I've spent around 15 hours of it since I got it two weeks ago, which is a lot given my limited time, and I have to say that I've loved every minute of it so far. A lot of things stood out and just wowed me. The first thing that I noticed was the music. Words can't describe how beautiful and amazing Nier's soundtrack is. Here is a sample of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1CjxQXXA7o
The other thing that stood out was the gameplay. It has a lot of diversity in terms of dungeon-design. One dungeon places an overhead camera view which turns the hack n slash gameplay into a sidescrolling 2D action game. Another one has you solve puzzles, another one turns into a text-adventure game, and another one turns the gameplay into a 2D shooter. The game is very fun and never gets old due to this diversity. The last thing I want to mention is the boss fights. The scale of the bosses are amazing, and the fights themselves aren't bad. In fact, just like the dungeons, the boss fights are also diversified. I'll put it up there with Demon's Souls as the best boss battles of this generation.
I told myself that when I finished the game, I would make an appreciation thread. However, I haven't finished it yet, and it doesn't look like I will soon. But the game has been an amazing experience that I couldn't help but spread the word. Also, I put three different opinions of Nier from my favorite and most trusted review website. Hopefully they do a better job telling you how the great the game is and convice you to try it out.
Recently gamers have been debating whether or not video games are art. While this has been an ongoing discussion, the intensity was recently ratcheted up a few notches by the incendiary comments of a certain well-known film critic. Amidst this cacophony, Square-Enix quietly released the Cavia-developed Nier, and it couldn't have come at a better time. While gamers and critics attempt to build fences to delineate what games are, Nier exemplifies and celebrates everything games can be...
At first blush, Nier is practically indistinguishable from the action/adventure games that have come before. There are few setups more familiar to gaming than plumbing the depths of themed dungeons, sword in hand, for the ancient MacGuffins that will save the world. However, these similarities turn out to be something of a red herring since Nier abruptly departs from this template with confident regularity.
For example, in one early dungeon, the camera rotates into an overhead position, and the game transforms from a hack-and-slash into a top-down twin-stick shooter. In another, Nier explores a creepy mansion filled with mysterious keys and fixed camera angles in a clear nod to the survival-horror genre.
No sooner has Nier donned one hat than removed it for the next, but the game never feels disjointed as a result. On the contrary, its mercurial weaving from genre to genre imparts the game with a paradoxically cohesive identity. This is, at least in part, due to Nier's self-aware nature. One character refers to a giant foe as "the boss," and Nier describes himself as a guy who just kills things. Grimoire Weiss in particular seems to delight in acting out within the confines of the game. At one point he argues specifics with an unseen narrator, and at another he shamelessly spoils one of the game's (admittedly predictable) twists.
None of the individual elements of Nier surpass the games and genres that originated them, but the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts that to even dwell on it misses the point entirely. With Nier, Cavia has done the seemingly impossible, and created something entirely unique from nothing but borrowed components.
9.0/10
Nier is a strange beast: a seemingly disjointed patchwork of play motifs built onto a "Japanese" role-playing game backbone. Nier, its protagonist, is also a strange beast: a beefy, ugly fellow less interested in saving the world than taking care of his daughter Yonah. Both Nier and Nier violate the conventions of JRPGs in many ways, which is precisely why the game is such a success...
The number of reinterpretations Nier layers onto its core mechanics is genuinely impressive, and includes styles familiar from Legend of Zelda (on which point you should read Chris Green's excellent commentary), Resident Evil, and Diablo, along with some unique ideas of its own. Notably, these never feel out of place or like pure gimmicks—they represent a ludic language intended to evoke a particular atmosphere in a particular place, just as certain kinds of angles and lighting constitute a cinematic language for film.
Nier uses this diversity of game styles to keep your interest while it's introducing the characters. Instead of weighing itself down with interminable expository cut-scenes, it lets the gameplay keep your focus while Nier's (and the player's) relationship with the secondary characters grows. It helps that they subvert stereotypes themselves. There's both a delicate female, and a magic-user with an amazingly sunny and loving disposition. Ordinarily these would be the same person, but in Nier the former is an impossibly foul-mouthed, aggressive fighter and the latter is a ghastly skeleton creature. Only when these characters have been properly introduced does Nier let their stories start taking over...
If the core of the Western RPG is letting the player shape a character to his liking, the core of the JRPG is to convince the player to see himself in the immutable protagonist. Of necessity Nier is not revolutionary in the means by which it accomplishes this, but it is notable for the skill and verve with which it helps the player become the character. In that regard, it represents the best of what its genre can be.
9.5/10
I've got to say, (Nier) was one of the most original and exciting titles I've played in a while, mostly thanks to the wide variety of ideas and approaches the developers managed to cram onto one disc. I especially appreciated the time and effort put into fleshing out each of the characters, and I have no doubt that I will be able to clearly remember them years from now. Nier, especially… it's not often that games star a late-middle-aged father who is basically an ugly bastard doing odd jobs to support his family, but that's exactly what's going on here—and I loved it.
I suppose that I was probably a little more inclined to like the story since I am approaching middle age myself, as well as being a father of two. Many of the themes within the game resonated quite strongly, and it was incredibly refreshing to play something that I felt spoke to something other than the spiky-haired-emo-teen-saves-the-world demographic. If developers branched out like this more often, the entire industry would be in a better place.
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So who else got the chance to experience this magnificent title? Are you interested on trying it out now?
