Holy fetch-quests batman. This was not at all the game I was expecting based on the raging torrent of praise its original always receives. The music, while not as striking or varied as Automata, was still good. The little of the town designs they had were sprawling and quite unique, though the linear dungeons left much to be desired. But heeby jeeby the amount of inane things the game makes you do... Whether it's asking you to go back and forth to Seafront five times in fifteen minutes for a single questline, head back home to receive a letter just so you can go back to where you came from, the delayed explosions of the robots, or those dreadful escort missions following the little girl as she sluggishly runs all over the town and desert. Even the notion of wanting a quick-travel is dismissed early via in-game dialogue, and when it is both unlocked and not impeded by some meandering plot, it's rare for it to even reach the places you need to go. Even as someone who realised early that the sidequests were going to harm my experience more than benefit it, the game design absolutely relishes wasting your time and it just kinda sucks. I'm super guilty of forgetting about JRPGs and leaving them sitting for several months at a time, but I've never encountered something infuriating enough to make me deliberately step away from it before. I tried so hard to love it for its legacy, but dang it the game just sucks. I am not strong enough to brave 30 more hours of this.

Watching a lingerie-clad warrior girl with white hair and chuuni bandages to seal the dark power in her arm get lectured by a tsundere grimoire about learning to live life through the power of love and friendship did leave me wondering how NieR is always such a staple of the "grr anime bad give me mature non-anime jrpgs" recommendation posts that pop up so frequently. Alongside Xenogears and its many ties to Megazone, Evangelion and Ideon, I'm starting to wonder if people just don't actually know what anime is.