Nier

No! Please, stay. Don't let the 2/5 scare you away from my review! I really have some things to say about this game and I think you should hear them; I'm not here to just slam the game by any means. This will be a good one if you are reading reviews prior to purchasing the game. Don't take my review score as a recommendation to stay away from this game. Instead, have a seat and enjoy. It's important to understand that I played the game on Hard and will be reviewing it as such. I will go further into this in the gameplay section. The concluding paragraphs are a good TL;DR.

Review

For the longest time I had been hearing about this game, NieR, and how it is a gem. I have been hearing about how this game is under rated and when given a chance, shines. I'm not sure if that is the right way to describe it but it is close, and I think you'll understand by the end of this review. The game does some things great, some bad, and some just different. The gameplay is a roller coaster, the story is top notch, but it's all held back by the structure.

Gameplay

NieR is a character action role playing game. The combat is real time and there's an inventory full of items for you to collect. There's even a farming and fishing mechanic that lets you make money on the side. Throughout the game, you will earn varied weapons to equip but no armor. Instead, you equip Word Edits that effect your stats, such as Physical Strength and MP Recovery Rate. This is a neat departure from your typical RPG armaments and is neither better nor worse, just different; I welcome different. There are also unique spells that are given to you throughout the game as well.

With all that said, the gameplay itself tedious. Mind you, I did not find it hard, but just boring. Enemy health is so inflated that each encounter feels more like a chore than anything. It takes far too long to get rid of any enemies and you should NOT take that remark with a grain of salt. Remember all those spells I mentioned, well players going through the game on Hard would find it foolish to not use only one of them (Dark Blast) for the whole first half of the game. It is by far the most efficient way to dispatch enemies, and at times, the only plausible way. Other spells prolong encounters only longer and physical attacks are just about pointless. So what you're left with in terms of the gameplay is spamming one spell while avoiding contact for prolonged periods of time. This is the problem with most of the gameplay on Hard mode; it feels there wasn't much thought to balance and the devs just inflated the health of enemies to the point of taking all of the fun out of it.

When part two of the game starts, after a five year interlude in the story, the player's weapon type choices are expanded from one-handed weapons, to include two-handed swords and spears. By attaining some of the games stronger weapons at the beginning of the second half, part two of the game becomes much more fun than the first. With the added viability of physical attacks, the player is open to experiment more with the combat. There is also a lot more balance between the power of the player and the enemies. This all proves to be a lot more fun but also leaves me wondering why the difficulty and balancing was not more ironed out for the rest of the game. One could also question their decision to restrict the player to one weapon type for 65% of the game, but I don't feel like that any problems regarding part one of the game lie in the weapon type selection available.

Let's have an aside real quick, here, and talk about the the difficulty options. I'm a player that enjoys challenge and overcoming it; I play most of my games on Hard. That might hold me accountable for a lot of my critique on games but I do my research before I choose difficulties. NieR seems to have a very passionate fanbase and the consensus I've found is that my experience with the Hard difficulty is typical: ridiculously tedious at first but well balanced in part two, with the right weapons. The consensus for the Normal difficulty seems to be that the beginning is easy for the first part and an absolute breeze through the second part. It's not even worth mentioning Easy. This is quite the disparity between the two modes and I feel it is fair to criticize the game for it. One one hand, we have a mode that is easy and becomes even easier, while on the other we have a mode that is far too tedious and drawn out, and leads to a well balanced late game. I wanted to experience a balanced game at least at some point during my time with NieR so I chose Hard. Even when I play games for their stories, I'm not one that enjoys being hand-fed content with easy modes. Let's continue and talk more about the word tedious.

I've mentioned combat with lesser enemies but the bosses deserve their own section. Each boss in this game feels unique with their own personality and mechanics. Most of them incorporate some form of spells that give the battles a three dimensional bullet-hell element. Avoiding a screen full of projectiles in a 3D space felt exciting and rewarding. The problem with these bosses is their massively inflated health. You will once again be relying on one spell, Dark Blast, for the bosses, because either it is the only realistically efficient strategy at all, or it really is the only way to damage them (more frequently than you might think). I don't mind the Dark Blast when it is meant to be used, it's when the Dark Blast is the only viable strategy of them all that it is frustrating. Boss fights are structured in a way that when you wittle enough of their health, you focus your damage on a specific section to continue the fight, and if you don't do enough damage, their chunk of health regenerates until you break it down again, and continue to damage the section. You can expect to damage a section 3-4 times before you finally knock off that 1/5 of total health pool. This causes boss fights to last well into 30 minutes at times. It is not the length itself that bothers me but rather that the player is expected to repeat the same action he has proved to be proficient at multiple times already within the same encounter. I will commend the game for check-pointing at certain points of the fights, though.

Another problem with some of the boss fights is their design flaws. Many times, there are ways to essentially bypass the fighting and just stand in a spot (or slightly move every now and then) and spam your Dark Blast until you win. The extreme case of this is during a very pivotal game-changing point in the story where you fight a boss that is titanic and meant to be intimidating, story-wise and gameplay wise. This falls to pieces though when you realize that there are spots where you can stand that fodder enemies won't attack you and the boss is literally harmless. His attacks don't come near you and he doesn't even face you. He has no awareness of your presence. Quite disappointing that this is the case sometimes for some great set pieces. A lot of times, it is either this, or you're repeating an interesting part of a battle so many times that it loses all meaning of fun.

There is one other small point I'd like to commend the game on, which is its variability. Throughout the game, the camera may switch to new perspectives, and the style of presentation may change. This was something that was quite the surprise to me. It does this multiple times in different ways and will connect with some players, while missing the mark with others. Whether or not this is enjoyed, I welcome the risk taking and slight change in mechanics to keep the game fresh. I won't go into too much detail because I feel what I've said is enough to get my point across, and the surprise of how it does these things is part of the experience. I think most people that choose to pick this game up at this point will welcome this aspect.

Narrative

The game's story starts off shallow but slowly expands on itself. As you learn more about the world you are in and the characters you meet, you become more invested, naturally. The story is helped along by great background music. This is where a lot of divisiveness for this game comes in, though. When you complete the game the first time, you really only get part of the story. In order to really understand the story, you have to start NG+ which picks up in part two of the game. NG+ includes additional cutscenes and dialogue (during original cutscenes and during battle). This adds many epiphanies to the story that are very powerful, all the way through the end. Although you keep your status and items, making the game much more of a breeze, I really did not feel like playing through another 4 hours of late game to experience it. Part of this is because there are no new mechanics to the enemies, bosses, or gameplay. Only the cutscenes and dialogue. Instead, I watched a playthrough of the NG+ late game, and I feel that none of the power of the added content was missed out on. But wait, there's more! in NG++ you get another ending, actually a choice of two... if you grind out for all of the weapons. (Pick the top option first because the bottom option erases every NieR save file on your memory card. Don't ask.)

NieR's story is great and powerful; it is its strongest element. That is why I think the game cripples itself in its RPG structure. It isn't the landscapes of the open world that are a problem, it is the tasks that fill them. A lot of side quests have you running between far points of the world map in a game with no fast travel. These side quests don't have particularly interesting plots and only break the pacing of the games interesting and engaging main story. It also all just feels very shallow. There are NPCs inhabiting cities and distinct areas, but it all feels slightly half-baked; almost as if the game were pretending to be an RPG which I really feel it is. For example, the benefits of exploring the fishing and farming mechanics are never explained, and the player is not given much enticing to engage with them. If the developers had realized the strengths of the game and trimmed it down to a more streamlined experience, the story would be better paced and keep players more engaged. There would be many ways of doing this while still including an open world with various landscapes. Now, I'm not criticizing the game for what it is not, no; I am criticizing it for what it is and expanding the discussion to how I feel its strongest element may have benefited. For this reason, I will make a recommendation.

Conclusion

NieR is a game that offers a strong story for those that are patient enough to experience it. Don't play this game if you're coming for the challenge because the only real challenge is the patience of sticking through its tedium. I recommend this game to players that are coming for a powerful story that becomes stronger as you play. This is best experienced by plaything through the game on Medium and skipping the side content, besides a few good ones (Yonah's quest and the lighthouse quest). There won't be much challenge here so most enjoyment in gameplay will be from experimenting with the combat, and experiencing the mechanics of the boss fights. Using weapon upgrades is a great way to fine tune the difficulty to suit the individual players. Once complete, youtube the trimmed down versions of the NG+ playthroughs (I highly recommend this playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE0BD067C4F02079C) and don't skip the gameplay sections as they will also contain new dialogue. This is where you'll find the reward of NieR and the best it has to offer, everything else has highly dimishing returns that are not worth it.

I give the game a 2/5 because although it has a powerfully rewarding story, the lackluster gameplay stemming from its absurd difficulty modes, along with its structure restricts it to a very niche audience. The game does some neat things with its mechanics, but nothing that saves it from its problems.