I finally booted up Drakengard 3 tonight, and it's a lot of fun so far. It's certainly more reminiscent of the other 2 Drakengard games than Nier, but at the same time there are definite Nier influences. Levels seem more linear and less "wide open battlefields". So far (only play 2 levels in) you can only use your dragon at predefined spots. The story is really what makes it, and I'm very interested to see where that goes.
I guess the main negative is that technically, it's kind of a mess. The artistic direction is great, but the constant screen tearing and framerate stuttering hurt your appreciation of it. Not a deal breaker by any means, but it strikes me as odd that S-E keeps greenlighting games in this series while at the same time apparently giving them extremely small budgets.