User Review: Nier

So you start the game, and get pulled into battle ever so quickly. mash square and your good. unfortunately this applies throughout most of the game so far. even though Nier is supposedly an Action RPG it plays more like a hack & slash to me, fast forward to the first boss or bosses i was surprised. it wasn't just walk up to them and mash attack till terminated like your ordinary hack & slash. in fact every boss battle so far has been unique, once weiss joined the the party my interest increased for this game. a magical book that other than granting Nier the ability to use magic. also keeps track of your personal records. status. quest. words. etc. these words seem to be the heart of Nier's growth. upon killing shades there is a chance a word will be released from their body. attaching these to weapons. magic etc. will boost their natural benefits. unfortunately there isn't a Bestiary. this could make hunting for words a pain because some enemies release multiple words unique ones at that. but how are you suppose to know if you've obtained every word from that enemy unless you use a Guide? you don't which is kinda dumb. they gave weiss everything but a Bestiary,

To add insult-to-injury a very unfortunate realisation came to me shortly after uniting with weiss. this game is spread out of tediously repetitive side-quest. similar to Zelda you go to a stage beat the boss and do some stuff before heading out to the next stage. however in Nier it goes more like this. go to a stage beat the boss go do some side-quest. go do some more side-quest.... go do some more side-quest. THAN go to the next stage. this wouldn't be so bad if the side-quest were more creative. challenging. or i don't know fun? i walk up to a old man who is complaining about a boar causing hysteria in the northern plains. i'm asked to kill it. (Well ok this COULD be fun) i start attacking it only to be one shotted in return, so i use cheap tactics to take it down. like standing on a damn rock spamming dark blast for 15 minutes. yay fun. i talk to someone else and he askes me to get him a chicken egg. while i'm walking to the egg which happens to be literally 30 feet away from him i'm wondering to myself (why couldn't he do this himself?) eh. this isn't even bad compared to some of the more repetitive side-quest in Nier. go fetch 10 mushrooms 5 rocks and a lizard tail. go fetch 10 wheat's a rat's tail and a melon. (didn't i just do this!?) half the quest in Nier require you to go material fetching for someone which leaves me wondering why the quest titles are unique. half of them should of been called delivery man 1. delivery man 2. delivery man 3 and so on, i was slightly shocked when a quest that had nada to do with fetching materials turned out to be a quest where you have to fetch materials!. your given the task of finding some man's son. not going into details but somehow you end up fetching items, *sigh* you know... normally i feel a sense of achievement for completing quest in RPGs but the only feeling Nier's quest left me with is that of a headache,

As i continue deeper into the game i find myself using magic more and more often. it feels as though physical attacks are almost completely useless compared to magic. and i believe if it wasn't for those shades with the force-fields magic would always be the clearer choice, i find it funny that even past mid-game your still receiving more (slightly useless) spells. because the two best spells are dark blast and dark hand. one is ironically the first spell in the game and the other is obtained shortly after, you really don't need anything else sadly, from the get-go i've liked the background music and i'm liking it more and more. reminds me of Castlevania. it makes quest more do-able. very entertaining, Nier has similarities to other games / genera as well. you go from 3rd person to over the head every once in awhile. with dark blast it kinda feels like contra's over the head sequences. very fun but the side-scrolling sequences are my favorite. makes me wish the whole game was a side to side platform'er,

Praying this game would get more complex battle wise. i'm still getting tutorial lessons useless ones at that because all i need to do is mash Square or R1. similar to Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII. you have a difficulty option but that doesn't help much when nothing really changes on hard. you can still get away with camping the enemies using Dark Blast. ironically you can forge and upgrade weapons. nothing i want more than super over-powered weapons to one shot my foes. (As if we aren't already given those) humorous are we Square-Enix?

Reading this you can clearly see that Nier has the ups and downs of a mediocre video game. but i ensure you that it isn't as bad as i make it sound. i mean you can skip just about every side-quest but you'd be saying goodbye to more than half the game sadly, on a bright note the story and voice acting is great. i was impressed let me tell ya. i was also surprised to find out this is a sequel to Drakengard. (That would explain the feeling of a hack & slash,) In the end i'm left with this Conclusion. take Zelda put hours and hours of boring side-quest. take away the neat dungeon items. add a broken magic system along with a dark gloomy story and world with a very entertaining soundtrack to go with it. that's Nier in a nutshell. take this as being good or bad i was simply making a comparison. overall i think Nier is worth the price of 60 USD's but i recommend renting,

Pro's: Interesting Boss battles. each unique in their own way* Beautiful Soundtrack. another Last Remnant Square-Enix?* Fantastic voice acting and a interesting story with multiple endings,

Con's: Interesting story with hours and hours of repetitive side-quest to delay your progress* Take away those repetitive side-quest and your only looking at 10-14 hours of game play* Very simple and easy battle system. this wouldn't be a problem if you couldn't get away with spamming Dark Blast 80% of the time,