The overarching mystery and the setup done for NieR Re[in]carnation as a whole is very interesting. I also really enjoyed the plot for this arc with the Girl and the Monster, but a lot of the individual stories that you explore were kinda hit or miss. Some of them were incredible and got me attached to its characters, but others were just kinda boring.

Music and art is awesome btw but the gameplay sucks

(I do have to mention that I started this game during the second anniversary. Around the same time where they started to be very generous, making it super free to play friendly (for the story content) and this did greatly affect my enjoyment & rating)

I can't believe people actually play this crap, my calculator is a better videogame and it's not even programmable.

The game essentially plays itself and all you have to do is gather resources (via ungodly grinding or paying real money, neither of which are valid) to make your party's number get bigger.
If your number is bigger than the enemy, you win.
I don't know why they pretend to have a battle system, it doesn't really matter.

Avoid at all costs, this is the only gacha I tried to play because I love this series, but not even my blind faith in Nier could make me stomach the insult this "genre" is to the medium.

My mind has some sort of emergency measure it activates against predatory mobile games, which I like. I might be very into a game like this, Dragon Ball Legends or Kingdom Hearts Dark Road for a month or two, but then, without much thought, I will drop it almost completely. My mind just does it. It knows this isn't a good use of time. It knows these games don't give enough to me to get my time. I don't even do the daily log-ins, that's how much I disconnect.

Will I get back to this game? Probably, to play more of the story. I reached a plateau where it was hard to continue it without investing a bunch of time. I assume they'll make it easier to improve your dudes (I always call gacha characters "dudes" or "guys") at some point. Then I'll come back because the story was somewhat interesting, the main story moreso than the little stories you go through, which is really most of the content. Some of those are good but they're filled with the same sort of pretension that has always categorized the written prose in Nier games (of course with weapon stories it doesn't matter much because those are so short; these are longer and fully voiced).

The game has good music, well-designed characters, and the battle system while still essentially idle was somewhat engaging. But the weight of all the things I had to constantly keep leveling up and keeping track of, event after event after event, it annoyed my brain and it said "buddy, I'm pulling the plug." And it did, before I really planned to pull it myself.

After playing this for almost a year I feel like I’m basically done with this game (I’ll still come back for main and even stories) so here’s a more detailed review than the one I cobbled together after finishing the main story that was available at once. I didn’t spend any money on this game but played it enough to be among the top players each pvp season.

Let’s address the elephant in the room first: This is a free to play pay to win gacha mobile game and that sucks. Personally, I was never tempted to spend money on this game, but that wasn’t because of how kind it is to f2p players but because of how incredibly expensive even the tiniest thing is. A 10x summon costs you 2000 gems. In the shop you can get 1540 gems for 11.99€. You do get a decent amount of free gems though so you can get new characters every now and then.
If you want to be good without spending obscene amounts of money on this game (and probably also if you do spend money), you’ll need to grind a lot. This is my first (and probably last) gacha game so I don’t really have a frame of reference, but I’ve heard from others that even for a gacha this game requires a lot of grinding.
While the regular pve is an incredibly boring auto-battler, the game gets quite interesting in the challenging abyss towers, the pvp, and the subjugation battles.

But obviously the reason people care about this game isn’t the gameplay, it’s that it’s a nier game, so how’s the story?
The main story is pretty alright, but the game is more about its various side stories. Those range from somewhat bad to really really good. The combined story of Akeha is probably among the best writing in the entire Nier series.

The art is also gorgeous, and the music is… well it’s keiichi okabe what do you expect. Just listen to this.

So, should you play this game? If you haven’t been playing from launch it gets even more difficult to ever reach the high-power content so I wouldn’t recommend trying for that, but if you just want to do the main story and the even stories, like I will do going forward, you’re probably going to have a lot of fun with that.

Having just finished the game I find it difficult to fully sum up my feelings on the game, but I can say that over all I enjoyed my time with it quite a bit. While Reincarnation does suffer from some of the drawbacks of being a gacha game, it is nevertheless rife with strong stories and characters both in the main story and in the side content(character stories, weapon stories, events, etc). I loved the variety of characters and stories on display, and some of the characters became some of my favorite in the series. Over all it was an enjoyable experience that I wish I could recommenced, but unfortunately the game shutting down makes it impossible.

Even as a huge NieR fan, when I started this game it was a huge miss for me; given I didn't have high hopes in the first place. The core gameplay is your standard clicker-game faire, with a couple bits and bobs to set it apart from the crowd like high production values, lots of English voice acting, and small bits of walking sim-style gameplay to push you through. This would be easily forgivable for what I wanted out of it if the story was good, but early on I found it was rather hit or miss to get through, with my only consistent solace being the overarching plot and mystery of the Girl and the Cage.
I appreciated how the core themes in each characters' stories are true to the NieR franchise in showing different perspectives on a certain conflict, but it's not until a bit into the game when the stories start to really spread their wings. Once you get to the Levania chapters, I feel the gameplay and stories get significantly better and reflect more of what NieR is as a series, with some tiny but appreciated gameplay twists and genre subversions, and more heartrending, better written stories.
Truthfully this deserves a 2 or perhaps even a 1, because again, the gameplay is pretty much nothing. But as things went on, I found it improved a lot, and eventually I actually wanted to see more and find out what happened with the characters. So see this as a generous 3 because I love NieR and most of the stories meet my standards in the end. It will stay in my mobile game rotation.

(Also as a side note: as with most Square Enix mobile games, the pricing is just outrageous! I occasionally throw a couple bucks toward mobile games I like, just to give the devs a tip and say "keep it up", but I would never do that for this game with how much you need to pay for any actual benefit.)

I wish I had a constructive review to write here about this game, but honestly it was just... a journey. I mean that in the best way possible, but I couldn't explain it if I tried to without just retelling you the game's story. The bombs they dropped on us toward the end were what I've come to expect from this series and Yoko Taro. So, safe to say, I'm mind blown with complicated feelings and all about this game after having played it, and all I can wish is that it wasn't a mobile game so I could pour over it more.

Also, for the record, I completed it with... 11 hours and 35 minutes to spare before the severs shut down. So, I am proud of that much having booked it from the end of the Sun arc all the way to the end of the game in the course of a day and a half.

Recently finished up this, and man I got a lot of thoughts about it. I’ve been playing since the game came out in 2021, stopped playing after the Sun & the Moon started, and got back into it when the End of Service was announced. NieR: Automata’s my favorite game ever and Replicant is not too far behind, so I was very excited to play this.

At first, it felt pretty stale and slow to get through. I remember Yoko Taro saying way back that this was the sequel to Automata, but nothing in the story brought up anything related to the previous games. This made it very hard to be interested in the individual characters, especially since they felt very 1 and done with how the chapters are laid out. But oh man, does the story wrap up nicely in the end. It felt like the storytelling got better with each act. Like, the Sun and the Moon characters felt a lot more memorable than the Girl and the Monster ones (granted that might be recency bias since there was a 2ish year gap between me playing the two acts). People and the World was everything I wanted from the start, and it benefits from being built off the foundation of the prior acts. For that it redeemed how I felt in the early story, definitely a great payoff in the end. If you loved Replicant 1.22 and Automata, you should absolutely check out the story on Youtube (Jaye Bird is a pretty good resource for all the game's content as it was in-game). It also helps if you know some pre-Replicant and between-game lore, like White Chlorination Syndrome, Legion, Drakengard connections, etc.

Now, the worst part of the game by FAR is actually playing the game, in every way. The combat is a mindless and slow auto battler. Like the combo meter building up and timing your healing sounds pretty decent, until you hit the auto button and realize you’ll get the same result. It makes all the game's characters and costumes feel the same except for attackers/healers, character stats, and different elements. Battling in the main story is so boring that it brought down my enjoyment every time there was a fight or 3 between story moments. The only kinda good moments were when characters would talk during the fight. Menus are also a tedious chore to get through, especially with it being where 99% of all inputs are made. I’m not sure if it was because I had a mid grade 2020 phone, but every menu action felt sooooo slow to get through, like getting a duplicate summon and wanting to upgrade the respective character and weapon. It also was hard to know what made units good toward the end, and checking everyone’s skills was so slow that I would just use nierrein.guide to get the highest strength teams. Luckily though, the main story is not that high of a force level, and by the end Square gave us so much upgrade material that you could get by easily. This is excluding all the side content though which where strength and knowledge really mattered. Like, I never wanted to do Recollections of Dusk because it’s tied to a huge debuff that you needed the right character trait to get past. Just a sludge of a game. I really can’t overstate how boring and slow this game felt to play. It being a mobile only worsened that as well.

The whole vibe of a NieR game is done soooo good though. I wouldn't say the soundtrack is on par with the main games, but it’s still pretty good and fits the atmosphere of the Cage. There's a few standout tracks like Kaikyo, Kizuna, Normandy, Sekiryo, Kusabi, and the final boss song. I think what brings some of it down is the way too frequent normal battle songs and the way more atmospheric approach to the music. The artstyle is very striking, and the character designs and costumes are very memorable. I really dug the play or stagelike style the story chapters had, and how alot of a lot of Automata is felt in the UI elements. It's a shame that the Cage itself looks so huge and grand, but because it's a linear mobile game there’s no real exploration to go see everything it has to offer. On one I hand I like the individual characters’ worlds are only in the story play portions, but since we get whiffs of the 3D version in battles, I also kinda wish we coulda seen stuff like the wizard school, F66x/063y’s home, or Noelle’s wakeup chamber in its full capacity. One thing I loved was how much this game’s storytelling reminded me of the Forest of Myth section in Replicant or Automata’s near-endgame text story. Those really hit hard and I love that they kept doing that here.

The amount of lore here is insane, especially pre-Replicant timeline events. Like I haven’t read the complete EX or Recollection of Dusk stories yet, but from the little I’ve seen it adds a lot more to the Reincarnation characters and the status of the world before and during Project Gestalt. It really gets me excited to eventually play the Drakengard games, and possibly read up on SINoALICE’s connections; Drakengard 3 in particular with characters like Zero and Accord. Seeing the community talk about this game was really fun.

So far I’ve had a hard time caring super hard about any gacha game I’ve played, but it's really sad hearing Reincarnation will be gone forever here soon. It’s a surreal feeling I've never experienced directly with a game. Usually these kinds of games’ gameplay loops seem so tedious and frustrating that it never looks worth it from the outside. It’s because I love NieR so much that I decided to stick it through to the end, and I’m really happy I did. Boring and sludgy gameplay aside, I’m glad this game’s art and narrative existed and is being preserved by the people for others to still experience. I am now part of a niche community of a niche community who was here while it was alive, and I feel I got a stronger connection to the game because of it. Just make it a standard game next time Taro, but maybe that’s not your style. I’ll be there for the next entry.

A wonderful story with the characteristic storytelling of Yoko Taro games, full of hard situations and beautiful moments. The game also brings us several references, especially in Season 3, to the different DrakeNier games that any fan will fall in love with.

But that's where the (very) good part ends, the gacha system and the lack of gameplay spoil the experience. Luckily I have played during their last moments of life in which they have given away many things to make it very easy to complete the story.

It's a shame that a game of this caliber dies completely and can only be experienced again through YouTube. I hope that one day a console version comes out without the gacha elements.