More like NieR: Auto[play]a.
Desolate in every sense! Combat is purely numerical and exists solely as power gates - simply upgrade your units, weapons and companions, then breeze through this battery vampire of a .apk for a few more missions before you need to upgrade again. OR u can Pay a humble fee for a chance to win epic units for you to also waste upgrade resources on :)
I just feel so wise and numb to the Twisted Mind of Yoko Taro. Grim "tragedy first" writing that passionlessly beelines towards an arc's desired sad outcome, a soundtrack that is essentially just spacy yoga music, vast post-post-magical-apoc environments that serve absolutely nothing. Sad to see Akihiko Yoshida designs wasted on this.

Dares to ask the ultimate question: what if SinoAlice didn't look and feel like a Facebook game from 2011?

No, for real, this is literally just SinoAlice but with a bigger budget and explicitly tied to the sigh Nier franchise. It actually has a good localization this time, along with a more engaging core narrative and better music, but it's still an auto-battling gacha game.

I feel like Yoko Taro has been phoning it in ever since Automata took off. These days, Drakenier fans seem more interested in lore dispensaries than actual stories, and that's exactly what they're getting here. I guess he's just supplying to meet demand at this point.

Reincarnation is certainly off to a better start than what I played of SinoAlice, but the humor and heart that made Yoko's console games stand out is barely present (if at all) in these mobile products. Both of them seem to boil down his writing to the grimdark tragedy porn he's often accused of with none of the fun dialogue, strong character development, or neat gameplay twists that elevated his past works into so much more. I'm going to try and see this one through to the end unless it gets too miserably grindy, but I can't say I like the direction these games seem to be going in.

EDIT: Just kidding this shit is so boring I dropped it midway through Chapter 3. Might return to it if they ever patch the loading to take less time than the "gameplay."

Played this a while ago and this is literally Raid:Shadow Legends with a NieR-Skin. The same auto-play combat with a trillion systems to fake a sense of progress and the same exploitative gacha system aimed at the most vulnerable players make this a miserable experience and I'm very sorry for anyone losing time to this disaster of a timewaster. If you want the (really not that great) story, just watch the segments on Youtube. I'm so very tired of these types of mobile game that offer nothing and want all of your money and all of your time in return. I cannot stress enough how much of a miserable experience it is. How a character called "Mama" coerces you into "playing" this thing might have been funny if the game wasn't, you know, actually exploitative.

Ótimos visuais e trilha sonora espetacular (como sempre), porém a gameplay é repetitiva e sem graça (full auto), se não tivesse esse sistema de jrpg que serve só para enfiar o gacha no jogo e fosse só exploração seria mil vezes melhor.
Posso afirmar que a estória está aprazível até agora. Entretanto não chega nem perto dos outros jogos do Taro, nem em questões como profundidade e peculiaridade nem como uma obra para tocar os corações dos telespectadores.

60/100 - Se porventura você for fã de NieR eu recomendo por causa dos eventos de collab, caso você seja fã dos jogos do Yoko Taro, jogue com baixas expectativas.

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.

Disappointing doesn't even cover it. The worst of gacha combined with the most phoned-in story Taro's put to paper, with a pace so ploddingly slow you'll fall asleep before you even unlock the main menu. Extending draken/nier's weapon stories to be a main mechanic backfires in a huge way.
Barely interactable, your avatar runs from one level gate to the next, the game begging you to put money into its loot roulette. There's no strategy, not even any real play: ultimately it's just a money vacuum.
Gacha is a poisoned well. Even the games that are entertaining (world flipper, love live, bandori) would be better without it, and Nier represents the very worst. A desolate, sinister creativity pit, it's sole purpose to empty lonely Japanese salarymen's wallets.

Yeah I did the first two chapters of the main story and I'm not coming back to this probably. Gotta love that music as always but once I booted it up and was greeted with the typical 100 currency gatcha nonsense my eyes glazed over. The actual game part is mind numbing too, it absolutely plays itself moreso than any other gatcha I've seen, and that's saying something. Gatcha really doesn't even work for the Nier series whatsoever, after doing some pulls with the starting gems and getting a bunch of literally who random nobodies with no personalities I was just left wondering who on earth would care enough to spend money trying to pull anyone who isn't one of the 7 or so main characters from Replicant/Automata.

Gotta say though the fact that the narrative of this seems to be about walking forever through an endless grind in an area literally called "The Cage" is pretty funny though. I choose to believe for my own sake Taro knew what he was doing there and didn't give much of a shit about this

thesis: yoko taro is often listed among the foremost auteurs of the medium but the reality is his strengths lie in a kind of prototypical 'video game' method of work, borne out of necessity, that prioritizes collaboration between a consistent set of screenwriters, an unorthodox style of design targeting emotional resonance, and a plethora of unique flourishes specifically aimed at facilitating the empathy, immersion, and connection of its players (researching drakengard 1s development makes this especially apparent - it's arguably not even a yoko taro game in the usually defined sense of the term). his works, when in production, are thwarted frequently by compromise, limitation, and sacrifice - stumbling blocks, all in service of eventually reflecting a well-trodden title which charms on the virtues of its rustic artistry. wear and tear and a heart of gold. this style of development, marked by haste and experimentation and fueled by pure zeal and love for the craft, perhaps reveals why the pillars of video games, the codified monomythic genres and the primordial archetypes and the frequent allusions to popular work, so often impress themselves upon yoko taro games, and why so often his work succeeds in connecting to people where other talent may struggle. the video game of it all, if you will. incidentally, this collaborative style allows for a large breadth of potential interpretation and analysis afforded towards his work, and ive long maintained that a YT game is at its most interesting when it's not about what he intended for it to be about. did the tragedies in nier gestalt sometimes fall flat for you? me too! thankfully that's not what the game is about, at least not to me. in sum: the work of many, each willing and able to leave a fingerprint on the mosaic of development, enriches the product in the long-run, creating a full-bodied textured work of art and contributing immensely to the humanity at the core of these games. if any given chord strikes you as dull, a separate melody will enchant you - that's the nature of YT's games. they're artisan because of what they value and because of how they achieve their mission statement, and especially because of their passion, always demonstrated by the little details in these games. passion will always reveal itself, but so too will a dearth of passion reveal itself.

proof: nier re[in]carnation
if these games worked because of a certain je ne sais quois shared by the collaborative nature of a team in a trying work environment, i don't think my prospective next project would be a game in an exploitative genre where a new team of writers handled an endless barrage of one-note vignettes while YT sat back, nodded halfheartedly at his desk, and tried to string every vignette together using an overarching plot catering to obsessive drakennier fans. just my two cents

This was way more compelling when I was playing it on my japanese phone vpn prior to the English release, understanding maybe 40% of the (dreary and predictable, it turns out) fable anthology storytelling, trying to fill in the blanks with my own sense of mystique and ambiguity, and enjoying the zoned out uninvolved music visualizer combat with the relief of not being able to monetarily invest in the gacha elements at all. Well now I played it w the full glory of intelligible language context and yeah it's kind of an insult on all accounts!!

love the idea of the jrpg goth western visual touches this occasionally hints at tho, and some of the character art and music still soothes me despite not surprising. Bummer those are wrapped in a predatory piece of shit mostly just spinning its own wheels

I've been playing this since the JP launch, and can say that the Global version got screwed in the early days. To many events all on top of each other, impossable to grind out all of the for a FTP.

If you don't like gacha games, your not going to like this. Very grindy, with very tough rates. That being said, the art and music is really good. I certainly enjoy the game enough, I just know that for most people, it's not going to click. Without a clear connection to the main franchise, ReIn is worth skipping for now.

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.