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.