Postby the wicked child » Wed May 19, 2021 10:01 pm
Finished up the platinum on Nier Replicant v1.22... earlier. Despite my early annoyances, I enjoyed the game quite a bit... with a few notable exceptions.
The great:
The soundtrack is A+. Pretty much every song worms its way into your brain as you're fighting your way across the world and is just some top notch stuff. In particular, Hills of Radiant Wind, which you hear quite a bit, but never gets old.
The combat is nothing insanely complicated, but it is fun as hell. I found myself gravitating towards a particular subset of moves, but there are different weapon types and magic that change up the play enough to fit different play styles, and certain combos certainly work better against specific enemies than others. Regardless, combat seldom felt like a chore.
The good:
The story is pretty bleak, and occasionally some of the dialogue will be a bit tiresome, but overall, the story is interesting, and depending on your knowledge of the series, probably doesn't go where you expect it to. Having played Automata already, some of the revelations weren't quite as hard hitting, but there were still surprises for sure.
Also in typical Nier fashion, the story reveals itself over the course of several different endings, each revealing a bit more of the story, and moving closer to the 'real' ending. All told, you have to complete the full game at least once (twice if you don't complete it under 15 hours and you want the speedrun trophy), part 2 three additional times, and then you have to start a fresh game and play to a certain point in part 1 before it goes into the final ending.
This didn't bother as much as I thought it would since I enjoyed the music and combat so much.
The bad:
The side quests are the drizzling shits. Almost every one is some sort of fetch quest, or a run back and forth between point a and b seven times. You only need 30 for trophies, but I completed most of them to get the gold and other rewards.
the ugly:
a couple of the trophies suck really bad. The first is fully upgrading 33 weapons. The problem is that some of them require super rare materials that have a low spawn/drop rate, and on some occasions literally only spawn in one specific spot, requiring you to continually reload the game to try again if you don't get it. I have no idea why I put myself through this grind. It sucked, there is no sugar coating it... some of these materials are just flat out RNG.
the other really **** trophy is the one for harvesting a white moonflower. This requires at a minimum 4 gardening cycles. Without any kind of manipulation, it takes 24 hours after you plant seeds for the flowers to bloom, and then another 24 before they wilt and you can collect the seeds. You have to do this at least 4 times (although the last one is only the first half of the cycle since you want the flower, not the seeds).
To make this more painful, the game remembers the system time that the seeds are planted. this means that it will be 24 hours from that point before the next cycle. You can slightly manipulate this by starting on the earliest timezone to plant, then jumping to the latest one to advance a day. but of course you have to do this multiple times because of course the chance of the flowers actually crossbreeding and giving you the next color in the chain is only like 10% or some ****, and is determined at the time of planting if it will work or not.
So after a few days of this horseshit, I finally got to harvest the white flower today. So dumb, but once I committed to the weapon materials, there was no turning back.
Summary: Overall, great music and combat with a story that probably doesn't go where you're expecting make it a fun game. But unless you're a Completionist, should probably avoid the platinum because that materials grind is teh shits.