Maybe it's because I just came out of NieR Automata, but the ending left me feeling drained and bummed the fuck out. Since it is a prequel, I should have seen it coming that all the credits sequences were about The Order fucking shit up throughout the land. Seeing them demolish stuff and chasing people away affected me in a way I just did not expect. I'm really glad this isn't the final expansion, because it's a downer to end the series on.
Depressing endings aside, I really liked it. Specter Knight's moveset is easier to grasp than the Plague Knight, and requires much less swapping things in and out. The dashing, wall-runs, and cool curios make for a much more fluid and natural experience than the other ones. You end up feeling overpowered pretty fast, which is fitting for the game's narrative. Speaking of the narrative, for how simple these games are, I can't help but be impressed every single time. They manage to squeeze out a lot of character and interesting stories out of these simple graphics with rather limited dialogue. The hub world is great, with plenty of little secrets that are easy enough to find on your own.
I have only two gripes with the game. While I appreciate that they remixed the music, I cannot help but compare the music to the other versions, and I often liked the old renditions more. Not a huge problem, but one nonetheless. The other thing I had was that I jumped into a bottomless put in the King Knight stage almost immediately. The reason for it was that one of the floors ended up being a background element. This can easily be tweaked by changing the palette of those parts into less saturated colours. That floor really tripped me up and messed up with the flow of that stage.
I hope they don't spend that much time on the next update, I'm ready to see an actually new game from these guys. Been three years of shoveling 8-bit diamonds, rubies and pearls.
