Malf on 20/3/2017 at 10:57
So after Jesh fessed up to owning this after our co-op session on Saturday, and saying it's rather good (and knowing I've liked every Platinum game I've played so far), I bought this on Saturday night.
And it really is rather good.
Mostly, it's Platinum combat in their idea of an "Open World" with a robust RPG character / weapon develop system.
There's a lot of weirdness to it, and I can already tell there's going to be some interesting explorations of existentialism and consciousness.
Technically, I'm not seeing any of the issues that are making headlines, but then I'm playing at 1440P as opposed to 1080P. Weirdly, the framerate is silky smooth while playing, but the cutscenes noticeably dip.
Still not sure how I feel about a lead character that's constantly flashing her underwear. Japan still seems quaintly behind the curve when it comes to gender portrayals in videogames.
The open world is obviously something Platinum haven't quite grasped in its entirety yet, with buildings and openings that beg to be explored, but have invisible walls blocking entry. And there's not much to do in the open world other than fight stuff and pick up glowing orange things. Yet It's very pretty in its portrayal of desolation.
But one of the best things is how they constantly play with viewpoints and genres. One minute, you'll be playing a classic Platinum spectacle fighter, the next it'll switch to a sidescrolling 2.5D platformer, then a top-down brawler, then an into-the-screen shooter a la Star Fox, then a vertically scrolling SHMUP, then a twin-stick shooter, then a side-scrolling SHMUP, hell, it's a massive grab-bag of classic gameplay, and all of the modes switch seamlessly and feel complete, not just half-assed attempts.
Unfortunately, this does serve to highlight Platinum's traditional weakness in their most natural spectacle fighter mode.
The camera's just as bad as it always is in Platinum games if you don't target lock, and even if you do, scenery will quite often obscure what's going on.
But that doesn't matter. I'm mostly here for those glorious Platinum boss-battles, and they are indeed glorious.
I'm sure "This Cannot Continue" will become as iconic as "Rules of Nature".
Sure, the battle itself is actually one of the easiest Platinum boss battles I've played, but the style, music and direction are pure Platinum.
First impressions and all that, but if you're a Platinum fan, I can pretty safely say you'll enjoy this massively.
WingedKagouti on 20/3/2017 at 13:05
It's been on my wishlist since it was available to put on your wishlist on Steam. It'll unfortunately due to monetary reasons stay on the wishlist for the forseeable future.
But I've liked all the Platinum games I've played so far (MadWorld, Bayonetta, Legend of Korra, MGRising and Transformers: Devastation) and I am certainly going to get this game as well, once I can afford it.
Sulphur on 20/3/2017 at 14:08
I've played it for a few hours and I really like it, though I can't really tell why so far. It's a post-genre RPG all right, part shmup, part Smash TV, part jRPG, part brawler, and those genre bending tricks give it a lot of mileage. It can be very pretty, but its graphics work at scale, with great sweeping vistas that resolve into some pretty ugly textures up close, and the colour palette is post apocalyptic bleach. Still, the setup is interesting, and it hints at deeper things going on, which is its own compelling reason to keep going.
As a port it's a 0-day mess. Fullscreen runs at a quad-buffered (apparently) interlaced mode that's a blurry mess, so you have to force it to run as a borderless window with a third-party app. It also uses all my available GPU bandwidth for something that doesn't look particularly demanding, and while I don't mind that it runs at 55-60 FPS, there's odd momentary microstuttering that isn't that bad but still noticeable. It needs a bunch of patches to get shipshape.
Malf on 20/3/2017 at 14:30
I take it you're at 1080P Sulphur?
From everything I've read that seems to be where most of the problems happen. As noted above, aside from the weirdly low framerate in cutscenes, my experience has been flawless.
Oh, another interesting foible:
Unlike a lot of modern games, it doesn't support the DS4 pad out-of-the-box, but you can get around this by getting Steam to recognise the DS4 by going into controller settings. Then it works flawlessly (apart from it having xbox 360 button prompts).
Sulphur on 20/3/2017 at 14:39
Yes, 1080p it is. Since we've got the same GPU, 1440p is worth a shot -- didn't occur to me to try it, to be honest, since I assumed a higher resolution would perform worse.
As for the cutscene framerate, I think those are prerendered movies encoded at 30 FPS like a few games do (Quantum Break, most recently).
twisty on 20/3/2017 at 14:52
I've been looking forward to this game for a while now and will probably pick it up on the PS4 in the next few weeks; although, as usual, it is a bit cheaper on the PC so will see how it goes. Apart from the pretty visuals and varied gameplay, how have you found the soundtrack? I've heard some favourable comments about it.
Sulphur on 20/3/2017 at 14:54
Oh dear, and to think that was the entire reason why I bought N:A in the first place (well, that, and that it's a Platinum collaboration with Taro). I can't believe I forgot to mention that.
The soundtrack is great. Haven't heard any themes that are as flat out amazing as the original Nier's standouts, but they're still really good, and I'm fairly early on in the game. It continues in the same vein of lacing most of its tracks with female vocals, and they're memorable and rousing in turn when needed.
Severian_Silk on 24/3/2017 at 12:45
A sequel to one of my favorite games. It"s probably gonna be a favorite too.
I'm playing it on PC and it works very nice with fan-made fixes installed (even thought my system's apparently below minimal requirements. Playing on 720p of course).
Malf on 24/3/2017 at 14:03
I did have one incredibly annoying bug occur last night that is making it hard for me to go back to the game:
One of the core mechanisms of the game is the whole Chip system. As you kill bots and complete objectives, you'll gather chips that can be used to augment your character. Regenerating health, better weapon damage, easier dodges, that kind of thing.
These chips feature a rating and a cost; the higher the rating and the lower the cost, the better. You can upgrade chips by fusing them, and the lowest cost chips, denoted by a black diamond, are the most valuable, because they take up less space in your loadout while providing the same bonuses.
They can in turn be fused with one another to make a higher cost but higher rated chip. If you use a diamond (or "Black Box") chip as at least one of the fused chips, you ensure you keep the lowest possible cost for the resulting chip.
These do now drop with regularity.
You use chips to build your character; they handily slot into a container that resembles nothing less than a hard drive's file table, with higher cost chips taking up more space. This means that if all you have are high cost chips, you have less functionality.
This all ties in to the Demon's Souls style feature they have: If you die, you have to recover your body to recover your chips.
Yesterday, I died. And yet when I got back to where I had died, there was no body there. All my equipped, upgraded chips were gone with no chance of recovery, and my character's effectiveness was dramatically impacted. My only option is to grind for replacement chips, something that could take an awfully long time.
Needless to say, I'm quite despondent about having my game punish me so dramatically, basicallly sending me back to the start, thanks to a bug.
It's also made me realise that this game has the potential to be even more punishing than Demon's Souls. If you die twice in Souls games, you just lose the souls, which don't really take that much time to re-accumulate (unless you're playing at high level).
In Nier: Automata however, there's the potential of losing a substantial amount of your character's build with your chips. I'm sure difficulty fetishists will love this, but for me? It's really soured me on the game.
And I hear that the jump in difficulty from Normal to Hard is obscene, with virtually everything being one hit, one kill. So yeah, good luck with that.
Basically? With my initial enthusiasm being tempered by harsh reality and bugs, I would definitely say "Buyer beware".
