Each of the sisters have paper thin personalities and rely on a single dominant trait to animate their personalities, generally a variant on 'sex-crazed.' That goes double for Zero, who is characterized in large part by her apparent love of killing and her aggressive bitchiness toward her companion dragon Mikhail, who follows her like a lost puppy. Putting aside the tone, the characterization is about par for the course for a magical girl anime. At one point, the dragon Mikhail makes a wistful comment about all the good times he's had with the protagonist Zero, and all I could think of was the trail of skulls that they had left in their wake. But all of this is presented against a backdrop of ultra-violence as soldiers gets chopped in half and scream for their mothers. A lot of the time, it's presented as sort of a light-hearted adventure, with Saturday morning cartoon-like dialogue and an aggressive amount of bathroom humor. The blood also tends to clash with the tone in a way that's off-putting. When it's just kind of smeared around, as it is in Drakengard 3, it's just nauseating.

Think of any of Kill Bill's best scenes, or even a Fatality in Mortal Kombat. My issue with it is that I've always thought blood should be reserved to heighten the impact of a big moment. It's kind of gross, though I don't see that as the main problem. One of Drakengard 3's key features is blood splatter on the main character as a mission progresses, she becomes steadily more covered in it until she's practically red from head-to-toe (though not in cutscenes). Drakengard 3 positively revels in the stuff, splattering characters whenever a convenient moment presents itself. Sailor Scouts in a world gone mad.Īnd I'm not exaggerating when I say 'buckets of blood,' either. Imagine a Sailor Scout suffering a psychotic break and killing her sisters one by one amid buckets of blood, and you've pretty much got the gist of Drakengard 3, absent some rather random multiverse elements. At the outset, it plays a bit like an anime-inspired ripoff of Kill Bill Vol. It gasps for breath for a while, wheezes, then just collapses under the weight of it all.ĭeveloped by refugees from Cavia (Nier, Bullet Witch), Drakengard 3 is an action RPG that functions as a prequel of sorts to 2002's Drakengard. Drakengard 3 is what happens when a perfectly good action RPG gets crushed by questionable taste, a poorly optimized graphics engine, and awful writing.

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