![]() The textures in this game look like they came from 2005. Heads up to anyone who's interested in buying the game after all the positivity it's getting here: the game without it's story is totally shit. I see an approach like this similar to the horror genre's jump scares or Hatred's shock factor-something that places too much value in the novelty of its very existence. Smart game design, like smart flirting, makes you realize what to do without you realizing that you're being instructed. Smart game design builds on top of itself in a logical manner. What's more difficult, creating a unique, engaging climax while keeping consistent to the systems and presentations the game had kept until now, or creating a unique experience simply by doing something that hadn't been in the game yet? Presenting players with an unexpected experience especially in such a pivotal game moment is very risky. The game doesn't encourage run and gunning, yet these fights ended up being power encounters that would've worked much better in a conventional FPS. You don't want to alienate players by presenting them with a climax that doesn't resonate with what they wanted.įor example, Deus Ex: HR's biggest criticism is how its boss fights didn't fit in with the kind of gameplay the game had been offering up till then. Well to be fair, while it makes sense with the game's theme, having a final boss that's completely different can be a double edged sword. I'm not saying all games need to deviate from the industry standard, but I wish Drakengard 3 had got more praise so that more developers would be inclined to do so. But I think for what Drakengard 3's final fight was, it should be appreciated far more than what it gets. Games take themselves too seriously and developers are far too scared to take risks. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish I could get experiences like this more often. Taro Yoko did it in a much longer game, and one developed by a full fledged studio. People praise indie games all the time for deviating from the standard and delivering experiences we never feel before. I feel like Taro Yoko isn't getting enough credit because too many people gave up on the game. So, in that light, the final fight has to be the farthest thing from a standard RPG final boss. The protagonist seemed like a villain, the dragon was a childish dumbass, your partners are all sick and twisted, and then you find out that Zero is nothing more than an animated corpse. But I feel like a lot of that is the point. The majority of the game is easy, for sure, and there's a lot of sex jokes and Mikhail is super obnoxious. The game catches a lot of flack for how strange it is, and I think that's a bit silly. I've never done anything like that in any RPG, and that definitely wasn't a bad thing. The fight was incredibly hard, but that also wasn't a bad thing. It was completely separate from everything else that's happened in the game, but that wasn't a bad thing. Here's the final fight, for those who want to see it, or want to appreciate the amazing song that gets played. The game then plays a variation of the soundtrack from each of those fights, and you have to reflect back the notes as they come to hit you. The final Song, instead of being a daemon or an angel like all the other songs had been, is the Plant growing huge mutated forms of Zero and her five sisters. But instead of getting a fight with Zero, you fight her parasitic plant and the final Song. To get to the main point of the post, when you finally get to the end of branch D and learn the truth of what Zero has been trying to accomplish, you know what's coming already. I felt a similar way after completing NiER, but I was much more confident in the fact that I really enjoyed that game through and through. I've been playing it for the past 3 weeks now and I just don't really have any way to describe what I'm feeling towards the game. The game had four separate "branches" and endings that all came together to create a strange, sometimes satirical, game that left me thinking more than I ever have after an ending. It was about 25 hours worth of gameplay, the combat was bland unless you made an effort to mix things up, a good chunk of the characters were useless to the story until the very end, the AI was bad, and the majority of the first several bosses were very poorly executed. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Drakengard 3.
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