Nier - Game Review

Year Made: 2010

System: X-box 360 and Playstation 3

Style: Action RPG

Graphics: 8/10
Pretty good as expected from this generation of system. It was a pleasure to look at for the most part which definitly added to the overall experince. Ocassionally there would be a bug like a part of the weapon going into his hair or something like that but nothing to bad.

Sound: 9/10
Nier had a pretty good soundtrack and some very epic bossfight music. This is definitly one of the games i recommend turning down your personal music while playing , and listening to the music they gave you as it will only add to your experince. This is further backed up by the fact that a soundtrack was released on CD and managed to make it on the toplist in Japan for awhile.

Gameplay: 6/10
Controls - The game play was very fluid and made for a great experince. And unlike some games i didnt end up sticking with one type of weapon throughout the game. There was a great balance added in the fact that larger weapons move slower , but add greatly to your damage output. Making alot of your choices between things like do i want to attack faster and be more agile or will i be fine dodging after my slower attacks , just so i can kill it quicker very precise and sometimes choosing the wrong option could put you through a very tough battle. Which is another reason i enjoyed switching between weapons so easily.

Side Quests - Aside from the main story there were a number of smaller quests you could do which normally were a facter of you running around looking for certain items , some of which could be harder to locate than others. Making complex side quests is fine , but id really rather not spend 15 minutes searching a city for a shiny on the ground hoping to god its that chicken egg ive been searching for. Ya , they give you hints as to where things can be found but sometimes things are just alot harder than they have to be. Though from time to time these side quests can be extremly rewarding , i was rather fond of hearing Popala and her sister sing. However , as a whole i was not a fan of going and fetching things for the needy villagers who seemed to be to lazy to even look for eggs.

Multiple endings - I for one am a fan of Multiple endings , now putting that aside how they went about doing that is a real pain. See you cant get all the endings from your first playthrough... Scratch that only 1 of the 4 endings is possible on the first playthrough , all of the others must be done by completing certain tasks and then finishing the game another time. For instance collecting all weapons and having all other endings is one of the requirements. So to get the full story of the game you actually HAVE to play through it multiple times , which honestly i find to just be painful when in truth , all the endings are just different parts of the same ending , not alternate endings. So actually the "True ending" is all of them combined.

The tree part - In a particular forest in a particular part of the game the game changes from Action RPG to.... text Mud. This was an extremly annoying part of the game to me and made me think the designers were just to lazy to flesh out some kind of battle for this part of the game. I dont remember exactly what its called but it definitly was something i didnt enjoy. Something similar was done for character backstory in other parts of the game , things that should have been handled with cutsenes were just walls of text.... these walls of text lasted from 30 min to an hour if you tried to read it , and i ended up skipping most of it anyways since it started to bore me. This alone drastically took away from my gameplay experince!

Story: 9/10
The game had a great story. It really kept you motivated to find out what hapened next and some of the twists near the end were almost mind boggling. I really had alot of fun on the teams journey through the world and its one of the games that kept me going simply off story alone.

The story has you playing as Nier , a middle aged man in search of a way to cure his daughter of her illness "The black Scrawl". As he journeys he meets up with various characters and ends up fighting against the forces of "The shadow Lord" a being that is said to be extremly powerful and possibly even the leader of the shades.

Now i dont want to give away any super spoilers but its definitly safe to say that everything is not as it seems at the beggining of the game and there are some horrendus things that happen that will easily make you care and feel bad for your friends and foes alike.

Overall: 7/10
What could have been a great game was in my opinion held back back massive walls of text , midocre side quests and multiple endings that were actually only one ending. Other than those few things the game was actually really fun to play and kept me entertained for hours. Id recommmend giving it a playthrough for the first ending , and if you really enjoyed it then flesh out those endings. Or be like me and look it up on youtube once you beat it the first time!