I tried NieR back on the Xbox 360. Here in America we only got NieR Gestalt, while Japan got both Gestalt and Replicant (which seem fairly identical, minus the character being older in Gestalt… I’m sure there’s other differences). I played it for a very short amount of time and gave up pretty quick, it didn’t click with me at the time. But since then I did play NieR Automata, and that’s one I quite enjoyed.

I figured because I really liked Automata and that this was coming out, I might as well give it another chance. So I played it through and… well, here’s the review.

So let’s go and try to review this maybe. I dunno.

Developer: Toylogic Inc.
Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: April 22nd 2021
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Third-person hack and slash RPG

So this game’s story… a bit of a mess. It certainly doesn’t like explaining itself without having to read actual books or playing Drakengard or reading lore entries. You start the game as this young boy in a semi-modern post-apocalyptic world, protecting his ill little sister from shades, these weird shadowy monsters. Things aren’t going well for the sister and she may or may not die. Then the game goes something like 1400 years in the future, but in a more medieval-ish world (with some ancient ruins that look a bit mode futuristic), where you’re playing as the same young boy, still taking care of the same sister. OR ARE THEY THE SAME? From this point on you do some questing around for Popola who is the semi-leader of the village, killing shades and other such stuff. After some questing he finds Grimoire Weiss, a book who talks and enables him to use magic. He also meets Kaine, a girl wearing sexy lingerie and is also half-shade I guess, she eventually joins you. And a young boy called Emil (who you may recognize from Automata), he eventually transforms into a more recognizable form and joins you too. Eventually the lord of shades comes in to kidnap main guy’s sister, and there’s a time skip of 5 years. So from that point on he must find a way to the Shadowlord, slowly learning about the origin of shades (which is pretty interesting, though would be moreso if it were explored a little bit more in the story itself and not in lore entries or books or stage plays or drama cds or whatever the fuck else), the fate of humanity, Project Gestalt (which again there’s external stuff about this), and having no idea by the end what’s up with Popola and her sister. It’s a story that has some interesting moments, that get more interesting in subsequent plays, but at the same time I gotta say I couldn’t really get into any of the characters at all. Which is a shame because Kaine is kinda cool design-wise and has the closest to an interesting story.

This game has this weird thing going on where there’s multiple endings. In Automata, this was handled by giving you new gameplay after each main ending, getting new characters to play as and actually progressing the plot. In this game… oh boy. You just play through it normally and finish it, then make an endgame save. Reloading that save starts you back around halfway into the game. The game isn’t balanced for this however, so you’re WAY stronger than everything else since you’re halfway in with endgame levels (and you keep getting stronger). The playthrough from that point is identical, except there’s a few different cutscenes… After that ending you get another endgame save, and reloading it puts you back at the halfway point of the game. At that point you’re ridiculously OP except for one battle at the end. Here you have to get all the weapons in the game, then you get a different ending again. Create a backup save before getting the ending, because you can just reload this to get the last 2 endings easier. Then this version of the game has a new ending, which I’m not gonna spoil how to get because that spoils a bit of the D ending. I gotta say… I hate how this game handles the different endings. Automata did it in such a smooth way that actually progressed the story after each ending, this one, fuck it just replay the second half of the game 3 times lol (and something a bit different and a bit more bullshit for the new ending). It’s kinda dumb.

From a remaster point of view, if I didn’t go and actually look at  comparison images, I’d assume this was a straight port, because this really just looks like an Xbox 360 game at higher resolution with better framerate. These environments don’t look too good… but then you look at the 360 version and it looks considerably worse, so they did improve the graphics, a lot, but not to the point where the environments look all that good by modern standards. Then again, this is a PS4 game, so even the PC version is held back because of that. They did improve some of the character models though, quite a bit. All the main characters look better, they had huge eyes on the old models, they look a lot more realistic here. The NPCs are a bit better but I’d say it’s a lot like the environments, they could’ve used more work, considering how few NPCs there even are.

So on the gameplay side of things… It functions like a DMC-style action game, and it has RPG elements. The game flow is very simple, just follow where the game tells you to go until the end.

You have 3 types of weapons you can use, and they’re pretty simple. You get a weak and a strong attack, a few very simple combos per weapon, and you can hold the attack buttons to charge some of the attacks for different attacks. It’s not a particularly deep system, and considering how little enemies really even react to your attacks, it’s not like your weapon choice matters all that much in the meta. Just take the one that has the attacks you like, or do like me and go by the highest attack stat.  Outside of the fairly simple melee system, you get Grimoire Weiss giving you access to magic.

There’s a few spells you can use, though you can only equip 2 at a time. I always left the basic machine gun-style projectile on R1, which is OP for most of the game, and chose kinda randomly for L1’s spell, it hardly matters. All the spells have some charging feature where they get stronger or bigger the more you charge, even the rapid-fire bullets which send out homing bullets after a bit over a second of charging. Some of these spells have interesting uses like the spears that pop out the ground, which can stop enemies from moving for a bit, but they’re pretty much just big hits, and I rarely used them.

Enemies in the second half of the game brain up a bit and figure out they can use armor to weaken the impact of the rapid-fire magic, at which point using strong attacks and charge attacks can be used to knock the armor off and reopen vulnerability to the rapid-fire. I talk about the rapid-fire because it’s really that good. It gets a bit less good when armored enemies show up… but then when you get to replay the game with the enemies not leveling up, even armored enemies are nothing in front of the might of the shitty rapid-fire projectile. It’s SO strong. It breaks the game entirely, and it’s just one tool, mixing that with normal melee attacks makes it a total joke difficulty-wise.

You do level up as you play. The normal way, so EXP from killing enemies. This gives you more attack and defense and such. Nothing special there. Killing enemies also randomly gives you words. Words can be applied to spells, weapons and your defend/evade skills. Those words give you stat boosts, may it be attack power, magic power and other stuff. You can keep it very straightforward and let the game just choose the best words for you, it’s generally right. Then you can mass-apply the best words to everything in the category, so you don’t have to individually apply words to weapons.

You can also power up weapons. This requires finding really rare item drops in environments or from killing enemies (I have NO idea where to find an eagle egg), then going to a specific NPC that will strengthen them at the cost of money and these rare hard-to-find materials. Some of the weapons will always suck, some get really really strong. It hardly matters but whatever.

Some NPCs give you quests. A bunch of them are missables (you lose access to many of them after the time skip, or maybe an NPC dies and you lose access to that one). These are mostly pointless to do… except a couple very specific ones that give you weapons. Like I said, you do need all the weapons (not for any plot-related reason, it’s just a vague requirement… the game does tell you about it at least) for some of the endings, and the game doesn’t tell you which quests give you weapons. Thankfully they’re not missable. Just google them, ignore the rest.

I really wish I had more to say about this game… There’s not much to really talk about. It does have a few interesting moments where it becomes a text adventure game, and one of the dungeon has fun puzzles… Other than that, the world is tiny, the fast travel system is bullshit (seriously, it’s so specific it’s useless beyond literal story progression to go to a spot you can’t without the boat). The game has a bullet hell system where lots of enemies shoot lots of bullets. Most of those can be stopped by the rapid-fire magic, some are more purple-ish and can be stopped by your melee attack… it looks cooler than it is to play. I really don’t have much to talk about with this one.

Overall

This was… okay. Like a way less fun Automata. The game is pretty fun at points, but there’s ups and downs, and the downs take center stage for me unfortunately.

I dunno, I find this a bit hard to review in some ways, because I hate reading lore bits that you grab in games (I play a game to play a game, not read optional lore), and the story isn’t super forward with you here. You do get interesting details, but basically no answers. And talking to fans of it, there’s a lot of external material that explains more of the story like what Project Gestalt is in more detail, and then you have to also play Drakengard to get more of the plot and fuck that. This game’s story isn’t very self-contained, and that’s to its detriment.

On the gameplay side, this game has its issues too. The combat feels really cheap overall, with the basic projectile from the book being ridiculously OP. The whole “you have to replay the second half of the game several times but the enemies don’t get stronger” thing is filler to the extreme and not fun to do, but you gotta do it if you want all the endings. And that requires doing all the sidequests because you don’t know which ones will give you a weapon (unless you cheat like me and google it, fuck trying to figure out which 2 specific quests give you swords), which you need for 2 of the endings.

I recommend this… to NieR fans, who probably already bought it. Otherwise… get Automata, it’s the better game, BY FAR. Might be because of Platinum’s involvement, the combat is a lot better, and I enjoyed the story much more in many ways, may it be the more interesting imagery and themes, or how it handled the “endings” and such.

Kaine is fun, I hope she finds clothes someday, she must be cold.