I just got End C and:
May poke around a little bit in chapters before aiming for the rest of endings. There are a couple of quest I really want to finish.
god but hacking is just so boring.
I wanna hit things with my floating sword combos.
You know the fun combat seemingly the entire game was designed around?
Not justā¦ shoot in a circle over and over.
I wish there were more variety in the hacking things. Hacking a low level machine with its very limited pattern variations can be a bit too drab.
By the end of the second loop Iād really come to like hacking though.
I am in the middle of the third loop and this game is glorious.
I agree, but the music is nice at least.
(I wasnāt a huge fan of Loop B either and almost dropped it. Loop C is worth the kinda boring middle.)
1 Like
No, thatās definitely the least interesting part of combat. You go in swinging with obnoxiously elaborate-looking and hard-to-read attacks that might stagger enemies briefly so you can keep hitting them, then they blink red and you dodge away, repeat. The attack animations are Really Cool but they honestly make me miss the simple and easy-to-use attacks of the original Nier.
2 Likes
More hacking game types besides the main 10-15(?) with slight variations, and beyond the handfuls of unique story hacks in the late game. Plus chips or something that wouldāve added a lit more dimension to mechanics.
As said before, a bit more enemy variety, but also types that could be far more punishing if you didnāt use certain weapon/moveset/combo strategies on them.
It might also be a result of where Platinum sought to tidily cut corners, or Taro not into that much power tripping. Still thems the things that lacked most to me. Gameplay always felt great but a foot in the shallow side, long as the full game turns out to be.
Yeah, in a way itās pretty reminiscent of Korra in that regard. Iām unsure if they just didnāt have enough time or if it was a directorial issue to not have too much that detracted from the story. And for all the sidequests, this game was much more into its main story thanā¦ well, pretty much anything Taroās ever done. For such a rich world the quests do fall a little flat, particularly the grindy ones that donāt really add much to the experience given how easy the game is. Granted, didnāt play it on hard or very hard but from my understanding itās just that those versions basically have you die in one hit, they donāt really make enemies more complex or adaptive in their behavior.
Iād say no lock-on on hard makes a big difference, but on playthrough B it was already second-nature. Very hard is also interesting because it makes half of the chips obsolete (every chip about HP or healing), but I donāt know how much it matters in the long run.
I think I could go on and on about how the OG nier actually had a dang fun and varied combat system and if you were willing to play with it actually had some depth. Itās akin to Kingdom Hearts or many superhero games. You can mindlessly mash, but the game is more fun/rewarding if you play with the systems and youāll be cleaning fights in half the time.
huhā¦
2 Likes
so ā¦ā¦ just wondering, what is the cut-off point for this thread/when does one transition in/to the 2B topic?
I made the jump after getting Ending E, and talked about it on the thread. So maybe that? Getting the final endings unspoiled is worth it. And really, getting all the last ones take waaay less time than getting ending B.
2 Likes
Good to know. Very slowly chipping away at B but I feel my willpower weigning as I look at my āgames to playā pile.
Finally playing this, and I think Iāve worked out where the game is going from the posts in this thread, despite not yet getting ending A. (I stopped playing last night after I defended some missiles before a pair of flight suits were deployed to my location, for reference.) If Iām on the right track, this post (plus some posts earlier in the thread) should probably migrate to the spoiler thread.
So, hereās what I think is going on:
[spoiler]2Bās loop is clearly the relatively-straightforward āwar of the machinesā story, through which the player learns the simple surface-level conflict between androids and machines. Things are obviously already going off the rails, so Iād expect the first ārealā ending to be somehow unsatisfactory, so you get to try again as 9S.
9S as the player-character will probably unlock some ability to intercept machine network transmissions, meaning his playthrough will give you the antagonistās perspective, during which it will become (even more) obvious that there is no more than a superficial difference between the androids and the machines: theyāre both proxies of the conflict between the humans andā¦ what? Not the aliens, clearly, as theyāre just an excuse to instigate the conflict; theyāre no longer active players on this stage. Rather, it would appear that while āthe humansā are driving the conflict from the android side, the ānetworkā and a sense of revenge are driving the machines. Maybe. The point is, whatever the excuse, it becomes clear by the end of 9Sās loop that the war is all a sham. Just as the aliens are dead, there are no humans on the moon. The humans are on Earth.
(Not 2B and 9Sās EarthāTHIS Earth.)
The third android knows the war is a sham. Canāt remember her nameā6A, maybe?ābut she made a point of declaring that it was Command that betrayed them, rather than her own betrayal that 2B and 9S needed to worry about. I donāt know if sheās already aware that sheās a character in a video game, but thatās clearly the direction things are moving. Just as the fish machines protect ārealā fish in the game world, fishing games protect real fish by providing a competing hobby. So the androids and the machines must fight not because humans on the moon want to reclaim the Earth, but because humans on the Earth want to be entertained by this game. So just as the machines become more sympathetic and exhort the player not to kill them, Iām guessing the true ending is an invitation to save ALL the automata living in the playerās games by breaking your console. Except that obviously one game doesnāt have the privilege to execute that kind of damage to the system itself, so itās an incomplete victory; all they can do is save this instance of themselves by locking you out of starting the game again without first uninstalling all game data.[/spoiler]
Obviously Iām speculating a lot here, and Iām glossing over all the particulars of how that plot winds up being executed, but yes: Iām guessing this is another take on the kind of story Undertale told, not that I think Taro necessarily played that one.
This is mostly right as an assessment with a few key points missing related to the story. [spoiler]So, the aliens are, or rather were real, but were destroyed by the machines after they achieved sentience, and, more importantly, the ability to evolve.
Effectively the ābig lieā is that the androids, not the machines, need a reason to fight (thus the lie about there being any humans left, as all humans are already dead in the game). They need to fight because they donāt assess a purpose outside the collective, and itās why A2 is considered to be a rogue - effectively she wanted something else from all the fighting and was willing, ironically, to fight for it.
As for the āmoralā of the story, Iām not really sure there is one, yet also believe thereās an analog for how war is a fruitless endeavor that just leads to destruction on both sides, and that we are driven to find meaning in it without really having a reason to do so. The deletion of the save seems more like a āsmall shout into the voidā kinda scenario that also attempts to assess meaning from something that the game, at least, assesses as not having a whole lot of meaning to it-and is more about the collective determining what is important. And that without the collective it becomes impossible to assess anything at all, because thereās nothing to compare against, no one to debate or discuss the potential or the reality of experience. I donāt completely buy into this but I do agree with the āno man is an islandā idea, even if itās not a philosophy I think is always true.[/spoiler]
At least for the last paragraph of that spoiler, thatās how I took Nier 2.
Julie also walked in during the vocal section before the desert boss fight and disclaimed the soundtrack as āno Snake Eater.ā
1 Like
Snake Eater was more polished than most games in general and hit on a lot of lines taken directly from 1970s films. Still, much like the new Legend of Zelda, I give it a lot of credit for having a desert at all.
Deserts are way underrepresented in video games given how great they are. Skyrim is markedly improved by a mod that turns the game into a tropical rain forest with deserts filling the tundra spaces. Wonder if itās just the warmer palette that I enjoy.
Boy you are gonna love the next TES game (which is apparently set in Elsweyr)
Much as Iād like this to be true, I canāt actually find a source that says anything about where the next Elder Scrolls is going to be.
These are most of the articles Iāve found on TES 6 so far: http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/06/13/e3-2016-bethesda-is-working-on-the-elder-scrolls-6