Essence_of_Meh

Nothing wrong with that.

The ability to play all that old stuff is a thing of beauty and seems to be getting stronger, both in practice and as a general concept within the industry, with each passing year. It's great!

Lame? Not really. Cheating? Maybe a little bit but yeah, if we were to go by access to the history of gaming then "current year" always wins.

Probably fifth and sixth gens (PSX-PS2 era), for three reasons:

• graphics - there's something about art styles used at the time that aged surprisingly well and is just pleasant to look at, even compared to later games.
• variety - both gens were filled with mid budget titles trying out new, often weird ideas that didn't always work but can be really interesting even to this day (as long as you can overcome jank usually present there).
• (least important point) there's a lower chance I'll find games from this era to be too old-school for me. I have a high tolerance to old game design but I'm not immune to it. Sometimes there is such thing as "too old" and that's alright.

Joplin is my goto as well!

I've got a lot of jank to write about in my backlog, might find some interesting surprises if you like that type of experiences.

I'm one of those posting walls of text so I guess I'll throw in my thoughts on this.

I tend to write down bullet points about stuff that pops out the most while playing - I jump between many different games all the times so it's a useful habit to avoid mixing my thoughts about them. I note these points shortly after play session (if I'm on my PC) or the next day (if I was playing on handheld in bed) and then expand on them after I'm done with the game.

Since I don't really have anyone to talk about older titles my write ups tend to be on the longer side and read more like a draft than a thought out summary. My desire to include as much info as I can also doesn't help with this issue. Lots of thoughts + no way to filter them through a third party + limited time do not make for a sensible process.

In the end, I just want to let people know about the weird jank I play. Bad and mediocre games need love too!

You're absolutely right about the dialog and I'm not sure why I forgot to include it in my post - that's a pretty stupid decision on dev's part, especially since there's enough downtime that could be used for that purpose instead.

While mission design is pretty linear I never really found it to be a huge issue. It might be because I never expected any openness to begin with so anytime there was an option to avoid full-on combat seemed like a nice surprise. It doesn't help that there isn't much room for experimentation since enemies can be really deadly at times.

It's definitely not a game for everyone and I can understand why you bounced off of it. I've been molded by jank so my tolerance to many of game's issues is rather high. Or maybe I just have a soft spot for mediocre titles - I seem to drift towards them more than to polished, high-budget games.

This looks kind of familiar. I don't think I've played it but I definitely seen some of it before.

I'm not exactly up to date with this genre as the newest game I could come up with from memory was Divinity: Dragon Commander and even that came out a few months before Drakengard 3. Plus it's primarily an RTS.

I did find something called On the Dragon Wings - Birth of a Hero - seems like a budget title but it's relatively new and with decent enough reviews.

It's not that I completely disliked the humor. Some of it was great, some would be fine in smaller doses and some was just tolerable - all in all I did have fun with the writing for the most part. My point was more towards "general public", since I've seen people play the game get turned off after seeing the disciples being characterized only by their fetishes for like ten minutes straight.

I forgot to mention it in my OP but I do think the transition from early silliness and stupid jokes to more serious tone of the end game is a good way to sell how bad things get.

These disclaimers/warnings were primarily aimed towards someone who'll most likely play in English since that seems to be the majority of people here and I can guarantee some of them will get filtered out by the writing in those early parts.

It's as good reason as any though you'd probably had quite a bit of a whiplash with later parts of the game as a kid.

Drakengard's weirdness has more to do with the world and concepts of its universe rather than any meta commentary. Still cool, just in a different way than MGS2.

There haven't been many of those since PS3, have there? It feels like there was almost a hard cut since then.

Ending E of the first Drakengard leads to Nier Gestalt/Replicant. I don't think any of the other ones are directly related (though ending A of Drakengard 3 technically leads to the first game, so there's that connection). There's also a side character from D3 that's briefly mentioned in Nier Automata and shows up in one of the stage plays, I believe.

As for trying out the series... It's rough. Both gameplay and technical aspects can be a bit tedious to go through compared to its sister series. At the same time, story wise Drakengard games go wilder and weirder than what you'll see in either Nier (in a good way).

It's definitely a series worth experiencing, just not necessarily by forcing yourself to play through them. Don't feel bad about switching to an LP if things get too rough.