The evolution of the DrakeNieR Series

Proposal

My idea for this specialist subject is to talk about the evolution of Drakengard and NieR
games throughout the years and what changed from when the franchise was small and then
when it blew up. The reason I’m choosing these games to cover is because I’ve been a fan of
them for quite a while so it’s a topic, I am knowledgeable in. Also, they are some of my
favourite pieces of media ever made so I think it would be a good overall choice. There will
be three or four games I will be covering in this plus the remake of NieR: Replicant which
include; Drakengard 1, Drakengard 3 Nier: gestalt /Replicant and NieR automata. I will not
be covering Drakengard 2 much as it is a non-canon game to the franchise and I will not be
covering the mobile game either.

Resources Needed

As this is a project based on a game franchise, I will not need a large amount of equipment.
Some equipment I will need however involve; adobe premiere Pro to edit together the final
product and video, I will also need a good microphone to record the audio of my clip which I
have available at home with recording software for my voice.

Interviews
For my Interview I plan to interview Trevor as he would know the most about video games
and talking about characters and stuff. I am going to ask questions about how character
design is important for creating a story in a game and how a video game can impact
someone’s life.

With the interview I will be having a blurred gameplay clip in the background that plays
when Trevor speaks and it will be that for about 3 minutes with some quiet music in the
background

I will ask questions about games and I’m thinking it will be about character design within
games and how a game can impact someone’s life. I think these questions will be good for
my subject as they relate to the story of NieR and can make the viewer think about them as
well.

Treatment
When Starting I will have an Opening with a quick speech about the franchise and the games
and what they have achieved. This will then lead into and an edit of all the games together
with music on the franchise over the top and show a title card for the video. With the title
card I will put the evolution of The Drakengard and NieR franchise. I will most likely use the
automata font for this title card which I could find online and put that as my font. I will start
off with a little history section about games with the creation of the PlayStation consoles
leading to the ps2 in which the franchise started on. After the history and title sequence is
over, I will start talking about the start of the franchise all the way at the beginning starting
with drakengard 1. This will then lead into a brief history of the franchise and what year the
games came out and the what this led to, all of this will be in order so it makes a lot more
sense when I go back and cover when I finished speaking about the order, I will cut back to
the start of the series with drakengard 1. During this I will briefly cover the story however I
will be mostly focusing on the statistics like how much the game sold and reviews and what
problems people had with the game in itself. During this I will also cover the games creators
and publishers. I will only be speaking about the end of drakengard and the lead on into the
NieR franchise. This would lead onto the next game in the franchise being Nier gestalt /
replicant. I will bring up how even though it was a start of a new franchise branching of the
end of drakengard it still has it similarities. NieR replicant was intended to be the 3 rd game in
the drakengard series however the idea came to start a new series from the end of
drakengard 1’s ending E being a spin-off of the franchise. With this idea in mind this led into
the creation of the NieR series. When the game released in 2010 it had okay reviews with
most of them being graphical problems, Gameplay and side quests. This led to it receiving a
68 on Metacritic. The game was said to have not performed poorly but nothing special.
However, to these reviewers the story and characters heavily stood out to them leading it to
become a cult classic a lot of people look back on. There was also a remastered version that
was announced at the 10-year anniversary in march 2022. Which lead to the game that
released on April the 23rd 2021 called NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139. This game had a
bunch of added content and excluded a new ending that was only in a non-translated novel
that tied it and its sequel together in more ways. At first a sequel wasn’t going to be made
to NieR however due to positive fan reception one ended up being developed. This sequel
which was developed by platinum games and published by square enix would go on to be
called NieR: Automata. NieR automata which was announced at E3 2015 would go on to
release on the February 23rd 2017 on PlayStation and windows a month later. NieR
automata released with amazing reviews having an 88 on Metacritic at the time. However,
one big issue with the game was the pc port in which wasn’t very optimised and ran poorly
and leading to the game getting bad reviews on steam because of this. If you compare NieR
automata to the rest of the franchise gameplay wise its can be seen as a big improvement.
This was due to the developer platinum games being very well versed in action games like
this leading to them making the combat simple but very well made. NieR automata did
extremely well for the NieR franchise selling around 7 million copies and even saving
platinum games from going bankrupt.

For the part of the video where I have to show my media skills, I am going to make my own
franchise trailer in premiere pro in my own time. With this I will be editing together an intro
for my video which is going to be my example of a media skill. However, if this doesn’t work
or isn’t accepted as a valid showing of my skills, I will have some sort of creation relating to
the game made in cinema 4D which would be something like a sword.

Throughout the video I will be showing game clips with blur on them in the background and
I will also be showing images relating and referring to what I am talking about in the clip.
This is so attention isn’t lost while watching the gameplay and to make it so the images put
over doesn’t get obscured by the video.

For sound I Will use a part of the in-game soundtrack quietly in the background with the
audio over the top. This will be very quiet but will still be part of the video to create a
relaxing feel while talking about this topic. The audio will be about 5 minutes of me talking
with the music in the background and 3 minutes with the interview questions. I think this is
the best choice for this as it is a song from the game and fits with the theme well.

I plan on adding a lot of images in my work relating to the subject I am talking about. This
includes stuff such as the games creator when talking about it and scores and rating. This is
the main reason I will be blurring the video in this due to adding these images so they stick
out.

I wont be covering two games in this video as they are the least important ones in this script
and I need to make sure I keep it under ten minutes as the way it is going it looks like its
going to be around 7 to 8 minutes long and I think that’s a good length and do not want to
go over that. If I were to add them though I would talk about similar things with the others
such as recapping the story and characters while talking about the problems and good
things about the games.

If I were to change some things looking over this I Think I would of changed my idea as I feel
like it doesn’t include a lot of the things we were told and makes my life with creating an
example a lot harder. This also includes checking over my script more as a lot of it is not very
good in terms of writing and make the video seemed rush and uncared for which I wasn’t.