just fucked off from work for 20 minutes to give the demo a shot. fairly excited about this!
thoughts:
I actually died about 15 minutes in and got dumped to the title, which is impressively harsh and betrays that this was probably a showfloor demo originally?
it’s pleasantly challenging on hard (not sure about normal), though unintuitively so at first; you seemingly can’t interrupt any enemy attacks & they do a fair amount of damage to you and make you use up your heals automatically.
combat is hugely dodge-and-attack focused ala bayonetta but it’s not nearly as obvious and flow-breaking; the enemies all have tells and you do much more damage on your first (gun or melee) attack after dodging, but the lack of interrupts makes crowd control tough. the enemies seem spongey until you figure out how strong your counters are (think bangai-o).
the gun initially feels weird and unintuitive in the 3D fights but it’s neat when you get the hang of it (though apparently one of the differences between normal and hard means having to directly aim a lot more, which you do with the camera, which I’m not too sure about restricting behind a difficulty slider), and when the game goes side-on it’s super intuitive. the melee feels solid in a way that no one other than from/platinum does and the weapons have different movesets and whatnot.
the visuals (in the demo area) are only good enough and maybe a little too spare, and the dialog so far has been pretty much “s–senpai!” which makes me think about how good the first nier was at times (and makes me realize that there haven’t been a huge number of different environments in the trailers), but the animation and the aesthetic are very solid and there’s very little that’s comparable lately. the jRPG damage numbers are way more on-point than you’d think.
I’m a little afraid it won’t be as consistently weird/endearing as the first game (I really hope they’re trying to hold back the visual novel segments or whatnot from the previews) and I wish the environments and storytelling were just a little more interesting at this stage (it feels vaguely low-budget and not necessarily in a good way), but the demo has definitely met my expectations and I’m looking forward to it.
It’s entirely possible that I liked Nier more than Yoko Taro or Saito Yosuke did, so I guess you can take it as an endorsement when I say that this demo did not disappoint. Some highlights
Giving the actual combat mechanics to Platinum was the best idea they could possibly have had. They’ve taken all the best combat ideas the original Nier had (there weren’t many, but the few ideas they did have were pretty good ones!) and spliced them seamlessly into the MGR/Bayo-style combat scheme they’re known for, and it works wonderfully.
It hasn’t lost any of that Nier flavor, the world FEELS Nier-ish and forgotten in just the right way
OH MY GOD THAT SONG OF ANCIENTS REMIX AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH
yeah, I just cleared it on hard my second try, albeit with no healing items remaining!
this is good. it reminds me of a few different things, among them the bionic commando reboot that almost no one liked. really hoping they nail it… it’s the first platinum game that hasn’t felt phoned in since revengeance (and before that, vanquish), and it’s doing “tasteful animu” pretty darn well
incidentally, scalebound still looks like a cancelled Dreamcast game and it’s bizarre that it’s coming out next year. I guess it sort of resembles the quasi-mobas from Japanese arcades but it’s very odd
Yeah, I uh, I’m not really feeling this. Too much Perfect Dodge, too much camera actively interfering with the gameplay (say what you will about Nier, the camera gimmicks usually did not obscure enemies winding up uninterruptable attacks), and combining Nier’s “boss fights are a bit of a slugfest building up to a QTE” with Platinum’s stage-one fondness for same is HELL on pacing.
I don’t think this is bad but I do hope the actual game is a lot more like Nier and a lot less like this. I don’t think combining Platinum’s Character Action with Nier’s other gimmicks is going to work out.
I loved this so much.
I mean in just the demo we flowed from a bayo combat, to a 2D plat former, to an isometric battle, so some weird shump thing, to some crazy ZOE level shiz.
I am hype.
I was considering the black box version, and honestly if I could get a PC one I’d breatk, but 3x the price is a bit high.
god i really hope they are just withholding the weirder story stuff of the first game from the public for now. it makes sense with the platinum combat etc but it will be so sad if it doesn’t end up somewhere close to the first game tonally.
ok I didn’t have a ps3 so I don’t know anything about nier outside of all the reviews hating it and all the people loving it, I don’t like platinum, and I generally am not real big on the SB sacred cows. but like – what the fuck was that? this demo is amazing. absolutely everything about this game is weird as hell. I don’t even know what works and what doesn’t. I beat a building robot to death with its own arm and I don’t even care that like half the fight was cutscenes.
this lady’s walk is real cool. the music is amazing. does the whole game take place in a factory level from 1996? why is there a map? is this going to need a map eventually? why do I have so much gold. what is this game. why is lock-on L2. what does L1 even do.
L1 fires your big piercing laser after it’s unlocked during the first boss fight. I only figured it out because L1 and R1 were both Spell buttons in the original game, so I tried it and oh hey, stuff exploded. It has a pretty long cooldown but it’s good for cleaning out big clumps of little guys in the top-down section.
i mean it’s a vertical slice, they almost intentionally leave out narrative. So that people can get a taste of the game but not ruin any of the story. Every line in there is to make the next bit of action resonate more.
We won’t know until release but this isn’t a reason to worry.
