Yeah... this game is just not as good as I remember. 7 or so years ago when I first played this I was over the moon with it, I would call it a masterpiece, truly a one-of-a-kind game, straight 9-10/10. But now that I replayed it, I honestly can see what I meant, but how the fuck did I not notice all the GLARING issues.

The game looks and sounds great fat ass its so deep soundtrack amazing etc etc you heard this part a million times so I will skip to stuff people conveniently leave out of their opinions.

The story is interesting, it's unique, and has some twists and turns in there, so it's definitely worth the effort (up to a certain point). But then you have some characters who are pretty one-dimensional, not helped by dialogue and characterization that bounces from 'brilliant' to 'babies first edgy anime'. This is an issue with first Nier too, but to a way less egregious degree. 9S starts as a completely fine character, has his development, and then for the last third of the game I just wanted to quit playing because of how much of a fucking screaming fucking baby he became. I guess that's how Yoko Taro sees emotional breakdown or something? I don't fucking care, I don't want to play as a screaming, annoying child for 9 hours. A2 is literally nothing, she does nothing interesting or meaningful, she says nothing interesting or meaningful, she could easily be deleted from the story and nothing would change except they needed someone to play the opposite side of the screaming fucking baby.

The combat while flashy and cool for the first couple of hours shows its hand extremely quickly, in essence, it's shallow. Your move set is fine but busted right off the rip, the dodge and parry that give you complete invincibility and follow-up attacks are so goddamn easy to perform they make any fight a joke, playing 9S just turns the videogame off completely due to his hacking being so OP. None of that matters though because the enemies you face in this game are designed fucking terribly. Visually they are stunning like everything in the game. But when it comes to gameplay you will never do anything else but rush down the enemy and mash attack, dodge/parry the huge obviously telegraphed attacks. If you are 9s just hack. That's it, you never have to wait, bait out attacks, aim for weak spots, change weapons, or adjust your strategy. There are a couple of enemy types like ones with shields, flying, and electric ones, none of that matters. Your approach to combat will never change, and your strategy will never get tested. The combat becomes boring at hour 6, and you have to go for 23 more hours to finish the game. I was yawning and falling asleep so often during the second half of the game it's unbelievable, I would only become animated again once a cutscene started playing.

Some of that could have been avoided if the 100% completely pointless B-ending potion of the game did not exist. Basically, after you achieve your first main ending you do everything you just did again, and it's so fucking unbelievably boring and lame. Some idiots will try to sell you the idea that you get to see stuff from another perspective or something. Super, you dimwit, that could have been easily worked into the main campaign by having you play as certain characters for certain parts. They picked the worst possible way to go about this. This game REALLY feels like the devs wanted to waste your time between all the actually cool story stuff. I'm talking MMO bottom of the barrel quest design at points.

Part of the boredom came from the fact that the game is balanced terribly in a very specific way. I went through the game doing the main story and leaving side content for later. At some point, I remembered why that was a bad idea. If you progress too far in the game you get COMPLETLY cut off from completing/taking on certain quests. The game expects you to do as many of them as possible apparently because the enemies in the main campaign out-leveled me pretty badly at some point, turning every single enemy into a health sponge that did little to no damage to me? It's called a side quest for a reason for fuck's sake, why would you expect me to do them in order to beat the main story, even if you did, why would you make them impossible to do after certain points so that you can really fuck yourself over. This exact thing happened to me when I first played too because no other game functions like this because it's terrible design.

It's quite middling. Okay but extremely simplistic story, with some great characterization and dialogue, okay-ish platforming, and puzzles that bring that tomb-riding, adventuring spirit to the whole thing. Everything bogged down by the mindless, plain unfun shooting mechanics, this game was released during the 3rd person cover shooter epidemic and it shows, the remaster could not have salvaged much of that unfortunately. Wave after wave after wave after wave after wave after wave after wave of enemies that tank stupid amount of shots into everything but the head, almost 0 thought was put into level design because the devs knew your ass is gonna camp that one specific thing that gives you the best cover.

Bro what the fuck, people are sleeping on this game big time. No naval combat, 3 completely different maps with such different vibes, ACTUALLY DECENT CHARACTERS AND WRITING, detection fixed, climbing puzzles are finally back instead of being "hold freerun", the story doesn't waste your time with filler bullshit (although it does get too fast and abrupt at points due to what I imagine were budget issues?), the disguise system is cute but it's definitely nothing to write home about, this also had SO FEW BUGS COMPARED TO AC3! I'm sorry, this shit was way more enjoyable for me than AC III and I will die on this hill.