Gaming

Final Fantasy it ain’t: Ars reviews NIER

We get our hot little hands on NIER, the latest action RPG from Square-Enix …

Michael Thompson – Apr 30, 2010 11:53 am | 52

It’s not surprising that Square-Enix released NIER after Final Fantasy XIII came out. By releasing a well-made action-heavy RPG, unwary gamers are likely to assume that NIER will feature similar fare; including a strong story, fantastic production values, and engaging gameplay mechanics. Sadly, this is not the case. Square-Enix outsourced the game to Cavia, the company responsible for other such unremarkable titles like Drakengard and Bulletwitch, and the result is just as unimpressive.

The story begins promisingly enough, with a man and his daughter scraping out an meager existence in the ruins of a massive city that’s being ravaged by unnamed monsters. The kid has a terrible cough, so you set out to find some food and end up in a massive battle outside the ruins that serve as your shelter. This skirmish showcases how fast-paced things will be later on when your character has managed to level up and has unlocked spells and special attacks; the monsters are particularly fascinating, seemingly constructed out of abstract binary magics that bleed when you hit them. The scene ends on a climactic note when your daughter dies in your arms.

Title	NIER
Developer	Cavia
Publisher	Square-Enix
Price	$55.99 Shop.Ars
Platform	Xbox 360, PS3

It turns out this was all a dream. Or a flashback. The man, Nier, and his daughter, Yonah, are still the main characters in the game, but they are actually living in a fantasy setting that rose up after the aforementioned end of the world. Yonah also has a bad cough like in the prologue, and it turns out that Nier is trying to find work as a strong-arm in order to get enough medicine to help her recover.

Generic to the point of being remarkable

While the plot is serviceable, the writing and acting are simply cringe-inducing. The dialogue is particularly bad. Case in point: the title character is a tough guy, self-described as “a hard man, doing my best to take care of my daughter.” Lines from other characters don’t get any better, and they’re almost all delivered as woodenly as possible.

Combat is certainly the game’s strongest element, featuring fast-paced battles that only get crazier as Nier levels up and unlocks new abilities to use against his enemies, but it’s far from perfect. The problem is that the fighting is unbalanced a lot of the time: many enemy attacks simply can’t be blocked and the dash-evade is sluggish to activate. Also, Nier will get some magic spells later on that practically throw the game’s difficulty out the window (Dark Lance is a particularly powerful ranged attack which will devastate random monsters and bosses alike).

Leveling up isn’t all that well-executed, either. There’s no way to gauge your level’s appropriateness in the main story quests, so you’ll have no idea if you’re experienced enough to start a mission until you actually undertake it and, possibly, get annihilated by the waiting enemies. When a new move is unlocked, a small note appears on the screen informing you of Nier’s latest talent. Unfortunately, you’ll have to bring up the game’s menu in order to actually learn how to use the ability.

You’ll also get used to seeing load screens as you play the game. While environments seem fairly large and open, running into a building will require players to wait while the new area is loaded, and different world areas are separated by gates that you have to run through and then spend a little while waiting while your screen goes white. Considering the rather simple nature of the environments, the frequency and wait of these screens is more than a little annoying.

Haven’t we seen all this before?

NIER is a surprisingly ugly game that looks like it belongs on the last generation of consoles. The environments are flat and lack any sense of texture aside from patterns that have clearly been wallpapered in. Character models are pretty generic, too, and the main player characters don’t stand out from any other fantasy game that has hit the market in the past couple of years.

There is also a lot of character and item pop-up when you run, run, run (and run some more) through the large open environments; this is a bit weird, since the landscape draw distance extends so far out, and the pop-ups will occur when you’re only a few dozen feet away from them. Almost everything in the game seemed to be coated in jagged edges, too, and this was on a 22-inch flatscreen at a 1080i resolution; one can only imagine how unimpressive this title looks on a larger display.

Finally, the auto camera isn’t inoperable, but it will settle on weird directions during combat; this means that you’ll frequently have to adjust the view manually with the right thumbstick, which is extremely frustrating when you’re surrounded by enemies. It should be noted that these problems appeared on both the 360 and the PS3 versions of the game.

One of the other reasons I hated playing this was because certain elements just felt sloppy. An early example of this popped up when I first walked through the town Nier lives next to. As I ran errands (including delivering mutton I’d taken from sheep I’d battled and killed), I heard the same people give me the same messages a few dozen times. After hearing someone tell me to tell my daughter to get better soon for the fifth time in as many minutes, I started hoping she would succumb to her illness just so I’d stop hearing about it.

There really isn’t any reason to pick up a copy of NIER for either the PS3 or 360. There are better-looking, better-written, and better-made games out there on the market more deserving of your money.

Verdict: Skip

Michael Thompson

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