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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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