literally the main story made me cry and every other side story is so melancholic.

i’ll play this game in bursts of a couple months, stop, and return because the welcome back rewards are so good lol. the crossover collabs are cool and i’m just a huge sucker for gatcha games tbh. graphics and music are beautiful even as a mobile game.

if u don’t like grinding dis ain’t it lol

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.)

NieR Reincarnation is a beautiful mobile game with a good presentation, excellent music, and sometimes intriguing storylines--which is absolutely butchered by having pretty much no gameplay.

Combat requires very little involvement to none at all. Characters attack automatically in a turn-based system and all the player can do is activate skills on cooldowns. Outside of combat, you walk around an area until you stumble across another mission, ad nauseam. As a whole it is a standard mobile gacha game:
• Constant menial adjustments of weapons and accessories.
• Manually leveling up characters with materials because missions give a pitifully low amount of EXP.
• Horrible rates in the gacha system. 95% of items you pull will be weapons with unusable stats.
• Uncountable number of minor inconveniences such as wasted time waiting for menus and the daily login bonuses to load and finish.
• The above issues play well into the EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE microtransactions (i.e., $25 for a single ten-fold).

It is horribly boring and a chore to "play" through just to experience stories that I consider to be just okay on average. This might seem harsh for what is just a cashgrab mobile title but when it carries and shares the name NieR with Replicant and Automata, it truly feels like a slap in the face to fans expecting anything resembling a game. You are better off playing pretty much anything else because most other games will look impressive in comparison to what NieR Reincarnation has to offer.

I've been playing Nier Reincarnation since release (at the time of writing this I've just finished the Sun & Moon arc.) and have myself able to consistently enjoy it even with its gacha mechanics. I've found rolls relatively fair and gems for them to be plentiful in game with many obtainable through story missions and frequent events. More importantly, I've enjoyed the stories and characters quite a bit and with a little effort have been able to get through without any major struggle. All in all I feel its a solid game and the mobile game I've spent the most time with by far.

As I write this, the game is currently nearing the end of it’s 2nd Anniversary celebration. Two new banners with what seem to be the last Celebratory alt costumes for the whole cast have dropped. My opinions on the game itself will be subject to change as time moves on, so this review most likely will not reflect my thoughts on the game when it inevitably reaches it’s end of service.


I preordered this game and played it on release on and off up until now. I’m not new to gacha games, been playing a lot of them for most of my life. However I did have a more vested interest in this one due to it’s relation to the Drakengard and Nier series as a whole, as the series has a history for branching out to other mediums to expand on it’s shared universes. The gacha mechanics in this game are standard, even arguably kinder than most other games in the genre. Reruns of limited event banners rarely happen, but the meta of PvE or PvP or any other game modes don’t particularly concern me. I just need a team good enough to progress through the story and enough currency to roll for the units I want. In terms of standing on its own as a Nier title, I’d say it neither fails nor succeeds. Rather, it feels more like a bridging point between Replicant’s and Automata’s design philosophies. It maintains Replicant’s more fantastical elements, more shown in the first arc, while going into a comparatively modern setting pairing with Automata’s futuristic senses in the second. Arc 1, The Girl and The Monster, introduces 10 playable characters, 8 of them all being from stories contained in weapons found The Cage, while Arc 2, The Sun and The Moon, introduces 8, with 6 being characters with weapon stories. I would go into more specificities on the nature of the weapon stories in this game, but that would be verging on spoiler territory for a story that is not even completely finished yet. The characters themselves are well established in their weapon stories, and there are plenty of other sidestories and events so that players can learn more about them and the worlds they come from. They are all equally fleshed out and no one character is poorly written in my eyes. The protagonists of the overarching plot in each arc are also enjoyable to learn about, and exploring The Cage along with them leads to some fun times.
Had I written this review earlier in the game’s life, one thing I would have given it praise for was the abundance of English voice acting, a thing which is not often present in most gacha games of this kind. The entirety of Arcs 1 and 2 are dubbed in English, with character stories and events also being narrated up until recently. On the date of this review being written, it was recently announced that English voicework would no longer be supported in the global versions of the game. Reading the news created a pit in my stomach, as one of the things that made this game stand out amongst its contemporaries was going away. A sad development, no doubt.
All in all, as a gacha game, it’s pretty standard, and nothing particularly outstanding, but not terrible, either. As a Nier title, I would say that it creates even more possibilities for the future of the series, possibilities which I hope Yoko Taro will capitalize on, in this game or the next.

Getting through so I'm ready for any sort of lore revelations in the concerts over these next few months. This first arc takes a while to get invested and only starts adding from interesting more elements in the storybook vignettes in the later half.

Shame gameplay is just an autobattler, but now its gotten rid of the gacha grind by showering players with all the general resources to max level characters. My only regret was dropping this at launch to never be able to get 2B, Kaine or Zero.

Going to curse at Yoko Taro at the concert cause we're now even further from Caim being mentioned in any way shape or form

I had low expectations going in and I was kind of still disappointed maybe?

This isn't a rant about how I hate gacha games because let's be real here, every gacha player on the planet hates gacha. The only real complaint I have about that is how stingy this game is with summon resources. Surprisingly I think the pull rates are pretty fair.

The actual issue for me is the story's overall presentation and its style of narrative and just how much potential it squanders. It's got a lot of unique character stories and ALL of them are good, but they are also conveyed through completely 3rd person narration, and they are way too short for me to form any attachment to these characters. There is too little dialogue or internal monologue for me to truly understand how these characters feel, which is ironic because those sections play out like novels, the medium that lets you have as much dialogue as you want. It's the difference between being told this character was hurt, versus actually getting in their heads and spending time with them to know how badly they were hurt on a personal level. And yeah I know you unlock more chapters of these characters' stories later on and they are better but they are locked behind so much progression and tedious grinding that I don't feel it's worth it. Doesn't help that I don't particularly love the battle system you have to endure to get that progression and the difficulty doesn't scale very well. The event stories are interesting but suffer from the same problems imo

The main story is alright I guess. It's not the best thing Yoko Taro has written but it doesn't have those aforementioned problems since Fio and Levania are somewhat well fleshed out and I liked their arcs, their internal struggles, their character dynamic, and their conclusion a lot. The main story definitely became infinitely more enjoyable when the focus was on Levania because you got a lot of great banter and the story felt less dead. But I still feel like more could have been done with the concept. Yoko Taro is a talented writer and sometimes his writing does shine even in this game, but it feels like he's holding himself back a bit much. There is genuine effort and passion put in, and I still really like the art and the music, but alas, this game probably just didn't do it for me.

I'll come back if they do a Drakengard 1 collab or if someone convinces me the story actually goes crazy later down the line or something idk. Otherwise....... it's got a little something for everyone 8/10 still a better gacha than Mobage Transformers Legends

you know, I downloaded this game 2 years ago thinking ill cry a lot, I thought I would love this game, but I did not. This game quite genuinely has no upsides, the combat is like xenoblade’s but make it a hundred times slower. The combat is not engaging at all, the story or actually stories are garbage, the “characters” are boring, they’re just nameless randos, im sorry i even hated the music, it literally sounds like something a neurodivergent 5 year old would make in garage band on the phone his mom gave him so he can stay quiet while she’s having a work meeting on zoom. terrible final entry. what a disgrace to the drakengard series.

I am very fond of the NieR aesthetic like many, and there are sparks of an interesting game present in Reincarnation, but unfortunately this game does very little to impress me. The story, while neat, failed to really grab me in any meaningful way early on, and the gameplay is totally braindead. When playing this game I ultimately couldn't help but feel like I was playing another one of hundreds of shitty mobile gacha games, but with a really nice NieR paint job. Perhaps the story gets better later on at least, but unfortunately that ship has sailed and the game failed to keep me playing.

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.

Still playing it, on second arc.

When you play it like visual novel, the stories are compelling and pretty. And the global story is pretty good. Art is good.

The rest of it is a mess of systems that makes the game autoplayable or a torture.