Recently finished up this, and man I got a lot of thoughts about it. I’ve been playing since the game came out in 2021, stopped playing after the Sun & the Moon started, and got back into it when the End of Service was announced. NieR: Automata’s my favorite game ever and Replicant is not too far behind, so I was very excited to play this.

At first, it felt pretty stale and slow to get through. I remember Yoko Taro saying way back that this was the sequel to Automata, but nothing in the story brought up anything related to the previous games. This made it very hard to be interested in the individual characters, especially since they felt very 1 and done with how the chapters are laid out. But oh man, does the story wrap up nicely in the end. It felt like the storytelling got better with each act. Like, the Sun and the Moon characters felt a lot more memorable than the Girl and the Monster ones (granted that might be recency bias since there was a 2ish year gap between me playing the two acts). People and the World was everything I wanted from the start, and it benefits from being built off the foundation of the prior acts. For that it redeemed how I felt in the early story, definitely a great payoff in the end. If you loved Replicant 1.22 and Automata, you should absolutely check out the story on Youtube (Jaye Bird is a pretty good resource for all the game's content as it was in-game). It also helps if you know some pre-Replicant and between-game lore, like White Chlorination Syndrome, Legion, Drakengard connections, etc.

Now, the worst part of the game by FAR is actually playing the game, in every way. The combat is a mindless and slow auto battler. Like the combo meter building up and timing your healing sounds pretty decent, until you hit the auto button and realize you’ll get the same result. It makes all the game's characters and costumes feel the same except for attackers/healers, character stats, and different elements. Battling in the main story is so boring that it brought down my enjoyment every time there was a fight or 3 between story moments. The only kinda good moments were when characters would talk during the fight. Menus are also a tedious chore to get through, especially with it being where 99% of all inputs are made. I’m not sure if it was because I had a mid grade 2020 phone, but every menu action felt sooooo slow to get through, like getting a duplicate summon and wanting to upgrade the respective character and weapon. It also was hard to know what made units good toward the end, and checking everyone’s skills was so slow that I would just use nierrein.guide to get the highest strength teams. Luckily though, the main story is not that high of a force level, and by the end Square gave us so much upgrade material that you could get by easily. This is excluding all the side content though which where strength and knowledge really mattered. Like, I never wanted to do Recollections of Dusk because it’s tied to a huge debuff that you needed the right character trait to get past. Just a sludge of a game. I really can’t overstate how boring and slow this game felt to play. It being a mobile only worsened that as well.

The whole vibe of a NieR game is done soooo good though. I wouldn't say the soundtrack is on par with the main games, but it’s still pretty good and fits the atmosphere of the Cage. There's a few standout tracks like Kaikyo, Kizuna, Normandy, Sekiryo, Kusabi, and the final boss song. I think what brings some of it down is the way too frequent normal battle songs and the way more atmospheric approach to the music. The artstyle is very striking, and the character designs and costumes are very memorable. I really dug the play or stagelike style the story chapters had, and how alot of a lot of Automata is felt in the UI elements. It's a shame that the Cage itself looks so huge and grand, but because it's a linear mobile game there’s no real exploration to go see everything it has to offer. On one I hand I like the individual characters’ worlds are only in the story play portions, but since we get whiffs of the 3D version in battles, I also kinda wish we coulda seen stuff like the wizard school, F66x/063y’s home, or Noelle’s wakeup chamber in its full capacity. One thing I loved was how much this game’s storytelling reminded me of the Forest of Myth section in Replicant or Automata’s near-endgame text story. Those really hit hard and I love that they kept doing that here.

The amount of lore here is insane, especially pre-Replicant timeline events. Like I haven’t read the complete EX or Recollection of Dusk stories yet, but from the little I’ve seen it adds a lot more to the Reincarnation characters and the status of the world before and during Project Gestalt. It really gets me excited to eventually play the Drakengard games, and possibly read up on SINoALICE’s connections; Drakengard 3 in particular with characters like Zero and Accord. Seeing the community talk about this game was really fun.

So far I’ve had a hard time caring super hard about any gacha game I’ve played, but it's really sad hearing Reincarnation will be gone forever here soon. It’s a surreal feeling I've never experienced directly with a game. Usually these kinds of games’ gameplay loops seem so tedious and frustrating that it never looks worth it from the outside. It’s because I love NieR so much that I decided to stick it through to the end, and I’m really happy I did. Boring and sludgy gameplay aside, I’m glad this game’s art and narrative existed and is being preserved by the people for others to still experience. I am now part of a niche community of a niche community who was here while it was alive, and I feel I got a stronger connection to the game because of it. Just make it a standard game next time Taro, but maybe that’s not your style. I’ll be there for the next entry.