Such a beautiful game; This was the lesson that JRPG's needed to learn. Unfortunately the sales numbers will ensure the sterility of the genre.
Mature storylines with characters we give a fuck about. It's a shame that the studio was absorbed into AQ (or shut down). I know there will never be a Nier 2, but I'd rather see that than another paint by numbers Final Fantasy.
Such a beautiful game; This was the lesson that JRPG's needed to learn. Unfortunately the sales numbers will ensure the sterility of the genre.
Mature storylines with characters we give a fuck about. It's a shame that the studio was absorbed into AQ (or shut down). I know there will never be a Nier 2, but I'd rather see that than another paint by numbers Final Fantasy.
I would like to see what the total sales are for it now - I'm betting it's sold significantly more in recent times. I remember everyone thought Demon's Souls was going to flop, and it's sold what, over a million copies now?
Nier won't be as popular, but I bet the sales are fairly respectable with the attention it's gotten lately.
The lack of any sort of push in America is kind of strange.
The whole point of developing two versions is to sell one in America and one in Japan, though it seems the Father Nier version we got was the one originally intended to be released.
Seems like Square-Enix just decided it was a bad idea and gave up on pushing it in America.
The lack of any sort of push in America is kind of strange.
The whole point of developing two versions is to sell one in America and one in Japan, though it seems the Father Nier version we got was the one originally intended to be released.
Seems like Square-Enix just decided it was a bad idea and gave up on pushing it in America.
I don't blame them for not being sure how to market it. They probably figured word of mouth would work in their benefit. I wouldn't be surprised if they were hesitant to push it too much because of the intersex factor. It's a very niche game to begin with. I doubt the Drakengard games had much of a push, especially since they didn't even publish the second game in North America. They couldn't go with that angle. Having Old/Father Nier seemed more like a way to give Nier some sort of a shot in North America, rather than a selling point.
FoeHammer said:
Such a beautiful game; This was the lesson that JRPG's needed to learn. Unfortunately the sales numbers will ensure the sterility of the genre.
Can someone run down how the DLC costumes work exactly for me, kept seeing this game mentioned in the GOTY thread and finally decided to check it out after having somewhat enjoyed Drakengard.
I would much much prefer to play through the game as the younger Nier provided it doesn't totally break everything. Is it just the direct skin from Replicant or does he have diferent armour or anything? And ofcourse how early can you start playing as him?
Also does anyone have the official Replicant wallpapers hosted somewhere, for whatever reason the Square Enix site doesn't load them, thanks.
Can someone run down how the DLC costumes work exactly for me, kept seeing this game mentioned in the GOTY thread and finally decided to check it out after having somewhat enjoyed Drakengard.
I would much much prefer to play through the game as the younger Nier provided it doesn't totally break everything. Is it just the direct skin from Replicant or does he have diferent armour or anything? And ofcourse how early can you start playing as him?
Also does anyone have the official Replicant wallpapers hosted somewhere, for whatever reason the Square Enix site doesn't load them, thanks.
The DLC is pretty good value. Its basically a set of 3 multi-stage challenge courses against some seriously upgraded enemies. The areas are mostly drawn from the existing game locations but have a variety of post-process filters applied to make them look different.
Gameplay is a mix-and-match of stuff from the game - for instance there's a shooting section set on the sand-barge in Facade - but its very melee heavy on the whole and gets really quite tough by the end. Its clearly intended for experienced players as you really need to be well levelled up to stand a chance - the first area of the first course is tougher than anything in "Normal" difficulty for example.
Finishing each section unlocks a costume set, (switched in from the front-end) and gives you a bit of cash. That said along the way you can receive a whole bunch of the rarer items in the game which is super-helpful for finishing all the weapon upgrades.
Story-wise there's not much in there at all. Between sections you get single lines of text that when added together basically outline the story of the game phrased as kind of a warning from the "future". Its pretty cryptic but is definitely worthwhile if you're into the larger fiction of the game.
The remixed soundtrack is pretty awesome too - being faster and harder versions of 4 of the major themes in the game.
Ok, so my curiousity allowed me to go for Endings C and D myself after all (took just under two hours starting from Ending B), and it
really is quite cool how the choice to "erase yourself" extends to everything in the Grimoire Weiss menu vanishing, all your materials, items, tutorials, words, fish records etc slowly being erased one by one - then you see your stats go and finally the whole savegame (all 3 slots!) are being cleared. I only looked at the cutscene when I watched the Ending D on Youtube and didn't even notice that happening!
Just bought this for $15 on Amazon. Figure it's more than worth it for that price, given what people are saying in here. I hope you guys are right. :lol
Just bought this for $15 on Amazon. Figure it's more than worth it for that price, given what people are saying in here. I hope you guys are right. :lol
Ok, so my curiousity allowed me to go for Endings C and D myself after all (took just under two hours starting from Ending B), and it
really is quite cool how the choice to "erase yourself" extends to everything in the Grimoire Weiss menu vanishing, all your materials, items, tutorials, words, fish records etc slowly being erased one by one - then you see your stats go and finally the whole savegame (all 3 slots!) are being cleared. I only looked at the cutscene when I watched the Ending D on Youtube and didn't even notice that happening!
Got it yesterday. Been playing nonstop since i started to it!
Lovely game and music. I love the voice acting, quests and battles so far. Nice change of pace after all those shallow AAA blockbuster KABOOOM games.
Got it yesterday. Been playing nonstop since i started to it!
Lovely game and music. I love the voice acting, quests and battles so far. Nice change of pace after all those shallow AAA blockbuster KABOOOM games.
Just beat it. Bought it when it was 15 on amazon. Well worth the purchase.
The Zelda qualities pulled me in enough to have me beat it within a few days. However, I hate the Japanese thing it pulls in the end with the endings and narrative. I didn't do any sidequests, upgrade my weapons at all through forging or do any goddamn fishing and it already felt an hour or 3 too long. My final playtime was 15 hours.
The plot dump at the end was annoying, even though I had figured out the broad strokes within the first hour of the game. My idea was confirmed when the end of the first half of the game happened.
I dunno, I was way more hyped about it before they recycled the environments. I liked it, but it's not objectively good.
I liked my first time through the Forest of Myth, but going back was a pain in the ass. Also, New game+ having you READ all that exposition . . . God, throw a MGS4-era Kojima cutscene at me, I'd rather not read during my goddamn video games. Kaine was probably my favorite character, but they couldn't have made learning about her more arduous for me. I youtubed second, third and fourth endings (something else I really didn't like about the game) and just feel meh about the whole thing now.
Anyway, interesting experiment from Japan, but still way behind the stuff being done in the West. Put this stuff against Mass Effect and New Vegas and it just doesn't hold up to me.
Sorry, didn't mean to shit up the thread with a bunch of contempt, but I feel really sour on the whole experience all of a sudden.
By youtubing the second ending you completely missed all of the extra cut scenes from the 2nd play through as well as the perspective from Kaine's side of things, just FYI (which I found really interesting and completely changed the story IMO).
I do find it amusing how everyone in our generation seems to be so against reading though. "Omg, you want me to READ? WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU!"
Anyway, interesting experiment from Japan, but still way behind the stuff being done in the West. Put this stuff against Mass Effect and New Vegas and it just doesn't hold up to me.
It's a very weird, very different thing, but I don't think this Cavia game is meant to compete with high budget blockbusters.
But if you didn't like it, that's your prerogative. A lot of what we like and dislike about games is context, I think, and I played Nier at just the right time for me, so I was able to forgive a lot of flaws that might sour other people.
I feel like there should be a better way to convey narrative than to make the player do the same stuff over again.
It's like deleted scenes on a DVD. You don't watch the whole movie with the deleted scenes in the right places, they just give you a menu with the scenes and you can play them at your own discretion. It's not ideal, but its a better option, to me, than saying "Yo, play this thing again. I know you just finished it, but you should do it again. It's fresh in your memory so you'll fly right through it."
There likely is, but it's not one the designers chose.
I was able to deal with it, because I was overpowered, had an incredibly strong weapon, and was literally dashing through even the strongest enemies. I enjoyed getting the new side stuff. Some people don't, which is understandable.
Nier is ultimately what it is. It's an awful painting to some, a classic to others, and a smudged work of art to others still. I wish the game had been better at some things, but what actually came out is something that I think is still pretty good in a world of Mass Effects and Fallouts, even if the objective quality does not quite match up.
Getting a bit spoilerish here guys, so please be careful when discussing the subject of NG+
The whole point of Nier's NG+ system REQUIRES that you've already played through once - because its you, the player, who's perspective changes, not the character(s) you are controlling.
Other than that, everything pans out the same way, except that of course (assuming you aren't playing on hard) your party is now insanely overpowered making you feel every inch the genocidal monster that the new perspective paints you as.
Basically this convergence of thematic and mechanical revision is why its such a powerful effect.
But obviously, you need to play through again to get this, just youtubing the end is missing the point completely. Ending B contains the warmest and most sentimental moments in the story - which is absolutely neccessary given how bleak and hurtful the new material makes the journey to it.
Endings C and D basically offers the player an opportunity to accept or atone for their actions. Do you kill your last friend in the world, or save them at the price of your existence.
Heavy stuff, the sort of thing that's the stock in trade of arty indie-games, not mainstream entertainment.
I dunno. I think my essential list is one of the most varied and representative of the bunch -- but that makes sense since I made it
By the way, at least one guy at the New York Times seems to believe that Nier is not just an essential RPG but an essential game as such, so I don't feel that crazy.
I get where they're coming from and what they're trying to do, but aside from giving the devs an E for Effort, I can't say that I like how they decided to play the story out.
With regard to the way the narrative plays out,
they could have had a bit of the plot dump when the first half of the game ends and you first confront the Shadowlord. The second half of the game would carry some, if not all of the meaning of the second playthrough the way it currently is, if we learn that the Shadowlord is taking Yonah because the body belongs to his daughter. Toss in how the shades are the old humans and that the world is inhabited by shells of the former humans. Now you have a single playthrough with all the meaning of two in the original. Why are things thought to be more impact-ful if we learn them after the fact? Filmmakers make this mistake as well. If for half of the game, you knew that the shades were human but Nier still wanted to kill them all because they took his little girl, that's just as strong as you not knowing til the end. Stronger even, because you as the player are complicit, instead of an innocent who didn't know what the true implications of your actions were.
I got rambly. And angry. Apologies. But I hope my overall point is clear.
Just beat it. Bought it when it was 15 on amazon. Well worth the purchase.
The Zelda qualities pulled me in enough to have me beat it within a few days. However, I hate the Japanese thing it pulls in the end with the endings and narrative. I didn't do any sidequests, upgrade my weapons at all through forging or do any goddamn fishing and it already felt an hour or 3 too long. My final playtime was 15 hours.
The plot dump at the end was annoying, even though I had figured out the broad strokes within the first hour of the game. My idea was confirmed when the end of the first half of the game happened.
I dunno, I was way more hyped about it before they recycled the environments. I liked it, but it's not objectively good.
I liked my first time through the Forest of Myth, but going back was a pain in the ass. Also, New game+ having you READ all that exposition . . . God, throw a MGS4-era Kojima cutscene at me, I'd rather not read during my goddamn video games. Kaine was probably my favorite character, but they couldn't have made learning about her more arduous for me. I youtubed second, third and fourth endings (something else I really didn't like about the game) and just feel meh about the whole thing now.
Anyway, interesting experiment from Japan, but still way behind the stuff being done in the West. Put this stuff against Mass Effect and New Vegas and it just doesn't hold up to me.
Sorry, didn't mean to shit up the thread with a bunch of contempt, but I feel really sour on the whole experience all of a sudden.
I dunno. I think my essential list is one of the most varied and representative of the bunch -- but that makes sense since I made it
By the way, at least one guy at the New York Times seems to believe that Nier is not just an essential RPG but an essential game as such, so I don't feel that crazy.
I get where they're coming from and what they're trying to do, but aside from giving the devs an E for Effort, I can't say that I like how they decided to play the story out.
With regard to the way the narrative plays out,
they could have had a bit of the plot dump when the first half of the game ends and you first confront the Shadowlord. The second half of the game would carry some, if not all of the meaning of the second playthrough the way it currently is, if we learn that the Shadowlord is taking Yonah because the body belongs to his daughter. Toss in how the shades are the old humans and that the world is inhabited by shells of the former humans. Now you have a single playthrough with all the meaning of two in the original. Why are things thought to be more impact-ful if we learn them after the fact? Filmmakers make this mistake as well. If for half of the game, you knew that the shades were human but Nier still wanted to kill them all because they took his little girl, that's just as strong as you not knowing til the end. Stronger even, because you as the player are complicit, instead of an innocent who didn't know what the true implications of your actions were.
I got rambly. And angry. Apologies. But I hope my overall point is clear.
This gives a fundamentally different message, because our characters don't know the revelations in question while they do what they do.
Since you Youtube'd the second ending, I assume you didn't actually do a whole second playthrough? It gives the game an extremely different feeling. And it only works because you understand that Nier doesn't know anything about the Shades, and he doesn't care, and he thinks he's doing things for the right reasons. And you understand that because you went through this portion of the game with the same information he had, and you experienced (ideally) the same kinds of emotions that he did. That forces you to be complicit, because you were, and you know why you were. When you go through the game the second time, you understand the tragedy of what occurred, and each of those battles takes a much more haunting tone.
If the game played out as you chose, especially given the scenarios that are presented to the player in the second playthrough, it'd be impossible for the player to have any sympathy for Nier if they knew he knew what he was doing, and the game would be a downer through and through. Nier would be a man with completely fucked-up priorities, as opposed to a father so desensitized by the violence of his task that he no longer cares what he does.
I agree that the exposition-dump at the beginning of NG+ is poorly paced, but the game would be better served by doling it out over time, not by mashing the game's structure together in a way that changes its meaning.
lol I give up with fishing. I read the "real instructions" on the last page and while they helped me a little in at least grasping the basics, I still can't land a fish for the life of me outside of the first one. It takes too long for them to get reeled in, and it doesn't help that the DS3's analog nub isn't concave, therefore my finger is essentially slipping off for the duration of the minigame. So bad.
Fortunately, the rest of the game has been good so far, so I'm not all that bothered about how bad the fishing is.
EDIT: okay right after I posted this, I tried one last time and landed a fish really easily. So I guess that means I was hooking some harder ones before. Yeah, don't think I'll be doing the fishing if that's what's in store for the later quests. :lol
lol I give up with fishing. I read the "real instructions" on the last page and while they helped me a little in at least grasping the basics, I still can't land a fish for the life of me outside of the first one. It takes too long for them to get reeled in, and it doesn't help that the DS3's analog nub isn't concave, therefore my finger is essentially slipping off for the duration of the minigame. So bad.
Fortunately, the rest of the game has been good so far, so I'm not all that bothered about how bad the fishing is.
EDIT: okay right after I posted this, I tried one last time and landed a fish really easily. So I guess that means I was hooking some harder ones before. Yeah, don't think I'll be doing the fishing if that's what's in store for the later quests. :lol
If your character is standing idle after you pull a fish, hold down. If he leans to the right, hold down-right. If he leans left, hold down-left. That's it.
If your character is standing idle after you pull a fish, hold down. If he leans to the right, hold down-right. If he leans left, hold down-left. That's it.
If your character is standing idle after you pull a fish, hold down. If he leans to the right, hold down-right. If he leans left, hold down-left. That's it.
I know, like I said I was able to do it when the bar goes down fast enough (easy shaman fish) but when the game wants you to hold onto the stick for what seems to be 60 or more seconds, it becomes a bit of a chore to even keep my finger on the stick without it slipping off. :lol This is the one time I wish the PS3 had concave sticks.
EDIT: Okay I get it, you guys are the master of shitty fishing minigames and I suck at them. Jeez. lol
I know, like I said I was able to do it when the bar goes down fast enough (easy shaman fish) but when the game wants you to hold onto the stick for what seems to be 60 or more seconds, it becomes a bit of a chore to even keep my finger on the stick without it slipping off. :lol This is the one time I wish the PS3 had concave sticks.
EDIT: Okay I get it, you guys are the master of shitty fishing minigames and I suck at them. Jeez. lol
Anyway, interesting experiment from Japan, but still way behind the stuff being done in the West. Put this stuff against Mass Effect and New Vegas and it just doesn't hold up to me.
Game is in the mail, on the way to my door. I've made an effort to avoid a majority of JPRGs over the last few years because every time I play them I end up bored and uninspired.
Different bait only affects the probabilities of the kinds of fish you'll hook. (I'm pretty sure you can hook anything on any bait, just "better" bait hooks bigger fish more often.)
The problem you're having is that you're hooking stuff too big to land quickly. If you really want to do the fishing stuff, it's pretty essential to complete the sidequests given by the guy who first taught you to fish. He has a long series of them, and when you complete each one your "fishing level" goes up. This makes you land fish faster, allowing you to catch the big ones. (Your thumbs slipping on the sticks never goes away, though. )
NOTE: Fishing is really only useful for trophies (though catching sturgeon is also one of the fastest ways to earn money in the game). If you decide to pursue it, USE A GUIDE. Knowing where to go and what bait to use makes it pretty easy; randomly visiting all the world's fishing spots and trying out each would be tedious beyond belief.
