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[NIER] - The words tell you to purchase Frankenstein's game.
Stuartenhaffen
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
"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 on the God damn furnace! How can someone with such a big smart brain get hypnotised 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 ass and START FUCKING HELPING US!"
Welcome to NIER. An action RPG on the PS3 and 360 from Cavia, the studio behind the very trippy Drakengard. Things are still a little trippy in the world of NIER, but it's a nice trip.
STORY
NIER takes place in a world on the brink of destruction. Monsters known as shades threaten the land and a disease named the "Black Scrawl" is a constant threat to the people. You take on the role of a father, doing what he can to make ends meet in order to ease the life of his daughter who suffers from this disease. You will do anything in order to help her, even chase after fairy tales.
CHARACTERS
The Father - A gruff, no nonsense man. Ugly as sin but makes up for that by being an all round nice guy.
Weiss - A Grimoire of legend. General book of awesomeness.
Kaine - She had a detrimental conflict with a demon which has made her a bit of an outcast. It also gave her the "Black Scrawl." She is pretty angry about this, who wouldn't be? She wears ribbons and strings as if they are clothes.
???? - A mysterious companion who uses magic . It looks like a skeleton, nuff said.
Yonah - The daughter of the main dude. She has it pretty bad. The "Black Scrawl" is debilitating, so she generally is bed ridden. All she wants is for her dad to be by her side.
GAMEPLAY
NIER can be summed up as a simple hack and slash game with a little bit of every bloody genre sprinkled on top! This gives the game a very unique identity which I'll spoiler due to information overload.
Basics
Like a typical hack and slash, you have a basic weapon attack and a magic attack.
To attack with your weapon you push Square/X. Very simple. Magic on the other hand is assigned to the shoulder buttons. As you progress you unlock different spells, so you ultimately have to chose which ones to cast. The shoulder buttons also control actions such as block and evade, so you can mix and match with a variety of abilities.
To attack with your weapon you push Square/X. Very simple. Magic on the other hand is assigned to the shoulder buttons. As you progress you unlock different spells, so you ultimately have to chose which ones to cast. The shoulder buttons also control actions such as block and evade, so you can mix and match with a variety of abilities.
Word Play/Pre-fix/Suffix/Upgrading
The RPG elements really come alive in regards to weapon and spell customisation. Cavia have designed a system that uses words to bestow stats onto weapons and spells in order to improve them.
Example - We have a Bastard sword in our possession and the words "PAH" and "RAN".
"PAH" gives us a 2% attack bonus. "RAN" gives us an increased item drop rate.
When combined with the Bastard sword we get a PAH RAN Bastard sword with the stats of the two words attached. The more words you have, the more customisation you have. As the game progresses, various status changing words pop up, imbuing weapons with poison or paralyse. Take into account that every weapon and spell in the game can be customised, that's a lot of variation.
Weapons can also have levels. When you reach a certain point in the story, you can start upgrading your gear. To do this, you need materials. Materials are scattered throughout the world, you just need to gather them up. Tis simple.
Fishing and Farming
Cavia in their infinite wisdom decided to make the fishing tutorial god awful.
Here are some tips. You start fishing by pushing O/B. Wait until the pole gives a sharp pull towards the water and hit X/A, when you hit the button, pull back on the left stick. The goal is to push the left stick in the opposite way of the fish in order to chip down its HP. Once it's HP hits 0, you automatically catch it. The problem is that the game is quite finicky when it comes to the left stick. You should not push the stick completely to the side, you should have it more like "down left" or "down right." If you push the stick all the way across you will lose the fish.
In the introduction to fishing quest, the beach you get the pole at is NOT the beach you have to catch the fish at. I spent an age fishing up tin cans until I realised this
Farming - Pick the seeds, pick the fertiliser. Water and watch. Make sure to harvest before the things wilt
Two things make this game really outstanding - The localisation and the Music.
A great deal of care has been given to the voice acting and writing in the game. Character interactions are extremely colourful and show a care that mimics the outstanding work found in Resonance of Fate. Grimoire Weiss sounds like Julian Clary and Alan Rickman mixed into one. His commentary about everything around him and his bickering with the companions is a pleasure to listen to.
Another thing that shines is the soundtrack. The music in this game is epic. The overworld theme is particularly catchy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlC-5ihAU44
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atFZGWy2yag&feature=related
NIER is a game that unfortunately doesn't have a lot of hype going for it. Evidence for this is that I'm making a thread about it. And with SSFIV coming out on the same day, I really hope some people will give it a look.
If you enjoy a good hack and slash with a dash of everything thrown in, and don't mind the fact that the game doesn't have AAA polish thrown on it, then give it a go.
And if this exhaustive intro don't float your boat. How does the ability to TOKYO DRIFT GIANT BOARS into sheep/goats/deer get ya?
And if that still doesn't seal the deal, then read this review - http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/nier-review
Stuartenhaffen on
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The game kind of gives me a Shadow of the Colossus vibe.
Will get it once I get enough money.
I got a Shadow of the Colossus vibe from it as well. The open fields have that eerie-ness that SOTC had, and the protagonist actually runs like the wanderer did (arms out to the side, flapping about.)
That's pretty gross and offensive. Please leave those derogatory terms out of her character summary.
Reconsider your topic title too please. From what I can tell she presents herself as female and uses female pronouns so no need to bring her womanhood in question because of a demon enforced intersex condition (god bless Japan).
I am quite interested in this game but I can't really justify buying it on release. It will undoubtedly be £15 or less on Play or Amazon within 3 months.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/nier-review
It's pretty much what got me from being indifferent to "holy shit i want to play that.".
Not that they were incredibly flattering or whatever (only gave a 6 which is good by EG standards), but they describe the game enough that someone like me would want to play it.
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I can't recommend it. But I'd encourage anyone after something a little... different to go check it out. And hell, it's a far better game than Drakengard ever was.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Oh, and the Red Star connection cannot be over-emphasised. We need more third-person bullet-hell shooters. The boss fights in this are frequently awesome, though entirely too easy on normal with only a little power-levelling.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
And hell, if those songs are representative of the whole soundtrack, this would be worth picking up for the music alone.
It really is. A better choice would be to just check out a playthrough on Youtube. The game was pretty terrible at release, but in 2010 I can't even imagine how bad it is.
That said, I still own it, and I kind of want to get Nier for the sole reason that it's even partially connected.
All the EDF games (well, aside from the spinoff) are genuinely great, the franchise just throws everything else out of the window - realism, polish, what have you. NieR is not great by any stretch of the imagination. It's an absolute mess without any kind of direction. But it has some genuinely fantastic moments the like of which you simply will not see in any of the triple-A blockbusters around right now. So far I've had more genuine entertainment out of it (as opposed to 'How the hell is my PS3 doing this', etc., etc.) than God of War III.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
I'm not surprised the Japanese would go for it. It's like a HD makeover of all those interchangeable JRPGs from the early days of the PS2, only weirder.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Better still, just read the screenshot let's play at SA.
http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Drakengard/
If that long, even for big name titles the discounts seem to start weeks after release.
I played Drakenguard 1 and 2(though I try to forget this one) once this goes under $20 i'll check it out.
Steam/PSN/XBL/Minecraft / LoL / - Benevicious | WoW - Duckwood - Rajhek
Some flat out don't. Or at least it's patently obvious there's no particular point behind them being included. But they still have a... spark, if you will, a feeling Cavia genuinely did this because for some reason they thought they'd be cool. The camera changes are pointless and somewhat clumsy, but it's still nifty having the game briefly turn into Contra-lite; they're perfectly playable and don't outstay their welcome. The fetch-quests are long, boring and frequently pointless in practical terms (several have no reward whatsoever), but there's little bits of dialogue for all of them that flesh out the characters in gratifying ways - sometimes a gag, sometimes a brief moment of pathos. The combat's simplistic and easily exploitable, but there's still any number of neat little touches to it, from the whispering voices when you absorb blood from a whole lot of kills at once, to the sheer amusement value in darting around with one of the giant spears, doing the dash attack over and over like some kind of psychotic figure skater.
It's certainly ugly, and it's a complete mess. But it does have any number of awesome moments scattered through it.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Maybe that's just me being desperate though.
Stick it in the Goozex queue, keep an eye out for a clearance sale, wonder why nobody makes niche quirky games anymore.
Man.
I just want this more now.
I'll probably get it once I recovered the money SSF4 has taken from me.
I'm really getting a deadly premonitions vibe off this. You wouldn't recommend as a good game but it's so kooky and charming that it turns into something fantastic.
I support this idea.
Interesting but flawed is practically my kryptonite. I've frequently really enjoyed games I know are mediocre at best simply because they're doing something I haven't really seen before.
So... I guess I might have to buy this. As if my backlog wasn't bloated enough already.
This game sounds brilliant.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
Should it be something like 'ny-er' or something?
Twenty-four hours in and I still really like it, though grinding is killing the game for me - not in the sense it's not fun, just that it makes things way, way too easy. I'm slaughtering bosses or bigger enemies in seconds, which kind of nullifies a good deal of the tension. Also wondering how the story's about to pan out, since it seems very piecemeal currently. I'm not seeing Squenix's much-touted big twists anywhere on the horizon. Perhaps that's a good thing?
Still enjoying it, though, warts and all. There's just nothing else currently out quite like it.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)