Nier - Not nearly as bad as reviews would suggest
By DJ_Lae 3 Comments
EB Games offered up Nier in early December for $10 - an unpublicized and nearly unknown sale, oddly enough. The first location I went to was full of employees full of blank stares who typed the game into their system (initially insisting it was spelled NEIR) only to be confronted with a $30 price tag.
So I went to the location closer to my apartment where I know the manager, and he got the same $30 total. Turned out all he had to do was ring the copy through and it got knocked down to $10. So ultimately my distaste of EB Games employees was renewed, as well as the baffling decision to have a sale and not announce it anywhere but an obscure source online who distributes it across Canada.
Anyway, the game.
It opens in a terrible, terrible way - a rather bland looking snowed in urban environment with a guy and his daughter. After some intolerably long cutscenes where very little happens, you're thrust into button mashy (really mashing buttons - X and X alone) combat against rip-offs of Ico's enemies, over and over and over again for a good five or ten minutes until a boss creature/shadow/whatever plops down and you lay into him until his lifebar disappears.
Then you are transported years into the future and end up in a generic fantasy looking town as the titular character (well, the manual never really says and I named him Ash because I like Evil Dead and he looks almost dead) and his infected daughter. I'm about halfway through the game, so I've managed to nab all of the scrolls needed to restore her...though I don't know if the game will actually turn out that way somehow.
The story is sort of secondary, as it's not particularly interesting. The characters, on the other hand, are. The main character and Grimoire Weiss have some nice exchanges that are both written well and well acted. There's a female character that pops up that's not too bad either, although I think it's due more to them leaving her past a bit of a mystery.
Nier plays out like a cheap God of War clone, more or less, but takes place in an open world divided into zones and collectables (both 'hidden' via twinkling markers and by scavenging animal corpses) so it feels like a weird blend of action game and single-player MMORPG. It's also graphically kind of barren, but still manages a weird sort of charm. Combat is handled by attacking or dodging and you eventually unlock magic spells that let you shoot out magic missles (used occasionally in the game as a dual-stick shooter, which is both awkward and awesome) or fire magic lances or what have you.
A lot of townspeople offer you sidequests, which are all collectathons (get me 10 muttons from killing sheep!) or courier missions, be it items or messages. One neat (and annoying) twist on the courier mission is that some of the items you have to carry are fragile - so no rolling to dodge enemy attacks on route, no getting hit by enemies, and don't jump around like a jackrabbit. Fail to do any of those things and you're heading back to grab a new item to cart off to the recipient.
The weird thing is that despite the generic nature of the game, I'm quite enjoying it. The fishing is typical JRPG bad, but is still kind of fun once you get the hang of it. The graphics have a certain charm. The voice acting is mostly restricted to the main characters, but it's pretty fantastic so far. The combat is serviceable and not particularly difficult. The boss battles are pretty epic in scope and have all been quite fun and a nice change of pace from whacking normal enemies.
And the music. Dear god, the music. It's almost bizarrely unfitting, because it's of a level of quality unlike Nier itself. The majority of the songs have vocals (some with too much vocal focus, like the Aerie music that becomes grating), and most of it works extremely well. I think the music is what plays the largest part in making the game less of a slog than it actually is.
And who knows, maybe the second half is better than the first. I'm just not looking forward to the required three playthroughs in order to experience the entire 'story.'