Also, the branches are the canonical reason for the multiple endings in all of the DrakeNieR games, and get extremely heavy usage in NieR Re[in]carnation.
"and what you guys think of drakengard 3" Thank you for video, i actually am one of fans of drakengard 3, as you mentioned in video, it has very solid combat , music , ETC ... (english translation sucked , i remember someone were translating the scenes properly(in jp version), the dialouges were totally something else, en version done it however they wanted, an example was about One's Dlc offical version, one was saying that killing one person to save other persons is ok and it worth it....fan made version was saying even if she indeed does killing for sake of other, that is still sin, and she is sinner( who have repent in future)...lol, it is too different...or in the same same chaters when she was talking with gabriella, in Fan made translation version, she was talking about how much weak and vulnerable intoners are who needed to constantly rely on others and thanks gaberila for being there and feel lonely without her...these entire interaction were replaced by some meaningless talking with each other in offical version , i have nothing to say) Honestly i did not have much of plan to actually make Comment here, because what i want to say might be controversial , but i go with it, hope it will be something unique and interesting for you Max --- so i like drakengard 3 characters( in video, as you mentioned , "this game has some of worst characters ever" ) , yes, that is a fact, no one gonna like dito(as matter of fact, i actually even read its "yoko taro anversary book" (or something like that) , in interview , yoko taro clearly said that, : "no one is gonna love these characters, if they love the murdering that they are doing , they are either murderer themselves , or they are extremely sadist ", but my love stems from my curriousty ,when i was done with this game, i felt hollow, there was many questions unanswered , many plots unraveled , i wanted to know more about sisters that you barely met, i want to understand true motives of each characters, which ultimately let me to get into OUTSIDE SOURCE MATERIALS when i done that, that was when i actually appreciated this extremely dark story and its characters obviously like everyone i had my own interspersion of story, tones of short novels, manga , Story Side Book , ... all and all(alongside the notes at DLCs ) made me get attach to its characters, knowing sisters, their motives, what is behind their faces are, and what they had fought for, a prime example, One one is prime example of characters that has being done interesting in otuside source , but done dirty in game her struggles , her bonds with gaberial and others, changes in her personality , her determinations how she managed to protect her world , all and all left unanswered within game, because story focused more on desiples(who by yoko taro's statement, you are not gonna love them at all), the final clash between zero and One in Story Side Book(known as branch E) Is extremely detailed , showing everything that one consider to be done, and how to engage with zero, how much she stand up against an unstopable force even if her face becomes as pale as white, swallow everything even all her senses screaming at her and end intoners even by how much she needed to damned herself even if it means to pay this with eternity (I can goes into details , but i don't want , you can check "STORY SIDE " In acord libarary Webside(i also made video about it in my channel, while i could not explain completely , i still managed to highly some points about it) Drakengard 3 characters are very interesting , even some simple looks like characters like five, has some interesting sides and depth... it is just extremely sad that story was not about them, they could have something like "Scalet Nexus" story , to allowing more muturing over characters within game, and for my final nail in coffin , I Think i love this game's story, its gameplay is very satisfying too, all of its main characters in game Suck...either too much idiot or too much selfish, Branch A kinda sucks(i mean those dialouges that even you mentioned in this video sucks really bad) and rest of branches's story doesn't make much help... but its characters are really something that convincing me to come back, to think about them, about their personality , what they did wrong , and what could possibly would had been better path in saving their broken world , and appreciate how some of them had being written(sadly, in outside source matterial , like MANGA + STORY SIDE + Short NOVELs ) *and just for interesting fact scenario, there exists a timeline , where everything end happily ever after in Drakengard 3, it being mentioned in "Nier Reincarnation" and even exists an artwork made by fans about it, sadly ,it looks like we never known how it happened , but considering the events that game was showing us, and how zero's goal , to fixing her own mistake at all costs , the overall picture of story shown a battle of determinations , whether how we interprete it , is left to audience in the end(well , not in game of course), sorry if i talked too much, i just rarely see content around this title, take this as final , that fan art that i mentioned : yt3.ggpht.com/Aknw7dqsMNQ5EJzF7E4KGfJmLJPDlyKoldLEC5TTEwJpRfWBtaf9L7n0mhne5r0zXRaQs_GaIvjgQw=s3968-nd-v1
Say what you want about this game, but it has a killer soundtrack. Listening to This Silence is Mine after figuring out the underlying meaning of the game and how it ties to the lore is still heart wrenching
This is probably still my favorite game of all time (not so much the frustrating combat), mainly the main character, story, and even dialog. The reason why I like the dialog so much is that it truly feels close to real life, people do talk like that in real life, especially growing up in Eastern Europe. The vile dialog and scenes show the true colors of how the world is, although at first, it can seem cringe. That is the main thing I like about Drakengard 3, it shows a part of life that is not often shown in video games. I think it challenges the irony we experience in life, an example people can watch an episode of South Park, while also at the same time watching news updates about the current wars that are in the world. Also the sexual theme in this game..., I believe represents that each character has limited time to live, especially the main character, and I guess that is the only way of entertainment between the numerous battles they have to go through. It is kinda weird talking about it, but I guess that's also part of life lol
The novella stuff really should have been in a game. Zero was sold into sex slavery as a young child. A prisoner in a brothel. She didn't even have a name to call her own. Sex is the only thing other than murder and thievery she knew. It's her only outlet. The flower created the Intoners as a backup when she tried to kill herself and modeled them after different aspects of her inner self. She created the Disciples. I personally read it as a commentary on societies that simultaneously hypersexualize people, women in particular, then make discussing or embracing that sexuality in any way taboo. Our weird corporate sterilization of something intensely visceral and organic. It's absolutely everywhere. You can't get away from it.
A few years ago, FF14 had a Nier crossover with a set of alliance raids. Ive never really played any of the Nier/Drakkengarde games so I didn't know much of the references. But i never knew that one of the attacks of the last rais final boss was based on something so frustrating (the rhythm game).
As someone that loves all the dialog in this game its always interesting for me to see how much people hate it, in fact I like almost everything about this game. It is unfortunate that you were not able to enjoy it as much as i did but loved the video anyways, always like to see your analysis.
I still Don't understand why Max Derrat is not getting that each Drakengard and Nier games are a theme of the human raw condition. also, for some reason I feel like Yoko is doing a reverse Alchemy color with the game to godhood. Just to Note, I'm a guy that has experience heavy stuff(regarding DG3 theme) at a really young age, and became discussed of being just touch by anyone until I was 28. It embarrassing to text but Zero kind of helped me to overcome this (her story not the game). also, from what I know a heavy amount of the fans of DG3 is female, maybe since this theme is something they have to be aware of more than men.
Accord is also mentioned in the Nier universe, and while she is never seen she's known to NPCs as just some merchant. I like to hope that these games are building up to some game where whoever Accords employers are and the Watchers are closing in. Accord disrupts the timeline of DG3 which is against the "Accord" rules so that Zero can extinguish the flower fully in that timeline and while it comes back many years later as the queen beast, this surely sent a huge spannerwork into "the watchers" plans. So much so that they were foiled again and had to restart their work in a new world and technically won.
I love your monotonic voice, man. It's soothing and together with your articulate way of expressing ideas it feels like velvet for the ears, your anger outburts sound comedic in contrast, even if unintentional.
Drakengard 3 is the only one in the whole series I didn't finish. That said, I did watch a full timeline video for the whole Nier universe. It's the one by EruptionFang and its 6 1/2 hours long...but one thing it did was make me appreciate the story of 3, its significance and the Nier series as a whole. Highly recommend.
This reminds me of one of my favorite scifi/fantasy authors of all time: S.P. Somtow; a Thai writer who had an uncanny ability to mix high brow and low brow language and concepts. I remember trying to get my older cousin to read one of his books in the late 90s and he gave it back to me and said he couldn't get past the cheese. That is exactly how Drakengard 3 feels to me. A baffling yet intriguing mix of opposites.
I love Drakengard 3 and also you, Max. I think it's proof of the games qualities that you don't regret playing it. To be fair, I only had to suffer half of the blow because my first experience with it was through a Let's Play. By the way, I had to laugh at your seemingly genuine anger and emotion in this video. You describe yourself as monotone, what you may look at as a disadvantage, but this time I feel like you broke through the barrier to natural sounding emotion. I wish you had spoken more about the lore, though. Maybe it was your intention not to spoiler too much, but at the same time the main draw for you videos, at least for me, is that you talk deeply about the things I love.
Regarding the title bit, early on in development, Taro actually intended for the game to be called Drakengard "4" and the game would have been about trying to discover what happened to the supposed third entry.
It's probably the first time i see a video regarding this game that doesn't try to pass it for some kind of secret master piece and everything in it is perfect. Thank you.
22:20 I could say the same about World of Warcraft Lore. People usually tell me to go read the book comic or listen to the audio books... when all I want is... to play the game.
remember this guy on twitter once saying he told Yoko Taro that Drakengard 3 was his favorite game, and he replied "I'm sorry"
I thought it was a guy bringing a copy of DoD1 to Yoko Taro to be signed and he apologized then.
And yet he wrote multiple mangas for it and a novella for all 6 intoners and made 6 of some of the best female characters in games of all time all in one swoop.
One of my favourite interactions ever. Truly, a game for the mentally ill.
I LOVE Drakengard 3!!!
Yes because people that loves DG3 are broken humans or people with issues
@@algomi9280 Couldn't hope for better
You'll understand why Drakengard 3 is the way it is if you were only aware of a few important facts:
1) What Yoko Taro was going through at the time the game was being developed.
2) The office politics at Square Enix at the time the game was being developed. Don't forget, 2009 to 2013 was a low point for SE on multiple fronts.
3) What was happening in Japan at the time
4) Yoko Taro had a pretty screwed up childhood and this effected his outlook on life, DoD (D3) is a reflection of some of his darker thoughts and expressions manifesting themselves.
5) The English localisation went very overboard with the direct translations. The original Japanese version, although just as equally vulgar was more tasteful in the vulgarity.
In the time between him making this game and now, Taro got his mental state together and also made Automata, which is a reflection of that. He also thanks to being good friends with YoshiP, who has an executive position on the SE board, he has gained a high level of respect and power within SE and with that came the responsibilities to be more mature, he has also matured *a lot* in the past decade. As he said on Twitter when a fan said they liked D3 "sorry" he genuinely means it, he regrets making that game in hindsight. But still believes people should still be able to buy it and play it if they want to.
Immediately on seeing some of the lines, I posted, wondering if it was shit localization. Assuming you are correct, I am unsurprised.
"The original Japanese version, although just as equally vulgar was more tasteful in the vulgarity."
That's debatable, and there are cultural & linguistic differences that make it very difficult to translate certain ideas into English from Japanese 'politely', or into English that somebody can read with a straight face or that conveys the intended emotion/meaning. (I listen to a lot of Japanese dub tracks with subtitles, and even the most faithful translations are 'massaging' the text quite a bit. Even at the most basic level, like Japanese often putting the subject at the end of the sentence while English does subject-object-verb order and wants the subject at the beginning of the sentence. There's also the cultural/localization element - "kuso", which translates roughly to "crap" is the default Japanese swear word, and the one you'll be hearing over and over, but in English usage ...sorry, but hearing someone say "crap!" fifteen times in a row while mutilating a corpse is going to make me laugh, not have the reaction I'm supposed to have to the scene. English has words more appropriate to that moment to an English speaker. "Kuso" is possibly THE most replaced words in all JP->ENG translations/localizations simply because the two cultures swear, and escalate their swearing, differently - and unless you're listening to the Japanese audio, you probably have no idea how common that is.)
Speaking of audio, one massive additional factor in Drak3 is the voice acting: for instance, Zero's Japanese voice actress just sounds ...bored and sad. She's doing what she feels she has to do, with a certain grief behind it that she's trying to assuage with sex, which foreshadows several lategame reveals. The English voice actress plays Zero as a continuously angry monster with two things on her mind: killing and fucking. That makes those lategame reveals more massive shockers, and I do like both performances, but the impression one gets of the MAIN CHARACTER varies significantly depending even on what audio language you select, let alone your impression of everyone else.
I've never heard anything about Taro's childhood, what did he say about it?
@@cyberninjazero5659 Something that if I posted it here in detail it would get deleted by UA-cam. It involved a friend who self removed who after doing so had a tent and Yoko found the tent funny.
From a japanese Interview about Drakengard 3:
"I'll digress with a short story, of when a friend was misbehaving, at the shopping district's arcade I was walking with my friends across a tall roof, and one of them fell from the roof, causing him to die. So, the fallen boy wasn't twitching nor moving, yet his "thing" was getting erect.... Seeing that, despite the horrific circumstances everyone started to laugh, the story is left me with a disturbing memory."
So yeaaaaaaah. This story explains this contrast of heavy violence and sex in the game.
I would have never given the game a second look if it wasn't for the fact that it has probably the most soul-wrenchingly beautiful song I've ever heard in a game: I believe Chihiro Onitsuka was in need of some kind of major throat surgery around the time that they recorded "This Silence is Mine," and it gave her weakened voice this gravelly, raspy quality that fit the context of that song so unbelievably well that it haunts me as the most perfectly imperfect thing that's ever been recorded. Just my opinion, but man... It's in a class of its own.
Listen to Ren Reiss covers of This Silence is Mine. The English and Russian ones are the best in my perception.
@@Godzilla_Star_Eater Nice, her Japanese cover is pretty damn good too! Though I still immediately miss that gritty quality of Chihiro's voice...
That song is up there in my favorite credit songs in video games. It put me to tears.
i will never skip a video about a game released a decade ago
preach my brother
Good sir
I think it's more interesting to see which ones have lasting emotional power, but I'm just an old fart lol
Ah yes, the game that makes Kaine from Nier seem calm and reasonable
The story can be best described as a woman yelling at a flower for stealing her death and using her to try to kill the world.
kaine isn't...? i thought all girls where like that... or well. my ex was exactly like that.
@@TheMilhouseExperience You just wrote the most amazing summary of the story. Truly, it sounds like an opera's premise.
@@TheMilhouseExperience She's not wrong though.
Mistranslation is also to blame ,you know what i mean
> i cant deal with virgins
emotional damage
Yeah he took it personally. She's jealous because she got it graped out of her as a slave
“I struggle to formulate coherent sentences because of how much this game drives me nuts.”
Maybe something’s wrong with me, but you’ve fully convinced me to play Drakengard 3.
Mate I think you're just a closeted masochist
It's definitely an experience that reserves space in my head even all these years later.
You've failed the assignment my guy
Drakengard 3 is my favorite Yoko Taro game. It's so fuckin sad and resonates so much with me. I would say Zero being reprehensible is intended, most Yoko Taro characters do horrible things but Zero is the only one who does knowingly and being completely honest about it.
Have you read her novella backstory? Being a former unalive attempter really helps me like Zero. She ends up being forced into immortality despite wanting to end
@@Godzilla_Star_Eater Yeah. The one time where the All Life Is Precious saying is a very toxic platitude
How is she reprehensible?
@@Godzilla_Star_Eater I did and that's also part of reason I like her so much.
@@BurghezulDjentilom She was a serial killer.
Sees Drakengard 3.
Reads Title.
“Yeah, Buddy! Let’s GO!”
I don't know if this will be brought up later, but fun fact, Accord shows up in the Nier series too. Yonah mentions her as a merchant in a diary entry between loading screens in Replicant and she's a weapons dealer at the Resistance Camp in Automata. I'm pretty sure she also shows up in Reincarnation, hence why Reincarnation leads to a loop connecting to Drakengard 3
Edit: She did actually show up in the anime! My GOAT
Also mentioned in Nier Reincarnation. The whole weapon collecting thing in that one is very Accord.
She is mentioned in Reincarnation, but doesn’t show up. The loop doesn’t seem to connect to Drakengard 3 though. It seems to be self contained to the NieR timeline itself.
I don't know if this link will work but at 24:15 of "NieR Re[in]carnation Longplay (Part 16 - Act 3 The People and The World)" by @TheSamUtari, Accord does sort of appear. ua-cam.com/video/LtSInODSUts/v-deo.html
Also, the DrakeNier loop is just a theory, but there could be evidence of both Drakengard 1 Ending E starting it, or the appearance of Cathedral City before Drakengard 3 starting it. The Watchers also appear in NieR Reincarnation, when 10H fights them in her Hidden Story and that's how she's able to be there at the end of the game.
She showed up in the Nier anime.
@@BOTC201 Yeah that was hype
I cheated and used a timing guide and it still took two weeks for me to beat the final boss. After every shift of work, I would come home and try the final boss again and again, dying in the same spot. Fortunately, my perseverance gave me my break through, and also fortunately, I knew about the final note. No game has made me feel so empty before.
Also, fun fact: Octa is in his 20s. Do what you will with that information.
I made sheet some music to nail the timing.
The troll note is just something you have to memorize, though.
Back up. Octa is in his 20s??
@@xChaosFlower yeah he says that all the pounding has drained his life force (not true considering his and the other disciples' origins).
@@MALS010He excreted his life essence?
@@djinnxx7050 Have you heard of the book "Fatal effects of Masturbation, a 1844 French Guide to death by onanism prevention"? (yup, I'm serious, look it up), that was probably Yoko Taro inspiration for that, which honestly, it's funny if you know about the book existence.
Separate comment for a separate issue, as apparently you haven't heard this take before. I am one of the overwhelmingly many that has failed to achieve Ending D. I am one of the many who felt it was frustrating and nonsensical to achieve. I am, however, one of the few who will unreservedly support the decisions behind it, and find it to be something beautiful.
From the very start, it was never designed to be fair. It was designed to be hard. To achieve what it asks of you is to successfully invalidate *all* of the works that come after. Ending D is the one and only truly happy ending for everyone involved in any of Yoko Taro's work. To succeed means there is no grotesquerie queen. Nier never happens. Our world remains blissfully ignorant to Maso and contract magic in general.
Ending D singlehandedly overturns *every* great tragedy that has befallen or likely ever will befall the world of Yoko Taro's work. If such a thing were something easy, then it'd make no sense the other lines ever existed to begin with. Ending D itself is something tailored around only a very select few ever attaining it. For Accord, and by extension to me, Yoko Taro himself, if even one person achieves it, that's good enough. It's good enough that such a world exists, somewhere out there.
First, I will say that in art, it's rare to so wholly get rid of accessibility and embrace exclusion at such a level. The message beyond that gate will feel tailored and special. The sacrifice Nier asked for Ending D, having *you* the player, give up something very real and important to you to wish for something better for those you've come to care about is one of the strongest feelings I've ever had evoked in a game. This ending is doing something similar. To me, it asks:
"Do you care about this world and these characters? Are you willing to make a sacrifice for their wellbeing, even if it will be hours upon hours of painful and grueling loss? Even if your opponent will not play fair, and the very world itself is against you?"
If a single person can answer "Yes" with honesty, and achieve that ending, then Yoko Taro's work has reached them. If it reaches and resonates with even a single person so strongly, even if the rest of the world reviles it, that will be good enough.
That’s beautiful 🎉
Yep, i do wish some would realize that Ending D is not just a meta-joke intend to make the player frustrated and stop playing what the game calls itself "a blooming rose from a puddle of blood". It's supposed to symbolize how hard and painful it is to try and achieve a real change, to really fight with yourself and your instincts to earn the right to fix... not really the world itself, but rather you.
The game being yoko's frustrations in life given form into a game, it's surprising that he even pulled back in the end to have a ending like this, and not just end on a cynical note (look at the original Nier ending.. not Replicant's extra scenario). It's not the only game he made to have an overall hopeful ending, sine Automata exists, but both Ending D in DD3 and Automata's E Ending are the only two endings that actually manage to break off this Taroverse timeloop without dooming everything (or atleast, partially dooming everything)
In reality, Ending D is just an allegory to fighting to break out of self-imposed depressive mindset, something that Zero as a character, has reached the explosive terminus of, literally.
You get it, my guy! You really get it dude!
perfectly summarizes much of my thoughts on why I love drakengard 3 so much
The entire main cast starts making a lot more sense, and becomes even more heart breaking, when you learn that Zero, original name Rose, was a prostitute that had to go through all sorts of vile crap. Before dying and getting revived by a parasitic alien plant, which not only doesn't allow her to die, but also resulted the "birth" of her "sisters" if she tried to end her days.
All of them more or less a part of Zero's own psyche and personality. All of which she then assigned Disciples to literally hold back their craziness and powers... essentially their counter parts.
And very likely molded in the image of those she used to... "serve" during her past life, quite likely against her will at worst.
.... 🤔 Usubeni ...
That's neat n all but that detail is barely in the game proper and very little is actually done with it even with extra materials. More unrealized potential.
@@blackosprey2219 Thats why we need a remake.
but again, like he says in the video, that's all supplement material. None of that is in the game. All you know from the game is that Zero is the Sister of the Five and that's it.
@@frogradarlet's be real no way squenix allows prostitution gameplay into their game
The characters being so unhinged is part of the charm for me, i love this game, but it's definitely one of those games i wouldn't recommend to anyone lol
Mrs. Puff: THESE are my people!
They're batshit insane and I love it
I think it's extremely important to remember exactly when Drakengard 3 came out (god, it's been over a decade now): having characters casually discussing sex and joking about various aspects of it to the degree and explicitness Drak3 cranks it to was still a taboo for a game from a major publisher. That was important. Most other games outside the indie (or doujin) scene had buried and/or implied their sexual content, confined it to a few jokes, or perhaps restricted it to certain optional scenes (which usually followed very standard romance story tropes), but Drak3 got right up in your face with it in a way that no other title from a major publisher had the balls to do.
For all the shit this game gets, and despite the fact that aspect pissed you off, it was an important watershed moment simply for that: its characters talked about sex the same way I and my bros did, and somehow got away with doing so, despite being published by a massive AAA company in the industry, in a time where that simply wasn't a thing companies like that published.
Yes, the game looks, and plays, like an end-of-life PS2 title that happened to be an end-of-life PS3 title. It's clunky, it has framerate drops for days even on the original hardware (which is kind of an impressive feat, really, considering that programmers had been able to pull off feats like Metal Gear Solid 4 as near launch titles), and parts of it get quite repetitive.
But I think it did something very important in normalizing explicit dialogue about sex in videogames.
I may be extremely biased toward it because watching a skimpily-clad woman with white hair get covered in the blood of her enemies is kind of my thing, but although it's one of Yoko Taro's weaker works, I think it has a broader significance than many give it credit for.
By this day next year, this will be one of Max's favorite games in the series. It gets in you and grows, just like a flower.
That describes me pretty well. I was initially confused by the juvenile dialog and plot points. Years later after playing "No More Heroes" I see this game differently. Drakengard 3 has an irreverent sense of humor, but it also has serious messages behind the humor. It comes off as crass at first, but when you look past that it actually has some interesting insights into the human condition.
@Yoshemo1 I see what you did there. :*
And at least with me it definetly is true that this game grows with time.
Its humor beyond comparison, the timing of it alone, the very open conversations about sex, the sheer refusal to be in any way scaled back.
The humour is what shields their hearts... the bleakness.
To have a laugh at your doomed condition... is to spit the face of despair... Its hope 😊 ...
I saw the chapters in the video, I instantly chuckled when there was an entire segment to how evil is ending D
Someone did an entire 40 minute (iirc) video only on how evil the ending D is, even a QA for the game showed up to comment how evil it is, that ending is just brutal
edit: commented this before finishing this video, Max mentions it at 24:19, oops
Lea pfp
Taro has spoken his intentions with Drakengard 3's tone in several interviews, and iirc what he said went opposite of what your theory states. He said something along the line that he feels like the fans of D1 won't feel at home with D3 and that he wanted to undercut D3's "Dark Tone" with humorous moments.
This makes more sense to me. I don't care what anyone says, Drakengard 1 is scarier, and more perverse. Drakengard 3 feels more like satire, despite both of them being satire.
Drakengard 1 is peak darkness for Square Enix games, and D3 only gets about 70% of the way there. Nothing can match the existential horror, and depravity of D1.
Every video of thread about Japanese games have soooo many unsourced comments that just say “yeah lol I heard 15 years ago he said this or something”
@@chadgoose7886 because most are from interviews taken by long dead websites. And with japanese being easy to mistranslated, accuracy is never 100
Was on the biggest draken/nier kick recently. Don't think I'm the same person that went in fresh tbh.
don't underestimate how many fans have written essays on this one game alone. under a lot of it's gross dialogue is an okay story about someone who wanted to die with the knowledge that the one thing important to her survived after she was gone
cute headcanon
@@youtubeenjoyer1743 It's canon-canon. The novella spells it out.
Zero was dying from illness and exposure in the stocks/pillory. She'd had a miserable life, had done terrible things, and wanted nothing more than her life to finally end.
The flower took that from her.
I like this comment. :)
@@maxderrat Jew
@@friktogurg9242???
Zero is possibly one of my favorite characters in all of fiction. Super well-written, really intelligent, and what a heartbreak of a story.
This game's story is in a lot of ways one of the most important in the entire DrakeNier universe. And an important feature of it is that it takes very seriously the lesson that Yoko Taro learned from Hideaki Anno: more, more, more, until you can't bear it any more, and *then* it hits you with an emotional freight train. Compare this to the ending of Evangelion, the End of Evangelion, and Evangelion 3.0+1.0: I was crying in the theater when 3.0+1.0 had its US run because it just piles so much on you and really expertly uses sensory overload so that when the rug gets pulled out, you have no more guards up.
Out of curiosity, would you have said that Zero was your favorite character even if you didn't know about her backstory from the novella? If so, awesome! I’m just curious.
Out of all of fiction? Bro.
I don't think it is as tedious as the Lost Izalith run to bed of chaos but the final note was just a war crime.
Manus with vitality at 22 but level 120 lol
Arguably it's kinda bettere to not summon sif against manus, better to melee him
Yoko Taro is hilarious, doing all this just to get this reaction is hilarious
"all the lore should be in the game" - while I normally agree, this is a yoko Taro game. I wouldn't be surprised if there's important canon lore in a live action pr0n some time in the future.
To that end, Nier Reincarnation, a now defunct mobile game, expands on the flowers. The characters affectionately called Baldy and Wife, as well as Noelle, are all super soldier clones from the far future fighting extinction at the hands of the flowers. It's all connected, and I love it.
Yoko Taro literally did this.
There is a series of highly difficult 24-player raids in Final Fantasy XIV’s 3rd expansion, Shadowbringers, that are fully canon to the DrakeNeir franchise. You need to play over 500 hours of FFXIV main story to even gain access to said raids. They make zero sense to FFXIV players that have no experience with Taro’s work, but left most Taro fans extremely satisfied. And again, they are very difficult.
Heads up: Drakengard 2 is canon to the timeline according to the World Inside book and Yoko Taro considers it just as legitimate as the other entries, he's said that he loves the idea that other people can create games in his world. Hopefully, you see this because there's a lot of misinformation-fueled hate directed to 2 and this information isn't exactly easy to find.
This game to me has always been a dark comedy. Like a combination of Madoka Magica and Panty & Stocking. It’s incredibly cynical, even in how it presents its game design. It’s almost like he knew that this game wasn’t gonna be good in the first place, but went forward with it anyway with a mentality of here we go again I guess, lol. Actually, look up the video where Yoko Taro talks about the game. Something definitely happened in development I think to make this more of a cynical joke rather than a serious piece of art until at least the ending. It has its seriousness, but it coats everything in a childish sense of humor. I don’t know if it’s considered a bad excuse for liking a really messy game, but I’ll take it. I still get emotional when listening to the credits theme plus zeros attitude and characters actually really inspiring when you get to the end of the game and realize the context of everything but unfortunately context is very sparse in this game isn’t it? Lol
Accord is Best Girl in DoD3 simply because she's the only mentally healthy character out of the entire main cast
...which may or may not have something to do with the fact that she's a robot
Bit of old internet lore for the curious. Back when Let's Plays where done with screen shots and before Minecraft and UA-cam were huge there was a guy who did LPs of all the Drakengard games and added his own character dialogue to add a bucket of flavor to the games. He turned the original into a buddy cop movie where Caim REALLY likes murder and is responsible for 'Drakengard!' becoming a punchline similar to 'The Aristocrats!' between my brother and I. If you're interested you can find them still up on the Let's Play Archive.
That final note of the rhythm game, that final fucking note.
Lol he means the SECOND final note
“Their only purpose is to make a ‘segs’ joke every second or third sentence that comes out of their face hole.”
Bro just described 90% of Hazbin Hotel’s characters 💀😆
5:28 ehh, that is a bit debatable
back when drakengard 1 was made Musou was still trying to figure out itself and was leaning more towards an arcade-ey stage based mount and blade where your player character was surprisingly squishy and you had to keep actual track of morale, allied troops, and enemy troop types to avoid dying, as well as enemy ranks (as in military ranks) since higher rank enemies tended to have more mooks, and defeating them would either weaken or full on lead their subordinates to retreat... but trying to power fantasy your way directly to them was suicide.
(archers in those early games are as deadly as cutscenes tend to show them to be, dealing tons of damage and stunlocking you, so trying to face an archer formation head on is begging to die, as an example)
And there were full on battle simulations going on in the background with troop number, type and morale all deciding how well your allies did all over the map
Its only as the franchise and overall genre went on that it became more of a power fantasy (with DW 5 / SW 2 being the final drop before the genre just fully embraced the power fantasy aspect; Though even 5 still called back to its roots with a mode in the extreme legends expansion where you started off as a common soldier and it took most of the campaign before you became able to cut through armies alone)
The more simulated combat aspects giving way to heavily scripted story stages where you basically have to do everything alone (unless a plot event says otherwise) or generic no story side modes... where you still basically have to do everything alone.
BASICALLY, the point I am trying and failing to make is that Drakengard 1 is actually one of MANY musou clones of the era (and even later) that kind of missed the point in a weirdly prescient way, being weaker versions of what the franchise they were copying would eventually become.
8:00 I cant speak for others, but I would not say its entirely that... at the least in regards to the originators; A lot of what I like is how characters react to how well you do, but then again I am the odd one out who actually likes the (well written) musou games...
In that regard, Spirit of Sanada has a great final stage where you are playing an absolutely broken powerful character... but against impossible odds that will wear you down no matter what.
Yoko Taro is NOT a man who does things on the nose. Calling it Drakengard 0 would have been obvious. Why would you want someone to "get it right off the bat". Finding out that it's a prequel through gameplay and lore is part of the ride.
Don't take that critique seriously. I was mostly making a joke. It's really no big deal that it's called Drakengard 3.
Funny because I finished Drakengard 3 a few days ago after Drakengard and NieR, and honestly it might be my favorite Yoko Taro game thus far. It's an endlessly fascinating work of art that defies every convention about what makes good or bad art. In my personal review of it I compare it to Picasso's Guernica, an equally ugly and grotesque painting that shines in its deliberate chaos. For about 75% of my playthrough I thought that I didn't like the game very much, but there came a time around branch D where I just thought about what the game was trying to say. Suddenly, all of it clicked with me and I somehow did a complete 180° on it. It's no NieR insofar as the quality of its story, but I don't think a game has challenged my way of thinking this much before.
I found myself so confused at why the ending of nier replicant was so tragic until I heard about the lore. Important story details should not be hidden behind some book that hasn't even been translated into English. It honestly kind of soured me on the ending to the game because so many important plot points were left vague or just taken out entirely . Now that I know all the lore, it makes me even more mad because I know just how much better the story could have been.
Where can i read all this lore i havent played replicant but i beat the original on the ps3
Grimoire Nier is what you want to check out. There is a fantranslation of the original release. In 2023 released a wonderful hardcover version of it in english (which is the updated version that talks about the remaster and adds new things). It explains everything in the lore.
This is why I hate cross-media stories. It's so annoying when you have to buy 3 different comics, watch a movie, read website ARGs, play DLC, read wiki, watch UA-cam videos AND watch an interview with the creators to get the full story.
Some stuff could have been explained a bit better, but you still should have gotten the main gist of what was going on just by playing the game. Drakengard 3 is really the only game by Yoko Taro that suffers from not having all of the story in the game itself. The multi-media stuff for the other games are just nice extras for the most part.
@@Jack-nj9pithere videos on UA-cam 6hrs too, look up nier retrospective, or nier lore full
DrakeNier is the perfect encapsulation of what happens when an IP becomes popular. While it's usually an annoyance when it happens to other IPs, I've honestly loved watching it happen here. Everyone hopped on during Nier Automata because big butt android lady, and got all the existential dread with a little of Yoko Taro's raunchy humor. Nier Replicant veered a little more into the raunchy with Kaine's existence, but was still mostly a philosophical romp. Then everyone goes "What's Drakengard about?" and it feels like everyone who didn't play Drakengard 3 before Nier Automata has the exact same reaction. It's like you're all reading Taro's diary starting from the end. You read the part filled with all the deep thought and want to know what got him there. But, much like every wisened old man with years of experience, you figure out he was once a horny teenager with every kink imaginable. I replayed the game in 2020 before Replicant's rerelease and still found myself howling like I did at its initial release.
I know Taro himself isn't the biggest fan of the game, but I still love it. I got the special edition with the little red book, and I honestly consider Zero one of my favorite characters in fiction. Even though I'm older now and I realize not everyone likes the dirty humor (which was admittedly overblown in the dub), it's a time capsule of sorts for me. I don't know exactly what Taro went through in his own youth or what specifically led him to make Drakengard 3, but 2013 was not a good year in my life. A game about a pretty woman running around murdering her sister/daughters with a quartet of guys that talked like my high school friends was ~$80 of concentrated rebellion for me. I'm not the same person I was in 2013 (I hope no one is), but it's nice to look at this game and think to myself "Yeah, I made it through that."
It's definitely not the best game in the overall canon, but it is my favorite. I adore the renaissance architecture, I love playing as the "bad guy" for once, I love the monsters, I love the mythology, and I still like the humor to this day for the sheer audacity of it even existing. If Drakengard 3 never released, and the next game from Taro after the Replicant remake was Drakengard 3 in its entirety but with a stable engine, there would be riots. 2024 SquEnix would never let a Drakengard 3 exist, and I don't think the most of the industry would allow it either. I can't help but respect it for that alone.
Branch D boss is the worst boss "fight" in history. It's atrocious!
Edit:
4:47 That'a nothing new. Both DMC3 & MGS3 are prequels in their series.
One thing this video failed to mention is the EN localization. This shit of a game is a totally different experience when you play it in Japanese. Granted you need to know JP for this. Shout-out to fellow JP enthusiasts out there. Let me say this, it's not as vile and degenerate as EN scripts.
we need dialogue like this in games again honestly. When games where unfiltered, it was the golden age
Zero is a beautifully written character. I love her.
Absolutely 💯
Her design is peak too. I have a huge figurine of her.
@@BurghezulDjentilom ohhh custom or where did you get it?
@@JC-cb8oi look up Creation Studio Zero. There's others that are cool, but I got that one. I'm pretty sure there's one statue that included Mikhail.
I agree, characters like Zero barely exist in games because the player will feel off being put in this position. It's like playing as an actual anti-hero, and realizing that you would rather prefer reading about this character than actually be the driving force behind them. And it's just one of the reason i adore her.
lol filtered
It's a shame you couldn't enjoy the funniest game in the franchise. I myself couldn't stop laughing. You can tell Yoko Taro was having a ton of fun while making this game.
I also don't agree that it's as meaningless as you believe. I found it sold the characters and the world they live in.
I'm also surprised you were so amazed at the Invoker transformation. It's just the stereotypical Devil Trigger mode present in most action games since DMC1. Maybe even earlier.
Only character action games. And it's more meaningful than Nier Automata. Automata is just nihilism. Dod3 is what the vsauce video talks about in "the greatest honour" similar to The Boss in Metal Gear 3
Yes, this so much, Drakengard 3 is so damn funny and the characters are all unhinged, I had a blast playing it and the story is great
but the music is lit when you transfrom
@@Godzilla_Star_Eaterautomata is nihilism? Wth are you talking about, buddy? Have you played past route A? Even then, it has oodles of depth and meaning. Nihilism is not just "the sads".
@@Godzilla_Star_Eater Automata literally doesn't let you beat it unless you admit that life is meaningful. I'm not sure how you got nihilism from that.
FINALLY Max sounds like a proper human, let his emotions out and all, lmao finally a game broke him.
This video is when this channel officially began.
Ah, this is his Ending C.
drakenguard 3 is truly a game which transcends autism
I really, desperately hope that this isn't the beginning of 'misinformed, badly scripted rage-bait Max.'
Like, I don't love his videos partly because of their woodenness, but I would hate what he'd become if he took this video as a signal for the channel's future content plans...
I would dare say you misunderstood the original drakengard because the intent was the same. This is for the psychos among us who loved the first.
I'm not actually so sure about that.
Drakengard 3's main narrative trick (don't worry, it's got others) is that it initially presents its protagonist as a psychopath propelled to kill her sisters out of some hideous mixture of hatred, bloodlust, and regular lust (she does take their men, after all) - but the lategame reveal is that she's arguably a real heroine doing what HAS to be done for the sake the world, not just a deranged killer.
I disagree vehemently, as someone who loves drakengard 1 with their innermost soul, I despise drakengard 3, it's not a return to form, it's something different.
I completely agree. D1 has nothing to do with violence in videogames; it's about what compels people to engage in violence and the consequences of succombing to it. The scene where you are fighting child soliders is meant to show the horrors of war, and what people will do to achieve their goals, because you have to kill them otherwise they will kill you as is true in the real world; child soliders are essentially weapons used by corrupt leaders because their innocent appearance betrays their ability to kill without remorse. Children are too young to understand the consequences of killing and haven't developed empathy and reasoning against it; this is why children have a natural psychopathic streak to them until they are taught out of it.
Haha amongus
@@SomeOtherTroperYet both can be true. It's not just about justification, but enjoyment.
I feel like the vulgarity of this game does have a point, though... It's not pointless just to be pointless, and pointlessness is not the point... We expect there to be a reason for everything, but sometimes the real reason is something stupid and irritating, and there's nothing to be done about it. That is to say, the vulgarity is meant to make you uncomfortable and piss you off, and to reflect on yourself if you aren't made uncomfortable by it. The protagonists are villains to make you look at yourself like you might be the real villain...
Zero is a lot like Jack (CHAOS!!!) Garland.
When you brought up the numbering, I was reminded that I read a decade ago that Taro said that the game was originally going to be called Drakengard 4 and the plot would have been about what happened to Drakengard 3. Which makes the numbering in this seem much more reasonable.
The vile dialouge is what drew people to it..on the contrary . _.
I for one absolutely love it the literal no filter. It's refreshing. No eggshells.
I loved the ending fight all the way through. Yes, I am the odd one out and I unironically enjoyed the progression of misery it brought on me. I even launch drakengard 3 sometimes just to play the ending again. I feel like this is a singularity that's not really going to (be allowed to) happen ever again. I never played another game which took me nearly a week of playing 1-2 hours every day to clear a single boss fight and I don't think I will ever will again. This is the ultimate way to show the absolute disintegration of a world in front of your eyes. Never have I ever actually felt the hardship of a character on a similiar level, a level that made me truly connect with their sorrow. Sure, Drakengard 1's pain of boring combat was also a way to burden the player with mundaneness, to make them feel something, but it didn't throw out literally everything out of the window. Here, the world around you collapses and it all turns into a numb void with only one voice echoing through it and you can feel your spirit breaking. And yet somehow you don't give up, just like the main character certainly wouldn't. They took every rule of the already established game design ruleset and broke them. All of them. They knew what they were doing, a beginner could make a mistake or two, but they intentionally turned the whole sequence on it's head. It takes insanity, and courage to do so, and that's why I fear this kind of a "no-f's-given" attitude towards a game won't be repeated. And that's a shame in my opinion, because I love when the developers aim to break out of the "normal". One thing I wonder about is whether this fight is the exact reason why Yoko Taro seemingly doesn't want to remake this game; I feel like it either won't represent the true spirit of the original, or it will be ill-received by people, who are not like you, and can't appreciate a game and it's strengths even though they didn't like some parts of it. Thank you for this video, I really enjoyed it, even though I don't agree with everything you said:)
Absolutely. Darksouls like games suck. This is the real deal. I can go on dod3, start the final song, and sometimes just beat it first try, now. I play it so much just for fun.
I hardly even play video games anymore, but this Drakengard 3 and Devil May Cry 5 are ones I keep replaying gladly.
You shits real when max doesn't try to sound all philosophical and posh. Game caused this man's voice to break just talking about it lol
I think it's one of those works of art that you either absolutely hate or absolutely love. No in between.
I see it's appeal as being attracted to ugliness and finding beauty in it.
Something like Danse Macabre art being ugly, but at the same time appealing.
After seeing everything related to Drakengard 3(game, DLCs, manga, book), I can easily say that Zero is the best, and most complex character, created by Yoko Taro.
I love your content, and I really appreciate your calm and level-headed analysis, as well as your drive for positivity in said analyses. I really feel like I'm being engaged with on an intellectual and philosophical level when I listen to you expound about games, stories, philosophy, alchemy, psychology, etc.
...That said, hearing you get truly unhinged is a rare but entertaining treat. Personally, I've never played Darkengard 3, and I honestly don't have any immediate plans to change that (not totally from lack of interest or anything, I just have so many other games I need to play, I still haven't gotten around to playing El Shaddai yet since college started back up recently), but I've heard a lot of mixed opinions about the game itself, lore notwithstanding. And yeah, ending D looks utterly horrifying, and that last note is just one of the most diabolical things I've ever seen in a game. Truly this game was the peak of Yoko Taro's villain arc, the point where he 100% lost whatever marbles he had left and became the kind of guy who would put a canon event in someone else's game (but it's okay because the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse FFXIV raids are *PEAK* and I will be accepting no challenge to this statement). I'm only partly joking of course, the inner machinations of his mind do terrify me to consider, but I can also see that Drakengard 3 was a game with a lot of soul put into it. Nothing about it feels phoned in from what I can tell. For better or worse.
I've another theory on the depraved nature of the characters that adds to yours.
During the later half of the 2000s and start of the 2010s we saw an increase of edgy characters in rpgs and action games. Characters that "fuck". Characters that cuss and that do some pretty horrible things to their enemies. Drakenguard 3 came out a whole 10 years after Drakenguard 1 and the indutry had only become more hyperviolent. The Devil May Cry series features a larger than life, balls to the wall "awesome" main character that takes no shit from anyone or anything leaning more on an anti-hero than a real hero. The No More Heroes series sees the player play an outright anti hero that goes on a mass murder spree just to get laid. Metal Gear Rising Reveangeance, Anarchy Reigns, all of the Gears of War series. Even in Rpgs you saw a much more serious Final Fantasy 13, the Mass Effect trilogy where you can be an absolute monster AND get laid (remember how the romance was a selling point?). I could go on.
I feel like Yoko also wanted to tap into this by making the characters be completely ridiculous and psychopathic. Almost as if saying that we, the audience, have learnt nothing since Drakenguard 1.
didn't watch the video whatever you just said was cringe
@@SuperYomama42 Good job Timmy! You wrote something!
@@ayuvir ദ്ദി ( ᵔ ᗜ ᵔ )
0:51 drakengard failed in that aspect for me because it became my comfort game i play now and then to unwind and relax
As much as I like Nier, I absolutely dispise it's transmedia projects, god how much I hate having key lore elements hidden behind novels, movies and anything other than the games themselves. Kingdom Hearts is on the same train, but at least we have everything neatly recorded for fans to see, in all the games and youtube videos os mobiles games, meanwhile having shit like plays and novels not avaliable in english suck so much ass in the Nier "verse", and don't get me started on Taro's gimmick of deleting the save at the end of the game, that was genius the first time you see it, but having it used so many times does take away the impact
Dammit! I only did Nier Gestalt/Replicant 1.22 and Automata!
I love the outside manga offerings like 1.3 and utahime 5, theyre a lot of fun to read. 1.3 is especially interesting because it ends up going all the way back to Caim and the Drakengard 1 events.
sounds like Evangelion - every piece of media and products outside of main episodes explains jack sheet
@@SpecShadowand then things like Evangelion 2 and Anima exist which bring far more depth to everything
Then there’s Xeno-series. Which resonant arc just released an episode that explains how every series inadvertently connects to each other in the first hour. Perfect works is, at the very least, consistent.
So what you're saying is, "Drakengard 3- game of the year"?
11:45 - Oddly I am tempted to give this game a try because of music. Not just the music within the game, but because of my own experience with Japanese Industrial Noise like Merzbow, minimalism in the vein of Philip Glass, and experimentalism à la John Cage.
Also because of the pun that came to mind when you mentioned the genre. Musou vs Mousou. :D A Peerless Delusion.
To preface, I haven't played this game, but I think that characters being vile and reprehensible is something that I find quite enjoyable as opposed to being annoyed by it. When media portrays certain characteristics that go against morality it showcases that absolute morality does not exist. A vile person may save your life. A kind person may kill you. There is something profound that CAN be said utilising characters such as these with the right storytelling techniques. Just wanted to throw it out here. Great video, thanks.
The way you describe the side character makes them sound like they belong in a Vizipop cartoon.
Love this series. Anyone else?
Are we sure this isn't just bad localization? I'm not saying it is, but BOY do some of those sentences look like bad localization.
I had a chance to speak with Yoko Taro at a conference where I said Drakengard 3 was my favorite game. He thought I was joking and acted awkwardly, so we quickly changed topics to the then upcoming Replicant remaster, but the thing is I wasn't joking. It's crazy to me that the man himself doesn't like this gem. I mean it's pretty common to see people online screeching about it because they don't get the raw art of it, but the guy himself isn't into it. Eh, what are you gonna do.
0:25 Lol Yup... Most definitely. Yoko Taro got some EXTREMELY dark and messed up shit in his head. He's actually rather infamous for it. The Drakengard series is pretty much representative of this fact.
I haven't even watched the video yet, but I just wanted to say: I saw the title and immediately just said out loud, "I love Drakengard 3!" with a big smile on my face.
Okay, time to watch Max talk about a game franchise I absolutely love.
EDIT: watched the video. I am truly forever traumatized by experiencing the ending section we'll call "Ending D". It might be the single worst gaming experience I've ever suffered through and I've experienced some truly awful, completely self-inflicted insufferable gaming experiences before that I wish on no one. Ending D might be the most cruel, sadistic, horrible thing I've ever put myself through to see its completion.
I love Drakengard 3.
Did you play Drakengard 1 to completion? The E ending is a similar sequence. I was almost disappointed with Drakengard 2 not having one.
Loved the game. I watched some LPs of the game and the only people I found who disliked it (Game Play) where those who refused to buy/upgrade gear or didn't try different types of weapons. Those who didn't ended I saw they kept complaining about how long fights take and were bored.
Also liked the jokes.
Drakengard 3 is all about you fighting against fate to try and set right what will soon go very horribly wrong (the end of the world in Drakengard 1). Par for the course of a Yoko Taro game, everyone dies. But this time, you're fighting tooth and nail to make sure it actually ends up as a heroic meaningful sacrifice, instead of being senseless and dooming the world regardless like in his other works.
Also the fact that every character was revelling in being a deviant psychopath was hilarious to watch. It was so funny.
I don't think I've ever heard you be anything but calm or enthusiastic in tone, at least for the opening few minutes. I still find anything that can annoy, enrage or make me care enough to comment anywhere online at minimum did something. . But then I remember while the subject distracted me , your being so invested that you got angry was what I am most caught off guard by.Thankyou for an always entertaining & interesting video.
Definitely the best drakengard game glitches/bugs and all hahaha the sex jokes and vulgar were there for a reason and i loved every filthy minute because none of them except for maybe one or 2 of the sisters were your common cliche
17:01 I can’t lie, this description makes me want to play the game
Sometimes, some people need to just stay away from certain types of games. That's a harsh lesson I had to learn, and keep relearning.
Granted, even as someone who likes "Drakengard", "Drakengard 2", and OG "Nier", I didn't like "Drakengard 3" much at all. But that's more due to how much it completely screws with the whole combined setting of the series. I have no issues with the raunchier parts, I've genuinely played and second-hand experienced much worse, though I admittedly am not a fan of how cynically juvenile the game feels.
On a side note, geez, I don't think I've ever heard anyone rail on about how "Drakengard 3" is a musou...despite it being just standard hack-and-slash. Think "Lollipop Chainsaw", "Gundam Breaker", or, well, "Nier".
As if Nier and Automata weren't depraved too.
This guy seems almost puritanical lol...
Drakengard 3 makes NieR and NieR: Automata look like a trip to Disneyland for me.
Definitely not. As I said, I'm all for sexual humor.
@@maxderrat tbf thats because nier series is kinda like that. drakengard as a whole, on the other hand....
Honestly, we need far more villain protagonists if you ask me. I LIKE being made uncomfortable, and I LIKE being made to reflect on my own actions as a player, especially in super violent scenarios where I am effectively the reason the horrific protagonist gets their way. Yes, even when it's up front from the get-go or as a left turn plot hook (although I prefer a slow reveal, just sayin' I can like both). Postal - as in the first one, which is definitely a psychological horror game disguised as a shooter - is an example, especially with the "high score" ending...
Edit: Just to be clear, it's not a defense of this game, which I never played, and it does look... "Meh" at best. I just have a feeling, subjectivity in mind, I'd have a higher tolerance for the main cast being so awful is all.
It looks meh because he's not very good at the game. Well, he's bad at it. It looks more like Bayonetta when you're actually good at the game.
You might enjoy the Deponia games.
Drakengard 3 is without a Shadow of a daubt the most underrated game I've ever played. On of the best games of that generation.
The characters generally make sense and are well written, it unfortunately is a case of you having to delve into their motives, backstories, and individual personalities as based on that. (yes, a lot of which is supplementary media, but that's genuinely just standard fare for DrakeNieR, and to be expected).
Also, the branches are the canonical reason for the multiple endings in all of the DrakeNieR games, and get extremely heavy usage in NieR Re[in]carnation.
Man, this one is easily the best out of the Drakengard games. Love this one so much, even if it is mostly just for the story.
"and what you guys think of drakengard 3"
Thank you for video, i actually am one of fans of drakengard 3, as you mentioned in video, it has very solid combat , music , ETC ... (english translation sucked , i remember someone were translating the scenes properly(in jp version), the dialouges were totally something else, en version done it however they wanted, an example was about One's Dlc
offical version, one was saying that killing one person to save other persons is ok and it worth it....fan made version was saying even if she indeed does killing for sake of other, that is still sin, and she is sinner( who have repent in future)...lol, it is too different...or in the same same chaters when she was talking with gabriella, in Fan made translation version, she was talking about how much weak and vulnerable intoners are who needed to constantly rely on others and thanks gaberila for being there and feel lonely without her...these entire interaction were replaced by some meaningless talking with each other in offical version , i have nothing to say)
Honestly i did not have much of plan to actually make Comment here, because what i want to say might be controversial , but i go with it, hope it will be something unique and interesting for you Max
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so i like drakengard 3 characters( in video, as you mentioned , "this game has some of worst characters ever" ) , yes, that is a fact, no one gonna like dito(as matter of fact, i actually even read its "yoko taro anversary book" (or something like that) , in interview , yoko taro clearly said that, : "no one is gonna love these characters, if they love the murdering that they are doing , they are either murderer themselves , or they are extremely sadist ",
but my love stems from my curriousty ,when i was done with this game, i felt hollow, there was many questions unanswered , many plots unraveled , i wanted to know more about sisters that you barely met, i want to understand true motives of each characters, which ultimately let me to get into OUTSIDE SOURCE MATERIALS
when i done that, that was when i actually appreciated this extremely dark story and its characters
obviously like everyone i had my own interspersion of story, tones of short novels, manga , Story Side Book , ... all and all(alongside the notes at DLCs ) made me get attach to its characters, knowing sisters, their motives, what is behind their faces are, and what they had fought for,
a prime example, One
one is prime example of characters that has being done interesting in otuside source , but done dirty in game
her struggles , her bonds with gaberial and others, changes in her personality , her determinations how she managed to protect her world , all and all left unanswered within game, because story focused more on desiples(who by yoko taro's statement, you are not gonna love them at all), the final clash between zero and One in Story Side Book(known as branch E) Is extremely detailed , showing everything that one consider to be done, and how to engage with zero, how much she stand up against an unstopable force even if her face becomes as pale as white, swallow everything even all her senses screaming at her and end intoners even by how much she needed to damned herself even if it means to pay this with eternity (I can goes into details , but i don't want , you can check "STORY SIDE " In acord libarary Webside(i also made video about it in my channel, while i could not explain completely , i still managed to highly some points about it)
Drakengard 3 characters are very interesting , even some simple looks like characters like five, has some interesting sides and depth... it is just extremely sad that story was not about them,
they could have something like "Scalet Nexus" story , to allowing more muturing over characters within game,
and for my final nail in coffin ,
I Think i love this game's story, its gameplay is very satisfying too, all of its main characters in game Suck...either too much idiot or too much selfish, Branch A kinda sucks(i mean those dialouges that even you mentioned in this video sucks really bad) and rest of branches's story doesn't make much help... but its characters are really something that convincing me to come back, to think about them, about their personality , what they did wrong , and what could possibly would had been better path in saving their broken world , and appreciate how some of them had being written(sadly, in outside source matterial , like MANGA + STORY SIDE + Short NOVELs )
*and just for interesting fact scenario, there exists a timeline , where everything end happily ever after in Drakengard 3, it being mentioned in "Nier Reincarnation" and even exists an artwork made by fans about it, sadly ,it looks like we never known how it happened , but considering the events that game was showing us, and how zero's goal , to fixing her own mistake at all costs , the overall picture of story shown a battle of determinations , whether how we interprete it , is left to audience in the end(well , not in game of course),
sorry if i talked too much, i just rarely see content around this title, take this as final , that fan art that i mentioned : yt3.ggpht.com/Aknw7dqsMNQ5EJzF7E4KGfJmLJPDlyKoldLEC5TTEwJpRfWBtaf9L7n0mhne5r0zXRaQs_GaIvjgQw=s3968-nd-v1
Max pls....this is one of his best games
Say what you want about this game, but it has a killer soundtrack. Listening to This Silence is Mine after figuring out the underlying meaning of the game and how it ties to the lore is still heart wrenching
A third of the dialogue is just sex joke? BASED.
This is probably still my favorite game of all time (not so much the frustrating combat), mainly the main character, story, and even dialog. The reason why I like the dialog so much is that it truly feels close to real life, people do talk like that in real life, especially growing up in Eastern Europe. The vile dialog and scenes show the true colors of how the world is, although at first, it can seem cringe.
That is the main thing I like about Drakengard 3, it shows a part of life that is not often shown in video games.
I think it challenges the irony we experience in life, an example people can watch an episode of South Park, while also at the same time watching news updates about the current wars that are in the world.
Also the sexual theme in this game..., I believe represents that each character has limited time to live, especially the main character, and I guess that is the only way of entertainment between the numerous battles they have to go through. It is kinda weird talking about it, but I guess that's also part of life lol
The novella stuff really should have been in a game.
Zero was sold into sex slavery as a young child. A prisoner in a brothel. She didn't even have a name to call her own.
Sex is the only thing other than murder and thievery she knew. It's her only outlet.
The flower created the Intoners as a backup when she tried to kill herself and modeled them after different aspects of her inner self.
She created the Disciples.
I personally read it as a commentary on societies that simultaneously hypersexualize people, women in particular, then make discussing or embracing that sexuality in any way taboo. Our weird corporate sterilization of something intensely visceral and organic. It's absolutely everywhere. You can't get away from it.
A few years ago, FF14 had a Nier crossover with a set of alliance raids. Ive never really played any of the Nier/Drakkengarde games so I didn't know much of the references. But i never knew that one of the attacks of the last rais final boss was based on something so frustrating (the rhythm game).
This game needs a remake ASAP. I love Zero.
Speaking of final fantasy, you absolutely should do a video talking about FF7 remake and rebirth...
As someone that loves all the dialog in this game its always interesting for me to see how much people hate it, in fact I like almost everything about this game. It is unfortunate that you were not able to enjoy it as much as i did but loved the video anyways, always like to see your analysis.
_"Log Jamming"_
I'll have to remember that one.
I still Don't understand why Max Derrat is not getting that each Drakengard and Nier games are a theme of the human raw condition. also, for some reason I feel like Yoko is doing a reverse Alchemy color with the game to godhood. Just to Note, I'm a guy that has experience heavy stuff(regarding DG3 theme) at a really young age, and became discussed of being just touch by anyone until I was 28. It embarrassing to text but Zero kind of helped me to overcome this (her story not the game). also, from what I know a heavy amount of the fans of DG3 is female, maybe since this theme is something they have to be aware of more than men.
Accord is also mentioned in the Nier universe, and while she is never seen she's known to NPCs as just some merchant.
I like to hope that these games are building up to some game where whoever Accords employers are and the Watchers are closing in. Accord disrupts the timeline of DG3 which is against the "Accord" rules so that Zero can extinguish the flower fully in that timeline and while it comes back many years later as the queen beast, this surely sent a huge spannerwork into "the watchers" plans. So much so that they were foiled again and had to restart their work in a new world and technically won.
I love your monotonic voice, man. It's soothing and together with your articulate way of expressing ideas it feels like velvet for the ears, your anger outburts sound comedic in contrast, even if unintentional.
as a gamer and welder best way i can sum this game up is "this is a blue collar workers rpg"
I'm here to defend Drakengard 3's final "boss." It's beautiful, it's challenging and I'll do it over and over again to experience the game.
Informative as always,
I loved this intro so much you sound so done man😂
Drakengard 3 is the only one in the whole series I didn't finish. That said, I did watch a full timeline video for the whole Nier universe. It's the one by EruptionFang and its 6 1/2 hours long...but one thing it did was make me appreciate the story of 3, its significance and the Nier series as a whole. Highly recommend.
Are you ok Max
This reminds me of one of my favorite scifi/fantasy authors of all time: S.P. Somtow; a Thai writer who had an uncanny ability to mix high brow and low brow language and concepts. I remember trying to get my older cousin to read one of his books in the late 90s and he gave it back to me and said he couldn't get past the cheese. That is exactly how Drakengard 3 feels to me. A baffling yet intriguing mix of opposites.
I love Drakengard 3 and also you, Max.
I think it's proof of the games qualities that you don't regret playing it. To be fair, I only had to suffer half of the blow because my first experience with it was through a Let's Play.
By the way, I had to laugh at your seemingly genuine anger and emotion in this video. You describe yourself as monotone, what you may look at as a disadvantage, but this time I feel like you broke through the barrier to natural sounding emotion.
I wish you had spoken more about the lore, though. Maybe it was your intention not to spoiler too much, but at the same time the main draw for you videos, at least for me, is that you talk deeply about the things I love.
Regarding the title bit, early on in development, Taro actually intended for the game to be called Drakengard "4" and the game would have been about trying to discover what happened to the supposed third entry.
Please do a video on Destiny
It's probably the first time i see a video regarding this game that doesn't try to pass it for some kind of secret master piece and everything in it is perfect.
Thank you.
The diologues are hilarious! 😂
To be fair, the characters in Drakengard 1 were also terrible. Like Arioch or Leonard.
22:20 I could say the same about World of Warcraft Lore. People usually tell me to go read the book comic or listen to the audio books... when all I want is... to play the game.
"I cant deal with virgins" is not vile.
Its funny. lol
Virgins got offended 😂😂
@@csrjjsmp that would ironically prove the point too LOL
@@gustavogus692 You just need to reply,No Hymen No Diamond.