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Nier Automata - G2.5 F2 E2.5 I don't quite understand the overwhelming praise for this game. It plays out like a stripped down DMC or even God of War with some elements that allow it to resemble a bad shmup at times. There are a number of bad design decisions that made the game really difficult for me to enjoy. - Everything in the game has this muted color palette, sometimes literally monochrome, that made reading the cool looking action a chore. I eventually gave up and decided to kite everything with my gun pod, which was tedious. This is part of a cohesive art design, but at some point you need to compromise to make the game fun to play. - The RPG elements added nothing to the game while detracting a lot from the experience. You have access to some cool looking stuff, but you will be mashing against even grunt level enemies due to level differences. Add also that it discourages trying different weapons because you may or may not naturally come across materials to upgrade your favorite weapons. Just scaffolded into using what you can upgrade the furthest in order to make the combat a little less tedious. - The autosave feature. The game tells you that it doesn't autosave at the onset, but it still does autosave at points. However, there are points where the game doesn't autosave can be back breaking. Near the end of the game, I was in an area that took me about 20 minutes to clear due to some inane shmup parts. I get to the end of the area, attack the boss, and he one shots me. There was no opportunity to save at any point, and autosave didn't kick in, so I had to repeat the entire area again. - The enemy designs are stagnant. You seriously fight variations of like 6 enemies the entire game. Though maybe this is a blessing since the combat is so inane. - The environments, partitioned by the area of the map, are pretty barebones. There is a lot of potential to fight in interesting places given the back drop of the game, but the bare minimum of effort was put into the actual battle spaces. The entire last half of the game you are fighting in like two environments that just repeat each other ad nauseum. Half of the shooter spaces take place over an ocean while the other half take place in a monochromatic place. - Speaking of repeating things, the entire second chapter was unnecessary. I can get behind the Pulp Fiction approach to see the events of the story from a different side, but aside from the intro and ending and some non sequitur fairy tale scenes, nothing different is really shown? That was 8 hours of my life wasted. - Apparently one of the big twists in the game only makes sense if you do a specific side quest, or pay really close attention to select bits of dialog. I had to look it up because I gave up on sidequests for the most part after the first ending. - The main female design is kind of bad. Gothic lolita over a leotard that you can apparently reveal and the distressed lingerie or whatever of A2 feels like it was catering to fanservice to be honest. I may add to that list later, but we'll call that good for now. As for the writing, I don't think it did anything special? I don't want to get into specifics here, but the twist near the end of the second ending I kind anticipated from the onset, and the existentialism was super ham fisted. Admittedly, that may be exposure to anime/JRPGs for most of my life. By the time I got the last 3 endings, I was filled with such contempt for the game that I didn't have any emotional connection to the characters. The soundtrack was phenomenal, however. It was the only thing that was consistently good to me. I feel like if you removed the soundtrack and got rid of the fanservice characters, people wouldn't care quite as much about the game. Of the main releases that I have played from a stacked 2017, it's my worst game. 1. Breath of the Wild 2. Super Mario Odyssey 3. Yakuza 0 4. Persona 5 5. Mario Rabbids Kingdom Battle 6. Nier Automata
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Mar 12, 2018 15:53
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Disgaea 5 - G3F2.5 I enjoy SRPGs, so I this was one of the first games that I bought when I bought my PS4 2 years ago. The Disgaea series is notorious for scaling to obscene numbers in every stat. That said, the story does not typically require grinding; the big numbers are purely optional. I last tried to play Disgaea 2 around release a decade or more ago and remembered thinking it was decent. The game has a lot of systems interweaving together. You can mostly ignore them, but it does throw a lot at you. I opted to just play through the main story and DLC. I hit a wall of boredom about half of the way through the game a year ago, and recently wanted to clear it off my backlog. The maps were large and spawling and just tedious honestly. One of the mechanics in the game is the ability to add special effects to spaces with which you can interact. Most maps have a single gimmick either revolving around those or just having the enemies spread out all over the map in spots that are difficult to reach. Add also that there were about 80 of them, 104 if you count the DLC. To avoid the tedium, I checked out a speedrunning guide, grinded a main character or two up to the point where I could loosely implement some of those ideas, and just powered through the game. The maps never really got better and the story just drug on and on without much substance in order to satisfy the 5 battles per chapter quota. I would have rather they cut out like 6 chapters worth of battles and made them tighter. Last complaint revolves around the really bad character design. The difference between this and Fire Emblem Echoes (I am also currently playing) is stark. I am looking to finish Fire Emblem Echoes next, and then onto either the Zelda DLC or Kirby Star Allies.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:35
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