I was expecting to like the third game the most but honestly the series kinda just felt repetitive after multiple installments back to back with only a miniscule amount of time for devs to hear criticism to improve the following entry. I really think this one could've benefited from being developed at a later date.
How did he fuck it up this bad.
I love Yoko Taro but this series feels like it's already run its course. Two sequels this year is absurd. They are still beautiful looking and sounding but they are largely the same and this one does little if anything to improve. In fact it plays much worse than Forsaken Maiden which I thought was a solid but steady improvement. Please stop it. Take a year if you're gonna make a fourth one and refine it.
I hadn't heard of this series, so this was my first experience with the franchise. I finished the game (once) and walked away vaguely unsatisfied with the whole deal.
For the good, the weird mashup of card battler and Dungeons and Dragons makes for some really neat aesthetics. As you explore fields and dungeons, cards are flipped over as you walk across them, square by square. The card art is fantastic, and I sort of loved the story's presentation of being told via cards through a "Dungeon Master" narrator of sorts. And the music! Fantastic stuff from the NieR team again. The whole package is sleek and shiny in appearance.....
....but then you hit the bad. The battles are incredibly repetitive, and those sleek, sharp-looking card art aesthetic transitions and moves suddenly make each battle take longer than they should. Your overworld random battles are also incredibly frequent, often just two or three squares away from the battle you just finished. The cards you use in battle can be "leveled up" by finding higher star rated cards from the same line or replaced with newer cards you find later, but I used basically the same loadout from beginning up until the final boss fight without issue making the whole card diversity thing meaningless. I also thought the difficulty was paced strangely as well. I mentioned frequently to the friends I was streaming the game for that I never felt challenged at all by any of the fights. I approached all of them the same way with the same moves in the same order and basically emerged victorious each time. The final boss fights though were a weird ramp up in difficulty I wasn't prepared for, but after a wipe I was able to cheese it rather easily with just swapping in a single new card. The boss fights at the end aren't particularly nuanced or engaging, just big HP sponges you need to outlast.
The story also wasn't very engaging. I won't speak on the ending so as not to spoil (though I have strong feelings on that as well), but the story told throughout the rest of the game was....kind of boring. The characters also weren't all that memorable, except Tralis who I think deserves her own game and carried my entire experience.
So, I guess, with music I really really really liked and story/gameplay I really really really didn't, I give it a middle of the road 3 stars for my overall experience.
For the good, the weird mashup of card battler and Dungeons and Dragons makes for some really neat aesthetics. As you explore fields and dungeons, cards are flipped over as you walk across them, square by square. The card art is fantastic, and I sort of loved the story's presentation of being told via cards through a "Dungeon Master" narrator of sorts. And the music! Fantastic stuff from the NieR team again. The whole package is sleek and shiny in appearance.....
....but then you hit the bad. The battles are incredibly repetitive, and those sleek, sharp-looking card art aesthetic transitions and moves suddenly make each battle take longer than they should. Your overworld random battles are also incredibly frequent, often just two or three squares away from the battle you just finished. The cards you use in battle can be "leveled up" by finding higher star rated cards from the same line or replaced with newer cards you find later, but I used basically the same loadout from beginning up until the final boss fight without issue making the whole card diversity thing meaningless. I also thought the difficulty was paced strangely as well. I mentioned frequently to the friends I was streaming the game for that I never felt challenged at all by any of the fights. I approached all of them the same way with the same moves in the same order and basically emerged victorious each time. The final boss fights though were a weird ramp up in difficulty I wasn't prepared for, but after a wipe I was able to cheese it rather easily with just swapping in a single new card. The boss fights at the end aren't particularly nuanced or engaging, just big HP sponges you need to outlast.
The story also wasn't very engaging. I won't speak on the ending so as not to spoil (though I have strong feelings on that as well), but the story told throughout the rest of the game was....kind of boring. The characters also weren't all that memorable, except Tralis who I think deserves her own game and carried my entire experience.
So, I guess, with music I really really really liked and story/gameplay I really really really didn't, I give it a middle of the road 3 stars for my overall experience.
Bought this because I'm a huge card game fan. Yet it's just an RPG with a tabletop RPG/Card Boardgame skin. Nothing has to do with cards as far as I know.
Probably the weakest entry in the series, though I still liked it enough. If you loved the others, give it a shot, but if you're trying to decide which of these to pick up, I'd look at either of the other ones.
The charm that this series had to start out with has really faded with how rapidly they've released these games and with how little they've iterated on the formula. The same issues of sluggish UI and exploration, an obscenely high encounter rate, relative simplicity and ease of combat, and general story shallowness remain. The series has certainly lost me with this one. It started out with some promise of diverging, with a pseudo-monster collection element, but this is beyond half-baked. There isn't a large variety of monster cards to collect, and they're locked behind randomness -- you have a random chance of getting three chests at the end of a battle, some of which contain monster cards and some of which contain regular items. It turned what could've been an interesting mechanic into something I found annoying. The story is also fairly predictable, with its twists being broadcast since the first hour or so of the game. Hopefully they take some more time before the next one, because they need to work on some of the core aspects of the game which are now grating.
Not much to say here other than that this is quite easily the least inspiring of the trilogy and a completely mediocre at best experience. The mild intrigue and decent character exposition of the other two (Forsaken Maiden & The Isle Dragon Roars) is completely gone in favor of a forgettable party with a lack of motivation to care for any of them. The music and enemy/character design is on the contrary beautiful once again, but it's not enough to make up for the issues this game has. Beasts of Burden has a poor plot, bad pacing, an extremely bad random encounter rate, pointlessly long dungeons, and a horrendously long final boss encounter that is more an item check then an evaluation of player skill. Even as a fan of Yoko Taro and the other two games I'm almost regretful to have played this as it functioned solely as a use of time rather than a memorable experience. I assume there's a true ending, but I am genuinely uninterested in looking for that.
I would only maybe recommend this if you've played the other two games in the series and are trying to complete the trilogy, otherwise this game should be a miss.
I would only maybe recommend this if you've played the other two games in the series and are trying to complete the trilogy, otherwise this game should be a miss.