It may well be that the story is the thing that people are remembering Nier for, and that’s why they speak of it so favourably. In one location, there isn’t even a dungeon – instead, the game suddenly becomes a text adventure! There are bosses stolen straight from Legend of Zelda, whilst numerous foes spew magic orbs in bullet hell style attacks that wouldn’t be out of place in a Touhou game. Maybe Nier’s combat system would have been a bit more polished if the developers hadn’t spent their time implementing whatever else took their fancy. Think you get invincibility frames whilst your character gets up? Think again. If an enemy hits you, you’ll go flying – spurting lots of blood along the way – and then its companions will likely pile on and just keep hitting you. If Nier’s combat system was a person, it would be the kind of bully that knocks you to the ground, and repeatedly kicks you in the stomach every time you try to catch your breath. Whatever button setup you go for, combat can feel like a chore. Except, of course, both evading and defending are useful in battle, so you’ll miss them if you don’t have them. On top of this, throughout the first part of the game you learn different magic spells, and of course you always have the option to evade and defend – or do you? You can actually remap the trigger buttons so that magic spells replace evasion and defence, and, given the number of spells you earn, the temptation is high. On the surface, it’s the typical action RPG with three weapon types: one-handed swords, which are fast but weak two-handed swords, which do powerful, wide, yet extremely slow swings and spears, which are reasonably strong but only jab straight ahead. Remember that tedious area you didn’t enjoy before? Well, here it is again!Īs for gameplay, well, here Nier doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. Worse than this, however, is the fact that pretty much the entirety of part two simply involves backtracking through dungeons you already visited in part one. For completionists, this means that pretty much all of the sidequests from part one cannot be done in part two. Nier is a game of two parts, the second of which occurs five years after the first. A limited form of fast travel via boat appears later in the game, but by then my character had surely worn through several pairs of his trademark sandals trekking between towns to fetch items for the villagers.
#Harvest moon tale of two towns red bouquet free#
The world, which seemed so open and free at first, revealed itself to be a limited set of areas that my character had to run back and forth between. But along the way, my attitude started to shift. There was always “just one more quest” I wanted to do before putting down my controller. I was ready to like whatever Nier had to offer.Īnd at first, I did quite enjoy myself. In short, I didn’t reach my current opinion of the game because I approached it with a closed mind. I liked the idea of exploring yet another post-apocalyptic world with a smart-aleck magic book and unlocking four separate endings. I liked the idea of a game where the main character wasn’t a destined teen, but was rather a 40-ish single-parent. And when a sequel was announced, I thought I’d better finally take my copy off the shelf and give it a whirl.īefore I started playing it myself, all the signs looked good.
Back when it was released, all the reviews seemed favourable, and in the intervening years, people still spoke positively about it. Nier and his pals – a talking book, a foul-mouthed warrior and Jack Skellington Jr.