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Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

I do agree that the whole concept of the story and history is deeply philosophical and in fact apparently NieR:Automata and even NieR:Replicant are only a fraction of the whole story.

BUT calling the gameplay boring with lots of running around is a fair statement. NieR:Replicant is worse. And reading through what others have said/shown about previous games in the series is that they're even worse.

The gameplay looks beautiful, but it grows only very little at the beginning of the game. After that nothing changes, there is no complexity to it. If you wanted to, you could get by with circling around enemies and pressing two buttons.

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Yeah, the combat / gameplay is quite dull (which is a shame because there's a great variety of combos with great animations[1], you're just not incentivised to use them at all), this is something that I agree with. I was only addressing the original comment's final remark.

[1]: https://youtu.be/QAU_8GEgSwI This has all of 2B's moveset and all combos with different weapon sets.

I'll never understand how game artists put such immense effort and detail into hardly visible in-between frame details, while putting zero effort into 80% of the time visible base animations. They don't even bother to attach weapons to the character properly (huge sword hovering 20cm away from the back). The transition from slow walking to an intense dash is also hysterical

Aren't both of these examples just stylistic though?

The swords sort of materialise in a "digital" manner that I feel helps to convey that the androids aren't humans. It also enables a lot of the flashy moves that involve attacking with the weapon while not touching it.

Lengthy transition animations can make movement more realistic but it also can degrade gameplay by making the characters feel slow or clunky when responding to input. This works well for games like gears of war or where the character's motion should obviously be restricted but not so well when the combat is meant to feel fast paced and fluid.

> "BUT calling the gameplay boring with lots of running around is a fair statement. NieR:Replicant is worse."

Both Niers are RPGs after all, in terms of mechanics, and traditional RPGs are even duller (attack/defend/item/flee menu choices) but still manage to be enjoyable. From that standpoint, the bullet sponge nature of the enemies, being unable to defeat them until the player characters have leveled up enough, and backtracking is understandable.

Personally, I found the combat adequate (yes, even Nier:Gestalt) and sufficiently varied to keep things interesting.

Hmm, isn't Baldur's Gate (2) considered to be a "traditional RPG" any more ?

Don't get me wrong. It's a beautiful game, but I guess I have a completely different understanding of RPGs. Leveling up building up different skills, magic, builds, etc. that are actually necessary to be able to advance to the next stage of the game is my understanding. In the case of NieR you can play through the entire game start to finish with your initial weapon set and drone and it would be fine.

And yes, you still assume a characters narrative in this case and you still have to level. Technically yes it is, but then again, I guess our understanding of what used to be RPGs has changed massively over the recent past I would say.

EDIT: Just googling around a bit it seems like the correct definition seems to be open world action adventure with RPG elements.

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