It's rare in this day and age for a game to be released and feel as complete as this NieR does, starting strong, continuing strong, and ending very, VERY strong. With a mix of hack and slash along with bullet hell mechanics, along with an engaging story that stands on its own two feet, it's definitely a serious GOTY contender for me and probably for others too.
Compared to most other Platinum titles the combat's a lot more forgiving, with only a few customization chips needed to mostly break the game in your favor. Granted if you get careless you'll still die extremely quickly, and there's plenty of fights that will seriously test you if you attempt to tackle them as soon as they're available, but hey, the challenge is half the fun.
The writing is also fantastic, which helps greatly to shore up the fact that, if you decide to do all the sidequests, you're going to be doing a LOOOOOOT of backtracking. Who knew that all it'd take for an escort mission to be fun was to end up having an awkward conversation with your escortee about where babies come from? I also appreciate that for the most part the game just tells you when sidequests open up and where to go for the many fetch quests, if you have to in the first place.
And in a way I can really appreciate this. For the most part you'll find yourself in control of our likeable, layered protagonists, seeing how they react to a strange, strange world filled with people trying to make sense of it all. And just like them, players get to make their own conclusions and find their own meaning in the game as a whole.
I also have to give props for the game taking the oft-used white-haired pretty boy archtype used so often in Square titles and dropping pretense in favor of clear-cut motivations and a bit of humanity. Give me Eve complaining about having to wear pants over long-winded, short-sighted rants about nihilism any day.
For various reasons my own run of the game still has a few stones left unturned, though I'm not sure exactly when I'll be able to get back to it. Not for its own faults though, but rather having reached a natural end to it all for which the rest of the game is just so much gravy.
But yeah. Play it. There's not going to be anything like it coming out anytime soon, at least not with the same level of depth and complexity, which on one hand is a crying shame, but on the other hand just reaffirms how amazing this thing is.
So let's talk about NieR Automata
It's rare in this day and age for a game to be released and feel as complete as this NieR does, starting strong, continuing strong, and ending very, VERY strong. With a mix of hack and slash along with bullet hell mechanics, along with an engaging story that stands on its own two feet, it's definitely a serious GOTY contender for me and probably for others too.
Compared to most other Platinum titles the combat's a lot more forgiving, with only a few customization chips needed to mostly break the game in your favor. Granted if you get careless you'll still die extremely quickly, and there's plenty of fights that will seriously test you if you attempt to tackle them as soon as they're available, but hey, the challenge is half the fun.
The writing is also fantastic, which helps greatly to shore up the fact that, if you decide to do all the sidequests, you're going to be doing a LOOOOOOT of backtracking. Who knew that all it'd take for an escort mission to be fun was to end up having an awkward conversation with your escortee about where babies come from? I also appreciate that for the most part the game just tells you when sidequests open up and where to go for the many fetch quests, if you have to in the first place.
And in a way I can really appreciate this. For the most part you'll find yourself in control of our likeable, layered protagonists, seeing how they react to a strange, strange world filled with people trying to make sense of it all. And just like them, players get to make their own conclusions and find their own meaning in the game as a whole.
I also have to give props for the game taking the oft-used white-haired pretty boy archtype used so often in Square titles and dropping pretense in favor of clear-cut motivations and a bit of humanity. Give me Eve complaining about having to wear pants over long-winded, short-sighted rants about nihilism any day.
For various reasons my own run of the game still has a few stones left unturned, though I'm not sure exactly when I'll be able to get back to it. Not for its own faults though, but rather having reached a natural end to it all for which the rest of the game is just so much gravy.
But yeah. Play it. There's not going to be anything like it coming out anytime soon, at least not with the same level of depth and complexity, which on one hand is a crying shame, but on the other hand just reaffirms how amazing this thing is.