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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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 Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2011 6:26 am |
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Bought this about a week ago for $20 at Walmart. The last copy on the shelves.
Beat it the first time and am now playing through the New Game+ file. Really enjoying it overall.
I think that Nier is probably the closest that I've gotten to enjoying a jRPG in a long time. It has all of the generic elements, but they're executed well, and I'm left with some dissonance between how the game wants to be perceived and how I actually perceive it. I get that the game wants me to be impressed with deep characterization and worldbuilding, but I find the characters only mildly deep, probably out of a chronic distrust of anything meaningful ever being possible through the jRPG genre ever again (goodbye youth). However, the quality of the execution (props to the VAs mostly) compensates for that gap between the quality of the characterization and the fact that these are jRPG characters.
The game's got a lot of imaginative weirdness to it, though, and that keeps me sticking around to finishing through the multiple endings. It's clear that all of this is building up to something, and I'm intrigued enough to see that through.
So congrats Nier! You got me playing a jRPG again. I'll never forgive you.
EDIT: Also you folks can totally hate me for this but there were several moments when I turned the background music all the way down for hours at a time. Too much choral vocals, not enough variation for my tastes. I've acclimated myself to it now so it's good sonic wallpaper.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2011 6:49 pm |
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Spoiler:
Second playthrough, and I'm almost proud of the fact that Nier's blind lust for vengeance is darkly responsible for all of the tender emotional (and final) moments of the shades' world.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Fri May 20, 2011 6:33 pm |
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| Gorblax wrote: |
| No, seriously, the second loop takes a quarter as long as the first one because you start from the halfway point and you keep all of your experience and weapons. It's pretty easy to breeze through and you should do it while the game is still fresh in your mind. |
I think this is the best way to go about the New Game+ replays, but it's ironic given that (1) having the story fresh in mind makes endings B, C, and D make most sense while (2) fighting the same battles with increasingly compounded experience and upgrades makes the replays more of a lengthy gesture rather than the kind of challenge that would make a replay genuinely fun.
I'm frustrated at the collectathon requirements for the C and D endings. I didn't see the acquisition of those weapons as thematically or narratively related to those endings, so the story felt disconnected from the means needed to get there. That actually underscores one of my bigger frustrations with Nier: it seems to make intermittent gestures to do something interesting as a jRPG without fully committing to that mindset. On one level, getting the last two endings is purely an exercise in genre conventions: you need to prove that you are actually playing this as a jRPG by collecting every useless item in order to see the last endings.
The fact that this collecting is (relatively) painless doesn't mitigate the fact that I would like for it to have been better implemented.
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