How hard is it to collect all weapons for ending E?

...

Not worth doing without a guide

Maddening
Not very hard, though

Not hard, just irritating. Some weapons require you to wait over 10 minutes in a level I believe.

Read a guide while playing, so you can get all the weapons from story missions while getting endings A-D. You'll easily get 60-70% of all weapons this way. Then do the free expeditions and get the weapons from there, it takes ~3 hours. It's not hard, just tedious.

Dude madman

Without a guide: asinine fucking bullshit.
With a guide: not terrible.

There are some weapons that are literally impossible to figure out without a guide because there's no hints to it at all and you're not given any criteria. IE having to beat a side mission in a certain amount of time without using lock-on, having to walk through certain pathways or else you don't get the weapon, or touching paintings in a specific order when there's no indication that it even matters.
Try and get as many as you can normally and when you feel like you're stuck I'd recommend switching to a spoiler free guide, otherwise you just won't be able to find them all.

I know ending E is the important one but does it add much to the game? If it doesn't I could just play A-D and watch E.

Ending E adds only a mini-game, some intersting CGI cutscenes and a final fuck you that makes the entirety of the "conflict" in NieR pointless once the big twist is revealed. That's not to say that the other endings aren't worth checking out. Drakengard is a far more interesting story than any of the other games in the series.
E takes a few hours to get and is easy to unlock if you have a guide.

Ending E is, uh... I mean the actual ending isn't significant, but it's what you do to get it and that whole process that makes it worthwhile I think. If you just watch it it's pretty boring besides maybe a little shock value.

Playing E is the whole thing that makes the game worth playing, you triple nagger.

It turns the game into completely different genre. It's also about the journey and not about the ending itself. Ending E is probably why you're playing the game in the first place.

I enjoyed my ride through the main story. I got through A-D. Felt like if i trudged through E I wouldve probably ended up hating the game by the time i got done with it. Watched E on youtube.

alright I'll do it, I plan to emulate drakengard 2 as well but I'm not going to put myself through harder difficulties for more endings. I know 2 isn't canon at all really so is it alright in that case to watch the other endings?

t. someone who hasn't actually played the game

Took me 18 hours to play through A-D, then additional 15 hours to reach E. It's the frustration, sweat and tears needed to earn E, going through the bullshit minigame and then reaching the catharsis what really elevates the game above being the dark souls of musou genre.

I remember being a retarded kid grinding map one and killing literally everything on the map all the time to evolve weapons. I usually did this when I got grounded from my computer. God damn I was autistic.

Drakkengard 3's dialouge is pretty shit. Everyone cant stop talking about their dicks. Id say 80% of recorded lines are dick analogies. It gets pretty old

Yeah, but be sure to watch the true last boss battle, too. It's pretty badass, and a nice excursion from the usual nightmare mode rhythm game finale. desu it was the one good thing about Drakengard 2.

if you get all weapons with a guide on your first playthrough does it count towards ending e so that I don't have to do it later on? also I can infer it's tedious but is it actually difficult to earn some of the weapons? I don't really want to put with with a hard playstation 2 game for long

Once you unlock a weapon it stays unlocked. The game has a chapter select. The sweat and tears come mainly from the tedium, but arguably a few of the flight mission weapons are also "hard" to get thanks to the autistic controls of the dragon.

I'm going to emulate 1 and 2. I bought Nier but should I buy 3 and play that first or can I play Nier then 3 since that's the order of release?

The bullshit mini-game is literally impossible to lose once you know the gimmick, which they took out in Drakengard 3. Besides, any and all catharsis is found in endings B and D. If you think E is supposed to be catharthic you've got it all wrong.
3 is the worst game in the series. Even 2 is better because of what it did from a meta perspective and Cavia's rebellion against Square Enix.

3 and Nier have literally nothing in common besides some weapons being shared. 3 is a joke game that's not even worth playing that the shitposting hack known as Yoko Taro made because he wanted to make "a game like Madoka Magic".

Release order is fine, Taro doesn't think that far ahead. Just don't play too many Drakengard/Nier games in a row or you'll get burned out on the gameplay.

Well the juxtaposition of ending E compared to the rest of the game, especially after several hours of grinding and frustration at the minigame was cathartic as hell for me, and I found none in D and especially none in B/C.
And yes the minigame yes was impossible to lose once I figured something out, no one's impressed that you did it, little man.

I played endings A-D and looked at the requirements for E, I figured it'd take at least 10-15 hours, probably more, of extremely mediocre and repetitive gameplay for a couple of cutscenes and an admittedly neat minigame. Ultimately decided that it just wasn't worth the time and suffering

E is just the pinnacle of the fever-dream nightmare atmosphere that Cavia was going for. You go from hell to pure Bosch-inspired chaos. It's literally Cavia killing themselves in the final ending as a joke, since their building gets knocked down. They're the gods that Verdelet spends the whole game talking about. It's why the endings get worse and worse. The first two games are incredibly and consciously meta.
B and D share the same themes, though since D was supposed to lead into a game that got canceled it's understandable that it doesn't feel as fulfilling as B, which brings an heavily foreshadowed end to the key players and C which is the only one with the slightest hint of redemption and hope.

I literally lol'd out loud at the ending E cutscene, because it dispelled all my pent up frustrations caused by the game in such a manner. Five months later I'm still liking how it made me feel. The game would have just been a relatively pedestrian experience without it.

>relatively pedestrian
>pedophile side-kick who lusts after one of your party members
>cannibalistic child-killing elf who gets gang-raped by the enemy and your off-screen soldiers
>child-murdering sociopath mute protagonist that deconstructs the silent protagonist model
>pure innocent character is actually a secret slut who slept with her brother and lusts after him every day
>best friend and rival is tortured, mind-broken and betrays you. Later on rapes your sister's corpse while you're fighting him.
>dragon companion revels in slaughter
>older, wise figure is actually a pathetic coward and advocates the genocide of lesser races
>Each ending gets progressively worse
>time itself gets fucked up with characters showing up where they couldn't possibly be
>the entirety of the watchers
>the entire soundtrack
>no comic relief
>looming atmosphere of dread, futility, despair and bleak, nightmarish hopelessness

What other games have you played that make Drakengard a pedestrian experience? The only games even remotely similar are Siren, Kane and Lynch 2 and Spec Ops.

>gang-raped by the enemy and your off-screen soldiers
>who slept with her brother
>Later on rapes your sister's corpse while you're fighting him.
>time itself gets fucked up
Please elaborate further

Relatively pedestrian video game experience is what I meant. While it has plenty of weird and interesting shit going on and the ludo-narrative cohesion is quite damn nice, it's not particuarly fun to play or in any way technically impressive. Averaged out, I would've just not thought too much of it but ending E triggered me in a positive way.

I'm a tarofag according to other people and while I agree, I'm such because I appreciate what he seems to accomplish on the meta level in his games, not because of the details in his stories. Your list mostly makes me think "yeah, but so what". Yes I thought everyone in this game is pretty much fucked in the head and that it's a refreshing change of pace while I played the game, I didn't gush about muh tropes at any point.

But yes, you're "objectively correct" in your statement. Congratulations.

Old gamespy/gamespot interview spoils the twist that the Furiae wants to fug Caim, but also includes mention of the fact that they had canonically banged before the start of the game. This was when they were doing interviews prior to the game. The also talk about the promo manga being canceled too.
Arioch is restrained to be "of better use to those around her" by Furiae. Angelus' reaction makes it clear that Verdelet's going to send her off to be raped by the Union's soldiers while she's still insane enough for them to get away with it.
Inuart's grunting while he's on top of the dragon is him recollecting raping her while she's captive, then while she's dead and then fucks her on the dragon. He has her corpse with him since that's how he takes her body to the city after the fight.
The events of the game are chronological based on how the player plays it. Ie, if you go and play chapter 12 and then feel like going back to chapter 3, that literally happens to Caim and the rest. It's why you can have party members show up in cutscenes that took place before they joined the party. Taro said it's due to the watchers fucking up time and since he's a big fan of cyclical stuff. LIke how the events of NieR have happened over and over for a millenium, switching between brother and father NieR, until you finally break the cycle by refusing the twins' offer. They experience the same things over and over in a hellcycle since time itself is fucked, just liked in Siren and Spec Ops: The Line
That's not to mention the whole thing Seere does in ending D that leads into Cry-On, but that's a different story that's not as meta.

Taro is a fucking hack. All of the genuinely good writing and ideas from the series come from Cavia and Sawako Natori in particular, who also wrote the Siren series so she's very much used to writing actually challenging, unique, emotional and disturbing material. He's declined as a writer and a person with each successive game, going from making intersting and intellectual interviews around the release of Drakengard and NieR to becoming le funny mask meme man around the release of Nier: Pandermata.
Drakengard isn't meant to be an entertaining game nor a pleasant experience, but that'ss since Cavia isn't a game studio but an artists' collective. Why is the camera so difficult to work with? Because it's how one-track Caim is, as shown when he gets wounded in the beginning of the game. Why is the music so fucked? To reflect that falling apart of the world around him and his own rage-fueled state. Why does it take so long to get up when you get knocked down by enemies? To make you feel Caim's anger, desire to get revenge, to get pissed off at everything, even the game itself, and just keep killing since it's the only thing that brings him and the player satisfaction.
Objectively, from a mechanical standpoint, Drakengard has much that's wrong with it and is not very enjoyable to play. It's not godawful but is certainly mediocre. However, as an artistic achievement and a reflection of the protagonist's experience, it's a resounding success, which unfortunately does not translate into enjoyable gameplay.
Funnily enough 2 improved a lot on Drakengard's gameplay while regressing in everything else, at least at first glance.

I made that list just because I'm hard pressed to find any piece of media or art that contains such themes and such excessive misery and despair without being political, exploitative or trashy. It's a game that hits some innate, universal, primal darkness in the human condition.

Interesting tbqh, but is there some actual strong implication that Inuart fucked Furiae's corpse other than some grunting? I've only played the English version which obviously left some stuff out but Inuart didn't seem QUITE fucked up enough to go to pound town on the corpse of his betrothed while riding on a dragon on the way to revive her no less.

I mean, for fuck's sake, the characters find out that they and the entire world was crated by cruel gods just so they could laugh at their misery as they make and destroy it countless times again and again. Then, when they start breaking the rules, ie the conventions of morality via outright killing the child villain, the gods threaten to destroy the universe, as you're getting closer to finishing the main game. But oh shit, what happens then? Meta-sucide joke ending of one of the real gods aside (Cavia kiling themselves in ending E), where else does this happen? That's right, you have the entirety of NieR, where your save files are erased and YOUR existence is erased. Sound familiar? After all, who's responsible for the suffering of the characters? Not just the writers, but you, for playing the game.
You control them, make their universe real and make them live through these miserable events when you turn on the game and play it. You can't even leave well enough alone at ending A, but keep going to see more of the story, for your own entertainment.
Is it a big surprise to see then that the original idea for NieR was a scientist finding out that the characters in fictional works actually experience everything over and over again everytime someone reads/watches something? And then bringing them to life? Like what happens in ending E? The series has been meta since day one and shits all over Spec Ops and Undermeme's heavy handed idiocy. Drakengard is fucking art.
It's not as explicit besides a lot of things after the fact, ie how the protagonist of 2 is formed out of their "pure love". The grunting is the closest it gets to it, the rest is mainly subtext