Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (PS4) - A Dark Road

When I first got my Playstation 3, one of the games I was very much excited for was Ninja Theory's action epic Heavenly Sword. The game was pretty short for the most part and drew many well deserved comparisons to God of War but all in all it was a pretty enjoyable experience. Sadly, there was no option to pick up a sequel.

But Ninja Theory did keep working on games like Enslaved and DmC, and a few years ago came a rumbling a new title they were working on. A shorter game trying to get AAA class production with a much smaller team and budget. The trailer originally had me think it was a Heavenly Sword sequel, but they denied that saying this was its own property. The trailers had me curious so for 30 bucks I took a swing at...

HELLBLADE: SENUA'S SACRIFICE(PS4)

The beginning of Hellblade, we follow Senua as she paddles through a darkened river on a hollowed out log. A quiet narration tells us this is her tale, and if we follow along perhaps we can have a part to play in it. Senua appears aware of this conversation, as she looks back directly at the camera. The narrator hushes us and quietly lets us know that she heard us.

Senua is a deeply troubled girl with a very tortured upbringing. As we play through the game we learn about her relationship with her father, mother, the people of her village, and one beacon of strength that shined through to her, a boy named Dillion. Her beloved Dillion has been taken from her, and she is off to try to bring him back.

It is a treacherous journey though as she is plagued by a "darkness" that follows her. She is cursed with a rot that continues to rise up her arm, and is constantly haunted, encouraged, berated by voices that antagonize her with every step, as well as visions that hound her and constantly distort her reality. Her only option is to confront the goddess Hela and plead her case, so she stomachs her resolve and presses forward.

So I'm not going to lie to you, Hellblade is a pretty fucking intense experience. If I had to describe it for a genre classification, I would say that it is very much a walking simulator first, with puzzles intermixed for most of the major set pieces, and occasionally intermixed with tightly focused combat as you play through. It would hesitate to call it an action game even though you can probably see it that way. Although the game is called Hellblade, combat is not the game's primary focus.

I lean to walking simulator because as you travel from set piece to set piece, you get more and more of the narrative from these surreal fade sequences Senua experiences. Constantly shifting from visions of her past and visions of a twisted surreal reality. With each step the voices that follow you are constantly chattering and heckling, whispering that she is going to die, she cant do it, yes she can, who does she think she is, etc, etc, etc. It goes on and on. The nature of how the sound projects, this feels like a game that should be played with a good surround system or a quality set of headphones.

Generally the flow of Hellblade follows a pretty simple path: Walk to your destination while experiencing the near psychotic break that Senua is having, reaching your objective, solving a puzzle or finding the necessary runes to open a door, and fight a wave of baddies. It's generally always these 3 things, although not always in that order.

Typically you will approach a locked door covered in the runes, and you need to wander around your environment while looking for the necessary symbols within the environment. Sometimes these can just be found painted on walls, but sometimes you might see is as shadows or light projected somewhere. Or in the latter stages, you need to stand somewhere else in the location so your surrounding environment actually forms the said shape. Think how you might rotate the map in Echochrome, for example.

The puzzles aren't exactly mind bending. Most of them present the solution right out the gate, you just need the right combo to make it all fit. Again, many of these are visual in nature so they aren't exceptionally difficult. Some just require some fast movement, but since the maps aren't overly complex I would say that overall the puzzles in this game were not very difficult. I think there was only one puzzle I got really hung up on and it's because I wasn't paying close enough attention to the cutscene prior.

And I suppose you couldn't really justify calling your game Hellblade if you didn't have some kind of sword combat in it. This was the aspect of the game that I was most worried about because when I saw the combat in action, it looked very fast paced and arcadey, weightless, as if there was no response to my swings. Happily, this was a grossly incorrect assumption on my part and combat actually ended up being way better than I expected.

It follows a pretty standard system: Light, Heavy, and Melee attacks with a dodge and block. It's pretty basic at its core but they add a bunch of little tricks to change up the combos to make them feel more skillful. For example, if you use your light attacks Senua just swings quickly with slashes. But if you use a light attack after say using a parry she has this jumping twist move to start the combo, I'm not sure if it's a stronger move but it looks cool as hell. In addition, if you dash towards a foe and use the same light attack, Senua does that jumping high stab I can only compare to Brad Pitt's Achilles' in the movie Troy. (A couple of games used this move).

The camera in battle stays high and tight in the 3rd person perspective but somehow doesn't feel disorienting. When enemies swing you can dodge away and dive back in for quick combos, or if you time your block correctly you can parry the strike for a unguarded retort. Sometimes there are multiple enemies, so while there is no lock on reticle, the camera will stay focused on the target you are fighting. but since the camera is so tight, you constantly need to continue to back up to make sure can see all the danger.

Generally the enemies are all variants of marauding northmen, but they evolve to have different weapons and moves. Some might have shields that force you to melee to break the guard before you can attack, some have heavy weapons that your guard will not hold up against. Some enemies fade to ethereal form and makes them invulnerable to attack. When this happens Senua can use her focus to bring them back to reality and slow time briefly to deal a lot of damage in a short time. But you have a limited number of uses so it's wise to save them for panic moments.

The combat excels when it uses the auditory clues from her psychosis to actually give you hints during the fight. Like while I was engaged in a fight with some hammer lugging troglodyte, the whispers started saying "Watch out! Look out! Behind you!" and I panicked and hit my dodge to the side. Sure enough just as Senua made her dashing sidestep, the sword of an enemy I didn't see came swinging down right where I was standing.

In one of the early boss fights, an enemy shifted into shadow and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to deal damage. I was blocking but it wasn't helping. But as he would ready his attack, the voices would start yelling at me to focus, or focus now. I originally thought it was because I was taking damage and were scared, but what it was actually doing was letting me know to use my focus to bring him back to a physical form. It was a very cool eureka moment and made me realize perhaps I can't just ignore the voices.

The visuals in this game are fucking stunning. I almost can't believe that it was done with just 20 people. The environments are all picturesque and gorgeous, with weather actually changing within the environment as you spend time there. The shifts to surreal hallucination are magical yet harrowing. There is a long segment in the late game that very much reminded me of the early stages of Dante's Inferno but with way more movie-like production value. Some of the voices in her head get visualizations done with live action, but they are filtered and blurred to the point where I can't confirm if they were digitally done or not.

But Senua herself? Holy shit.  I have been a big proponent of the use of motion capture in video games, because they give us stellar examples like Grand Theft Auto 5, Infamous: Second Son, and The Last of Us. But Ninja Theory might have set the new standard for how it's done. Using a single lighted head harness and some effects makeup they developed a system that basically captures a 1 to 1 recording of facial reactions that are animated in the game real time. It's fucking impressive.

And it's this that really makes Melina Juergens performance as Senua come to life. Senua's story is gutwrenching, and the ever present hysteria and agony in her voice, the constant fighting she is doing with the voices that berate her for the whole journey, being forced to constantly relive the tragedies of her life. It's fucking brutal, and Juergens' performance was crucial to really setting the tone. I had never heard of this actress before, so I did a little digging to find out she's actually the video editor for Ninja Theory, and this is one of her first actual acting roles. Holy shit, Melina. Bravo.

There is also and option to turn on a photo mod which I dabbled with a bit. It's pretty simple and intuitive to use, although admittedly it's a little tricky to time when you are trying to get it to freeze in an action shot. It let me know that the camera is set a certain way in combat because that's the way it looks best. When I'd try to spin the camera for a cool action shot it would never look as good as the behind the back look. Still, you can pull together some very gorgeous screens with this. All of the screenshots in this review are ones I did myself. This game is just fucking beautiful.

A lot of facial acting went into this game, and it really sells Senua as a character.

An absolutely stellar performance by Juergens.

Hellblade features a score you would expect for a story in this setting. Classic instruments performing that epic fantasy score. I can't say any one song jumped out to me but everything had a place. Much of the game didn't have music as I traveled from place to place, low melodies as Senua experienced some flashback or remembrance of conversation from her past. The other voices are well acted, and the narrator really deserves credit for framing the whole story. Like a grandmother whispering a sad story, she has a haunting presence that is felt from the very first lines of the game.

It's not a terribly long game to play. I think by the time I finished it I it had taken me maybe close to 7 or 8 hours. While that is short, the game is only 30 dollars and I have payed 60 for games that don't last that long. Ninja Theory's Heavenly Sword only ran about that long and that was a full priced game, so this didn't bother me terribly.

A lot of people are complaining that the combat in this game wasn't necessary. I understand that the walking simulator is becoming more and more prevalent and accepted as a genre these days, but I do feel that if you took out the combat, there will be very little left to hold the rest of Hellblade up. At that point it would just make more sense to cut things down and make it a movie. But if you did that I don't know if I would have felt as invested as I was. There are also story mechanics interwoven in the combat that wouldn't work otherwise if it wasn't there.

But with that in mind, I will say that for as good as the combat felt, it does get a little bit samey feeling after a while. Yes the enemies evolve a little bit to require more tricks to actually put them down, but after a while they just start sending more and more waves of them at you. Some of these are for story effect but if this was say a 60 hour epic, it would probably grow tiresome to continue to do.

There were a handful of glitches that are probably already being patched out. Mainly with the subtitles. There are a number of grammatical inconsistency (something I would know nothing about because I am a flawless writer) and timing issues on the subtitles.  There was one glitch where I tried to climb up a ledge, and instead climbed down through the floor that left me falling in limbo forever till I restarted the game. There is also the "head turn" thing that happens when you spin the camera around Senua where she whips her head from side to side to look at what the camera is on instead of posing like I'm trying to get her to do. She always has this kind of open mouth gape of an expression too in resting moments that is not very photogenic either.

And while I praise the absolutely exceptional acting done in this game, a little more volume on the narration would have been appreciated. I know it's going for a specific tone and effect with the soft spoken whisper, but I had that sound effects and music dropped well under 70% and maxed out vocals, and there are still lines of dialogue I can't hear. This is even worse when compounded with the off timed subtitles.

This game could be an easy platinum trophy for you collectors out there. I got all of them but one in a single play through because apparently I missed one of the way-stones that explain the Norse lore throughout the game. It was the only achievement I missed and if I got it, it would have been platinum'd so it's certainly possible to do in one go. (I am pissed I missed it, honestly)

I certainly had more reservations and expectations when I first started seeing live gameplay footage of Hellblade but I was very happy to see that not only did it exceed my expectations, but I was left thoroughly impressed. It's certainly not a perfect video game experience, but Ninja Theory proved that they could can produce a high quality title for a lower price and smaller budget. I find myself wondering how fast they could have pumped this out if they had a slightly larger team to work on it.

I very much enjoyed my time with Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Everything was done to properly fit its length. Any little annoyance I could really come up is effected rounded out by the fact the game isn't long enough for them to become a persistent problem. If they can reduce the development time, I would be ok with more of these shorter games at half cost. Hellblade isn't a game you will probably play over and over and over again, but it's certainly a game that's worth getting through once for the experience.

Problem is, thanks to this game now I question if I'm actually schizophrenic.
Shut up, No we're not.
You shut up.
Tsch, asshole.

Kindergarden (Steam): School is still rough.

I tend to pretty savvy when it comes to video game releases. As you can tell from this very blog if you have actually read some of it, you would know that I haven't had a whole lot to rage about because apparently I know what I like. So rarely when I take a flyer on something does it bite me on the ass (*coughNightsOfAzurecough*). But I am not one to ignore recommendations either from sources I trust. It's basically how I found Undertale.

One of those sources is the Game Theorists' MatPat. He can be a polarizing figure on youtube, but I genuinely love his work. So when he said on a recent GT Live that this game is one of the best games to come out of 2017, that made me turn my head because were in July (at time of statement) and we already have like 5 Game of the Year candidates already. I fired up steam and saw the inexpensive price and decided why not take a shot on this one. 

KINDERGARTEN(PC)

What makes Kindergarten clever is that the narrative of the game is constructed over the individual stories of the characters. The primary arc of the story is that you are are young kindergartner in a very Groundhog Day situation where you are perpetually reliving monday morning as a bright eyed child out for another fun day in kindergarten class.

But as you play through, you learn the stories of the various children and learn that many of them revolve around one of the students, Lily, and how her brother has recently gone missing. In order to learn everything that has happened and to learn all of the games secrets, you need to properly befriend everyone by the end of the school day.

At the start of the day you can bring items or money you have earned,
as well as admire you Monstermon card collection.

And that's really it. There is not a lot of really introductory story to really explain things more than that. You learn from Lily in the very first school segment about her brother so that is not exactly spoilery, and you learn from each of the children right off the bat exactly what character archetype they are. But it really give you a proper setup of what kind of experience this is, it would basically be easier to explain what happened in my very first play through.

It was time to wake up and go to school. I didn't have any money in my piggy bank nor did I have any Monstermon cards. So without much to do I left my house and went to class. I said hello to Cindy, who asked me to her boyfriend, but told me off when I wouldn't put gum in Lily's hair. I tried to talk to Jerome, but he doesn't think I'm cool enough. After getting some weird pill from Nugget, I started to bother janitor. He didn't take to kindly to me sassing him, and warned me that if I didn't skedaddle, he would wipe up my blood with his mop. I called his bluff, and he proceeded to bludgeon me to death with his mop handle. 

Well then, THAT caught me off guard.  Yes, the world of Kindergarten is not just a playful romp with other children ending with show and tell. No, Kindergarten has a very very dark sense of humor about it and there a lot, and I mean A LOT of ways for you to get killed during the course of this game. It's actually pretty hilarious.

If I had to summarize how game play actually worked, I would say that it is very reminiscent of how old adventure games used to work, but a much more stripped down version of it. Think of it if they took old LucasArts games like Monkey Island or Maniac Mansion and stripped down the majority of the actions down to conversation options, and only item prompts when you have something you can use in the situation. It is very simple.

Navigation is easy too whether you are using either the controller or keyboard. Keyboard actually uses both arrows and WASD controls to move, and shift, enter, or space all function as a confirm button. The mouse click also works as well. They keep things simple in that you can only interact with certain objects, and they will always be marked with an exclamation point to signify that this is something you can interact with.

The rub is you only have a limited number of major actions that you can do. After you leave home for the morning, your day in Kindergarten is broken up into 5 segments: schoolyard, class, lunch, recess, and show and tell. During these periods you have 5 apples in the bottom of your screen to signify the major actions that you can perform during the course of that period. So while you can talk to and interact with most things, to make moves on the story you need be selective on what you will take, sell, use, or who you will talk to. You can also spend these apples to earn .25 cents for each that you don't use. 

It takes a very careful approach to deal with Cindy....

So your objective when you start a new Monday (and it is always Monday) is to decide what character you want to follow through on the story on, and try to decipher what items and actions you need to see it through to completion. Some of them can be done going to school with nothing. Some of them require money or items from other completed stories to finish.

There is also a collectible objective as well, as you play through the game you will find or earn Monstermon cards throughout the day. Some are hidden in plain sight, some require a puzzle to solve, some need an item, some are gotten from other characters, and etc.

As you play through the game and collected cards and talk to people through the various conversational options, you will unlock hints that can be accessed through the games menu. These hints can tell you tidbits of how or what you need to solve a specific character's objective to friend them at the end of the day, or the locations and how to get Monstermon cards you don't have. Some of the hints are more helpful than others because I haven't collected everything yet.

Kindergarten is not a very long game, to be sure. I think a cycle of like 24 Mondays I managed to get through all of the individual character stories and saw what I guess you could consider to be the "ending" of the game?  But from what I've read from other players, there is also an additional hidden ending if you can collect all the Monstermon cards. So it looks like there is still stuff for me to do.

Normally in these reviews I discuss the graphics or music but there isn't terribly much to say. It uses some simple but fluid sprite work that manages to look alive and rhythmic, but there isn't a whole lot of motion happening during scenes aside from a little walking. It's always a little funny when a death animation comes out of nowhere.

There is only like 3 or 4 songs in the whole game, and they make for decent background music I suppose but it's nothing I would catch myself humming. The title screen song, a game song, end of day and death jingles, and song for end of the game. So I suppose the longer it takes you to play the more grating it might get. It's a perfectly serviceable soundtrack for the length of the game.

I mean... We were all thinking it. The janitor just said it out loud.

I suppose I could complain about how much text you have to skip through as you play through the game, but that would be a foolish complaint since the game is 100% narrative based. I wouldn't say it's as dense as a visual novel but if you make mistakes through a run, that means you have to go through all the text over again, and sometimes that can be tiresome.

This doesn't feel like a game though that is going to have a lot of staying power after you have played through the majority of the stories. Because to go back and complete others you might have to go through the same dialogue options you have already read multiple times by the end of the game. Once you hit that point Kindergarten does admittedly lose a little bit of its fun factor. I only have a few more cards to get and I find myself lacking motivation to bumble through a lot of these same text options again.

But I can't really complain about the length of the game or difficulty, because the price of this game on steam is only a scant 4.99. So the fact that I got more than a few evenings of streaming and entertainment out of the game certainly says I got way more than paid for on this one. So any complaint that I have is a nitpick and really doesn't sullen the experience for me.

The fact that I only paid 5 bucks for the game and got at least well over 10 hours of entertainment for it says that it was a worthwhile purchase in my book. So if enjoy low stress decision based adventure games that don't require the tedium of excessive menus and options , Kindergarten is certainly worth a play in book. It's only a couple of bucks and it's pretty damn funny. It's certainly different from a lot of the stuff I've played on steam, so I'd give this a recommendation.

Seriously Cindy, what kind of home situation do you have?
Dial it back a notch.

Nier (PS3): Making Amends.

I did not give this game an honest try when I first played it. I found it out of the blue on the shelf at work and surprised I didn't hear anything about it. It came from SquareEnix, which surprised me because they were so high profile I couldn't believe anything came out under the radar with them. But here it was, on the shelf. So I took it home and gave it a try, but as you now know from my review of the new one in this franchise, a single soul murdering fishing game gave me so much fury and frustration that I couldn't proceed with the story. I did not continue.

But I truly loved the new one. I played the shit out of it, and recently got the platinum trophy in it. This is something I never do, but a lot of the story didn't make sense. Or rather, it would have made more sense if I had the proper context. I wasn't ready to leave that universe, so on my Thursday night streams that I have been doing, I decided to give the game one more try. 

NIER:(PS3)

It is the year 2049, and we open with our protagonist Nier (Bonerson, in my game) and his daughter Yonah. They are holed up in abandoned grocery, they are both hungry, and freezing from a snowstorm. On top of this Yonah is very ill. Both try to keep up a positive demeanor to their situation despite its bleak outlook, but are then laid siege by dark ethereal monsters called Shades. Nier is able to fight them back, but Yonah's illness takes a serious turn of the worse. Nier cries out of help in desperation. 

The game then jumps ahead to the year 3361 where we find Nier and Yonah living in a small village in the remains of a completely fallen society. Humanity has reverted back to a more primitive age. Nier has been making a living doing odd jobs for people of the village, but the situation with Yonah has worsened. She has contracted an illness called the Black Scrawl, and it is a terminal condition.

Nier receives a tip that if he can produce a rare flower called a Lunar Tear, he can cure his daughter. And so he sets out to the a nearby ruins to try to find the cure and comes across a talking floating book called Grimoire Weiss. Weiss suggests they team up, and with the use of his magic, he and Nier can find a way to rid Yonah of the scrawl for good.

It's a little strange to come back to Nier after the greater half of a decade, but I loved Nier: Automata that much that I felt if I was going to give this series its honest diligence, I had to go back. Please forgive me in advance, since I will probably draw a number of comparisons to Automata throughout the review. Nier is a fantasy action-adventure in a somewhat open world. The story generally plods along with one specific marked story quest at a time, so if you want to barrel through the games narrative, you can do so with little hindrance.

But there are a number of side quests for you do as you play along the game. Many of them come from the village inhabitants that you come across as you play. Many of these come from the main town, but there is questing among the locations. However unlike Nier: Automata, these quests really are just for rewards of money or xp to power up your character. You sometimes will get a little banter between the characters during or after completion of the quests which is nice for story context.

There is also a farming mechanic to the game to where you can take things back to your home in the starting village and grow various crops.  I couldn't tell you why this is here outside of a distraction because I honestly played through the entirety of the game not even remembering that it was there. So I clearly doesn't have any mandatory function needed to complete the game.

Sidequesting helps and the banter is nice, but it felt unnecessary.

Nier is the protagonist you control, but you actually get a number of support characters that follow you along for the duration of the game, and it's a pretty interesting mix of characters. Nier kind of operates as the good-guy-grump dad, always looking out for everyone. Weiss plays kind of a posh know it all, but is actually helpful and kind of sweet. Emil is our somewhat tragic child hero who is burdened with terrible power and a cost of it, and Kaine who.... Phew.. Kaine is our bad ass action girl who is probably the most foulmouthed woman I've ever heard in a game, but if you play through her back story you learn that despite her past she's actually pretty awesome.

Unfortunately for this review, I played Nier: Automata first which was developed competently by Platinum Games who are kings of making the hacky slashy combat. In playing the original Nier I can see that many of the combat mechanics that the new one featured, did originate here. Weiss functions similarly to the little support bot of Automata which you can use to rain magical attacks on baddies and unload bigger attack spells.

I think hearing a lot of major voice actors in this one helped me to really like this cast.
Blew my mind to realize Kaine is also Rise Kujikawa. Totally different characters.

You actually get a number of different attack spells in the game with differing various effects (that most are faithfully recreated in Automata) and you can charge them up for much bigger stacked damage, but its recharge rate is slow, and aiming your shot can be finicky so more than likely you might overcharge your shot more than you want to while you are trying to aim. Because of this I tended to stick with the big lance projectile and the smashing fist ability because of its wide hit area. Everything else just didn't seem effective or felt like a waste of time.

Combat in Nier is pretty clunky as a whole, really. It follows a generally accepted light attack, heavy attack, dodge roll system you see in many of these games. There is a loose camera lock on system that more often than not works. But the combos and attack are not exactly fluid. For the basic light sword (which is what I used for most of the game), you can swing your light attacks and do a pretty respectable job among most enemies, shifting to a heavy attack to break an enemy guard.

But the other weapons like the great swords or spears, I found the combat to be so slow or so imprecise that it actually took away from the enjoyment of the game, so despite their significantly better attack effects, I ended up not using anything but the most basic gear that I got from the onset of the game. You can also use materials to craft for better weapons, but it felt like I found better stuff as I just progressed through the game before I actually got any upgrades.

The dodge roll is kind of loose too, if I am being honest. When you are fighting things one on one most of the time it will do what it needs to and get you out of the way, but there is a handful of enemies where they move so fast the dodge essentially means nothing if you aren't in the right position to begin with. That can be a little annoying. There are also points in the game where you will be so overwhelmed  with smaller shades the dodge does little to help there either. Thankfully the block is pretty reliable and can be used to stop pretty much any attack that comes at you.

There is also a word system mechanic that I felt could have been better explained. As you play through the game you will continue to unlock words for Grimore Weiss. Basically what these do is provide varied bonus effects to your character and equipment. As you unlock more you can go into your menu and add a pair of words to a weapon, spell, or even your base abilities for bonus effects such as more EXP, damage, defense, etc. I didn't realize these could be added to my block and dodge as well, which probably would have made some of the game significantly easier.

Honestly, I just selected best on everything and it seemed to carry me fine.
I didn't feel a major need to try to min/max my skill set.

Much like Automata,  Nier is a game with some reasonably large maps but on the whole not many of them. On one hand, like I said in Automata it manages to provide a sense of largeness to the world yet at the very same time make things feel incredibly small. On the other, you can argue that in created a more contained world you gain a greater sense of familiarity to your settings, a level of mastery of knowing your way around the areas as you go back and forth.

The problem is, you do backtrack to a lot of the dungeons in this one very frequently. By the end of the game I knew exactly where it was I needed to go which allowed me to rip through quickly but it felt like it was forced to be reuse itself because it just didn't have other areas to use. It sort of feels like there was more aspiration to have this be a bigger universe as it is, but it just didn't have the budget to support such an epic scope..

Furthering this theory is a pair of sections of the game where it just goes Zork on you and gives long segments of black backgrounds with white text. This happens TWICE, and they aren't short sequences either. Between large empty world maps, dungeons with tight small rooms, and several sections with text, it really feels like some serious corners needed to be cut.

While not hard, shades in large numbers can be frustrating to deal with.

Nier also has a wonderful score to supplement the game as well. Some tracks I recognized from the other game which made moments in this one even better because I know could see they were legacy tracks. It again has a very well fitting classical score by Keiichi Okabe with chill music for over-world travel, haunting melodies for creepy manors or dungeons, and epic scores for fights and bosses. Overall I would say that the Nier OST is just as good as any game I've played.

The problem with Nier classic though is some of these tracks feel like they loop ad nauseaum. The main over world song is particular bad with this as it feels like the whole song is just the primary chorus and nothing else. That said, for a number of important story moments some tracks like Emil's theme absolutely make the game.

Then of course, we have my biggest issue in the game which is the reason I put it down for over seven years. A little over an hour or two into the game you get a story line quest saying that to ease the pain of Yonah's illness you need to catch a Shaman Fish known for its medicinal properties. Fine. Wander over to the coastline village where the fish can be caught. Okay. Told by an old man why give it to you when you can catch it yourself. Fine, I have no problem with a fishing mini game. I actually love fishing mini-games.

But what happened to me and probably everyone else who has ever existed is you assume that the old man means the giant eff'n strip of ocean directly in front of where you get rod is where you catch that fish. If you try to do this, you will be met with impossible frustration from the bream infested waters will literally snap the line the exact moment the fishing game mini game starts. I struggled for this for what must have been at least an hour before I gave up on it. There was no sense of progress, no inkling that I was learning anything.

What the game doesn't fuckin' explain to you, is that the massive eff'n coast of beach that is directly in front of you where you get there rod, is not the place where you need to get the goddamn fish. You need to walk back in town to find an easily miss-able alcove on the east wall that takes through a cave to ANOTHER beach, and if you fish there you land the Shaman fish almost immediately and in an insulting easy fashion. There is no reason that the easiest fishing should be in the first spot where you get the goddamn fishing rod, and the harder stuff should be tucked away and require more effort to get to. I seriously made an effort to try again and was getting ready to quit when I live streamed this one again.

So you would think that after this onslaught of complaints I've made, I would feel justified in saying that the original Nier was indeed a bad game. But the one thing that holds up better than some games with this many faults is it tells a hell of a story. See, as you finish the game you receive a somewhat satisfying ending, but you have a handful of dangling plot threads left unexplained. You could certainly stop playing after finishing it here.

But if you start it up again, you pick up in the midway point in the game and while you still control Nier, there is a lot more narrative exposition explaining whats happening, you get more cutscenes showing what is actually going on, and it completely changes the tone of the first play through. If you finish the game again, you have the option for a pair of other endings depending on what decision you decide to make. They are all pretty tragic and brutal, but satisfying. Yoko Taro has won me over as a story teller.

If I were to be painfully honest, I could review this game for what it is: A somewhat standard action adventure game with some control issues, repetitive music, and somewhat lacking and cut down environments. But that would really be doing an injustice to Yoko Taro's approach to using the medium for innovative ways to tell a story with some above average and memorable characters. It also does put a number of things that happened in Nier: Automata into proper context that I just wouldn't have gotten had I not gone back to play this.

It's not difficult to see why Nier came out to no fanfare and immediately dissipated only to be appreciated by its niche audience. But I am certainly glad that I went back to play this one, and I am more than man enough to admit that I was wrong about this one. Complaints aside the story was more than enough to carry me through any technical issues I was having with the game. If you enjoyed the series' newest installment, I would say it was worth going back to play the original. I don't know if we'll see another in the Nier franchise, but I'm certainly going to keep my eye on Yoko Taro's work going forward.

Seriously, That over world theme will loop in my head for the rest of my life.