"You don't have to be insane to kill someone. You just have to think you're right." - Yoko Taro, Creative director of NieR and NieR Replicant Ver.1.22.

NieR (2010) was a very depressing game: It centered around the dusk of humanity, slowly dying out to an incurable disease as monsters roamed the countryside. More often than not, the quests our hero would embark on ended in tragedy, or in one extreme case, with the game itself seemingly mocking you for being the altruistic hero expected of the genre. The party is full of misfits, outcast from society, born into unfair circumstances beyond their control. Halfway through the game, the world itself began to feel bleak. Ugly. Cynical.

NieR (2010) was a game about compassion. The world was bleak, yes, but the people in it found the will to continue because of the people around them. Our hero, who's undying love for his family drives his every action, even when the world has kicked him while he was down, until every scrap of altruism and goodwill is used to justify his violent and self-destructive actions. Our party of misfits, who find true companionship in each other, even if they are all deeply flawed individuals. The people and townsfolk who still find it in them to look out for those closest to them, even in the roughest of times. The Shades you slaughter wholesale, who may be more like the party than any of them would ever like to believe. NieR was unique in that it's condemnation of violence did not start and end with the act itself, but rather the fact that everyone has something to fight for, whether you realize it or not. The horror comes from how easy it is to dehumanize, to dissociate from the slaughter, to kill, when you truly believe you are just in your every action.

Ver.1.22 at its core, is still the same game it was 11 years ago. I felt for the characters like I did with the original, every emotional beat hit just as hard as it hit in the 2010 original, and the new story content slotted into the existing story perfectly. But I worry what Ver.1.22 means for the franchise going forward.

The characters have been dolled up and made more accurate to the original illustrations, and yet the charm of uncanny people in an uncanny world (even if it was unintentional) was lost. The combat has been made silky-smooth like Automata, with fancy lock-on and big sweeping flourishes, and yet the heavy, brutal nature and weight of the original's combat that really sold the impact and viscera has been lost for the sake of flashy extravagance. The soundtrack has been souped up with more instruments, additional passages and a cinematic flair, and yet the original's sense of aggression, quiet and intimacy have been lost (looking at you "Shadowlord"). NieR was admittedly rough around the edges, and not every change was bad necessarily, but NieR has been made to conform to its much more successful younger sibling Automata, and in doing so, has lost some of it's original edge and feel. It's the Yakuza Kiwami to Automata's Yakuza Zero.

Ver.1.22 is no Demon Souls' (PS5), it's no Silent Hill HD Collection, it's no Conker Live & Reloaded. It's still a fantastic game, and a great way to enjoy the story of NieR and its characters. But in our era of re-releases and remasters, we're so blinded by the ideal of progress that we seem to be losing sight of what made our games unique in the first place.

Never has a game made me cry this much before.

It's snowing. A boy and his younger sister are starving and freezing, so they seek shelter in an abandoned supermarket to find rations and warmth. No one else is in sight, the streets and supermarket are empty - until mysterious shadows break into the store and threaten the siblings. With his remaining strength, the boy heads out to the parking lot and decides to take on the monsters with just an iron pipe and dark magic spells from a mysterious book, as he needs to protect his beloved sister at all costs. It's a hopeless battle, but the brother has no other choice.

NieR Replicant ver1.22 tells the tale of the young Nier and his quest to find a cure to heal his bedridden sister Yonah. Their parents are dead, so Nier is doing his best as a big brother and takes on various requests in his village to earn some pocket money to buy food, but at the same time he hates seeing his sister alone and wants to spend more time by her side. Life isn't easy for the two of them and it would be a shame if it got any worse.

Alright, I'm not giving an entire rundown of the plot here. My point is: The game is sad! Really sad. As you've read in the opening sentence, never has a game made me tear up and shiver as much as Replicant before and I'm a sucker for stories with emotional impact. It's really one of the best narratives I've ever seen. The moment I stepped foot into Aerie Village I knew I was in for a ride, but to be fair, the game does start rather slow and doesn't really gain momentum until an hour or so in, but that's because Replicant starts by showing Nier's daily life in the village and his routine (comparable to Twilight Princess' intro segment, but only half as long). The payoff is worth it though, as experiencing the plot unravel firsthand from an average shonen story to pure Yoko Taro madness is truly an one-of-a-kind experience and you'll never see this adventure the same way again after some reveals. Through episodic storytelling in the form of multiple routes, the player needs to replay a part of the game each time, but in each subsequent playthrough, new scenes that give context to certain events are added, which totally enhanced the experience for me, especially since you'll always know after your first playthrough what's going to happen next. Not gonna elaborate on that further, since it's a very spoilery topic by nature, so you should just experience it for yourself. However, I can understand how people are upset with the repetition, especially since the third playthrough is nearly identical to Route B. But trust me, pushing through is worth it and by the time you reach Ending E most of your questions should be answered, which is a great reward. The only thing I'm a bit torn on is the requirement to have all weapons in your inventory to access Routes C, D and E, since some of them are missable. A bunch of missed weapons can be bought at the blacksmith in Aerie Village after a certain point in the story, but some also require you to do three certain side quests. My recommendation: Since you can't get all the weapons on Route A normally anyways (3 are locked behind the World of Recycled Vessel content, which only unlocks after beating the game once), I suggest you just play through that one normally and pick up every weapon you find along the way (remember to break the crates!!) and if you are still missing some, you might look up where to get them on Route B. This requirement really shows the age of the original game, but shouldn't distract you from the overall outstanding narrative.

Okay, so the story is good, but what about the gameplay? I think it's great personally! (Except for the part where I broke the spring in my controller's right trigger... by dashing too much.) The controls are simple and the combat feels satisfying, there are great animations and the attacks feel like they have weight to them. Being able to utilize weapons and magic at the same time is really cool, you can pull off some interesting maneuvers by combining certain spells with standard attacks; there's even an in-game tutorial for it, if I remember correctly. But the combat is not the only aspect of the game, a lot of time is spent... backtracking (and fishing). There's really a lot of running around, especially if you're looking to complete as many side quests as possible. As someone who wanted to get the most out of Replicant, I finished the game with 97% sidequest completion and only left out two specific ones deliberately because I really didn't like the idea of spending several real-time days on the gardening part of the game with only a chance to get the flower seeds you need. That quest aside, surprisingly I really enjoyed my time with most of the sidequests! A whole lot of them were just fetch quests, yet you get some nice (voiced) dialogue out of them and I got to spend more time in this cozy world, so it didn't really matter to me - the extra banter alone made it worth to me. There's also some particularly good quests, like ones where you can make decisions that actually impact your rewards and the people around you. As an example, in one quest you can decide whether to help a criminal out or not and you have to live with that decision. Same goes for several occasions throughout the game where Nier can decide to either tell the truth or lie to people - there is no "right" choice and it's up to the player to decide what they think is for the best. Very cool.

The cast of this game is awesome, and I'm not just talking about the main party. Characters like the twins, Fyra or the postman really add to the liveliness in this overall rather bleak world and everyone has their own unique story behind them. I mean there's even a backstory for the fisherman who gives you all those fishing quests! Fishermen and postmen aside, Nier's actual companions deserve the spotlight just as much. Weiss, Emil and Kainé are some of the most unusual JRPG companions I have ever seen (and I love them for it), since they basically go against most of the common tropes you'd expect out of a sidekick. Personally I found the banter of the party to be really interesting at times, since their distinctive personalities are just destined to have a weird dispute every now and then.

The rearranged soundtrack is just beautiful. While NieR Gestalt focused more on the bass of the songs and sounds "rougher", Replicant ver1.22 centers the instruments more and has a "softer" tone, which fits the melancholic vibe incredibly well in my opinion. If you'd ask me to pick three four favorite songs, I'm going with Snow in Summer, Temple of Drifting Sands, Song of the Ancients (Devola) and Fleeting Words (Outsider). I'm not linking them this time, because it's quite hard to find an upload of the individual ver1.22 arrangements on YouTube and its even harder to find spoiler-free ones (very important for a story-heavy game like this).

To wrap this up, I firmly believe Nier Replicant is a must-play for anyone who loves JRPGs with great narrative, characters and soundtrack (but can also handle a little repetition). While the game can be a little slow at times, the experience of slowly piercing this story and context together for yourself is unbeatable and I hope it makes you just as sad you can find just as much enjoyment in it as I did!

Can gamers at least try to be consistent when trashing games for having MTX, it feels like such random games always catch heat for it when there's much bigger offenders even among Capcom's own library (Monster Hunter World & Rise lmao)

I can at least understand people being upset over optimization (even if in my experience I've had little to no issue in the 5 hours I've played so far), but obviously the issue differs from person to person.

Game is fun tho, I'm having a blast, this really is just an improved version of the original Dragon's Dogma and I'm all for it.

This highlights everything that is wrong with modern gaming, in one soulless predatory, cringey, outdated and repetitive package.

Peak creative bankruptcy and Rocksteady should be ashamed of themselves.

Uninstalled out of 10.

huge youtuber psyop. not great especially in the way of writing ("This TEAM ROCKET thing is just a job, but I can see it hurts others. That's it, I'm leaving. Thank you so much. Sorry GIOVANNI!") and some balancing decisions seem pretty arbitrary but serviceable enough. you guys can do most of this on your own in a few weeks b/c of how much is copy-pasted from guides on pret's pokecrystal decomp github repo

https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal/wiki/Tutorials

https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/pok%C3%A9mon-polished-crystal-update-2-2-0.373172/ !!!
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3840/
https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/pokemon-crystal-ultimate.441959/
https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/pokemon-pyrite.350926/
https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/pokemon-complex-crystal-100-complete.291295/

Probably the worst Pokemon has to offer. A short game that's filled to the brim with the most annoying and intrusive story I've seen. Of my 20 hours of playtime in this game, I'd wager over half of that was spent mashing A to get through dialogue and cutscenes. The structure of the game is also weird. On release I didn't mind the trials, but on a replay I think the majority of them are very annoying to sit through. The game was only difficult at all because I chose not to evolve my starter, didn't fight most trainers, and used a monotype team. I cannot stress how awful the story is. On top of being intrusive like I said, the actual content of the story is terrible. It's all over the place with tone and has no buildup to the climax. For like 2 hours before the climax, you just get a complete break in the story and go fuck off somewhere else for a while. The first 10 hours of the story are spent doing nothing that has any impact on the last few hours of it, and it honestly felt like a massive waste of time. This game would have been better if they had decided to rely less on a shitty story and more on fleshing out interesting trials and islands. Bad game.

The best possible sendoff to Yu-Gi-Oh GX. There's a lot going for this game.

First of all, most of the grindy parts of the previous tag force games has been eliminated, making it much more reasonable to complete every character's story mode. Each character has multiple stories, not only allowing you to tag with characters as they are in GX, but also different version of them. What if Syrus never matured? What if Zane never became a masochist? It's really cool to see the ideas that they came up with for this one.

The downside to this is that there are a lot of GX characters who should have had stories who just didn't, like Jesse and Axel. You can still partner with them for a more generic story, so it's not the end of the world.

This game also give Bastion the sendoff he deserves, which makes me happy.

Anyways, I love this game.

the references are dated
the humor is fucking embarrassing
the fakemon designs juvenile
the people behind it are questionable
the update releases are glacial
yet its still somehow the best pokemon game ever made

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