NIER Gestalt/Replicant

[Bandersnatch]

Anyone else been playing this? Been having a good time playing this the past week along with RDR. I was kind of annoyed at first when I heard they were changing the main character for those outside Japan, but I think it's more engaging to be fighting to save your daughter rather than your sister. The soundtrack is amazing, the voice work is pretty good, Weiss sounds awesome.

I started the game on hard and after the first hour or two I was regretting my purchase. If you are going to play the game, do it on normal. I put in about 7 hours on hard before I changed it to normal, it just sucks on hard. You do almost no damage while every enemy has lots of health. There are sheep in the first area of the game you go to after the prologue that are supposed to be nearly harmless fodder. It took me over a minute to kill one since I would knock it down with a combo which barely did anything to it and then it would run off and I'd have to chase after it. Boss fights are made far too long than intended. It's time consuming rather than an added challenge, so do yourself a favor and play on normal.

Now that I dropped it to normal, the game is much more satisfying. Overall it's a mishmash of multiple games, just did a Zelda type puzzle dungeon last night. Kaine is always pissed off and has some hilarious lines. I can't really comment too much on the story so far, I'm still early on.

[malkav11]

They didn't change the main character, per se. There's two versions of the game in Japan, one with the old guy, one with the young guy. I think (but am not sure) that it was a console split - one version on 360, the other on PS3. They just didn't import the young guy version (although Tom had an article on Fidgit suggesting it was coming as DLC).

I'm moderately curious, if only because of The Dark Id's Let's Play of Drakengard (from the same studio) - if they brought that level of batshit crazy to the design of Nier but had some actual gameplay, I'd be all over it.

[russellmz00]

so was this game good? the ny times thought it was all right. i am trying to decide between this and 3d dot heroes.

[Miramon]

This is the best RPG I've played since Mass Effect 2.

OK, so that's not saying much. But after that beautiful but godawful Final Fantasy XIII, it was nice to play a game that was actually a game. Minimal character-building elements, no skill trees or anything like that, simple mostly real-time combat with minimal aid from your AI party members, but still a fun little action-RPG that doesn't try to do anything clever in terms of gameplay.

Nier is fairly easy throughout. You get a kind of you-win-button with that time-slowing dark lance power that kills most bosses. The shmup aspect is amusing without being very difficult. There may be a couple of side quests you can take at low level that are a bit too tough to begin with, but generally speaking you don't have to go back and grind for anything except some unnecessary item collection for some random weapon improvements you don't need.

It's got loads of side quests, item collection, weapon improvement, farming and fishing minigames. It has NPCs and towns and distinctive cultures. In short, it's everything FF XIII is not. It even has a story, superficial in some ways, but with some unusually grotesque and tragic moments -- a different sensibility than most JRPGs.

So on my very harsh personal scale, it's maybe a 6 out of 10, but FF XIII is a 2 (not a 1 only because of the awesome production values.)

Anyhow, I actually finished Nier, which I don't do for most mediocre games. I haven't finished Resonance of Fate, for example, a game with much deeper and more interesting gameplay and better graphics, but somehow a bit less fun. I think Nier kind of wants you to replay it with a cleared game, but that's not for me, at least not for a 6/10.

I certainly recommend Nier, anyway, though perhaps not with that joyousness that a really superior game would elicit.

I'm pretty sure that I would have liked the game less in the Japanese core version with the generic androgynous young brother hero. The grizzled father who for some unknown reason looks like a S&M barbarian is just a better character.

[Bandersnatch]

I finished the first ending last night in about 25 hours. Like Miramon I haven't gotten around to finishing Resonance of Fate, but once Nier hooked me in I couldn't stop playing. I will be playing through it again for at least one more ending, I like how new game+ starts at the halfway point, I don't think it will take long to go through it again, especially if I avoid the side quests. I did about 45% of the side quests on my first run. I loved how depressing the story was overall, lots of tragedy to be found. Characters that I thought were throwaway would come back and you'd learn their stories.

It's just a shame the game the game is so easy. You can upgrade weapons, but there really is no reason to. You can mod weapons and spells with words, like putting a word on a weapon to cause poison or armor breaking, but you never really have to. On top of that you got tons of healing items. Would of been better if they ditched the items and just had enemies drop health orbs or something GoW style. I only used about 4 of the spells, Dark Phantasm, Dark Blast, Dark Hand, Dark Lance. Some like Dark Wall and Dark Gluttony seem useless to me for the most part. The enemies just aren't complex enough to provide a good challenge. I did like when they swarmed you with the enemies, I wish they did that more. If you are going to have pathetic enemies at least throw a couple hundred at me at a time.

I did like farming even though there isn't much to it, just chill out in town and grow some crops. They grow in real time, not sure how long it takes, but I would plant a bunch and then the next day when I played they would be grown most of the time. I'm glad you don't have to micro manage it and leave dungeons in the middle of them to go water your tulips or anything like that. I was planting all wheat towards the end since you get lots of money selling it. Speaking of money though, there isn't much point to it. The only things I bought were weapons, and I maybe bought 5 the entire game. I remember in the second half of the game I had like $13,000 and was going to buy the best weapon they had which was about $22,000 so I sold off a bunch of materials that seemed to have no purpose and bought it. I then did one side quest and got $50,000 as reward. In the first half of the game I was like ooooohh $4000! In the second half everyone claims they are starving to death, yet shell out around $30,000 every time you do some easy task for them.

All in all, the characters are great, soundtrack is fantastic, and it's entertaining to beat shit up so at least give it a rental. Think I'll check out the DLC.

[Miramon]

Right, cash is plentiful. There is no point to farming for money really, I only did it for a couple of the side quests.

There are a couple of dozen weapons, but some easy to get spears at level 1 are better than most other weapons at level 3 or higher. To raise these ostensibly weak weapons you need to grind for those stupid titanium alloys, so what's the point? I think I finished the game using a level 2 spear around 680 attack strength or something like that.

I imagine there is some reason to have all these weapon upgrade paths for some obscure quest to get to some obscure goal, but you can ignore most of them.

[MatthewF]

The greatest NIER review ever. Next to Zeropunctuation, McElroy's video reviews are the funniest things I've seen since the OMM days.

[Abilio Carvalho]

oh my god the ending on that is GLORIOUS.

[Abiding Dude]

OMG that was hilarious.

[Bandersnatch]

Yeah I hated that part and ended up turning to the interwebs after about 15 minutes. Basically he was failing because he wasn't using any bait and he was in the wrong spot. The game implies that you can get it with just the lure in that area though. It took forever for him to catch the fish because his fishing skill was too low compared to the difficulty of the fish. Smaller fish like the sardines and shaman fish take about 10 seconds to catch. Once I bought bait and went to the right beach it took about 2 minutes to get the shaman fish and I never fished again.

[ryan]

Oddly enough, I was able to catch a shaman fish on my second or third try. In addition to moving in the opposite direction of the fish's path, you also have to hold down, which he mentions in the comments later on. The game doesn't tell you this, but I ended up doing it anyway after losing a fish once and realizing it wanted me to tug back and away as in regular fishing.

[Kevin Grey]

The fish thing is super easy and the game will solve it for you if you don't catch it in two or three tries. With the super HUGE caveat that you have to be in the right place. It seems kind of obvious to try and catch the fish in the fishing spot right next to the guy who gives you the pole but you have to actually go over to the secluded cove. Took me 45 minutes before I realized that.

Really the only sore spot in the game for me and I really enjoyed the rest of the game.

[Miramon]

Yeah, that errant beach placement is dumb. I think you actually can occasionally catch shaman fish at the pier beach, but odds are you will hook something more or less impossible to reel in at the skill level, which is just a stupid design decision. It's also dumb that they don't really explain the fishing control/action scheme very well. Fortunately, it is in fact pretty easy if you do the right thing in the right place, and you never have to do it again after that.

[razarok]

Started playing yesterday and just finished with the lost temple thingy in the second half/part of the game.

So far I think the game is criticized pretty harshly. Yes, there are many fetch quests, but I only did 2-3 of those, but at least at this point in time skipping them is not a problem.

The soundtrack is absolutely wonderful. The bossfights are a tad easy on normal. I'm consideringn exiting out of the game to the main menu and switching to hard for those fights...

The last mutli-phase bossfight of part 1 of the game was amazing.

So far I'm really enjoying this game and for 30 bucks I think it was a hell of a bargain.

Yes, the graphics aren't that good and the design has some rough edges here and there, but I would rather play a slightly flawed game than another highly polished incarnation of some FPS.

[russellmz00]

30 bucks?! where's this? spill!

[razarok]

30 euro, sadly, not dollars. It's a dutch webshop, so depending on your locaction that might not help. The adress is www.smartgamer.nl.

[razarok]

Alright, got Ending A. First playthrough took 18 hours and 28 minutes. Substract half an hour for fishing in the wrong spot for shaman fish and nearly throwing my controller through the TV in frustration.

Yes, entering two of the dungeons three times was a tad annoying, but overall I think I found my "Game of the Month - June".

Especially the two boss fights and the end of the first and second half of the game were amazing, especially with the excellent soundtrack.

My biggest complaint is that the game offers only three save slots, which limits saving before "epic want to replay this section" moments.

[Bandersnatch]

Got endings C and D today, also finished up the DLC. Each play-through after the first didn't take long, only took me about 10 hours to get the other three endings.

Minor non-story related spoilers about the subsequent play-throughs.





The second play-through is pretty cool, if you liked the reading parts of the game there is a big chunk of it in the beginning of the second play-through all about Kaine's past. There are added scenes when you enter every dungeon that give names and back-story to all the bosses. There is also a new character in a manner of speaking, though he's not as chatty as I would have liked. The third play-through only changed 1 thing that I saw, the cut-scenes were the same as before except for the ending if you got all the weapons. You don't need to play it a 4th time to get ending D, just load up an old save and pick the other choice during the last part of the game.

The DLC is alright, really short. The newish songs were all good. I did like the extra outfits though. You can totally see Kaine's bulge in the Kabuki outfit :O. Hope they make a sequel, really loved this game.

[Rock8man]

There's a lightning deal on the PS3 version at Amazon right now. It's $41 for the next 5 minutes. Not sure how good a deal that is though. I've got a feeling a game like this can't have been much of a hit. There's another lighting deal coming up in 5 minutes that sounds like the same game, so maybe it will be the 360 version.

[russellmz00]

Got endings C and D today, also finished up the DLC. Each play-through after the first didn't take long, only took me about 10 hours to get the other three endings.

Minor non-story related spoilers about the subsequent play-throughs.





The second play-through is pretty cool, if you liked the reading parts of the game there is a big chunk of it in the beginning of the second play-through all about Kaine's past. There are added scenes when you enter every dungeon that give names and back-story to all the bosses. There is also a new character in a manner of speaking, though he's not as chatty as I would have liked.

liked it, the main story kept me going through some of the grindy parts. i did have to go through the junk heap way too many times to get what i needed for stuff like upgrading and progressing to the next part of the story.

plus, the second play through made things really, really depressing to me. a minor accomplishment given the stuff that happened in the first playthrough, and how many funny lines i smiled or laughed at. after i found the beepy cutscene and knowing what i had to do, i decided to put the game away and just watch the alt endings on youtube. reading kaine's backstory was a lot more fascinating than the brief summary and hints i've read before. no fair game, making me care about the monsters!

[Marcus]

I picked this up from Gamestop a few weeks ago for 15 bucks and wow am I impressed. I have logged about 24 hours so far and I am just a little over half way done with the game and I just want to keep going. There is a lot of game here and I am loving all of it so far.

[Miramon]

The entire FF XIII design team should play it and then feel sad they couldn't come up with something 1/10 as good with 100 times the budget.

[driillSGT]

I have one word to sum up this game.

Tranny

[Angrycoder]

Jesus Christ that fucking ending!

[serling]

I am still listening to the soundtrack for this fucking thing. I really want to play through the game again too, but every time I approach a JRPG these days my interest just fizzles. Saving it for a rainy day, I guess.