![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
NIER
"Weiss, you dumbass! Start making sense, you rotten book, or you're gonna be sorry! Maybe I'll rip your pages out, one-by-one! Or maybe I'll put you in the goddamn furnace! How can someone with such a big, smart brain get hypnotized like a little bitch?! Huh!? Oh, Shadowlord! I love you, Shadowlord! Come over here and give Weiss a big sloppy kiss, Shadowlord! Now pull your head out of your goddamn ass and START FUCKING HELPING US!!"
Nier will do anything to save his daughter Yonah from her mysterious illness. Kill monsters, make pacts with magical books, run random errands for the townsfolk, save the world…anything, really.
The prologue is a bit of a mindscrew, taking place 40 years in the future where a man tries to defend his sick daughter from monsters with help from a magic book. The game itself takes place over a millennium later, with what appears to be the same man and the same sick daughter in a post-apocalyptic dying world where the sun never sets. (This eventually makes sense…mostly. It’s that sort of game.)
This was made by the same folks who did Drakengard, and it’s a semi-sequel to that, though it ignores the “canon” from Drakengard 2 and takes off in a different direction. And we’re back to having a protagonist who’s kind of an angry asshole, rather than the prissy prettyboy who created such dissonance in Drakengard 2. It works much better this way. (Though apparently there was also an alternate version of the game in Japan, where you played as Yonah’s brother rather than her father, and were indeed a white-haired prettyboy. I’m glad they gave us this version.)
It plays as a pretty standard 3D action game. The camera controls and I took a while to come to an agreement, but by then end were pretty much okay. I give them a lot of credit on the graphics, in that they fall into “real is brown” a lot, but they’re really good with the contrast between light and dark, and the “gold glowing fragmented monster” things really do work. (It’s not clear why these monsters explode into bloody smears when you kill them, mind you…until the big mindfuck at the end.) The game doesn’t seem to use many pre-rendered cutscenes at all. Virtually all of the cutscenes feature Nier’s weapon, which you can switch out, and the detail is really amazing.
If you have an issue with ridiculous, stripperrific outfits, this game may not be for you. A major character fights evil in nothing but lingerie (that leaves little to the imagination) and high heels. She does all the cursing, too. She doesn’t really become a sympathetic character until the New Game Plus, when you see a lot more of her backstory, but she’s pretty badass nonetheless.
The show-stealing character, though, is Grimoire Weiss. The voice acting reminds me of Alan Rickman, with a low, droll snark that lampshades a lot of the more ridiculous things in the game.
The fishing minigame (required for a number of the quests, and once in the main story) takes a lot of getting used to and can be really frustrating if you’re not sure what you’re doing. I think it was designed by somebody who had gone fishing and hated it. (Weiss’s snarky comments when you fail at fishing for a while only serve to support this theory.)
Some of the quests require a lot of grinding for rare drops, either by killing a lot of monsters or running back and forth between zones looking for spawn points. There’s also a gardening minigame, where you can plant seeds and harvest crops, but they grow in real-time.
You have to revisit a lot of the dungeons (the “world” is actually quite small, all told), but they add new areas to them and they try to make things different and interesting. Several areas give you side-scrolling, top-down or odd survival-horror-esque camera angles.
In the end, it does get a bit repetitive. They reuse the small number of areas a lot, and not just for sidequests. The New Game Plus adds a bunch of content—story content that shows exactly how terrible a person you actually are—and picks up from the halfway point, which helps.
The music is pretty and haunting, and fits the mood of the game well, though it’s very repetitive. I found it easy to tune out after a while, though Jethrien had issues being in the same room while I played because she couldn’t tune it out.
(Because Cavia hates you, there’s a hidden quest just before the unreturnable halfway point that would give you 51% quest completion, and missing it means you can’t get 100% quest completion without starting over entirely. Oh, also, you can’t view the last ending unless you let the game erase all of your save data.)
Overall: This game is a trip, easily on par with the original Drakengard. I’m not going to spoil it. If you really want the details without playing the game, you can look up the Let’s Play. But I think you should play the game—if you don’t get into sidequests, it’s not terribly long; the system is intuitive and fun to play; and the plot and characterization are totally there.
Nier will do anything to save his daughter Yonah from her mysterious illness. Kill monsters, make pacts with magical books, run random errands for the townsfolk, save the world…anything, really.
The prologue is a bit of a mindscrew, taking place 40 years in the future where a man tries to defend his sick daughter from monsters with help from a magic book. The game itself takes place over a millennium later, with what appears to be the same man and the same sick daughter in a post-apocalyptic dying world where the sun never sets. (This eventually makes sense…mostly. It’s that sort of game.)
This was made by the same folks who did Drakengard, and it’s a semi-sequel to that, though it ignores the “canon” from Drakengard 2 and takes off in a different direction. And we’re back to having a protagonist who’s kind of an angry asshole, rather than the prissy prettyboy who created such dissonance in Drakengard 2. It works much better this way. (Though apparently there was also an alternate version of the game in Japan, where you played as Yonah’s brother rather than her father, and were indeed a white-haired prettyboy. I’m glad they gave us this version.)
It plays as a pretty standard 3D action game. The camera controls and I took a while to come to an agreement, but by then end were pretty much okay. I give them a lot of credit on the graphics, in that they fall into “real is brown” a lot, but they’re really good with the contrast between light and dark, and the “gold glowing fragmented monster” things really do work. (It’s not clear why these monsters explode into bloody smears when you kill them, mind you…until the big mindfuck at the end.) The game doesn’t seem to use many pre-rendered cutscenes at all. Virtually all of the cutscenes feature Nier’s weapon, which you can switch out, and the detail is really amazing.
If you have an issue with ridiculous, stripperrific outfits, this game may not be for you. A major character fights evil in nothing but lingerie (that leaves little to the imagination) and high heels. She does all the cursing, too. She doesn’t really become a sympathetic character until the New Game Plus, when you see a lot more of her backstory, but she’s pretty badass nonetheless.
The show-stealing character, though, is Grimoire Weiss. The voice acting reminds me of Alan Rickman, with a low, droll snark that lampshades a lot of the more ridiculous things in the game.
The fishing minigame (required for a number of the quests, and once in the main story) takes a lot of getting used to and can be really frustrating if you’re not sure what you’re doing. I think it was designed by somebody who had gone fishing and hated it. (Weiss’s snarky comments when you fail at fishing for a while only serve to support this theory.)
Some of the quests require a lot of grinding for rare drops, either by killing a lot of monsters or running back and forth between zones looking for spawn points. There’s also a gardening minigame, where you can plant seeds and harvest crops, but they grow in real-time.
You have to revisit a lot of the dungeons (the “world” is actually quite small, all told), but they add new areas to them and they try to make things different and interesting. Several areas give you side-scrolling, top-down or odd survival-horror-esque camera angles.
In the end, it does get a bit repetitive. They reuse the small number of areas a lot, and not just for sidequests. The New Game Plus adds a bunch of content—story content that shows exactly how terrible a person you actually are—and picks up from the halfway point, which helps.
The music is pretty and haunting, and fits the mood of the game well, though it’s very repetitive. I found it easy to tune out after a while, though Jethrien had issues being in the same room while I played because she couldn’t tune it out.
(Because Cavia hates you, there’s a hidden quest just before the unreturnable halfway point that would give you 51% quest completion, and missing it means you can’t get 100% quest completion without starting over entirely. Oh, also, you can’t view the last ending unless you let the game erase all of your save data.)
Overall: This game is a trip, easily on par with the original Drakengard. I’m not going to spoil it. If you really want the details without playing the game, you can look up the Let’s Play. But I think you should play the game—if you don’t get into sidequests, it’s not terribly long; the system is intuitive and fun to play; and the plot and characterization are totally there.