YMMV / Drakengard 3

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Is Cent genuinely loyal to Two in Branch A and only joins Zero because he feels he has to if he wants to maintain his existence, or are his actions an attempt to manipulate Zero into performing a Mercy Kill on Two? Cent being loyal to Two is present in all routes so his loyalty is unquestionable, but his actions don't make sense if he was trying to protect Two. Namely, Cent kidnaps Mihkail but causes the dragon no harm, and claims to be working under Two's orders, which is a lie since she's not able to truly talk. This suggests that he recognized that Two was too far gone to save, but couldn't bring himself to end her. Route B also brings up elements of this as well: does he join with the crazed Two solely on his love for her, or is it possibly because he feels he has no choice?
  • Did Octa betray Three because she lost interest in having sex with him or because he was disturbed by her human experimentation? When meeting Three, he cites the latter as the reason, but she says he's lying and just following his libido. Both may have influenced his decision. The game heavily leans towards the former interpretation, but does acknowledge Three's perspective as being somewhat true.
• Anti-Climax Boss: One, at the end of Branch C. Unlike the fight against Two in the previous route, and the fight immediately prior to this one, you aren't fighting on even ground at all, due to the boss having a pitifully weak weapon. The only real issue the fight has is One being much stronger than you in Intoner Mode, which she only activates when you do, and can be avoided entirely.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: The game's initial premise of playing as a character who comes off as a rather unlikable Villain Protagonist for most of her screentime is a rather tough sell — while Zero does get fleshed out considerably more in the other branches, this requires playing through all of Branch A first. The game's link to its predecessors (which were never very successful to begin with) is also very loose, only revealing itself very late in, which causes it to seem In Name Only at first. Consequently, the game was a rather awful seller. Or, as Demolition D+ put it:
  Yoko Taro, I love you, but sometimes it feels like you derive pleasure from hurting your own sales. 'What do you mean, Demo?' Well, for one, many and most people are going to pick this game up for its story, and when you can reach the credits of a story with a completely unrelatable main character, who does nothing but - spoiler - murder nice people, with motivations fueled seemingly by nothing but lust and power, and call that 'Ending A,' even though half the game's content is locked past that threshold, guess what? That's where a lot of reviewers are going to stop, and draw their conclusions, and give a final score, and have a bunch of people read it and go 'Oh, that sounds dumb,' and not buy your fucking game.
• Awesome Music: Keiichi Okabe does a wonderful job with the very well-received score, though the following tracks stand out:
  • "Kuroi Uta/The Black Song", the main theme, is an orchestral song with nonsensical translated lyrics that somehow manages to give a hopeful tone in the Crapsack World of Drakengard.
  • The boss battle themes for the sisters are all great, but Two's theme, "Leap Wishes / Egregori", takes the cake and is easily the best of the group for its rock instrumental and the lyrics showcasing the tragedy of Two.
    • And then there's the amped-up Raphael version, which instead shows the insanity of the Intoner in Branch B.
  • Also, a remix of Drakengard 1's "Growing Wings" returns in Ending C, with vocals from Maaya Uchida. While both versions are hopeful, the version is quite ironic considering the ending it plays in has Zero succumbing to the flower.
  • "Final Song", which plays during the boss fight in Branch D. While the final boss for Branch D is hair-rippingly frustrating, most players have agreed that the song is gorgeous. Special mention goes to remixing all of the sisters' themes before descending into a slower version of Kuroi Uta.
  • "This Silence is Mine", the credits theme for Ending D. After everything Zero went through, she finally achieves her goal of destroying the flower and achieving a final death, and this song is fitting for that tone.
  I will throw away my sadness,
  And lose my heart,
  Even violate my thoughts,
  If I can move forward, Ahh, then fine.
  • Four's Prologue Chapter 4 has its final Verse and "Out Come The Crawlers", a speedy epic track that also sounds like an elegy to those you're destroying.
  • "Seere's Prayer - Sky", which originated from the very first game, returns with a remixed version. Like the original, this track conveys a sense of insanity and builds up to new, surprising vocals.
• Base-Breaking Character: Dito is generally either someone's favorite or most hated disciple, with little in-between. The latter group hates him for being bloodthirsty and abrasive in comparison to the other disciples, who are generally kind-hearted, if quirky. Meanwhile, the former group finds that the aforementioned traits are over-the-top enough to make him strangely endearing, plus they like his chemistry with Zero.
• Breather Boss: Three's giant doll in Route A. Unlike Four's airship, it's incredibly easy to hit, and unlike all bosses after it, it's utterly harmless. It's immune to attacks from the square button outside of certain circumstances, but it can be effortlessly chipped to death with a bunch of grounded triangle attacks.
• Broken Base: The game's focus on the more fanservice-y approach has this status in some circles. Some wanted a focus more on a Drakengard 1 cast, basically a bunch of Anti-Heroes. Some like the new cast since it's unique and also has a female lead.
• Complete Monster (prequel manga):
  • Fatal Crimson (aka The Red Unto Death):
    • Nero, one of the last elves alive, is a swaggering sadist and the traveling companion of the male One. Together, the two have been slaughtering their way through entire towns and kingdoms in an effort to extinguish the otherwise-incurable Red Eye virus. Unlike his partner, Nero only cares about indulging himself, having fun, and murdering as many people as possible — infected or not — while constantly imploring the male One to become even worse. When Nero and the male One ingratiate themselves to a kingdom by saving its princess, Nero attempts to rape her, and is only forced to substitute her with the princess's handmaiden by the male One's intervention. Not even the revelation that his own sister is an Omnicidal Maniac dampens the grin on Nero's face; Nero always wanted to destroy the world with his own hands, and when his sister is dead, Nero hacks off his partner's still-living head to keep with him as he moves on to keep spreading the virus and eventually tear apart the world.
    • Nero's sister, the imposter posing as the female One, is no better than her brother. Likewise a sadist who tricks the male One into thinking she's his sister before stabbing him for a sick chuckle, the imposter murdered her clan elder to take his magical power and then used that power to amass a huge following of people infected by the Red Eye. The healing magic Nero's sister uses is illusory — all of her followers are secretly kept in their physically ravaged states and turned into brainwashed soldiers Nero uses to commit political assassinations and spread the virus even further. Nero's sister is responsible for manipulating war and bloodshed on catastrophic levels, all for the purpose of seeing humanity rend itself apart.
  • Five Intoners: Bass, Lord of the Country of Sands, is a truly vile piece of work even among his fellow Lords. Bass has kidnapped dozens of children during his reign, murdering their parents and anyone else who tries to appeal to him, hanging the bodies of his dead citizens on his castle's walls. Bass murders all the children he's captured in order to make sick artwork out of their dead bodies, making dolls made of skin and bone and stuffing the corpses of the kids he's murdered in order to mount them. Bass also turns people into horrific, misshapen monsters he looses on anyone who tries to stop him.
• Crosses the Line Twice: As is the case for games in the Drakengard series, the entire plot could be accused of doing this. You play as an excessively foul-mouthed woman with no apparent positive qualities to speak of who violently tears her way through the armies of every human settlement in existence in order to brutally murder her more sympathetic-seeming younger sisters, the sole individuals maintaining order in the world, seemingly for no other reason than to amass more power for herself. After killing each sister, she forcefully claims their male lovers as her own and makes them assist her in continuing her slaughterfest. While the story eventually reveals that the feud between Zero and her sisters isn't as black and white as it seems, the sheer absurdity of the game's pitch black content and the rather blasé way in which it is all presented makes it laugh-out-loud hilarious from the start.
  • This is particularly clear in the moments after the opening level, where Mikhail decides to empty his bowels as his first appearance. On screen.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Archers. While weak enough to where a single hit can kill them, their range and very precise accuracy makes them a nightmare when you fight them, mainly because they hide behind protection and let the other units fight you.
  • Spirits. They are no threat on their own, but if they possess an enemy? That enemy gains a massive increase in attack and defense, and does not flinch when attacked. The worst part is that Spirits can even possess mini-bosses like a Gigas. The only ways to force a Spirit out is with a Perfect Guard, dealing a lot of damage to them when they have super armour and thus don't flinch, or by entering Intoner Mode.
• Epileptic Trees: Many believe Zero is the Grotesque Queen in Drakengard as the flower's final form resembles the Grotesque Queen. In Drakengard, it's shown the Grotesque Queen came from another dimension, and Drakengard 3 has Mikhail sealing Zero (and the flower) in another dimension. One thing that disproves this theory is the endings aren't connected and Drakengard 1 continues from the side story novel instead of Ending D.
• Fake Difficulty: The Accord Request Missions run on these full stop. Collect three books? Not a problem. Have to kill Demonic Spiders to get them? Frustrating but doable. Only have 40 seconds to do so? Yeah...
• Good Bad Translation: This installment retroactively validates the English title for the series. "Drakengard" can be interpreted as "a dragon that guards" or "someone who guards a dragon". When the word was used to replace the original title of the first game, it didn't mean anything other than sounding cool, but in this game the developers run with both meanings; Zero guards a baby dragon, and that dragon guards the world from the Flower's evil.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: Most reviewers gave the game scores in the average to above average range. IGN though? 4/10. A fairly large number of players were upset at this as it was clear the reviewers did not fully play the various routes.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Dito's opinion on Five: her curves are just unsightly fat.
• I Knew It!: Even before the games release many fans guessed correctly that the Intoners had a strong connection to the Watchers.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: A particular irritating case. The pre-order situation for North America's CE and Europe (which only gets a CE without a physical disc and no standard edition at all) is as confusing and badly organized as it gets. Most of the time, it looks like they aren't even trying.
• Moe: Four, Two, and Mikhail all possess a certain amount of adorable innocence to them.
• Moral Event Horizon: Four crossed it at the end of her DLC when she went on a full-blown ethnic cleansing against the elves while they scream in pain and terror.
  • Three also crosses it at the end of her own DLC episode when she describes just how far she went to create "the perfect soldier", and how much fun she had doing it. She butchered 56 people just figuring out that the only people that can survive her transformation are those that are filled with the Power Of Hate, so she deliberately did the most despicable things possible, such as killing the women before the men, and forcing the men to watch. The human-crossed-gigantes she fights against cry out for their parents while they're trying to kill Three.
    Three: "People grow stronger when they lose something precious. So I take whatever's most precious to them! I take it, and create powerful soldiers! Heh hah! Hah hah hah! Hah hah hah hah hah!"
• Nightmare Fuel
  • Three's experiments in creating armored gigantes. It crosses over into Drakengard 1 when it's revealed the soldier writing the logs in Three's DLC is one of the cyclopses.
  • Four committing elven genocide.
  • The truth about Zero's flower. It's the nascent form of the Grotesqueries, and the Intoners are its spawn.
  • Not only that, but the Intoners' forms being based on prisoners tortured alongside Zero before her first death, as well as the graphic detail that went into each torture.
• That One Boss: Four's boss battle is annoying and difficult because you have to hit and destroy four disks while being shot at. No big deal for the first one, but after the first, all of them start moving and throwing green shards at you, making it difficult to hit it. Then you beat that and have to give chase and hit a very small target while large green Sword Beams are thrown at you and make you have to dodge. As this is the second Intoner you'll be facing, the jump in difficulty compared to how easy Five's fight was causes the fight to be much harder then it should be.
• The Scrappy:
  • The Fairies are disliked for their annoying personality and just Jerkass comments. They get exactly what they deserve, though.
  • Nero for his sadistic and misanthropic tendencies. It's not strange that some people wished he died in the manga. Unfortunately, he survives.
• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • The fairies. It seems they just couldn't resist mocking Zero, and it seems Zero just couldn't resist squashing them.
  • If you don't like Dito, then you'll probably be happy that in Route B, Cent kills him, or in Route D where he gets his joy trampled on for betraying Zero.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Mikhail was confirmed to have encountered both Angelus and Legna at some point in the past. Sadly, that's all we know about it so far.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: While lighter than its predecessors, the game continues the series trend of being very grim. It can get easy to forget who you're supposed to root for until you learn the full story.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Four. The base game makes her appear relatively non-evil, and a lot of players mourned her death… until they played her DLC, which shows she's just as vile as the other Intoners, she's just better at putting a good face on it.
• The Woobie: Two. The various events that happen to her in the game make her the only truly sympathetic of the Five Sisters Zero has to kill.

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