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qreedence

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Weekly Update #27 - May 2, 2021

I'm sorry, AC: Valhalla, but you're taking a back seat for just a while longer. I've also kind of stopped my daily routine in World of Warcraft as well, I just log in to raid 6 hours a week and then I'm done with the game for now until the next content patch (which is rumored to be released late july/early august).

Nier: Replicant ver. 1.22474487139...

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Instead, I opted in to diving in to a new (re-)release of a game I didn't play but heard a lot of positive things about. To set some context here, I never played the original NieR when it came out. I didn't play the Drakengard series before it. And I didn't play NieR: Automata in 2017. I came into this completely fresh, except for the 45 minutes or so shown in the quick look by Alex and Jan. I had some vague memories of people discussing this on podcasts and seeing some articles about it, talking about how it's a somewhat tedious game with less-than-stellar combat but a compelling story. I'm not sure why I decided to pull the trigger on this, since all of the previously mentioned bullet points kind of sound like a bad time.

But boy am I glad I took the plunge. I started this game last weekend, and in about 7 days managed to rack up about 35 hours of playtime. I got really invested, and this occupied a space in my life that's kind of rare for me. I booted it up as soon as I got home from work and played until I would go to bed, and repeat for almost the entire week until I was done with it.

To start off with, I had some rough issues seeing as I was playing on PC and didn't know about all the mods people usually play the game with to make it playable, but once I spent those 15 minutes or however long it took, I didn't really have any performance related problems. The biggest thing at the start was that the gameplay logic is tied to the framerate. Seeing as I'm playing on a 144hz monitor, the game tended to go a bit supersonic at times, so I had to find an external mod to lock the framerate to 60.

All the discussion on the early parts of this game kind of hits it on the head. It starts off innocuously as an action-oriented JRPG with all the tropes intact. Fetch quests, a damsel, party members and banter. It soon starts to morph into something really special. The actual plot is nothing groundbreaking, but I found myself captivated by the characters and the world-building. I happily spent a whole day just running around and completing sidequests, made all the better by everything being voice acted. There's a LOT of dialogue as well, so kudos.

I had heard that the game kind of requires multiple playthroughs which kind of put me off at first, but it felt fine doing subsequent playthroughs seeing as they were completed fairly quickly. My first playthrough took somewhere around 25 hours, the second playthrough around 5, the third took me like 3 hours and the fourth somewhere around 30 minutes. There's a lot of added context as well, so I definitely wouldn't stop at ending A, which is where the credits roll for the first time.

I didn't wind up doing every sidequest in the game (there are a LOT of tedious grindy quests, I just opted to skip them), but I did a fair amount of them and collected every weapon (a requirement for endings C and D). This re-release also added a new ending, ending E. To call it an ending is selling it short though, it feels more like a short story based DLC, it's basicaly 1-2 hours of new areas and cutscenes.

I can't believe I've written this much text and still have not mentioned the music. It's incredible. I don't usually listen to game soundtracks outside of the game, but a few of the melodies have been stuck in my head the whole week (Song of the Ancients and Grandma being the biggest culprits), so much so that I decided to start learning them on piano.

I had initially thought that I was going to go back to AC: Valhalla after finishing this, but after the credits rolled for the fifth time I saw that NieR: Automata was on sale for €20, and I felt like I craved more of this world that Yoko Taro built.

NieR: Automata

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I only started NieR: Automata 2 days ago, I haven't gotten TOO far in yet (11 hours or so I think), and so far... I don't like it quite as much as I did NieR: Replicant. I started reading up on it to get motivated, and found it to be at or near the top on almost every Giant Bomb staffer's Game of the Year-list for 2017, with a fair few mentioning that they put it down when it started to slow its pace down, but word of mouth made them pick it up again and that they were glad that they did.

I haven't gotten to the point yet where I'm amazed by this game, but I'm really hoping it picks up, 'cause as it stands now - just having gotten ending A, I feel like it's okay but not amazing. I'm going to be spending a lot more time with it next week so here's to hoping it wins me over.

I have to say I enjoy the combat in this a whole lot more than in NieR: Replicant, but fighting the same type of enemies gets tiresome quite quickly, and the move to a more open world setting means there's usually a lot more enemies just in the way when you're going from objective marker to objective marker.

I feel like I don't have a completely formulated opinion on this game yet, so I'll hold off until next week. But so far, I loved Nier: Replicant and I think NieR: Automata is okay.

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