NieR

[evil_ash_xero]

I beat this game the other night.
It's good, and a return to form for Platinum. However, the game is short, so it gave me the same feeling I had after I beat MGR.

It's doing well in Japan, so maybe if it does well here we can have a longer sequel.

I'm going to work on Route B and Route C, but I'm kinda bogged down with games right now.

[Squire Grooktook]

I sincerely hope you didn't stop at ending A.

[evil_ash_xero]

I sincerely hope you didn't stop at ending A.

I've played into Route B. I'm just not really psyched to replay a lot of the same content right now. I know Route C is more "new".
The beginning of Route B was interesting.

How awesome was the Sunken City shmup-fest?

[Udderdude]

wow GTX 770 minimum

Yeah, I noticed that too. Contrasted with the comically low CPU requirements (i3-2100? lol), it makes me wonder just how poorly optimized this game is on the PS4 and PC .. I only have a GTX 680, so I'm definitely concerned!

[qmish]

Do you trust those requirements? It may be that actual reqs are lower.

[Udderdude]

Hopefully there's a demo version on Steam ..

[Durandal]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLnFWVmsrQc

WARNING
A HUGE BATTLESHIP

????? ?????

IS APPROACHING FAST

[Obscura]

I managed to make it 35 minutes before requesting a refund.

If a game that controls like I'm ice skating through molasses is the best Platinum can do in 2017, then it's for the better that they're probably about to go under. The controls are straight-up unacceptable. If I'm walking and press the "jump" button, it shouldn't take two fucking whole steps before the jump button responds.

Add to this a fucking terrible control scheme (WHY THE FUCK ARE SHOOT AND DODGE BOTH RIGHT TRIGGERS?!?!) and constant irritating camera angles, and it's 100% pure trash. A shame, I was really looking forward to this one.

[Squire Grooktook]

I have no lag with jumps on ps4.

Also you can change the control scheme to whatever you want (though I personally find r1 evade, r2 shoot the most comfortable set up).

[Obscura]

Other people I've talked to said the same thing about jumps, but it's weird to me that jumps and weak attacks are laggy as hell, but dodges come out fast. Either it's the most fucked up PC port ever, or a lot of people just got used to the awful-feeling DMC 1 jump just before playing N:A.

EDIT: AWWWRIGHT, just got my $60 back. <3 Steam.

[evil_ash_xero]

This game controls great. I don't know what's going on with your version.

EDIT: I've been reading the PC version lags.

[cave hermit]

I'm playing the PS4 version, and sometimes the jump button seems to lag, other times it doesn't. I think it might have something to do with how much is going on, since the game has pretty noticable issues with frame rates.

The frame rates and general slippery feeling of the controls are pretty annoying, but otherwise the game is doing a pretty good job of keeping me engaged; I'm about 9 hours into playthrough A, although I'm getting constantly distracted by side quests.

[Durandal]

I don't think it's lag, the jumping animation has a bit of wind-up to it before you actually jump for some reason.

[Zaarock]

Add to this a fucking terrible control scheme (WHY THE FUCK ARE SHOOT AND DODGE BOTH RIGHT TRIGGERS?!?!) and constant irritating camera angles, and it's 100% pure trash. A shame, I was really looking forward to this one.

You can fully customize your control scheme apart from left/right analog. The default one is crap yeah. There's also a million camera settings if that's your thing. Using lock-on makes the camera weird but it's not useful 90% of the time anyway.

[Squire Grooktook]

Like, one of the first things the game does when you create a file / start new game is show you a big option button next to "start game" labeled CONTROLS. I wonder if I could change that or anything...

Nah, better go complain on an internet forum instead.

[Obscura]

Yeah, but they waste an entire button on "pick up something in the environment" instead of letting another button pull double-duty, so there's not enough buttons to stuff everything on and still have a not-stupid control scheme.

[Squire Grooktook]

The fuck are you even taking about, the game doesn't need any more buttons. And how would you even know if you only played 30 minutes.

[Obscura]

And how would you even know if you only played 30 minutes.

It only takes 30 minutes to see something totally obvious. Do you need to play Bikini Karate Fighters for more than 30 minutes to realize it's garbage?

[Squire Grooktook]

Do you need to play Bikini Karate Fighters for more than 30 minutes to realize it's garbage?

Considering how bizarre and unnecessary the complaint of "not enough buttons" is, apparently it does.

[BulletMagnet]

Watch the tone here.

[Eaglet]

I do agree with Squire.
100%ed (aside from the fishing lol) the game (started out on Normal to pass the intro, switched to Hard when able to save) and the only problem i had on PS4 were some occasional bugs and glitches (there's a memory leak in the game probably related to the hacking mini-games. played through the B route in one sitting and got stutter after a couple of hours with lots of hacking that didn't stop until i reset. Event skipping the on-foot battle with the first dual Engels at the top of a big building caused the cutscene after the shmup battle with the second to never trigger).
Controls felt fine throughout the game.

It is a weird game for sure though. Lots of things i were intrigued by and some things i didn't like as much (more hacking variety would have been nice).
Not really sure what my final verdict is aside from liking it a lot. Easily one of the most interesting games of this generation.
Imagine what they could've done with a bigger budget and more environmental variety.

[Durandal]

I finally bought a wireless receiver for my wireless 360 controller so I could play this without having to deal with the c̃aͧͤ̊̈ͦ͆ͫ̃n͌ͩͬͮ͑̐̀͏͢c̶͂́eͫ̆̑͒̓̉̾ͣ́rͥ̍ͩͫͬ ̑̃ͥt̷̡͂̏̈ͥ̋ͬͣ̀͆h͌̒͐̑̚͠a͛͐̽͋̂̃ͬ͒ẗ̸̨́̓ͯ̒ͫ ̨͗͛̈̍͞҉iͦͬͥ̀͝s̡ͬͨ̉̽͐ͪ́ ̨ͧ̽ͮͣ̈͛̊͢͝dͪ͗͊ͨ̾̀͡ö̡͆̅̿͒̀̄̒̀uͭ̑b̓͘lͦ̕͟ë̴́ͮͤ͂ͩ-̷̢̄ͪͫ̚t̄̑̂͏a̍̆̽́̉͒҉p̔̉͌́͏̕ ̶ͥ̅͐͆̊i̎̈́̎̊̅͠n̡̈͆͆͋̽̄͜p̶͗͗̉̾̄͛̍̑u̔t̶̐̒̐̿ͨ̅s͛̆̌ͩͯ̓͂͂̂͏ ̷̃̎f͋̇ͦͥ͐̐͑̉͏҉͞oͬ̄̚͞͞r̢̎ͨ͋̋ͮͣ̂͆ ͑͛̉͛ͣ҉̷̧fͦ͒͋ͧ͠uͬ̆͆ͦͧ̋č̊̌ͥ̔̌̈́͂͏k̔͌̔͐̉̎̎̀͟i̵̎ͩ͂ͭ̄ͫ҉ň̨͗ͤͩ̉ͥ͒͌͗͜͝g͑ͧ̎̃̂ͨͣ̎͘ ̉̾ͭ̂͗̈́͘d̵̨̈́̇o̶̅̃͗͟d͌̃ͤͭg͐͠͏́ī̵ͫͣ̔̓̔ͭ́͠nͩ͞g̸ͯ͠, so now I have a much easier time of spamming my dodge button.

I'm only 12 hours in (no endings achieved yet), and I gotta say it starts rather slowly with having you going around doing sidequests before dealing with serious story stuff at a pace like in the prologue. The sidequests do show an overall more variety than in the first game in terms of what you actually do, but it's still largely the kind of quests you'd be doing in an MMO even though there are some decisions you can make which don't seem to affect the plot strongly (unfortunately). The world design is okay-ish? It's not that huge to the point where walking from point A to point B takes way too fucking long, and there's still plenty of secrets and items you can find through exploration even if the exploration feels rather underwhelming when most of the shit you find in chests ends up being a meager amount of gold or the umpteenth material only useful for upgrading a weapon you probably will never use. Aside from some hard to reach areas which you have to do some tricky jumps to reach, there's not a lot of hidden stashes protected by powerful foes or something. Unfortunately the world is barren enough that you'll mostly have to rely on point-of-interest markers do 'discover' some stuff.

But one thing that irks me the most is that Automata has next to no sense of natural quest progression. What I'm talking about is that out of the zillion quests you might accept at one time only a few of them are actually more suitable towards your current levels than others. So what ends up happening that at one point you'll be facing enemies who are ten levels higher than you, have ten times more HP than you, and kill you in one hit. In any other WRPG like Gothic the presence of really strong enemies you can barely put a dent in meant that you just had to take another approach or get stronger before you come back, resulting in soft-locked areas where you aren't blocked by invisible walls but just really strong opponents.

Unfortunately interesting things only present themselves in the world if you have accepted a quest which involves you fucking about in that area, meaning that in a previous point in time you might have explored that very place already and found nothing, but now it's inhabited by enemies ten times your size, making the world feel rather artificial and lifeless (no pun intended). But instead of appearing like threats you should avoid until later, the combat in Automata is forgiving enough that you only need to dodge when the flash appears and continue your eternal quest to bring the enemy's infinite HP to zero. One encounter pitted you against one guy with a lot of HP, and it just came down to dodging at the right moment while continuing my small sword light+SSL+SSL+SSL+Large Sword Heavy combo. It was the very definition of repetitive. On Hard difficulty most enemies your level will take you down in four hits already, so it's not like dying in two hits instead is that much of a deal when you have a zillion health items.

But most of all, I miss the banter. They're what made the fetch quests in the first Nier bearable to me, but here nobody but 9S feels like talking to the point where he might as well be the main character. 2B is silent emotionless girl and Pod has no personality aside from some black humor-ish moments. I don't know how likely this is to change as the game goes on, but I do miss the lovable band of degenerates.

The game seems rather passive when it comes to how you should use your items. I prefer to not use them, but in some cases where I'm about to retrieve my dead body and its plug-in chips I'd really prefer to not die and not having to manually reload my save if I do fuck up in the process of retrieving my body and end up permanently losing all my potato chips. I fought really hard to fuse those high-ranking chips together, man.

I guess dodging is unique as it lets you counter attack with a light strike, heavy strike, and a pod shot, although the effects seem to depend on the weapon type. A small weapon counter attack will perform a guaranteed launcher attack, but some enemies seem completely impervious to being launched at all with no visual indication of what enemy type is unlaunchable or not (a reskin of the basic enemy type is not launchable while a boss enemy is? go to hell), so when you do perform a small sword counterattack you'll probably end up just hanging in the air like a dunce while the enemies are chilling on the ground. Not even normal launcher attacks apply in these cases. I'm probably doing something wrong here, but I wouldn't know what.

A counterattack with a large sword or spear seems to perform a straightforward lunge attack. This stuns some enemies, but most robots I fought were apparently not affected at all. You can go all out on stunned enemies for a while, but when you get close to a stunned enemy the Use prompt appears, which lets you perform a pre-baked attack sequence on them similar to the attacks you perform in Furi when you hit an opponent with a charged attack. This flurry attack is also possible when an enemy is low on health, but it's usually faster to just manually slash them until they die, and more than often you'll kill the enemy before you even see the opportunity for a flurry to arise. The thing is that the flurry attack doesn't seem to deal all that much damage in the first place, but it also ends the stun state on the enemy. So you want to deal as much damage to an enemy before the invisible stagger state runs out and then finish it off with the flurry attack.

You can also perform a pod shot counterattack, which just fires one powerful shot at the enemy. I find it to be rather slow and damage output questionable, so I don't use it too much. Most of the time I stick to large sword/spear counterattacks instead of launching only myself into the air, I think there's supposed to be a tactical choice to make here between the three options but I don't see it.

The shmup sections in this game are euroshmup-tier, fancy but not to be taken seriously. It's mostly Yoko Taro trying to shove in as many homages as he can. The usage of bullets during melee combat still feels largely the same like in the first game, where your pod will cancel most of the bullets as you close in and finish the deal, with the occasional uncancelable bullets forcing you to stay back. There's now somewhat more variety here like enemies firing large and fast clusters of bullets and other kind of shit I forgot, but most enemies prefer to just punch you. The enemy variety is rather commendable and isn't just reskinned enemies with more HP (though that does happen).

I like the plug-in chips systems and how sometimes you have to take out some of your system chips to make place for others at the cost of HUD elements. I did notice there's a Counter chips which lets you perform a parry similar to the MGR parry and then follow it up with a counterattack as if you just dodged the opponent, though I don't really see the difference between countering and dodging aside from the required inputs. Higher ranked Counter chips speak of returning a certain amount of damage back to the enemy, just where are the tutorials when you need them?

The weapon set switching mechanic is quite nice as well in terms of what you can do with it to lengthen your combo, although I wish you had dodge offset (which I hear is available as a chip).

Nonetheless, Automata remains an intriguing game. There's still a lot about the premise and story I want to uncover (and the developers' intentions for the combat design decisions) despite how the game seems to focus more on worldbuilding for the first part. I still think Platinum shouldn't bother with stuff like leveling, weapons farming in Transformers Devastation wasn't all that fun either and I'd rather Automata didn't bother with leveling at all, or instead gave you a fixed amount of health and damage output to fuck around with using plug-in chips and pods.

[Sumez]

Been avoiding this thread as I'd consider almost anything a spoiler....

edit: Talking about Automata, obviously.
Anyway, I'm around 13 hours into the game (just finished the (first?) return to the factory from the intro) and it still doesn't really appeal to me... I guess it still has the potential, and since I'm fighting to avoid spoilers, the only way I will find out is by pressing on. But so far I'm just not finding anything near the same attractive charm that the original had, which I loved about it.

And this is despite all the other pieces seem to be in place. It's delightfully quirky, the gameplay is smooth, and it retains the original way of mixing up tropes from various genres (this time with even more twin-stick shooter). So I guess it's a decent enough game, but it has yet to reach under my skin. Same sort of goes for the soundtrack - it's a good soundtrack, but I have yet to hear a tune that reaches the same level as even some of the relatively weaker tracks from the original's OST.

[Durandal]

The pacing is rather slooooow. Things don't really fall into place until the second season after which you've already spent 20-30 hours or so. The first half is largely spent on worldbuilding whereas character interactions are minimal in comparison to the first NieR. Up to that point the game largely carries itself with the machines and the sidequests since barely any of the major events get explained to you or what the point of them was.

I think this is more of a case of Yoko Taro's photo-whatever style of writing backfiring when it gets applied to a lengthy RPG with some rather drawn-out pacing and a lack of characters to interact with eachother. One thing all Taro games had in common that you were usually in a party of several people, which allowed for banter to happen and something to listen to while you were slashing things over and over. In Automata, 2B is largely the silent type while 9S does all the talking to the point where he might as well be the protagonist, and the Pods are mostly one-note in terms of personality.

Though I do not think this is a failure of the story as a whole. Drakengard 3 was identical in terms of story structure, but as it was an action game the game was much shorter so most people could stay consistently hooked, whereas in terms of story, the long length of Automata makes things feel stretched out. I'm not lying when I'm saying that things will make sense later on and make you more grateful for the set-up of the first thirty hours, but your patience will be tested.

The comparatively weaker reception to the soundtrack has I think more to do with the tracks being used dynamically and adapting to the current situation/location, so most of the exploration is done while listening to more ambient tracks as opposed to energetic songs like Hills of Radiant Winds, while a large portion of your time in Automata isn't quite spent in dungeons where similar energetic music would normally play. That, and there's just less new songs if you don't count the 8-bit arranges and the arranges of songs from the previous game.

[evil_ash_xero]

I got the actual ending (E).

The game certainly mixes it up on the third playthrough, does it not? Some serious shock and awe going on.

[Durandal]

I got the actual ending (E).

The game certainly mixes it up on the third playthrough, does it not? Some serious shock and awe going on.

It sure as hell all comes together at the end. On my repeat playthrough I find that a lot of stuff early on I thought was mostly random actually was more relevant than I originally thought.

[neorichieb1971]

Played an hour, got past the 2 big cog things.

It does feel a bit disjointed to me. And very scripted. The shooter sections at the start could have been done so much better. Does the palette change at all? Seems awfully orangey from what I played.

[Durandal]

Played an hour, got past the 2 big cog things.

It does feel a bit disjointed to me. And very scripted. The shooter sections at the start could have been done so much better. Does the palette change at all? Seems awfully orangey from what I played.

Did you turn off Global Illumination completely by chance?

[neorichieb1971]

A friend brought it round for me to demo. He played for 30 minutes whilst I watched and then I carried on. So I don't know what the settings were.

[Lord Satori]

Am stuck on the giant worm you fight as A2. Note that I blazed through the both A and B routes and did only a few sidequests with minimal chip interaction. Tempted to turn on easy mode.