Hopefully Replicant kept the part that made me love the game
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The Resident Evil door loading screens in the haunted house.
That and the
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Text adventure at the tree
were my favorite bits outside the endgame/ending which is really good.
To me Nier felt like a love letter to videogames. There are so many references to classic titles & genres. It makes the videogame nerd in me real happy.
I can't tell if this
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forest "text adventure" dream sequence (which is pretty awesome btw)
was planned like this or was just a way to cut some corners at the time. :doge
Continued to run into more video game references and that makes me wonder if some are less obvious but still references.
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Popola sends Yonah a book about a tree in one of the loading screens and she says a sad tree is the worst thing ever, is that a Kirby reference?
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The Resident Evil reference was quite obvious
Wrapped up about 35% of the quests according to the completion rate. Most side quests have been either a kick in the nuts or a blatant fetch quest though :doge
After the
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Time skip
The game sure picks up pace again.
Was that spoiler (click to show/hide)
Metal Gear?!
Oh shit, is this one of those Ending A, B, C, D, E .... things again :doge
Yes, but once you finish it once, the game will start you after the time skip on new games, IIRC. Which also means you need to make sure you got everything pre-time skip to get all the endings.
The new route E scenario in this game changes things and spoiler (click to show/hide)
you play as Kaine.
I finally sat down and finished the last part of Nier raid in FF14 that came out mid-April. It's pretty crazy how it's full of Nier Replicant, Nier Automata and Drakengard references. Very satisfying as a Nier fan.
The final boss track combines Drakengard ending E's bell tolls with Kaine's song and FF4's prelude.
And in the fight
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You're fighting in a Drakengard Tokyo environment where the boss throws Square Enix HQ's building at you and you're repelling the sound vibrations from Drakengard's final boss.
https://youtu.be/fr9OEKNbElQ
Jesus the second run is even more fucked up than the first :doge
I also found spoiler (click to show/hide)
daddy Nier
Moved into a new place and had my computer but no keyboard so I figured I’d try and get the fourth ending. Was going great until
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I got to the point where I needed to delete my saves which requires you to enter the name of the save. Of course this port is low effort so it doesn’t have a built in keyboard. I couldn’t advance so I’ll need to replay the ending one more time :fbm
I really like the game overall, but once I get ending 5 I never want to touch it again.
The new episode Mermaid section in the main story was pretty meh and pretty noticeable that it wasn't part of the main game from a design perspective. This being forced into the main story is probably the single negative I have about the remake vs the original since I've grown ok with brother nier.
The boss fight is way too scripted and not fun at all, and long, but mostly it's a filler story that drags the pacing down between The Aerie Pt.2 & Facade Pt.2. I thought it was a new optional sidequest, which would've been better. Didn't realize it's a new section of the main story.
It's not something terrible and is like 30-45 mins or something, but I still sorta consider Nier's story campaign pretty close to perfect and its holding up great replaying it now, and now it has this one dragging section. The boss fight is just sooo bad.
Also I guess it can fail a sidequest too?
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If you didn't do the boat couple sidequest in pt.2 I'd imagine that becomes uncompletable since he's dead?
Luckily even though I've only done a few pt.2 sidequests so far, that was one of them.
Almost done with Route B run in Nier,
and yeah, even on Route B, the new seafront pt.2 thing, while being not 4/10 terrible, is pretty weak and overall brings down the quality of the narrative. It really feels to me like modern writing that can't catch the spark of the original. Like the whole point of Route B is
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you are sympathetic towards the shades. Like POOR LITTLE BEEBPY THE ROBOT and Wolves stuff is pretty depressing. But like LITTLE GIRL THAT EATS THE TOWNSFOLK TO TRY TO BE HUMAN is sorta like...nah, she can fuck off and die.
Also there are so many (LOADING) - cutscene - (LOADING) pauses every time it cuts to the postman and the girl which is way too much for saying so little. Between that and the boat being very much not fun to navigate on 2nd try and the boss fight literally being 100% scripted where you can't do anything until the dialogues play out (there's essentially zero gameplay in this boss fight)...
I still think this section is pretty mehtastic whereas all the other scenarios are fantastic. I think it brings the game down but at least it's only like an hour of it total. Wish you could like turn it off to get the original narrative experience. It does make sense that this was cut content because its weird every other location has a pt.2 except Seafront, but it's just not good content.
I fully upgraded my phoenix spear, so I have a fully upgraded spear, heavy sword, sword. Gonna do the World of Recycled Vessel now before doing the final dungeon in Route B. That way my Route C/D run is just a pure skip cutscenes speedrun since I have everything I need and I've seen everything until the final boss.