Gameplay is basically non-existent (and through that at least slightly less painful than Drakengard 1 /hj), music is great though the OST lacks in variety. Biggest strength is definitely the design of the cage, which constantly blew me away, despite its simplicity.

But sadly this game consists of more than just walking along those beautiful corridors: it wants to tell a story as well - or at least it tries to, while it often feels like it doesn't REALLY want to. Characters, one of the biggest strengths in previous games, are one-dimensional and mostly disappear into the background aside from their individual weapon stories that make up about half of the game: and they're barely any more interesting than the weapon stories in previous games, just now stretched out over an entire chapter each. Predictable at best, hilarious at worst. The rare good idea is quickly suffocated by the extremely stilted presentation.

The main story of Sun and Moon, the second story arc, was the only part of the game I felt went in actually interesting directions, conceptually. The story between the two siblings still mostly falls flat for me in the end, but telling this story from two, intertwining perspectives was a short glimpse of an interesting idea - something that could've been turned into a proper story for a proper game.

Then the final arc, The People and the World, comes along, with a "power of friendship" main story, carried entirely by tons of lore drops that make all the TRUE NieR fans go "WOOOAH, LORE!!!". Because this IS the real NieR 3 after all - how could you disagree, when it has all this incredibly """important""" lore that answers all these questions? At least, that's the sentiment I've seen online recently, one that might just be the final nail in the coffin towards my alienation from the NieR-community.

Here's the thing: what defines the "importance" of this game within the series? Sure, it answers tons of questions, it confirms so many of the theories I had for almost 10 years… but at some point, I just had to ask myself: "so what?". I was really invested in the lore of this series for the longest time. And now all this buildup for all these grand mysteries lurking in the background, carefully planted over the course of multiple games: it all culminates in the answers being thrown in my face in between the actual plot. All this LORE barely matters to the events of the actual story, much less so to the characters themselves. They just accidently stumble into documents and glorified flashback sequences and go "wow, I have no idea what any of this means", just so players can go "YOOO, THAT'S THE THING FROM DRAKENGARD!!!".

I think at some point many fans of the series have stopped to understand what made Yoko Taro's games so special, and why he handled world building the way he did. Over the years, I've seen more and more people complain about how the lore is "too spread out" across different types of media, and how all of it should've just been in the games themselves instead. But no: those details and backstories weren't originally left out of the games to get on people's nerves and sell more books and manga: you think anyone bought those before Automata became the success that it was? You think this was all planned out as a clever marketing strategy? No, those details were left out because THEY DIDN'T MATTER. The lore was always hinted at, there was always this certain air of intrigue to how big and incomprehensible the DrakeNieR multiverse really is. Instead, the games focused on the characters inhabiting that world - never understanding it fully, much like us.

I always loved crafting theories around the lore because it was this hidden background element: something I had no chance of ever fully grasping. First and foremost, however, I was there for the stories Yoko Taro decided to tell. That becomes all the more obvious, now that we get a game in the series he didn't direct - one he only supervised to make sure it stays accurate to the lore, while an entirely new team of writers came up with the actual, individual character stories.

This is the result: paper thin vignettes drenched in lore. So much new knowledge, yet so little value. I never cared less about what the world of NieR might have left to offer.

"Yo, amigo! Post that footage on YouTube! It rocks!"

I think this is the best Codemasters arcade rally game. The cars handle well, the stages are interesting and memorable, there's a lot of cars, classes and locations. It's very accessible for new comers but gives enough space to hone your skills and grow. It's almost perfect.

However, I really don't like the Gymkhana and DC Challanges. I just wanted to rally, not do these stupid things. Those are the reason why I can't say that this game is perfect. I understand why they included the them. That was the hot new thing in the rally scene back then. Ultimately, even though I don't like it, in a way I'm glad that it's included as a piece of "rally history" and will be nice to look back on the Dirt series one day and say "Hey, remember when Gymkhana was all the rave? Even Dirt 3 had it.".

The Rally and Trailblazer stages are beautiful and they have a nice variety to them. I wish I could say the same about the Rally Cross and Land Rush tracks. Those are very same-y and kinda boring.

I also don't like that ugly colorgrading filter that PS3 era games had, but I mostly don't mind it anymore. The game is still pretty enough. The announchers are also annoying and unskippable.

I might sound like I don't like the game but I really do. None of the negatives I've listed take away from the amazing feeling of flying through the dirt in a Ford RS 200 in the straight then launching into a satisfying handbrake turn through the corner. Sometimes there are other drivers on the stage which lives up the otherwise lonely nature of stage rally.

In 2014, after finishing Virtue’s Last Reward, the second Zero Escape game, I finally had a purpose in life: Operation Bluebird. This loose conglomerate of folks was basically a campaign to push publisher Aksys and developer Spike Chunsoft to make the final Zero Escape game and complete the trilogy. Somehow, my reward for this was becoming Facebook friends with director Kotaro Uchikoshi. While Zero Time Dilemma did eventually arrive, and is best described as “fine”, Virtue’s Last Reward remains the most intelligent narrative structure I’ve ever seen in a game and is an-all time great.

Uchikoshi’s follow up in 2019, AI: The Somnium Files, was a neat new direction that I had a great time with, but desperately needed tweaking in a few places. When the sequel, The Nirvana Initiative was announced, I knew Spike Chunsoft had taken notes. I can’t describe how hyped I was for this game, how confident I was that it would be my game of the year, and Spike Chunsoft’s best game yet - and against all the odds, I think it is.

The first question most people likely have is “Can I play this game without playing the first one?” Ordinarily in video games, the answer is yes, as the publishers generally want as many people to be able to buy it as possible. For the Nirvana Initiative, I think my answer is “kinda.” The characters in the game tutorial actually ask you, the player, if you played the first game. If you say yes, they quiz you about the events that transpired to prove it. If you tell the Nirvana Initiative that you skipped the first game, they’ll tell you that’s quite alright and will add extra bits of exposition when meeting returning characters so that their actions and dialogue won’t leave you confused. So technically, yeah, you could. There is a considerable amount of interaction with returning characters though, and a lot of nuance, jokes, and references are going to totally fly over your head. So, final answer; you could, but don’t. The first game is currently on PC and Xbox game pass, so get to it!

If you’re not familiar with the Spike Chunsoft Visual novel hybrids like AI, Danganronpa, and Zero Escape, they’re much more packed with gameplay than the genre tags would lead you to believe. While Zero Escape blends horror with 3D puzzles and agonizing decision making, AI is much more of a detective thriller. You’ll find twists, turns, secrets, and clues hidden about everywhere as you hunt down a merciless serial killer who has been terrorizing near-future Japan by splitting people in half at a molecular level - alive.

For the first half of the game, you’ll take control of Ryuki, a junior detective at ABIS, which is a special crimes unit of the police that use cyberpunk gadgets and machinery to investigate specialized crimes. This first half of the Nirvana Initiative takes place only a few months after the first game’s conclusion, and you and your AI-ball companion Tama will investigate the string of mysterious murders across Tokyo by traveling to dozens of interesting locations, meeting tons of well-writted three dimensional characters, and solving some very innovative 3D puzzles.

Tama is an all-powerful AI that lives in an artificial eyeball in Ryuki’s head, and has a direct link with his mind as well as all information in the internet and at ABIS, and can even help Ryuki see around him in X-ray or thermo vision. In Somnium (we’ll get to that), she takes the form of a mature woman relentlessly teasing Ryuki and keeping him in line. Her relationship with Ryuki is probably my favorite in the game, and she’s brought to life with some excellent voice acting by the wonderfully talented Anairis Quinones, who you might know from Pokemon, My Hero Academia, or Demon Slayer.

The general rhythm of the Nirvana Initiative is traveling to a few locations, working your way through many fully voiced dialogue trees, investigating locations and items Phoenix Wright Style, and then speaking to Tama to help you mentally piece together what it all means. You’ll then bring in a person of interest to the Psync machine back at ABIS, which lets you travel into their Somnium. You have exactly 6 minutes to solve it, but brilliantly time only moves when you’re moving. You have unlimited time to stand still and consider your next action, so it’s a great balance of strategy and racing against the clock. Each of the Somniums is wildly different; one’s an escape room, one is literally Pokemon Go, one is a crazy Japanese game show - and so on.

A person’s Somnium is basically their eternal dream - it’s not a dream they’re having while asleep, it’s the physical manifestation of the things that are their mind. The Somnium presents itself with a number of mental locks, or things that person is either repressing or hiding. The Somniums are monumentally improved over the first game. In that game, you basically would need to trial and error/brute force your way through puzzles since a lot of them didn’t follow logical sense. And why would they? They’re dreams, and things in dreams mostly don’t make sense. This, however, does make it a poor game mechanic, no matter if the lore explains it.

In the Nirvana Initiative, every time you make an action in Somnium, you’re given a small piece of information on how the rules of the Somnium work. Is down up? Does fire put out water here? Do soda cans need to be unlocked with a key and locked door popped open? You’ll find out slowly as you experiment, and take advantage of TIMIEs. Every time you take an action in solving the puzzles, you’ll be given a TIMIE that can be applied to a later action and reduce the time cost. This adds a second layer to puzzle solving of rationing the better TIMIE’s for actions that take longer, but knowing you can only hold three of them at once.

All of this balances out to exactly what they were trying to nail in the first game - the Somnium is a chain of challenging but solvable logic puzzles where the rules of the world are slowly revealed to the player , each providing clues on how to progress, with both the strategy elements of puzzles combined with the anxiety of a time crunch seamlessly. Besides two puzzles in a later Somnium, I was able to logic my way through all of them without outside help just based on the clues provided to me and what I knew about the character. And that’s the genius part - getting inside each person’s Somnium shows you who they are on the inside vs who they are on the outside. Getting to know the amazing characters this way brings a whole new level of depth to them that you just aren’t going to get out of most other games.

In the second half of the game, you’ll play as Mizuki 6 years later, and the gameplay loop remains largely the same, but with more intrigue. Every so often, you’ll get to an action sequence. These are definitely the worst part of the game. The action sequences happen about once per chapter, and largely consist of you watching Ryuki or Mizuki running around doing anime style kicks and flips for 6-7 minutes, and every minute or so doing a quick time event. I would say about 75% of them aren’t even necessary to the plot, just “some thugs show up and another fight sequence happens”. I’m not gonna beat around the bush, they suck. Watching long stretches of cutscene with random QTEs is not what anyone is here for.

What I AM here for is the fantastic, best in class music. The first game had good music, honestly nothing notable to me, but the Nirvana Initiative has absolutely the best soundtrack of 2022 so far. It’s bangers straight from beginning to end and hits pretty much every genre I can think of. Composer Keisuke Ito has an impressive resume including every Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game, Yakuza, and Bloodstained Ritual of the Night, but this is very certainly his best work. I have been jamming to this soundtrack every day. I cannot recommend it enough. It’s on Spotify! Stop watching this. Go. Listen now ! And not to mention the dance sequences that will never fail to bring a smile to my face. Oh well, I’ll eat a donut in the bathroom.

One last major thing I haven’t really stressed - The Nirvana Initiative is probably the funniest video game I’ve ever played. Yeah, funnier than any of the Yakuza games. And it does it so consistently, I laughed out loud every few minutes during this 25 hour romp. Tama and Ryuki especially have a perfect relationship to produce constant comedic moments, and I always loved seeing people kick the shit out of Date for being an asshole when he showed up again. The performances in this game are top of the line with some great talent behind them, including Sungwon Cho, who you may know as Pro ZD, as the gentle giant Gen, youtube musician Amalee as Kizzy, and the immensely talented late Billy Kametz in his final role as the show-stealing serial killer Tearer. The English cast is full of the industry’s best, and you can tell not a single person phoned it in.

I haven’t even gotten to the real brilliance of the story, which I cannot reveal. Suffice it to say that when you reach it, you’ll realize that your preconceived notions of what a video game is and can be have led your entire investigation astray. The cracks that form in the story as you’re playing are not writing mistakes - they are your brain’s mistakes. There’s no way you’d figure it out before it’s revealed, but all the clues are theoretically there. Honestly I haven’t had a story twist experience like this since Bioshock in 2008, and that’s what pushes the Nirvana Initiative so close to a perfect game for me.

In addition to my previous comments about the action sequences, there’s a weird amount of time in the Nirvana Initiative that’s just dead air. Luckily there is a skip button to fast forward through segments where a character slowly walks for a full minute without speaking, so I’ll forgive that. The Nirvana Initiative improves on its predecessor in every way, bringing in twice as many interesting, layered characters that all get their time in the sun, crazy mysteries with twists i never saw coming, intelligent writing, vastly improved puzzles, impeccable voice acting and the best soundtrack of the year. I am shocked to say this, but I think the package as a whole outdoes Spike Chunsoft’s previous works. Whatever Uchikoshi’s next project is, whether it’s AI 3 or something else, we all need to be there day one. No one else is making games like him, and, frankly, I'm not sure anybody could if they tried.

One of the best videogame experiences I have ever had. No game has made me cry so much, laugh so much, lose my mind so much, made me understand myself better, and appealed to my specific tastes so well.

I think one thing the AI series does well, is straddle the line between parody and seriousness. Like there is no other series where you can go from over the top action sequences with a character getting powered up by porno mags to experiencing a somnium where child experimentation happened. With Nirvana Initiative, I didn't expect to be bawling my eyes out over a character with a square head, or one that looks like he's in a Marshmallow man costume, or a mermaid girl but here I am, cherishing these characters with all my heart, thankful for getting to experience their stories.

The running theme of learning to love yourself and accept yourself despite your flaws, and learning to accept love from others is something that appeals to me on a deep level. It doesn't matter how bad you think you look or how much you think you disability hinders you, if someone tells you that your existence makes them happy and means the world to them, then don't push them away to try and confirm your own self doubts, accept that there are people in this world that would put your happiness above their own because seeing you happy brings them happiness.

As for the actual serial killing case, I don't think that aspect is as pronounced as it was in the first game. I feel like this game goes more for the mental aspect of the damage done rather than the more obvious gruesome damage. The twists and turns are all fantastic but this game feels more like it's about the experience of the journey rather than the conclusion of the story if that makes sense. It's something I think, that once you've beaten the game, and you take time to think back on it, the more you realise holy shit, that was really clever how did this and how this all fits together.

The somniums are much more thematically inventive here as well I feel. Trying not to spoil anything but there are a few that really appealed to me and I couldn't stop smiling until I got the information at the end of them.

There's also a really neat post game easter egg to check out if you want to and oh my gosh, it was one of the best pieces of easter egg content I have seen in a really long time.

So yeah, I adore this game with all of my heart. There are so many moments that truly made this a special experience for me and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Remember to always love yourself because no matter how bad things might be, there is always someone out there who will accept you and be the half to make you whole