My first Nier game, and I’m hooked!
My friend Gibbon got me to try this new mobile RPG as it launched, and I played it daily until now! It’s got all the usual trappings of these kind of free to play games, with an energy system, premium currency, tons of crafting materials, events, crossovers. Gameplay is simplistic and more about keeping your numbers up. But it’s wrapped up in an appealing package with some pretty engaging story and very stylish, clean, and consistent visual design.
It’s a Yoko Taro game like the other Nier and Drakengard titles. From what I know of them (not having played them yet myself), this seems to share many traits: desaturated colour schemes, themes of transhumanism, most of the characters being waifish, white-haired cyborg asassins with embarrassingly revealing outfits.
In this case, there’s a framing story about a young girl/insectoid monster being led around a vast stone ruin by a mysterious and deceptive but cute ghost-like creature. In trying to recover her memories/consume the dreams of humans, they enter other stories from across the ages, and observe the absurdly tragic lives of a series of characters, recruiting them for your team. These range from touching tales of lives ruined by war (90% of the cast), to infuriating debacles of a guy selfishly neglecting his family (Argo, he sucks).
My main team consisted of Gayle, the provincial provider forcibly converted into a part-mechanical killing machine; Akeha, matriarch of a house of assassins in feudal Japan; and Fio, the main character(?), who was forced into a social subclass and whose family fell apart, her only solace found in the world of dreams with an unlikely friend. Most of the settings of these tales are post-apocalyptic dystopias of one kind or another, and share themes of cruelty, war, the search for meaning, and having ridiculously terrible things happen constantly to the characters and seeing how they react. You can dig as deep as you want for the story content, with alternate skins, weapons, and events fleshing out backstories and sidestories of the cast, their contexts, and their intersections.
I don’t know how much I can say about the gameplay. There is a fair bit of depth to setting up and customising your team and navigating all the upgrade menus. The RPG battles set in their restricted 3D arenas look flashy but basically play themselves, although you have a little bit of interactivity with them. Like many of these games you can spend stamina to grind a bunch of quests automatically, but in this one you actually have to let them play out in real time even then, which requires a not insignificant time investment on the player’s part. I got used to setting this up then putting my phone down while I did something else; keep in mind this can be a big drain on the battery.
As far as free to play games go, this one was very generous. They throw premium currency and materials at you often, and the international launch had events coming thick and fast, to catch up to the six-month-old Japanese release. As of today we’ve reached parity on main story content, and had crossovers with Nier Replicant and Automata, as well as Drakengard 3. With a roadmap of more improvements and content to come, the game is still living and evolving, but it’s in a robust shape and worth checking out.