Dear Internet,
"Nier"
continues to amaze me with its soundtrack.
The blend of fantastic lyrics and orchestral melody work well to add
atmosphere to the post-apocalyptic world and create a unique musical identity
for the game. Everything else that the
game has to offer, on the other hand, makes me want to gloss over the game.
Let me
start off with the graphics and aesthetics.
The game "Nier" has an interesting landscape to itself. Rusting raised-railroad platforms dot the landscape,
missing entire segments that have fallen away.
Stone villages carved out of desert rock that house masked people, dominated
more by their law system than by the raging sandstorms just outside. An automated factory houses numerous robots
that at a moment's notice will evict or kill any intruding outsider. So on and so on, the game makes use of its
visuals to create a world that is able to convey the story along. The problem is that the game has a few
hiccups so far. The most obvious one is
the excessive use of bloom. Bloom is a
visual mechanic that games and films have started to use in excess in recent
years. It is a lighting effect that is
meant to replicate the way that the human body manages light entering the
eye. If a person in real life enters a
bright room or goes outside on a bright day after being in a low-lit location,
the surrounding area then appears very bright until the eye is able to focus
and adjust to the new light situation.
Bloom attempts to replicate this by illuminating the screen every time
the camera goes from dark to bright, when the camera is looking at a light
source, or when an abundance of light is refracting off a surface. "Nier" does all three with the
final effect being an excessively lit up screen that is irritating to the
eyes. Sometimes the game forces the
bloom to activate on a hair trigger, instantly lighting up the surrounding so
quickly that I have to stop moving for a few second just so I can let the game
auto-focus. I can understand that the
developers wanted to replicate real-world mechanics to make a slightly more realistic
image, but when it gets to the point that the player has to actually stop
playing for a few seconds this interrupts and flow that the game has built up.
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| At least I am not on fire, lady. |
On the
note of the game's flow, "Nier" moves like a lemon of a car. It chugs forward intensely for a few feet
before giving up and going back to a crawl.
The first segment of the game has the main character collecting various
Sealed Verses which act as spells that the player can use. A small pattern begins to develop of the player
getting a Sealed Verse with every boss that is defeated. Then the game changes shift radically to a
text simulator for one "dungeon," if you want to call it that. The game's pace slows to a crawl while the
player has to read a bunch of text that in the end has no point other than to
cause the player to slow down. Worse yet
is a labyrinth in text format that can cause the player to have to reload back
to a save point because there are no indications as to what the right answer
is. The game just throws out the central
game mechanics for a required reading list that does absolutely nothing to add
world building or character development.
"Lost Odyssey" had segments of pure text stories interjected
into the game, but those were not necessary to read and were implemented to add
depth to the characters while making a more fleshed out world. When "Nier" tries this, the effect
is a jerk in a direction that only serves to remind the player that the game
has one more hobbled together homage to another game or genre.
"Nier"
has many references to other games and dips its toes into many genres. One moment, the camera is free control over
the character's shoulder, and the next moment, it is locked in a top-down 2D
angle. In one moment, the player is
fighting enemies while having free roam movement, and in the next moment, the
player has to deal with a bullet-hell styled fighting segment. One level is designed in a classic
"Resident Evil" look, all the way down to the horrible locked cameras
that will inevitably lead to cussing players who get sideswiped by an unseen
enemy while trying to go around a corner.
There is even a "Legend of Zelda" reference sneaked in if you
look quick enough. This is all well and
dandy but it just highlights one of the game's problems. It is often too busy trying to make a
reference or homage to another game that "Nier" itself is unable to
make its own identity. The central
gameplay mechanics are constantly being focused through these various lenses of
other games that it becomes difficult to say what exactly is supposed to be the
norm. If I want to play a game that
pulls from various genres and references, I would rather play "Paper
Mario: The Thousand Year Door," which does not abandon the core game mechanics
set down in the beginning. One could
argue that the over the shoulder, free movement fighting gameplay is the most
often gameplay of "Nier," but that would most likely only be the case
if the player spends the time to do the various side-quests.
The sidequests
of "Nier" are bland. They boil
down to just a few types of quests.
There is the delivery quest and the collection quest. Either you are going to go out and find a
bunch of normally useless items or carry a package to someone. This by itself is not all that bad. Most games boil down to "go here"
and "get me this." The trick
is to make it an enjoyable experience by making more than just simple
chores. The first problem is that there
are only about five characters that give quests that are named. Everyone else that hand out jobs is given
names like "Villager" or "Merchant." The game makes no attempt to differentiate
between the quest givers. At first, the
game highlights the NPC, via a mini-map and glowing icon over the characters
head, when they have a quest to give, but often do not give any indication as
to which NPC you must report back to when the job it completed. This leads to confusion since unless the
player memorizes who gave the quest they will have to talk to every person they
meet. On top of that, the quests are
rarely given any sort of mask to hide the fact that they are tedious
time-wasters that do not even give out worthwhile rewards. Sure, the player can do them for the cash,
but there is nothing that the player needs to buy since health items drop like
flies and all the good weapons are practically handed out free while exploring
dungeons. Doing the quests for non-cash
rewards usually just end up with rewards that have to be used in other
quests. The never ending spiral
continues.
It does
not help that the game's bosses are just as boring. Either the player has to bash away with
attacks, dodging the attacks that can be seen coming a mile away, or they have
to do precision attacking that requires no real thinking to figure out. One boss is as close to a carbon copy of
Gohdan from "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker" that can be done
without leaning to copyright infringement, which ties more into the homage
problem than the game's rote gameplay. Various
times, the game tries to add another tutorial, explaining a new move to the
player, but when the first strategies end up working the best for so long, why
learn the new moves? A considerable
amount of the game can be easily overcome by lining up the enemies in a row and
spamming one of the two projectile magic spells. I was able to beat one dungeon by just
standing still and shooting down the corridor.
It was like "Metroid: Other M" all over again.
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| This is like trying to feel clever when being told there will be cake. |
I have
not even touched farming, fishing, the main quest's tediousness, or even the plot
problems yet. But with multiple endings
in store, that last part might have to wait a while.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
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