lnc0

Assigned Essex Lad at birth

  • Fae/Faer

Sebastiana
In that 3rd Decade cycle
Autistic as in Eat My Ass
Agender / A System / Cute

Currently writing Beastiary Beas


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archiveofourown.org/users/lnc0
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headfallsoff
@headfallsoff

probably the only place i’ll share this lmao. been tweeting about it but don’t wanna go full hater in front of 23k people. so for the cohost homies please enjoy a shocking opinion: the gacha game is bad

NieR Re[in]carnation Review
★★★★★
★★★★★

first of all it's not a video game. removing the gacha elements only makes this more clear. the only mechanic is Number Big? if number big, you win. if number not big, pay up. in its final pre-cancellation form they let you skip that and in so doing only reveal there was never anything there in the first place, it was alwasy only a series of whale checks in front of that sweet sweet yoko taro lore you crave. the craven cynicism of it all is existentially destructive for the work, as taro's already tiring eccentricities of hiding crucial details in the least accessible of places now become vectors to leverage for the direct exploitation of his audience into a gambling black hole. better hit the pulls so you can upgrade enough bullshit to see the dark memory that reveals the connection to drakengard 3 that makes everything click into place!! don't want to be left behind!!

but that is known. the game is a gacha and more than that it is a bad one even by the exploitative standards of a blighted genre that shouldn't exist, and that's why it's shutting down. nier reincarnation will forever live on as a series of youtube videos where fans can experience the story fairly close to how it was originally intended, and that's more than you can say for japanese exclusive yorha stageplay number squintillion. so how is that?

bad!! very bad!!! the game takes one of the weakest elements of the nier games, the sidequest and weapon stories all having the exact same tragedy monotonously drilled into your skull over and over and make it the entire game. no weiss and kaine bantering to prop all that up with a jrpg party of the greatest oomfs ever pressed to a PS3 disc, no experimental presentation of combat and level design, just storybook tragedies presented at such arch remove you don't even learn the character's names until you check the menu.

it is ludicrous. it is hilarious. there's one where a kid joins the army to get revenge on the enemy commander who killed his parents, only to as he kills him discover with zero forshdaowing that the commander is his real father and his parents kidnapped him as a child. there's one where a perfect angel little girl's father is beaten to death by his own friends so she runs home crying to her mother, who is in the middle of cheating on him, and is like sweet that owns and leaves lmao. they do the who do you think gave you this heart copypasta!!! and you'd think with such ridiculous material that it would be played with a coens-esque A Serious Man type wry touch, but it isn't at all, it's thuddingly earnest throughout as every tragic story plays out to overwrought voice acting and a haunting sad piano.

it is impossible to take seriously, and by the time the twelfth playable character has experienced a tragic loss and succumbed to the anime nihlism of I'll Kill Them All, another more fundemental question arises: what does all this lore actually give you, as a function of storytelling? the yokoverse is an intricate and near impossible thing, spanning multiple decades and every kind of storytelling medium imaginable, and reincarnation references damn near every single page of it, grasping onto the whole thing and framing it as a sprawling multiverse of human conflict across infinite pasts and infinite futures, with decades of mysteries to unravel and connections to make and characters to ponder and: why? for the exact same No Matter How Bad It Gets, You Can't Give Up On Hope ending that every anime RPG has? that automata already did? the plot is vast and intricate but the themes are narrow and puddle deep.

the more nier blows itself out to greater and greater scales the smaller it feels. in earthbound you fight the same ultimate nihlism of a the universe and then you walk back home again. and you say goodbye to your friends. and you call your dad. and it makes me cry like a fucking baby every time. the original nier, for all its faults, had that specificity. that sense of a journey with characters you loved that overcame the generic nature of its larger plot. here, you heal all the tragedies and fix all the timelines and everyone continues to live inside the infinite quantum simulations that will never end as you strive to find a way past the cyclical apocalypses past and future that repeat for all eternity, and i feel absolutely nothing. a world of endless content and no humanity. how tragic. how so very like nier.

Reviewed on Apr 05, 2024


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in reply to @headfallsoff's post:

this is the most haterbrain thing I'll allow myself to say, but it's been nice the way that public opinion has gradually shifted against the former 2010s image of yoko taro as this perfect iconoclastic artiste. I wouldn't say I even particularly dislike him (nier and automata both kind of whip!) but he really does just have one specific story in him and the mythology was very tiresome to see forming (and all the moreso when he deliberately played into it.)

Gacha is bad civilization.

I almost want to go back to see the ending for myself, but my compulsions are already taken up. Even when I was playing it during the first year with the "Girl and the Monster" arc, I found it comical how the stories repeat themselves.

Gacha games may in fact be where everything good about gaming goes to die. Cygames have, like, some of the most talented staff in the industry. They have people who worked on all of the universally-agreed-to-be-good Final Fantasies. And yet, Granblue Fantasy is merely an "okay" game, because that's all it ever has to be to become an infinite money machine, and that's the saddest thing about it.

i have been dragging my feet with playing the nier games, so when i heard that reincarnation was going to be taken offline, i was disappointed. all the story and lore that was going to just vanish! what a waste!!

but now i am relieved after reading this because it sounds like i wont be missing anything. and if i really need to catch up (unlikely), there's always the gameplay walkthroughs (no commentary) on youtube that i'll be able to pull up. or maybe that time would be better spent seeing what earthbound is about, instead.