Crimson dribbles and squirts blossom into full-scale floods, painting the scenery and coating Zero’s flowing white gowns. Men, monsters and goddesses alike are grotesquely hacked and torn, with Zero and others ripping open flesh with the scary skill of a crazed Iron Chef dismantling a tuna.

Limbs are lopped, skulls are cleaved and death is dealt in maliciously gruesome ways. With a scheme of jumping, dodging and slashing combos, the game readily gives us a sense of what it might be like to be a supercharged goddess who can move with balletic grace while using her weapons (dragon included) to devastate scores of foes.Īnd devastation in this case is a gory ordeal. But she’ll also have to take on their cavalcades of generally immoral and pruriently psychotic disciples … but more on that side of the squalor in a sec.Īll that taking on and taking out is where the fast-paced combat comes into play. Learning from her “mistakes,” this time Zero decides to take out her magical family members one by one. She’s donned another pristinely clean goddess-worthy gown and set off once again on her unexplained quest for blood. Skip ahead about a year and she’s regrown her arm, replaced her eye with a flower and taken on a newly reincarnated dragon sidekick. No, she’s much more interested in … killing them all! Actually, that’s too tame an assertion: Zero doesn’t want to just kill them, she wants to butcher them, hack their corpses into pieces, grind their bones into powder and wallow in their blood.Īfter a game-opening battle of the squabbling sibs-where Zero loses an eye, an arm and her giant pet dragon-the battered goddess limps away to lick her wounds. Zero, however, isn’t interested in her siblings’ musical abilities or their unifying accomplishments. These Intoners are all magically imbued ladies who, we’re told, have used their powerful songs to bring peace and harmony to the roiling world of man. She’s the outcast sister of five other comely, singing goddesses-conveniently numbered One through Five and collectively called the Intoners. Players take on the role of a beautiful but ruthless goddess named Zero. Square Enix’s Drakengard 3 is one of those titles, slipping out to explore the very edge of gamedom with the same ease that an incontinent dragon might relieve itself for comic effect in stressful moments.

But every once in a while, a title in the genre will cross over the line marking the end of merely peculiar and the beginning of something completely bizarre. Generally they’re made up of a collection of odd, quip-minded anime characters swinging gigantic swords and splattering lots of gore as they tromp through some sort of murky medieval fantasy world. Japanese role-playing games have always been something of a strange lot looking at them from my admittedly very Americanized vantage point.

Gamestop drakengard 3