by Belgavion
© 2010 Gav Ross
It’s not a fully immersive role-playing game, nor is it a stylised action romp.
Nier is a muddled concoction of ideas that don’t quite coalesce. There are moments where brightness shines through, and one begins to think they’ve misjudged the game, but these occurrences are rare and fleeting. Another title published recently by Square Enix – Final Fantasy XIII – knows full well what kind of a paradigm-shifting beast it is, whereas Nier seems to be suffering from a slight identity crisis.
Developed by Japan’s Cavia (the team behind the rather dismal 2006 third-person shooter Bullet Witch), Nier revolves around a principal character with the same name as the game’s title. He’s gruff, battle-worn and has made it his mission to rid his daughter, Yonah, of an evil that’s infected her known as ‘The Black Scrawl’.
With a variety of missions and dungeons, Nier progresses through the story gaining experience and upgrading his various weapons and spells. Sounds just like any other action RPG, right? One the one hand it certainly appears that way, but Nier branches out with some small design choices that allows it to distance itself from similar games.
The mission structure leads to some pacing issues as there’s a lot of running back and forth between areas you’ve already visited. The lack of any kind of ‘fast travel’ becomes frustrating from the outset, and it isn’t as if the player is constantly running around taking in the gorgeously-rendered environments.
Oooo Ahhh, blandness…
Nier looks much like some first generation 360 games from back in 2005; bland textures and colours mix in with terrain that’s barren and lifeless (and I don’t mean ‘barren and lifeless’ in a way like Fallout 3; this is just boring).
The areas that Nier is able to roam to are varied enough, including a small coastal town; a dusty, labyrinthine city with citizens that talk in an alien language, and a large, cavernous sky village full of ladders and rickety bridges. Although it’s a dull universe to explore, the frame-rate is rock solid and everything has a soft look about it that’s easy on the eyes.
In time, the silver-haired warrior is accompanied by two others that make up the game’s main party: Grimoire Wess – a magical, hovering book (yes, a book) with a quaint English accent, and Kainé – a feisty hermaphrodite with g-strings that leave little to the imagination and an issue with a demon that has apparently taken over half of her psyche.
Already this should be sounding like anything but your run-of-the-mill RPG. Nier traverses various lands with his companions sort of in tow (Grimoire is pretty much always there in spirit and can be summoned for Nier’s magical use), and Kaine seems to show up whenever something important is taking place.
Combat is localised all to one button in a hack-and-slash manner along with a blocking and rolling asigned to the triggers. The upgrading aspect of weapons is original enough with Nier finding ‘words’ scattered around the lands and applying them to each weapon for a different effect.
The first half of the game is slow-going, but Nier and his odd companions venture to new places for each mission, so there’s always something fresh (but still quite plain) to look at.
Padding Games 101
Oh look, Fantasy midevil story with SURFBOARDS???
Unfortunately, the developers decided that a good workaround for cramming all of the cities/villages into the first half would be to have the player revisit them during the second half.
It feels like you’re essentially playing the first half of the game over again until there’s a change towards the very end. This kind of back-tracking could be forgiven had it just been done for one or two locations, but having to go back to almost every one is a chore.
Even with this kind of padding, the main quest can be completed comfortably in under 10 hours, and there are a plethora of side missions to boost this hour count to over 30 if you’re a glutton for repetitive punishment.
Thankfully, Nier isn’t just about wandering desolate countryside doing fetch quests. There are dungeons-a-plenty with a mixture of enemies that are consistently surprising. Boss battles are far from innovative, but there are some interesting gameplay additions that allows Nier to break free from the standard action-adventure ordinariness.
One particular boss battle, about a third of the way through the game, sees Nier fighting a bunch of giant glowing blocks that shoot red orbs. These orbs can only be conquered by dodging or using your trusty book companion to fire right back at them. So, for a short time, the game becomes something akin to a classic vertical shooter as the camera angle changes to an overhead view and the player needs to analyse patterns to overcome the foe.
Other sections of a dungeon feel almost Zelda-esque, but they remain very straight-forward and there are some lazy attempts at puzzle design that let things down.
The same dungeon with the block boss also houses a number of ‘trials’ that Nier must go through. Each room presents a unique dilemma where the player must pass through without performing a certain action (like dodging/rolling, for instance). This is all very well and good, except there seems to be a cheap way out of almost every trial – like quickly jumping and running up the side of the room.
Perhaps the developers added this feature because they knew, deep down, that most gamers (like myself) don’t really have the patience for dungeon puzzles in an adventure that has already been pretty sub-par on every level.
Piss on a Campfire
What's with the stupid clowns faces and African styled hats/cloths in this genre?
Voice acting is bearable and the story itself is interesting enough not to skip every cutscene that comes up. There are a few absurd nuggets thrown in that will no doubt catch some players off-guard.
An example is a fetch quest where Nier’s polite daughter asks her father to go fetch some ingredients so that she can cook a nice meal. While eating his dinner and verbally complimenting his offspring, Nier comes out with the line “tastes like I pissed on a campfire!” in a thought bubble.
In another instance, the scantily-clad Kainé tells a boss that she’d like to “pull out your eyeballs and piss down your sockets.” Such moments are a welcome distraction, even if they do feel jarringly out of place.
RPG fans wanting a casual fling with Nier will no doubt find a few things to like, but the longer the adventure goes the more obvious the game’s flaws become. When we’re in a period of multiple blockbuster titles hitting shelves one after the other, Nier will probably remain an afterthought.
© 2010 Gav Ross
“6/10
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