1632: Defenders of Eorzea

Final Fantasy XIV patch day today, and I told myself that today was going to be a day off from stress, anxiety and worrying about things, and that I was just going to enjoy myself. So I did. I logged on at about 11:30 this morning — or yesterday morning, if we're being truly accurate — and now, at 2:52am, I am logging off, with only a few short breaks throughout the day for food and drink.

Suffice to say, patch 2.3 is excellent. I, along with many of my Free Company-mates, took today to work through the new episode of the main scenario quest, which included a spectacular battle against Ramuh, Lord of Levin (aka "the old man who flings lightning everywhere") as well as a ton of other story content. I also completed the new Hildibrand questline — a comedic questline that, for many, has proven a highlight of Final Fantasy XIV's ongoing updates — as well as trying out all three of the new 4-player dungeons.

And I've barely scratched the surface. I've bought a room in our Free Company's house for my character, but I'm yet to fill it with furniture — there's just a bed, a couple of chairs and a table in there for now. I haven't even touched the new 24-player Crystal Tower raid, which promises to be an enjoyable clusterfuck, just like the previous 24-player Crystal Tower raid. And there's a ton of other stuff I'm yet to fiddle around with, too — not to mention returning to the tasks I was already working on prior to the patch, which will now be somewhat easier thanks to improved rewards from a bunch of game content.

So far there have been numerous highlights. Although some disliked the amount of dialogue and cutscenes in the main scenario quest, I enjoyed what was offered, as if you stopped to read it and see what was going on, it proved to be a nice "here's what's been happening elsewhere in the realm since last you saw these people" affair. There was also some neat — if rather obvious — foreshadowing of who the next "big fight" is going to be against.

The new dungeons are great, too. Tam-Tara Hard is particularly fun — as one of the low-level dungeons that comes up most frequently in Low-Level Roulette, Tam-Tara is a dungeon that many people were growing sick of, but its Hard incarnation successfully reimagines it into one of the best — if not the best — dungeon in the game. Featuring a creepy atmosphere, some brilliant boss fights and a narrative twist that is sure to please those who were paying attention earlier in the game, Tam-Tara Hard was a real highlight of today's session.

Stone Vigil Hard has proven more divisive, but it's certainly an interesting, challenging experience. The regular enemies are more than a match for even a well-geared party, and the bosses all make use of interesting mechanics that require far more than a simple "tank and spank" approach. This is nothing unusual for Final Fantasy XIV, which features some very involved boss battles throughout, but Stone Vigil Hard features some particularly interesting mechanics.

Finally, the all-new dungeon Hullbreaker Isle was great. Unfolding mostly outdoors, the "dungeon" sees you attempting to track down the treasure of the pirate Mistbeard. Along the way, you have to contend with various groups of angry wildlife, some unpleasant traps left behind to deter unwanted visitors, and, at the end, a rather annoyed kraken who wants nothing more than to pick you up, fling you around and splatter you with ink.

Final Fantasy XIV continues to go from strength to strength. It remains, as it has done since it launched last August, one of my favourite games, and if the strength of this new content is anything to go by, it has a significant amount of life in it. I'm genuinely intrigued to see where the main story is going, and in the meantime I'm really enjoying the other tasks and challenges the game faces me with. And there's some stuff — like the super-challenging endgame raid The Binding Coil of Bahamut — that I'm still barely touching. There is so much to do, and I'm having an absolute blast doing it — not to mention making some good friends in the progress.

Now, my brain is fried, so I should probably go and get some sleep. It's back to the doldrums of hunting for work tomorrow, though I don't doubt I shall reward myself with an hour or two in Eorzea as the day progresses!

1610: Titan Falls

Just wanted to share my enthusiasm for what I felt was a significant (gaming) achievement this evening: finally successfully toppling Titan's Hard Mode incarnation in Final Fantasy XIV without dying, without being blown up by bombs, without getting hit by Weight of the Land (too many times) and without doing anything stupid. The secret? Zoom out the camera.

For those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV's endgame, Titan Hard Mode was formerly one of the hardest encounters in the game, taking the form of an 8-player variation on one of the main story's 4-player bosses. Mastering (or at least clearing) the fight is an important part of endgame play, since acquiring your class's "Relic" weapon requires you to beat him along with the other two Hard Mode primal fights and two original bosses Dhorme Chimera and Hydra.

The actual battle against Titan bears some resemblance to its story mode counterpart in that Titan makes use of many of the same abilities throughout. The main difference is that the fight is overall a lot longer and incorporates a few new mechanics — most notably the addition of "Bomb Boulders" that drop down from the sky in set patterns and then explode in sequence, requiring the party to quickly and carefully manoeuvre from position to position in order to avoid damage — and while avoiding Titan's other abilities such as Landslide, which can knock you off the arena and out of the fight completely if you're not sharp enough.

Like the other Hard and Extreme mode Primal fights in Final Fantasy XIV, Titan Hard is quite a "choreographed" fight that requires the party be in the right place at the right time, and respond quickly to prompts on the screen. Titan always uses the same abilities in the same order, so there's very much a sequence and timing you can learn, though there will be slight variations on exactly what you need to do each time you play owing to people standing in different places.

It may sound odd to say, but it's a strangely beautiful sight to see a party pulling off a fight like Titan Hard efficiently and effectively. The group moving as one from place to place in response to the incoming threats is a very satisfying thing to watch, particularly when you're part of it. It's a hard thing to convey to anyone who hasn't experienced it for themselves, but in many ways it's like pulling off an impressive "dance" as a group — eight people working as one (for the most part… there's usually at least one person who falls off remarkably quickly, and up until tonight it's usually been me) to achieve a common goal.

I must confess to feeling pumped up and happy about my victory this evening — and, now, much more willing to jump into the Trials Roulette mode of the Duty Finder, which I'd previously been extremely hesitant about making use of despite the helpful rewards on offer. The Extreme Mode primals may still be a while off before I can confidently tackle them — same for Twintania, the notorious boss that guards the end of the first super-tough endgame dungeon The Binding Coil of Bahamut — but for now, I feel I have conquered Titan Hard and can move on to stiffer challenges.

Oh, and I should give a shout-out to Andie, too, who has been playing Final Fantasy XIV and has just got her first character to level 50, putting my friend James — who has been playing a lot longer — to shame. Nice job, W'khebica (an authentic Miqo'te name, apparently) — I look forward to enduring the endless Myth grind with you at my side.

1609: In Custody

Finished Murdered: Soul Suspect this evening. It's not a long game, which may cause consternation among some people wondering whether to splash their hard-earned cash on it, but I found it didn't outstay its welcome, and it was an eminently satisfying experience. (I am also of the age when I remember paying £30-40 for titles like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, which are about 2-3 hours long apiece, so I don't mind too much when something clocks in at 10 hours or less. In fact, given the number of absolute behemoths I play on a regular basis, it can be quite refreshing to play something short.)

I won't spoil the story here, but I was pleased to see that it didn't end up being quite as predictable as I initially believed it would be. Those with a better mind for this sort of thing than I — I'm thinking mainly of my friend Lynette here, who can spot a plot twist coming a mile off, however well the author might have obfuscated it — may still find it to be predictable, but I found that there were a few interesting surprises along the way, and the conclusion was satisfying and, well, conclusive.

I stand very much by my feeling that it had the atmosphere of a 1990s PC game, and I've been trying to figure out quite what I mean by that. It's a combination of things, I think: the use of "real world" settings with various obstacles in the way so they don't end up having to render the entire interior of a building; the way that NPCs sort of mill around and occasionally have conversations with one another that occasionally give you little hints about the plot; collectible bits and pieces that help flesh out the world; and gameplay that is less concerned about being overly "cinematic" or based on spectacle than it is about using its mechanics to make the player feel involved in what is going on.

It is not a hard game, and since the protagonist is already dead at the outset, there are relatively few situations in which you find yourself in peril, making it a mostly fairly cerebral experience. Even the few instances in which you find yourself threatened by angry spirits (known in the game as demons) are more environmental puzzles than fast-action combat — you don't actually "fight" the demons as such; instead, the only way to defeat them is to sneak up behind them and "execute" them. Alternatively, in pretty much any situation where you're threatened by them, you can just sneak past, too, which is nice.

This latter aspect of the game called to mind a slightly more recent game: Silent Hill: Shatered Memories, a retelling of the first Silent Hill game that replaced the PS1-era "survival horror" gameplay with something a bit different, a bit more modern, and entirely combat-free. In Shattered Memories, the most you can do with the monsters that inhabit the dark world of Silent Hill is to block their path with something heavy — for the most part, you're simply fleeing from them, attempting to make your way back to the exit as quickly as possible. Murdered: Soul Suspect isn't quite that non-violent — you can defeat the demons through the aforementioned sneak attacks, after all — but playing a game that doesn't have a straight "attack" button that causes you to flail wildly at enemies is always a pleasant surprise.

It may sound contradictory to compare Murdered: Soul Suspect to late-'90s PC games and Shattered Memories, a title I described above as being "modern", but there are certainly elements of both in there — the atmosphere and structure of a '90s game; the unconventional approach to gameplay of Shattered Memories.

Ultimately, the whole thing ended up being a game that I'm very glad I played, and one which I have absolutely no hesitation recommending to anyone who enjoys a good ghost story, a good detective story or a bit of both. It's an enjoyable tale told well, and a worthwhile investment of 10 hours or so of your life.

1608: Soul Suspect

I've been playing a game called Murdered: Soul Suspect today. It's a game that immediately intrigued me back at the Eurogamer Expo last year when I attended a hands-off gameplay demo and developer talk about it.

For the uninitiated, the premise is this: You play the role of Detective Ronan O'Connor, a sharp-eyed investigator in the traditional sense, complete with perpetual smoking habit and the dress sense of someone from the 1940s. Ronan is investigating a murder. Nothing unusual for a detective, you might think, until you discover that the murder he's investigating is his own. He's dead, you see, and not altogether happy about the situation in which he finds himself. And, in traditional ghost story fashion, he can't fully shuffle off this mortal coil until he unravels the mystery keeping him chained to existence.

Murdered: Soul Suspect has received rather poor reviews to date, with its Metacritic rating varying anywhere between the low 60s and the 40s depending on which platform you look at. And yet, as I've found in so many cases recently, these numbers do not paint an at all accurate picture of what the experience of playing the game is like.

It's enormously enjoyable. It's engrossing, well-written, well-acted and intriguing. Its blend of noir-style detective fiction and ghost stories is excellently handled, and the main storyline is backed up by some truly excellent supporting material, ranging from an exploration of setting Salem's history to some entertaining, authentically "campfire-style" ghost stories that you can unlock by discovering collectibles around the various environments in which you find yourself.

Gameplay-wise, it's rather simplistic: you wander around, you uncover clues — occasionally using your ghostly abilities to do so — and every so often you're quizzed on what you've discovered in order to progress. These quizzes may involve putting a sequence of events in the right order, deciding on the right piece of information to use to get a witness to do something, or simply making deductions based on the evidence you've found. Some of the questions and answers throughout are a little obtuse — and some are deceptively obvious — but the game never feels like it's punishing you for picking the wrong choice. Story is king here, and in this sort of game that's exactly how it should be.

In many ways, the game feels like a late '90s PC game, with its open, non-linear environments, lack of minimap and objective markers and… I don't know, there's just something about the general atmosphere of the whole thing that calls to mind titles like the original Deus Ex, Kingpin, Thief and any number of other titles from that similar era. It feels like a game out of its own time — and I kind of like that. (Oh, the PC version is also a tad buggy, too; I had to tweak an .ini file to get it running above 30 frames per second, and it works better with keyboard and mouse than it does with gamepad, but neither of these issues are something that has particularly hampered my enjoyment.)

There's an interesting cast of characters to explore, and some enjoyable banter between Ronan and Joy, a young medium who becomes his "sidekick" and pair of physical hands as his investigation progresses. The story itself — which I'm yet to finish — is looking like it might end up being fairly predictable overall, but that's not necessarily a bad thing; plenty of hardboiled and noir fiction is, in itself, predictable and formulaic, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Murdered: Soul Suspect has been unjustly lambasted by much of the press. I'm not entirely sure what people were expecting from it going in to it; I'm really enjoying it so far, and its simplistic gameplay certainly doesn't detract from the fact that it tells an enjoyable, interesting and unusual story. And that's what I want; I don't need fast action sequences, sprawling open worlds or a story that drags itself out unnecessarily over the course of 40+ hours. With Murdered: Soul Suspect what I've got is a good, concise, enjoyable interactive story that doesn't overcomplicate itself with unnecessary mechanics and irrelevant content.

It's a game worth playing, in other words, and another nail in the coffin for the usefulness of most modern reviews, so far as I'm concerned.

1599: Through the Maelstrom Again

Final Fantasy XIV patch day! If you don't play an MMO, it's probably difficult for you to understand why people get excited about patches, but we really do.

The reason for this is that, more so than any other type of game out there, MMO patches can considerably improve the experience of the game for everyone playing as well as adding new content to enjoy. And Final Fantasy XIV has definitely been delivering on that front since it launched.

Since launch, the game has, so far, enjoyed two major content patches and a few smaller patches along the way. These smaller ones are arguably the most interesting ones in many ways, because they tend to be the ones that improve the players' "quality of life" in various ways — perhaps through interface refinements, perhaps through balancing tweaks, perhaps through adjustments to the way the game works based on the community's feedback.

So far, we've seen all of the above. We've seen the easy to miss red targeting markers for enemy attacks replaced with more brightly coloured, pulsing markers. We've seen the addition of the Challenge and Sightseeing logs to give people more things to do and ways to earn rewards. We've seen adjustments to the endgame currencies as the average "item level" of endgame players gradually increases. And we've seen much-appreciated little usability tweaks, like the fact you can now get off a chocobo you're riding by pressing the shoulder buttons on your controller rather than having to twat about with hotbars and icons.

The game is still recognisable as what it was when it launched — it was already a solid game then, after all — but the refinements it has enjoyed ever since mean that it has been consistently, constantly improving — and, more importantly, it's proof that the development team is both willing to listen to players and implement some of their best ideas.

The game is going from strength to strength, in other words. And they said subscription-based MMOs were dead.

1531: Zodiac Brave

Final Fantasy XIV's second major patch is brilliant stuff, bringing with it an absolute shit-ton of things to do for those who have reached the level cap.

I used to be a little disappointed to hear that MMO expansions and major patches tended to favour endgame players over those working their way up through the levels, but now that I am an endgame player, I completely understand the logic. There's already a bunch of stuff there designed to get people from level 1 to level 50; but the people who have reached level 50 need a constant, continual stream of New Things to Do otherwise they'll simply jump ship and go off to play something else. In a subscription-based game such as Final Fantasy XIV, this is exactly what Square Enix does not want to happen.

Patch 2.1 added a decent amount of new content for endgame players to work through, primarily in the form of new dungeons and Trials (complex boss battles) to play through. Patch 2.2, the most recent one, initially appears to be somewhat similar, but there's a bunch of more subtle tweaks here and there that are designed to keep people invested in the game in the long term rather than simply racing through the new content as quickly as possible, then taking to the forums to whinge that there's not enough to do.

Chief among this time-consuming stuff is the Zodiac Weapons quest. One of the first things you'll want to do upon reaching the level cap in Final Fantasy XIV is complete the "A Relic Reborn" quest, which outfits you with a good weapon for your class that can subsequently be upgraded. The quest is a lengthy affair that demands you work through some of the toughest battles in the game and then participate in enough endgame content to earn the special currency required to purchase some items. Once it's done, it's done, though, and for each class there was previously only really one weapon better than the Relic available, and that was extremely difficult to obtain due to it being secreted in what was formerly the hardest dungeon in the whole game.

Now, though, your Relic can be upgraded further through the new Zodiac Weapons quest. After maxing out your relic, you're then tasked with going on the hunt for twelve "Atmas" — mysterious items that are required to buff up your Relic weapon into something new and shiny. In order to obtain the Atmas, you have to participate in the "FATE" events around Eorzea — little mini-quests that pop up around the world map that anyone in the area can jump in and help out with. For each FATE that you attain a gold medal in, there's about a 5% chance that the Atma for that area will drop, and you need to obtain twelve Atmas in total, so I'm sure you can see how this will take a while.

A grind it may be, but it's had the side-effect of making FATEs relevant again, which is a good thing, since they're a lot of fun and had fallen somewhat into disuse after the rewards from dungeon-crawling became significantly better. Now, though, there's always bands of wandering adventurers crawling around the various areas and stomping through the FATEs, and due to the game's level-sync mechanic, no-one will ever come along and simply overpower them, making it no fun.

Once you've obtained the twelve Atmas, there's then a selection of books to work through, each of which have their own challenges to complete and each of which buff up the Zodiac weapon's stats by a particular amount when you complete them. And then you can do this for each class.

In other words, it's going to take a while to accomplish. Despite the fact it's a fairly unsubtle move to keep endgame players invested in the game in the long-term, having a long-term goal like this is actually rather enjoyable because it brings a wonderful sense of achievement when you do finally accomplish it. I have no doubt that I'll put in the hours required to get a Zodiac weapon for my Black Mage class, and I will probably do it for the other classes I get to 50, too. I'm in this game for the long run, and I'm really enjoying the flow of new challenges that appear every few months.

1314: Day One in Eorzea

So it's finally here: Final Fantasy XIV. Of course, this isn't the first time I've played, as well you'll know if you've been paying attention to my enthusing, but we're at last at the stage where the game won't be "turned off" for significant periods of time (maintenance periods aside), and all characters people are playing as now are for keeps. (Here's mine, if you happened to be curious.)

While I'm not exactly what I'd call a hardcore MMO player, I have been present at the launch of a number of reasonably-to-large-sized MMOs, including World of Warcraft, Star Trek Online, DC Universe Online and a few others I've doubtless forgotten. And I have to say I've been pleasantly surprised at how well things have been going for Final Fantasy XIV so far — more often than not, an MMO's launch is a complete disaster, with servers going down, significant gameplay problems and at least one Legendary Error that becomes a meme before the first day is out.

Today's experience on Final Fantasy XIV hasn't been completely flawless — on more than one occasion, there has been problems with the instance servers, for example. For those not au fait with MMO lingo, an "instance" is a private copy of part of the game world specifically for your character and, in some cases, your party. Final Fantasy XIV makes extensive use of instances not just for multiplayer dungeons, which is how World of Warcraft popularised their use to the world, but also to keep significant "story events" for your character private and free of naked catgirls wandering around ruining the atmosphere (or enhancing it, depending on your view on naked catgirls).

FFXIV isn't completely reliant on these instances, thankfully, but the game's main story quest and class-specific quests do make use of them quite frequently, so the fact that they haven't been working properly for part of today has meant some people haven't been able to make as much progress as they'd like to have done. Naturally, some players have expressed anger at this — this is the Internet, after all, where people start petitions to remove Ben Affleck as the next Batman, for fuck's sake — but, as ever, this isn't particularly reasonable. Sure, it'd be lovely to have the game working as intended from the moment it's turned on, but we're currently in an "Early Access" period, with official service not starting until Tuesday for players who didn't preorder or play the previous incarnation of the game. As such, it's a good opportunity for Square Enix to work out any last-minute kinks — like this instance issue — and ensure things are running as smoothly as possible when new, non-preorder players start to arrive.

I should also draw attention to the fact that Square Enix hasn't just been sitting back and letting these problems go on; they've been investigating the causes and trying their best to fix them. There was a maintenance period earlier today that temporarily fixed the instance issues, but then they came back; as I type this, they think they've found the solution, but are testing it thoroughly before rolling it out to the game proper. By later tonight, it should hopefully be a lot more stable.

So far, then, FFXIV's launch has been one of the smoother ones I've seen. It hasn't been without issues, no, but at the same time they've been handled as well as can be expected — and things can only improve from here.

So here's to many more adventures in Eorzea; I've had fun today, and I'm looking forward to the further adventures of my character Amarysse as she becomes an ever more skilled thaumaturgist.

1171: Easy Listening, Part 2

As promised, I'm continuing yesterday's post with another game music fest to introduce you to the joys of some soundtracks you might not be familiar with.

Today, it's Cavia/Square Enix's strange, wonderful and rather depressing action-JRPG Nier.

Nier

Nier wasn't particularly well-received by critics upon its release due to a variety of factors. Having played it (and adored it, I might add), I can see why it was criticised, but equally I feel it was treated a little too harshly. Not only was it doing some fascinating things with the way it told its story and what its story was about — I'll leave the spoilers out of the discussion for now — but it was also doing some really interesting things with its gameplay, too. What initially appeared to be a relatively conventional third-person character action game/RPG subsequently revealed itself to have elements of visual novels, text adventures, farming sims, 2D platform games, isometric-perspective dungeon crawlers, bullet hell shooters and numerous other genres. It really was a massively interesting game in almost every way.

And then there was its soundtrack, which even if you don't like the game is indisputably amazing. Let's look at some standout tracks.

This track, known as Hills of Radiant Wind, is one of the tracks you'll hear most frequently in the game, since it typically accompanies your jaunts across the countryside surrounding the small settlement where the title character Nier and his daughter Yonah live. This track is hugely memorable both for having a catchy melody and capturing the atmosphere of the game world beautifully. The pounding drums at the bottom of the mix give a sense of adventure and driving forwards, while the vocal line atop the relatively simple accompaniment gives a suitable air of melancholy to the experience. Nier is not a happy game, and this track, while one of the more "upbeat" ones from the soundtrack, reflects that nicely.

This song, simply called Grandma, is beautiful, and is, to me, probably the most representative piece of music that illustrates what the Nier experience is all about. A simple accompaniment accompanied by a mournful voice provides a massively atmospheric backdrop to some of the most emotional story moments in the game.

And then we move on to a few tracks that use the "leitmotiv" technique I'm so fond of, where a number of different pieces make use of similar melodic or harmonic sequences to reflect various things happening to different characters and/or places.

Let's start with Emil, who, without spoiling anything, gets fairly consistently screwed over throughout the course of the whole game, through no fault of his own. Poor kid.

Anyway, here's Emil's "Sacrifice" theme, which accompanies some heartbreaking, sad moments:

And by contrast, here's his "Karma" theme, which comes shortly after a heartbreaking, sad moment when you're venting some aggression on the perpetrators:

The addition of the pounding drums and the urgent piano line in this one always gives me shivers, particularly when I remember how it was used in context.

Then we have Popola and Devola, two characters who are extremely important to the overall narrative in ways I won't spoil right now. When we encounter them, we hear various versions of the "Song of the Ancients" theme, beginning with this acoustic guitar-centric version:

…and moving on to this… I'm not sure how to describe this, really. Plinky-plonky version?

Well, if you're going to do two different versions based on the two characters who sing it, you might as well do a third version where they sing it together, mightn't you? Yes, obviously. This, along with Devola's theme above, are some of the only examples of diegetic music in the game — the rest is there to evoke a mood rather than actually be "present" in the world.

And, hell, if you're going to do that, you may as well go the whole hog and have a battle theme based on their (by now) iconic song, right? Of course.

The latter one, like Emil's "Karma" theme, still gives me shivers because I can remember it in context. Gobsmacking.

Then we come to Kainé, possibly one of the most fascinating characters in any game ever for a whole host of reasons, many of which aren't made entirely explicit in the game. Kainé has two main versions of her theme: a slow one, which goes like this…

…and a fast one, which goes like this.

Those who know their Nier lore will be familiar with the fact that Kainé is intersex. If you weren't familiar with your Nier lore, now you know too — don't worry, this isn't technically a spoiler in terms of the game's overall plot, and in fact knowing it beforehand brings a whole host of hidden meanings to a bunch of sequences in the game to the fore. I like to think that the markedly different character of these two pieces reflects Kainé's "masculine" and "feminine" sides, because she is most definitely in possession of both. She is, it's fair to say, a very angry person — and with good reason — but not afraid to express her feminine side in some rather… flamboyant ways.

One of the most interesting things about the vocal-heavy tracks in Nier are that they don't use a language from this world. Instead, vocalist Emi Evans was encouraged to make up words in a "futuristic language" — Nier is set in the far, far future — and used elements of Scottish Gaelic, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, English and Japanese to create something with a very distinctive sound, but which doesn't "mean" anything in and of itself. Instead, the vocal sounds are simply intended, for the most part, to evoke the overall feeling of sadness that pervades the whole game without distracting the player with recognisable words.

So that's Nier. Easily one of my favourite game soundtracks of all time, and a score which adds a huge amount of emotion to what is already a game rammed to the rafters with heartbreak.

#oneaday Day 866: NierCast

I've finally beaten Logic into submission and got it up and running on my new Mac, which means I've finally been able to edit the most recent Squadron of Shame SquadCast. Here it is:

(Direct link for those who can't see the inline player)

The subject of the podcast is Nier, an action RPG for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 published by Square Enix and developed by Cavia. You may recall I was enthusing about this game quite a lot back in early May, and that enthusiasm was what sparked the desire for us to do this particular podcast.

Nier is a fascinating game. Whether or not it's actually a good one is up for debate somewhat, but it's certainly a unique experience in the console space. In fact, to call it an "action RPG" as I did above is a gross injustice, since the game also incorporates elements of bullet hell shooters, text adventures, 2D platform games and open world quest-based "traditional" RPGs. The only games I can think of that offer a comparable experience include Space Rangers 2 and King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame, both for PC, and both offering wildly divergent experiences from Nier, but both taking this "kitchen sink" approach to genre blending.

Nier also distinguishes itself by having a mature plot that is worth following through. Sure, it's pure fantasy, but it's good, compelling fantasy — and the fact that the game was released as part of a much larger opus that spans several forms of media is very much apparent if you take the time to read up on it using sources such as Grimoire Nier. The game can most certainly be enjoyed in its own right without exploring any of the additional background material, but it becomes a far richer experience once you delve into the lore of the world — and, for that matter, the story of the game's creation. It's very much an example of a game whose world and characters are "bigger" than the game they inhabit, much like an author who plans out their characters by writing scenes for them that never appear in the book in question.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Nier, though, is its treatment of "New Game+" — the ability to go back and replay it after you've beaten it once. In many role-playing games, taking on a New Game+ is simply a matter of starting again with all your awesome items, equipment and buffed-up characters from the end of your first playthrough and then romping through the game slicing off heads with gay abandon and nary a fear for your own safety. Nier certainly does this — on subsequent playthroughs, boss fights that were once challenging are an absolute joke — but it's not the most important point.

Without getting into spoilers, Nier's New Game+ gradually adds new layers of complexity and nuance to the plot, calling into question the actions that you undertook without even thinking in your first playthrough. The player is given additional context with which to understand exactly what is really going on — and this manages to seamlessly pull the player's perspective around between several different characters and conflicting viewpoints while still keeping them in direct control of the titular hero. It's a very interesting experiment in a variation on the "unreliable narrator" trope, and one which could really only be done so effectively in an interactive form of entertainment such as a video game. It also makes Nier's New Game+ something that is actually worth doing rather than something which is just there for a bit of fun — and it's worth noting that it makes it abundantly clear when you've done absolutely everything there is to do by actually deleting your save file when you're done. In the context of the game, this somewhat dramatic action makes a great deal of sense (though you are asked to confirm whether you're sure you're okay with this five times) — but can you imagine what would have happened if, say, Mass Effect had pulled something similar? It would have been brilliant, but those complaining about the game's ending would have been even more furious than they are.

The final thing worthy of note about Nier is that it takes no more than 40 hours to do absolutely everything in the whole game including three New Game+ runs (an utterly stupid real-time farming minigame aside, which can be easily gamed by dicking around with your console's clock), making it eminently friendly to the busy lifestyles we grown-ups tend to lead these days.

So if you've never given Nier a shot, give it a chance. You might be pleasantly surprised. And if you have played and loved Nier — or, indeed, have no intention of ever playing it, ever — be sure to listen to our podcast for some in-depth discussion on this remarkable game.

#oneaday Day 835: I Finished Nier

As the heading says, I have indeed finished Nier… once, anyway. I'm going to hold off on doing a "review" as such for the moment, however, for several reasons. Firstly, a full understanding of the game is only attained following several playthroughs. And secondly, Nier is a fine example of how the "reviewing" system we use most of the time is, at times, flawed.

Nier enjoyed mediocre review scores on its original release, netting a Metacritic average of 68. As people who care about such things will tell you, 68 is not "bad" if you're taking 50 to be "average", but unfortunately no-one does. The assumption is made by most people that anything under 80 is not really worth bothering with, and anything 90 or higher is an essential purchase.

But in my experience, it's often in these slightly lower areas that you get the most interesting games. They may be rough around the edges, they may not be perfect, but by golly they have soul.

If you were judging Nier purely mechanically, it's easy to see why it attained the mediocre review scores it did. There are a very limited number of environments to explore which you spend a lot of time backtracking through. The environments are pleasant enough, but not that interesting. The enemies are repetitive. Combat can be a bit clunky. Most of the magic spells are fairly useless. The AI partners you pick up over the course of the game are completely useless. Most of the game's quests involve either killing things or fetching things. Choices you make don't matter. And the "real-time" mechanic for growing crops is just ridiculous.

The thing is, though, play Nier and become invested in its story, and absolutely all of these factors cease to matter completely. Nier tells an interesting, mature, emotional tale, and it tells it well with a small cast of well-defined, unique (and bizarre) characters — and a much larger supporting cast who make the bleak, far-future world of the game seem all the more believable. It piles on the darkness but knows how to lighten the mood with a pithy comment or two at just the right moment. It constantly does things you don't expect — with the story, with the characters, with the style of gameplay, even with the camera angles. It encourages the player to get inside the head of this unyielding, determined protagonist and almost "method act" their way through the game as he toils and struggles to save his daughter.

Do Nier's occasionally-clunky mechanics and sometimes-repetitive gameplay make it a "bad" title? Absolutely not. They may, however, put off the less patient players out there — and that's fine. Those who stick with it will find themselves enjoying a surprisingly creative adventure, while those who chose to forgo the game's hidden charms and depths for whatever reason doubtless have plenty of other things they'd like to spend their time playing.

The sad thing, though, is that the mediocre review scores were probably enough to put a lot of people off even trying the game in the first place. Why bother buying and playing a "68" when you could play a "90"? This problem becomes compounded when you take into account the fact that a lot of publishers make strategic decisions about what franchises they want to explore further — and in extreme cases, which development studios get to keep taking home their paycheques — based on Metacritic scores. Do you think we'll ever get another Nier (or at least a game like it)? Probably not. Why? Because it's too risky. Nier has its fans, sure, but they number relatively few, and aren't necessarily going to be enough to let the game make a profit.

I'm glad Nier exists, though. It's evidence that all hope is not lost for creativity, maturity and a desire to do something a little bit different, even in these days of budgets spiralling out of control and a growing desire to create games that are "services" rather than "creative works".

Nier most certainly is a creative work, a labour of love, and it should be applauded for that.