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| This might be one of the worst structured games I've ever played by Rafiki 04/19/2021, 11:45am PDT | ||||
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| Or worst designed? Both? I don't know the right way to phrase it.
I finished the game, the FULL game with all of the "endings," and there's so many things in here that just don't make sense. It all feels so arbitrary, like they included things or did things a certain way because "genre conventions" or because "video games." So the actual game is set up like an action-RPG. Worm's right in that it's just Bayonetta combat, which makes sense because Platinum Games is the developer. So that comes with all of the pros and cons of Bayonetta, namely some flashy moves, tight controls, but pretty shallow combat. You only need to learn how to time your dodges to avoid damage, and beyond that you can just kind of button mash your way through like I did. The enemy AI isn't sophisticated and there's no puzzle bosses, so you just dodge and hammer attack buttons. There's also bullet-hell shooter and twin-stick shooter sequences to help break up the monotony, but the game goes on too long so it all becomes kind of a slog by the very end. I will say that this is a game you can pick up and play pretty much instantly, and it's a game that if you put down and come back a month later you can just press a few buttons and you'll immediately be reoriented with the controls, so that's nice. As for the RPG elements, there's leveling, crafting, main quests, side quests, and consumables. The leveling is mostly pointless. Enemies scale up to your level over the course of the game, undermining the whole point of leveling. You can briefly out-level them, but as you progress you'll fight new enemies that match your level and old areas will eventually spawn enemies scaled to your level. When you start another playthrough, everything is scaled to your level as well. There's no talent trees or skills to unlock, so it seems like leveling was included because they decided to make an RPG and that's what RPGs do. As far as consumables, there's health potions, which are extremely useful, and assorted power-ups, which I think I used maybe 4 times and could have been completely removed from the game with no consequence. I played on normal difficulty, so maybe they're vital on higher ones? Side quests are typical lazy "grind this, fetch that" or "run to this location halfway across the universe and then run back" RPG quests. A lot of them seem to exist just to pad out the play time and also because RPG, although some side quests do provide some background and establish the world more, which is good. They should have kept those and cut everything else. As far as crafting, you collect a million items to level up your weapons. Increasing weapon level actually seems to have the most valuable impact on combat so it's not completely worthless, and you can easily collect enough ingredients without having to grind for them just by playing the game normally. Since you play in an open world, they included fishing because that shit-awful mini-game has become a staple since Ocarina of Time for some reason. OoT got away with it because it was novel in 1998 and well-implemented, but no one has improved on it since and everyone should just stop including it. It sucks, and there's no reason to include it in this game except as a pointless time sink. There's no quests that require it, no part of the story requires it, absolutely no upgrades require it. Its only reason for existing is for getting 100% of collectibles, and there's not even an achievement for that. And even if there were, once you get all of the main story endings you can literally buy achievements you haven't unlocked from a special vendor. The game feels like they wrote "RPG" on a whiteboard, underlined it, and then built a checklist of stuff that's traditionally found in RPGs, with no real rhyme or reason why they're including it in Nier. I haven't played the earlier games in the series, so maybe they included it because the earlier games did, so "conventions." As a final kick in the balls, after you've replayed the first half of the game twice and then the remaining 10 hours of content, you have a fucking find the keys quest. They don't even try to hide it. You have to run to three locations in the world and collect keys from mini-dungeons. The story is why I say this is one of the worst structured games I've ever played. The story is actually completely linear, but is structured in a way to make it look like it has multiple endings. That's why I put "endings" in quotes up above. But they're not multiple endings. They're cutscenes that would occur in the middle of normal stories. But in Nier, they roll credits and kick you back to the starting screen for you to start another playthrough. It makes no sense, not even thematically for the story being told. It's so bad that at the end of the first "playthrough" you literally get an on-screen message from Square-Enix customer support telling you the game isn't actually over and you should continue your save file. That's how bad they fucked up, the publisher had them put in a notice to tell the player they're only about 40% through the game. Even the notice is kind of vague, along the lines of "there's more to discover!" Fucker, the game is literally not over yet. The 2nd playthrough is actually a replay and is completely unnecessary. You play through the entire game all over again as the companion character, and run through all of the same quests and same storyline. There's just a few additional side quests, and the game adds in some additional cutscenes it withheld for no real reason. There were points in the first playthrough where you and your companion split up, so the 2nd time through you play from a different perspective at those points, but the game could have just had a single playthrough and had you swap perspectives at various story checkpoints. In fact, the game does exactly that on the third round. The 3rd playthrough isn't actually a new game, it continues the rest of the story where the first two end. It's actually the second half of the game. You swap between a new character and the companion character from part 2 and finish the story. So the first two "endings" aren't actually endings, of the last three only one is an alternate ending, and the remaining two are two pieces of the real ending. This isn't like other RPGs where there's a "good" or "bad" ending, or where you unlock a variety of cutscenes based on your choices and they're strung together in an ending montage to explain the outcomes of those choices. They just chopped up a linear story, forced you to restart halfway through the game, and had a bunch of credit sequences for no good reason. And they're trying to tell a real story here. It's not a game where they just provide a flimsy premise for exploring and stabbing things (Zelda), they invested a lot of time and thought into trying to create real drama. So why the fuck did they chop it up like this and present it in a way where customer service had to put in a notice that the story isn't finished because you could unwittingly walk away knowing only half the plot? This is a good example, I think, of critics' failure to identify failings in a game. I went back and read a bunch of reviews and all they do is talk about OOOOH the story is so WEIRD sometimes! And after all of this negativity, I still can't definitively say I don't recommend it. Yeah, the story and in-game settings are weird as shit sometimes, it's all sincere and earnest as hell, and it's all oddly compelling. Like, robots obsessed with humans, human customs, and humanity, establishing a monarchy, appointing a baby robot to be their king, and then 400 years later confused as to why the robot baby isn't growing up. And despite the obvious humor, it's not really played like a comedy. Instead of it all being eye-rolling and embarrassing, I kept wanting to see where the story would go, and there were some moments that felt kind of jarring and poignant. Some Steam reviews were saying, "this is the most meaningful story in a game ever," and, well, yeah, let's not go overboard, here. Granted, most game stories are total shit so they might technically be right, but I'm not ready to talk about Deep Meaning. I will say that I found it overall pretty entertaining, and it's probably at least one of the most unique stories in any game I've played. And despite my problems with the shallow combat and pointless features, it's still a game that's so easy to get into you can probably immediately have fun for a least a little while. If they would have cut out the unnecessary replay, streamlined the game down to about 20 hours of content, and just told the goddamn story normally I think it would have been a much, much better game. |
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NierAutomata is great by 03/28/2017, 5:18pm PDT  I'm surprised there wasn't more talk about this game by 03/21/2021, 1:37pm PDT This might be one of the worst structured games I've ever played by 04/19/2021, 11:45am PDT Re: This might be one of the worst structured games I've ever played by 04/20/2021, 9:52am PDT I'm going to cum all over the girl robots, watch me NT by 09/17/2022, 11:25pm PDT It this the one with the white haired broad with big breasts? NT by 04/27/2023, 7:24am PDT B-cup, tops. NT by 04/28/2023, 1:01pm PDT Were you thinking of Bayonetta? NT by 05/10/2023, 7:23am PDT THIS is what you should be playing by 05/09/2023, 2:42pm PDT |
