The most exciting combat feature is the Intoner Mode, a special overdrive that makes Zero nearly impervious to damage in battle. I loved being able to dispatch an entire phalanx of enemies with a few quick swipes of a sword, and changing weapons on the fly kept the pace of combat fast and furious. If you really want the full story, you’ll have to go through all four endings (with the last ending only accessible by collecting every weapon).ĭrakengard 3 has one bright spot: Zero’s combat abilities. Again, that’s something that can be done well if the mystery is properly built up, but here it left me feeling directionless. Even Zero’s motivation for her quest to kill her sisters isn’t fully explained until quite late in the tale. It doesn’t help that Zero and her disciples are poorly written, and no amount of rifling through Drakengard’s database or attempts to engage Zero’s Disciples in conversation reveals much about them. The series’ Rubik’s-cube approach to storytelling doesn’t really work here – Drakengard 3 is too slow to reveal its secrets, and relies heavily on fans remembering what happened in the original Drakengard (which came out 10 years ago) in order to understand what’s going on. “ An entertaining story and interesting characters could’ve made all of that worth suffering through, but Drakengard 3 is devoid of both. Linearity can be a great experience if it’s done well, but outside of the way developer Access Games differentiates each location with a special feature (a dark, creepy forest maze, a desert with drastic weather fluctuations that affect your characters’ health, etc.), any attempts at innovation are ruined by the constant backtracking and limited variety of enemies encountered along the way.

It’s all a terrible strain on the eyes.ĭrakengard 3 is an extremely linear game, and areas have very little to see and explore. (Yes, I know, every game in the Drakengard series has suffered from these issues, but repeating a mistake doesn’t make it less of a mistake.) There are jagged edges everywhere, the framerate plummets whenever there’s a lot of activity on the screen, the color palette for the world is bland and uninspired, and textures are so undetailed and boring they look like they belong in the PlayStation 2 era. In the first of the 40 hours I spent with Drakengard 3, I noticed the subpar graphics and framerate.

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