Coming in hot out of Paris Games Week. It looks a lot better than I thought it would. It somehow manages to look like a smoother version of Bayonetta, although you can't really judge that without getting your hands on it first. You can see that they also squeezed in a bullet hell enemy into a third person action game, which is cool. Overall, I'm really liking the flow of combat. Your character looks swift and capable and the enemies seem like a fun challenge.

60 fps is confirmed

Also, someone should alert @jeff that if he wants MGR2, this might be as close as he'll get. Unless Konami....naaaaah.

For best quality, go to gamersyde.

Edit: German site did an excellent video interview with Taro as well. The interview itself is in English.

Maaaaaaaan, I still need to play the first one....

I hope Sony decides to do an HD remake for PS4 or at least release it on PS Now.

This makes me feel really bad about

A) Having not yet played Bayonetta 2

and B) Having never finished Nier.

This little bit looks super cool, and some pretty sweet music too!

@frequent838: I thought about playing the first one but man that game looks rough.

I'm also curious to see if this is even a largish game because to my understanding the first NieR was around 30-40 hours long. It will be interesting to see if they attempt to make it that long with Platinum being well known for their 4 hour long games.

The first Nier was some cool ideas and story wrapped in a shitty game. I really liked the third-person, bullet hell stuff, but the vast majority of the combat was a tiresome mash-square-to-win affair. And every single sidequest was a collect-a-thon borefest. This looks like it might fix those problems. Though I'm not sure how I feel about that character design. Japan really has run the goth-lolita into the ground. Nier at least managed to avoid too many tiresome anime tropes (albeit in part due to the NA version making the main character an angsty middle-aged man instead of the angsty teenager you play as in the Japanese version.)

Is that protagonist supposed to be Kaine or somebody new?

Really want it to be Kaine.

Nope, it's a new android character.

@aegon: Bummer. Game still looks great though.

Hey man Nier didn't play great but it was an awesome game. I miss that sense of Japanese weirdness that we just don't get too often in games these days. This has Platinum working on it too? Man sign me up.

Still can't believe they're doing a sequel to the best game of all time

Still looks pretty early and rough. As a fan of Platinum and Nier, this looks a little too much like a compromise between ideals. Though I hope it's gonna end up being the best case scenario for this game. Definitely still excited to get my hands on it!

@dudeglove: They look very Nier-ish. Like weird and creepy but simultaneously cartoonish.

@humanity: It seems kinda weird that the enemies, at least in the sections shown off, look kinda like Emil vaguely.

@sinusoidal: While my first thought was "oh, more goth loli," I have complete confidence that the Nier guy can make a really compelling, interesting female lead, so I'm not too worried about it falling into a ton of anime tropes.

I don't like the design of anything really. It does look pretty smooth to play though and technically I like how it looks. I trust Platinum to make something pretty fun though.

I never tried Nier though. I know many swear by it.

Gameplay looks solid. The big robot looked cool, but everything else looked pretty generic.

@artisanbreads: It's a game that requires you to go through a lot of mediocrity to get to some genuinely good stuff. That said, parts of it are really interesting with some creative boss encounters and really interesting camera work.

A Cavia game that doesn't look bad and play painfully mediocre? Wow. Hopefully we'll see Caim and Angelus make an appearance somehow.

I really hope that Platinum developing this doesn't mean the story is gonna take a total back-seat to the gameplay though.

Doubt it. That's what Taro is there for. Story focused trailer is supposed to come out at a later time. Also, interestingly enough, Taro says it's more like an Ocarina of Time than a pure action game. Weird, considering what was in this trailer, but that's what he says. I mean, I would be totally up for a more open world atmospheric game with excellent combat instead of a pure character action thing. That just seems tough to pull off.

I really like that they kept the weird 3rd person bullet hell parts for the fights. That stuff was always really fun to play!

Also this trailer makes me want to get the true ending in Nier, but then I remember how much work that involves.

A new Nier needs to deliver in terms of story and characters first and foremost, those are the things that made the first game so special. Judging by this footage and the mere fact that Platinum is developing it I guess it's a safe bet that this time around the gameplay will also be more than just "kinda okay", which is good, of course.

So a German site did an English interview with Taro and the game's producer, and the interviewer asked some excellent questions, like for instance "why make a sequel to a dud with a company that has a pattern of making commercial failures" (paraphrased). The answer the producer gave was that he was well thought of in the company for his work on Dragon Quest and used that respect to conjure up a project he thought would be cool. Interesting stuff.

That looks badass.

Yoko Taro wants Undertale in Japanese! Make it happen!

How is the first Nier compare to something like...let's say...Drakengard 3? A game which I did very much not enjoy for reasons I won't bother getting into here. I want to play it, but I also wanted to play Drakengard 3 and seeing as how they're directed by the same person, I'm hesitant to pull the trigger.

The only Yoko Taro game I've played is Drakengard 1 when I was a kid (didn't beat it), so I am no expert. From what I understand about Nier and Drakengard, his intent in the storytelling is different between the two. This is just stuff I've read on the internet, but people say he uses Drakengard as a stage for weird / F'd up characters to do extreme things, and Nier is a bit more serious in its approach. With regards to gameplay, this is the first time Platinum has been on board. Taro says he spent a lot of time during Nier's development yelling at the team. Not so much with Platinum. He's happy with them. He's even drinking buddies with Kamiya.

Friggen cannot believe they are doing a sequel and cannot wait. Sounds a lot like that NieR soundtrack already.

That movement looks hella Rising, to a weird degree almost. I'm on board so far.

I haven't played Nier and I'm not going to, but that director is an interesting guy. That interview was great too, props to the guy asking questions.

Really happy they kept the bullet hell elements. The more bullets, the better. That's what set Nier apart from the hundreds of character action games out there.

This looks neat and makes me want to finish Nier, though I don't want to hook up my PS3 again to do it. I'm going to keep my eyes on this game. Was anyone else's attention drawn to how far away her swords floated off her back?

EDIT: Just read about the backstory of the game. Androids and metal aliens invading Earth that caused all the humans to flee to the moon? Okay, I can totally get behind that.

Nier is one of my favorite games, I can't wait for the sequel. I hope the soundtrack is at least half as good as the first game, because that would make it still better than almost every other soundtrack.

Nier is one of the best games I've played in a long time. Very much looking forward to this one, it looks really good. I have my doubts about it being better than the first one though. As long as it's great I'm happy. It's a dream come true for the fans that this game is even happening.

I'm probably in the minority but I quite enjoyed the combat of Nier even though I knew it wasn't brilliant. This looks it's fixing that problem and that it could be a much better game. Would love for the singer of the first game to be involved in this somehow and while I quite like the design of the robots shown, I hope there will be some more variety in enemy design. I have to imagine that will be the case as Nier had a good variety of locations. Would also be nice to see this on PC but PS4 sounds like it will be fine with that 60fps confirmation.

Nier with platinum games and the MGR director seems like a dream. I can't wait!

Edit: Liked the music too, that's another important thing I hope this game delivers on.

Nier plays much better, has a much better framerate and, I feel, a much, much better realized story and better written characters. It still doesn't play great, but the combat is just simple enough that you can mash the button, kill things, feel powerful, and move onto the next cutscene. That said if you just wanted to experience the story you could get away with just watching a Let's Play and skipping the gameplay nonsense. In particular I would recommend a Let's Play from The Dark Id, a Something Awful user who has done LPs of all the Drakengard games an Nier. It's long and text only, so you miss out on the extremely high quality voice work of the game, but he sometimes posts videos of specific cutscenes that are worth watching.

I love that they seem to be keeping the bullet hell stuff in there, hopefully that means they'll also play around with the gameplay like they did in the first one (old school text RPG, isometric RPG, that Resident Evil mansion thing).

Whatever, I still can't believe they're making this. So excited, and maybe someone at GB will actually play it now that the default combat won't be as dull.

The combat was what prevented me from making any headway whatsoever into Nier. If this one has all the nutty story stuff I've heard about while also being a solid game, that could be really neat.

Cool music

Goddamn. Can't wait to get my hands on the final product. Really like the name, mostly because Automata is my favorite Penny Arcade spin-off. Considering the role of androids in the Nier-verse, I'm already intrigued by the story.

I do wonder what the Nier name is for. It's in the Drakengard universe, but they called it Nier because it was a new setting and a new story. Depending on the ending they consider canonical, the character Nier might not even be a factor. Hopefully that will become clear.

Glad to hear it. One of the things I loved about Nier was how you (much like Zelda) had your house and got mail etc. and all the side missions that you could go on, which could be kind of trivial at times but helped build the world.

I actually thought Drakengard 3 looked kind of cool even with its stupid dialog and characters but I just cant stand action games that have a shoddy framerate. This new game looks good but it seems to be lacking the visual flair of a Platinum game.

i wanna play as the old man from the first one

Bayonierta

Kinda strange to see that Nier is losing it's janky combat. I'm excited to try out the final product.

What if they're descendants of Emil and it ties into the previous game in some cool way? Man I can't believe I'm this hyped for Nier 2.

If only...

The Playstation Blog released some info regarding the setting as well as the team composition:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/10/29/the-full-story-behind-nier-automata-on-ps4/

My thoughts on what has been said revealed so far (contains spoilers, but I assume that anyone in the Nier Automata forums has already achieved a D ending):

I don't want to be a naysayer from the get-go, but I'm already slightly concerned about a few aspects. I'm not crazy about alien life forms - Nier was about the relatively-insular problem of humanity's downfall (as the result of Drakengard 1?). I feel like aliens will muddy that message. Also, humans are on the moon? That begs the question, which humans, in what form, and if this takes place after Nier, how did they transition from one form to the other? Is this game set another1300 years in the future? The article/press release said the story is written such that knowledge of the first isn't mandatory, which makes me wonder how much of it is at all related to the events of Nier?

All of that is peanuts compared to the biggest problem - Keiichi Okabe is confirmed as composer (yay!) but Emi Evan's name is sorely missing (boo!). In case you weren't aware, she was the vocalist on most if not all the tracks and she basically invented the language(s) heard in the songs. There's a great interview in which she describes the process of making up words that sound like real languages, then giving her foreign friends the songs to listen to confirm that no, despite sounding French none of the words are distinctly French. The music was fantastic but so much of the effect was from the vocals. The omission is not a confirmation of her absence, but it's worrying no one realized that, hey, she was extremely important to the feel of Nier.