Nier

Right off the bat, I feel Nier was both excellent and bland at the same time. In a gameplay sense, this game definitely falls short. The combat is boring and uninviting, and I felt that most of the time it was just bland and I wanted it to be over with. The story, on the other hand, is fantastic, although it has horrible pacing issues. The story crawls along like a dying snail at points, consisting of inane fetching side quests, along with the infamous fishing mini-game that is hated so. In the end, however, Nier had a well-rounded story that sucked me in, and I felt that it was interesting enough that I played through every ending, simply to see how the characters and story progressed. Nier, however, made either good or horrible design choices in separate areas of the game. A good one, for me (since it was different, although a lot of people seemed to dislike it) was the little text adventure. I personally thought it was well written and it changed up the gameplay in a good way for me. One bad design choice, though, was the fact that after you get all of the different endings, after you get the last one, the game FORCES you to erase all of your memory from the game. I don't know why, but for some reason they did that. Also, the graphics aren't up to par with other video games, but the story is the only thing that really shines in this game. This is one of those games that you either love or hate. What I would recommend is renting it first, playing through the story, and then if you really enjoyed it you should go pick it up. This is because if you really enjoyed the story, new game + brings about an interesting new factor into the story that will bring you deeper into the universe of Nier, and you can figure out all the different endings. In all, not a bad game, but some poor design decisions, boring gameplay, inane side quests, and not up to par graphics make for an occasionally dull experience.