Characters: 7/10
Story: 10/10
Music: 10/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Enjoyment: 8/10

Total: 8/10

This review is only for the original base story which was decent but the unfun mobile gacha mechanics made it not desirable to play though. Still, if you do complete it you will have part of a story that in the end eventually becomes something truly fantastic.

Other Story Arc Reviews:
• Sun/Moon: https://www.backloggd.com/u/DayChan/review/1438202/
• World/People: https://www.backloggd.com/u/DayChan/review/1493465/

Staring at the login bonus screen realizing I have not engaged with any "gameplay" from this game for two weeks and have to admit to myself that I'm out. I was in the hospital. I have been sick. I have had no brain. I have been, in retrospect, in the perfect situation to get the most out of this game. It doesn't ask much of me, and I don't have much to give at the moment. A match made in heaven! But my behavior has shown that even when at my lowest, I would rather do literally anything else, and oftentimes nothing, than ever "play" this game again.

For additional context, I am at a hurdle in Chapter 10 that would require level grinding. Except, this game is getting discontinued, so I am awash with resources. "Level grinding" would take literally 2 minutes of me going into a menu and making some numbers go up while some consumables go down. I could make like 5 mistakes investing in the wrong stuff and it wouldn't matter. I could probably max out one dude and solo the story mode of this game. I could probably take 10 minutes to read how the combat system of this game actually works and trivialize it.

But thinking about doing any of that makes me seriously consider with recent experience if I would rather have an IV reinserted in my arm than ever touch this game again. Which is probably the clue I need that it's time to write this out of my system and move the fuck on with life.

I can't help but think of my review of DLC for the original NieR and how language gives substance to vapor in the realm of ideas. Here, NieR Re[in]carnation is NieR: The World of Recycled Vessel, but blown out in every dimension, wrapped around itself, an ouroborus eating the tail of its future child. It is such a profound perversion of gaming as an entity that I sound hyperbolic to accurately describe how incredibly awful it is. Because when a game concept gets a couple things right, there’s a handhold from which the pain of its existence feels novel, fixable. But when something is truly flawed at its core, in every structure of its being, is evil in its conception, execution, and existence, it becomes dreadfully dull.

I've played a couple mobile games now, and apart from some of the Netflix offerings, they've all been evil. But the ways they've been evil have been... mixed? Like they have a touch of humanity in them that got corrupted somehow. Like there could be a version of them that was capable of loving me. But NieR Re[in]carnation hates me in a multipronged attack that is simultaneously so inert I almost didn't recognize it as violence. I wish I had written about all of its follies and injustices when they were fresh, instead of writing about them now, after I've let them wash over me, let myself marinate, let hope turn my anger into indifference. It perfectly matches the pattern of an abuse victim becoming complacent as they learn to be helpless.

NieR Re[in]carnation game has a 3D world. You can walk around in it. It doesn't matter. It's a hallway. Like literally is only a hallway. No gameplay happens there. It has an "auto" button that has your character walk down the hallway by themself. Do you know for how many hours I resisted pressing that button? That I wanted to have some gameplay in my game? I clung so desperately to the hope that there would be a maze, something, anything to justify the existence of this fully realized HD world of hallways and my ability to control my movement in it. But no. Trying to play the game was only a waste of time. Not pressing the auto button was a waste of time.

So, wherefore art thou hallways?

When I wrote about Cats & Soup, I was jolted when I realized that the game world was not the cats, but the menus overlaid on the cats. That the cats were a pretense and the game was the menu. I could buy that the world of the hallways was the pretense of NieR Re[in]carnation, and in a way they are, but then where is the gameplay?

In truth, NieR Re[in]carnation is layers of pretense that never gets to anything.

I have to marvel at the ingeniousness of the triviality. At the same time, this is not the work of a human being. This is the inhuman efficiency of attention hacking only possible by multiple passes within an organization that has memetically learned from other organizations.

Let’s start at the surface. There are hallways. The hallways are a pretense to getting to “levels”. These “levels” have stories in them with light interactivity, very simple visual novel elements. The stories in the levels largely have nothing to do with the world in the hallways. Maybe they converge later than when I stopped playing, but I’m hours in and my god can I not care if I’m wrong. But all of these stories can be skipped, because there is combat. So all the storytelling is set dressing to the combat, itself a pretense.

I have to interject here that the stories are bad. They are vague, simple sketches, nothing more than premises and flavors. But separate from their vapidness, they are bad stories. They are mean, they are droll, they are dour, full of cruelty and irony and melancholy. There is no love. Relationships exist only to exert pain on others. It will say “these people loved each other” only so it can relish in someone’s death and maiming, in the survivor’s suffering and guilt. They are uniformly dreadful in tone, only broken up by the spice of convoluted incomprehensibility when sci-fi and magical elements are introduced. I could spend paragraphs tearing apart each and every one if I was live blogging my experience with them, but thankfully they have been culled from my memory banks. Imagining anyone sees these stories as “rewards”, or worse yet, “incentives”, to engage with this game - I can’t even imagine watching these on youtube without finding the autoplay ads more interesting.

Then we get to the combat, and realize how much the storytelling doesn’t matter, because whatever you fight is abstracted into black blob monsters that have no physical presence or reality to the story of the level. So you might think, ok, this is it. Everything else was a pretense for this combat system - until you see that this game is an autobattler. Combat can happen entirely without your input. In fact, you often get rewards for pressing an attack button ONCE during a battle. Because the game needs artificial incentivisation for you to engage with the only game-like gameplay the game has to offer. Even as it also has a fast forward button, and an auto-battle button. And if you get far enough into the game, you get things called “Skip Tickets”, that let you repeat a battle for experience points / rewards for leveling up your dudes without having to actually experience the battle again at all.

Early on in the game, when I was still in tutorial land, and hadn’t even gotten to the gacha system yet, the tutorial character said “Don’t worry, this game plays just like most others.” I at first thought that phrase was hilariously useless to me, trying out one of these gacha games for the first time - it told me jack shit! But the more I learned about this game, the more that phrase has just borrowed deeper and deeper into the pit of my gut, blossoming into a kind of disgust that would melt any business executive that came into contact with it.

Because the combat system itself is a pretense for - the gacha system. Spin a roulette wheel and get weapons and characters to use in combat. Some are shiny and have big numbers that make combat easier.

Now, I tried this game after the premium store was closed, because the game’s end is imminent. So I have no idea what the monetary value of any of this bullshit would be. Nobody tell me or I might become a terrorist. But. I just have to say.

The gacha pull animation is … kinda lame?

Abstract boxes turn into coffins that slam down and turn into .jpg’s of Ebon Spears and Emerald Bracers and everything about the colors and the environment and the music is just so… without gravitas, without playfulness, without anything that I can imagine incentivizing another pull. I have enough premium currency for like, 10 or more gacha pulls, and separate from the decision paralysis of there being a million events going on the for the game’s end, after my free daily pulls, it’s been such a boring experience that I’ve actively ex’d out of the summoning menu and often logged off of the game because its so dull. I cannot believe this is where the money is supposed to be made.

And that’s when I realized the gacha system itself is only a front for where the true addiction is supposed to lie - the character upgrade menus. You upgrade characters. You upgrade weapons. You upgrade skills. You upgrade teddybears. (That is not a joke.) You upgrade instances of characters. All that take varying amounts of money, experience, currencies, resources, and most importantly, time.

I thought I’d be mad that the gacha system has ridiculously low percentages for getting the good shit. I thought I’d be mad that getting a cool character is only the beginning - that you need to get their low drop rate multiple times to fully upgrade them. And like, yeah, that’s pretty evil, even without considering the compounding evil of charging real world money every time. I don’t want to underserve that. It is morally indefensible. Maybe I’m only less worked up because I have no idea how much any of it used to cost. But I can relate to the time. The insane amount of time that is required to fiddle with all these numbers to get past combat encounters to clear story episodes to walk down more hallways. All journey, no destination, but you’re not traveling with friends, and you’re not going to make any. This is a journey that can only be completed with misplaced investment into a beautifully drawn delusion.

I feel so incredibly dead inside thinking about how there are people who like this game. I read about this game’s existence and thought, “oh neat, I’ll get to play a gacha game without all the gacha elements hanging over the experience, and in the NieR series that I’ve been playing through!” And it had fans, and they loved it, and expressed so much concern for this game’s preservation. How there was so much art, so much story that needed to be preserved for the future. And a part of me really wanted to experience something magical about a shared experience with a piece of art that will never be possible again.

But after trying, sincerely trying, I’m just scared. Because this game fucking hates me. It hates you. It hates everyone. I can’t even tell how personally it hates people, because I don’t know how much it can even conceive of humans as people. It hates me for wanting to find an experience worth having within it, even as its loading screen begs me to appreciate the vistas of its hallways and listen to its soundtrack with headphones. Why does it do that? Why is it so desperate for me to think of it as art?

Because it is not. It just fucking isn’t. Artists worked on this, but this is not art. This is not even video game as product. This is not even video game mechanic as health insurance website design. This is a concentrated psychological attack. It has many beautiful elements to it wrapped up in an IP that begs you to think about the interestingness of its ideas more than its content, begging you to find value in what it has to offer as well. All a trick, a ruse, to get you nice and inoculated to being dead inside to get stuck in its number go up factory work.

I can see the thread for how investment happens. The visuals for walking through the hallways are interesting enough you want to keep going. The stories are delivered piece meal, so you might as well see what the next section looks like. The combat doesn’t require much mental effort, so you might as well grind for a bit. Any individual element sucks, like really sucks, but not in a way that hurts, that causes pain. So if you’re used to getting something out of one of the forms of engagement being teased here, you press on. And then you’ve made a habit, and then you’ve learned some of how the loop works, and then you get curious what kinds of side quests you could do, because you want some control over this experience again. And choosing to do a side quest over a main quest is really the most purposeful engagement you could hope to get out of this app. And then there are enough resources and numbers to manage with art that’s just pretty enough to look at that it keeps on happening.

I hated Cats & Soup and thought it was evil, but I could get it. I could have sympathy for the societal forces that could make one want to give that game some time. But this one? Naw. Playing this game, loving this game, you have been hacked. I want to give you hugs and milk and cookies and a 3DS and / or PS Vita so you know there are good things in life.

If anyone defends this game because it has Lore™ pertaining to the DrakeNieR universe I am going to implode.

One day, in the distant future, Square Enix is going to realize that maybe this game deserves as much love as the other NieR games and treat it with proper respect.
One day, NieR Re[in]carnation is not going be remembered as the "NieR mobile gacha game" but as an entry in the franchise that deserves the same love as the other games in the series.

One day it will get a proper rerelease, on consoles and PC that actually preserves its story contents, enhances the gameplay and possibly removes the gacha parts entirely.
I know what you're thinking and I agree, if it's not impossible it's at least highly unlikely. But, I guess you can say it's my coping mechanism about this situation, I want to believe it will happen anyway.

Last thing: some the NieR/Drakengard fandom is split between those who believe this is NieR 3 and those who believe it isn't.

The truth is, it is NieR 3 and to me it's why it sucks

The more I played this game, the more I hated it for what it is. It's story, art and music are all that you expect from a Nier game, it's quality is on par with some of the best games offered in the market. However, this comes bundled with a lazy and absolutely shallow gameplay consisted of battles which autoplay and rely only on your setups gained from the gacha and upgrade systems. Apart from that, the game ends in a month from now(April 28th) and this story may be lost forever, which is a sin since this really is Nier 3, it is post-Automata and it summons lore from Drakengard and both previous Nier games, answering some questions and gives a lot more in exchange. It's a bittersweet piece, in the end.

Review of first chapter The Girl and The Monster

Has some really beautiful set pieces and the music is great The Cage really reminds me of Ueda's aesthetic in games like Ico and Shadow of Colossus.

As far as the story goes the individual weapon stories are largely hit and miss with the overall arching story of Girl/Monster being fairly good and I felt ended really strong. The main problem is the game is just dull as hell the whole thing just plays itself. As shitty as it is that this game will soon be taken offline and be unavailable to play you can get the same experience by watching someone else play it on youtube quite literally.

"Yoko Taro milks his loyal customer base edition"

"You wouldn't touch or even get near it if it didn't had the "nier" in the title".

Played until the "sun and moon" last chapter and my review gonna be according to that.

Let's start with the obvious question. Why did I start a gacha game and even had expectations for it? It's because yoko taro considers this game the third nier game from what I understand. He tweets about it and even add elements from this game to nier automata anime. So I had thought maybe there is important things going on in it? Also people was saying it's best time to go in because of the rewards they give before servers gets closed. So I jumped in and 15 hours torture started.

"Main story? What the hell is that? Here is 80 different no connected mini stories. Have fun".

In a franchise that is known for it's emotions and unrelenting drama, yoko taro choose to make a game that is just about "random mini sad story collections". And wastes a lot of the promising concepts just to fill the gacha content quota with making them less then 20 minutes that makes you unable to connect in any emotional form whatsoever.

Now I am gonna say there is small hopeful lights here and there, for example if you look at act 1's story seperately from ministories and just look at it as a "poor girl Fio's sad adventure" you can actually feel it's nier emotions at it's core.

It's too bad that you have to seperate %75 of the game to see that core tho.

And that's the problem. You can throw %75 of the main story to garbage and nothing would change. No... Actually maybe main story would be even better without all those unnecessary cut ins with forgettable mini stories.

But that's not all. This game have the worst gameplay in the entire yokoverse. Even worse than drakengard 1 with it's awful camera. Yeah imagine that.

Why? Because drakengard 1 had a point to give at least. This game has not. You can delete all the combat moments of the game and you would lose NOTHING. Yes. That means you can convert all of the game into a visual novel and nothing would have been lost. It's just a auto battler after all. And an uninspired and a timewasting one.

"But you didn't finish the game!" Yes I didn't. Maybe it actually gets important? Or not. I don't even care anymore. I am not even sad for it's servers closing. This game loves to waste your time with all those mini forgettable stories and GRIND moments. Because it's just an another "gacha game" not an another proper "the game".

"What do you mean with grind? Didn't you say game rewards a lot right now?" Yes. And you can level up everyone from the moment you started to 60. But after that? Ohhh it wants you to waste your time with getting bazillions of materials to unlock it's second and third rate for unlocking next level rate requirements. So essentially you are locked into playing daily missions and one by one level up every goddamn weapon from the SLOWEST goddamn menu ever that makes you think if it's designed to make you go CRAZY with every single upgrade have UNSKIPPABLE ANIMATIONS.

Then why should I care after all if itself dedicated to waste my time? I don't think I would lose "anything" with watching a summary video before next nier comes out. Because in it's core I am essentially playing a visual novel with forced grinding. A really badly paced, no... a nonexistent paced one.

And lastly if the next nier or whatever is even slightly similar to this game yoko taro is just no more to me.

Just watch the summary of it on youtube and done with it rather than wasting your precious time with it. So you can experience the worthwhile ones without all the timewasting.

Edit: I found a big playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGa4JvuGzOs&list=PLsZ-WzLIqahy4Vmlt7sHh01HyLWeXbS0G

The overarching mystery and the setup done for NieR Re[in]carnation as a whole is very interesting. I also really enjoyed the plot for this arc with the Girl and the Monster, but a lot of the individual stories that you explore were kinda hit or miss. Some of them were incredible and got me attached to its characters, but others were just kinda boring.

Music and art is awesome btw but the gameplay sucks

(I do have to mention that I started this game during the second anniversary. Around the same time where they started to be very generous, making it super free to play friendly (for the story content) and this did greatly affect my enjoyment & rating)

Getting through so I'm ready for any sort of lore revelations in the concerts over these next few months. This first arc takes a while to get invested and only starts adding from interesting more elements in the storybook vignettes in the later half.

Shame gameplay is just an autobattler, but now its gotten rid of the gacha grind by showering players with all the general resources to max level characters. My only regret was dropping this at launch to never be able to get 2B, Kaine or Zero.

Going to curse at Yoko Taro at the concert cause we're now even further from Caim being mentioned in any way shape or form