Current plans for the team are as yet unannounced, so we don’t know if the former Cavia will continue making games for third parties. Officially, however, its last game was Nier, which is kind of an unfortunate note on which to leave.

Report: Nier developer Cavia dissolved into parent company originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The character model change is included as a bonus in the “World of Recycled Vessel” pack, whose main component is a world unlocked by a hidden diary, in which Nier and his companions find themselves in a “dreamscape” that combines the past and present of the game.

Square Enix didn’t announce pricing for North America, but the price in Europe, where the release date is May 12, is €6.99 or 560.

Play as the ‘other’ Nier in this week’s DLC, ‘The World of Recycled Vessel’ originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 11 May 2010 05:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In a world where big-budget videogames mostly cling to the safe tropes of established genres, Nier ventures outside the box.

Square Enix’s latest is in the “action RPG” genre — a blend of hack-and-slash gameplay with character progression, swappable equipment and stats. But Nier, released last month for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (reviewed), also steals conventions from other genres. Creatures unleash waves of projectiles straight out of bullet-hell shoot’em-ups. You can waste time raising vegetables with gameplay seemingly harvested from FarmVille. Occasionally the whole thing turns into a text adventure.

While it does this, Nier makes some parodic, unmistakable references to specific games like Zelda or Resident Evil. In doing so, it clues us in to the fact that none of this genre-bending is coincidence — Nier is making a point of being a mashup. To what end, I have no idea. But this playful design is why lovers of games should try this one.

Nier’s story kicks off sometime around the end of humanity, circa now. Humans are dying off thanks to a gross disease. After an intro sequence in which a guy named Nier attempts to save his daughter Yonah from a bunch of monsters, we’re flung thousands of years into the future, where civilization has apparently collapsed and then rebuilt itself in ramshackle villages.

In one such village, a guy named Nier is trying to save his sick daughter Yonah from a similar gross disease. What’s the relationship between him and the guy from millennia ago? That’s the big question you’re trying to unravel as you progress through Nier’s 20-hour story. Once you figure it out, you can start the game over and get extra scenes and endings that flesh out the back story. The game also boasts three difficulty levels, so there’s a decent amount of replay value.

Nier’s basic hack-and-slash battles feel good. It’s no God of War, mind you — the combat’s a bit stiffer, something noticeably less than fluid. But in the context of an action RPG, where the moment-to-moment action is only one facet of the gameplay, it does its job. It’s still satisfying to polish off enemies with your array of weapons, which range from light, one-handed swords to massive blades that do lots of damage more slowly.

Nier pounds some enemy Shades with his Dark Hand magic attack, as his buddy Grimoire Weiss comments on the action.

Nier’s world is, in a word, small. Your tiny village has three gates, each of which leads to an easily traversed field that leads to a few other smallish areas — a town of bridges and platforms stretched high above a valley, a secret laboratory underneath a regal mansion, a mist-covered forest, etc.

As you continue through the game, you’ll head back to these again and again, fighting stronger monsters and bigger bosses. It’s hard not to feel a little walled-in by the limited play space, especially since the environments are bland, boxy, plain pieces of workmanlike level design. The characters look a lot better than the geography, but Nier isn’t going to wow you visually. The music, on the other hand, is tremendous — almost every piece benefits from a prominent vocal track, which sets Nier’s soundtrack quite apart from most games’. Listening to the pretty, catchy tunes makes doing laps around the small levels more bearable.

Besides going through the story missions, Nier will also have to tackle many different optional “quests.” These are mostly simple little fetch missions, in which one character will tell you to run clear across the world map and talk to somebody else, then back again, until you’re told you’ve run around enough and you get a bunch of money. Doing these quests is the only way to earn money, which is Nier’s solution to the old RPG problem of “uh, why would a wolf be carrying 200 gold?”

Since they’re your primary source of cash, the quests aren’t really optional. No, you don’t have to do all of them. And you can just take every single quest that comes along, completing only the ones that are convenient. But that doesn’t quite excuse the fact that the quests are mostly just a bunch of simple excuses to make you run around, kill time and pad your gameplay clock.

One of the things that make taking quests more bearable is that they contain more of the game’s dialogue. While Nier himself isn’t that engaging of a character, the banter between two of his companions — prissy, magical talking book Grimoire Weiss and filthy-mouthed woman warrior Kain — is priceless. Kain steals the show, dropping F-bombs and dripping venomous insults at every opportunity. You know what her R-rated language makes her sound like? A real person. It’s like one of my friends is sitting in the room making ironic comments on the game. She talks like I talk, in a way game characters rarely do.

Nier’s other redeeming factor is its constant desire to surprise the player with new, seemingly incongruous gameplay mechanics. For example, as in shoot’em-ups like Ikaruga, some enemies fire massive, patterned sprays of bullets, which Nier can respond to with a bullet-spray magical attack of his own.

The game’s camera is also used to change things up: While it usually follows behind Nier, sometimes it will snap into a fixed position overhead or to the side, changing the way you approach the combat. In one memorable dungeon, it zooms way, way up and out, creating a tiny, top-down, almost 2-D experience.

In a few memorable moments, the game’s graphics drop away and Nier becomes a narrated, prose-style text adventure, leaving you to imagine the action yourself.

To dismiss Nier as just another quirky oddball Japanese game would be to miss the important point — other videogames box themselves in too much. Able to choose from the wide range of creative expression offered to developers of major videogames, most just pick a few standard tropes and iterate on them. But why not turn your game into Zork for a few minutes, if it could add some depth and surprise to your story?

Q: How is Nier‘s fishing minigame? A: This is the final image your TV will ever display before you throw your controller through it.
Images courtesy Square Enix

The other side of this coin is that Nier bites off more than it can chew: It wants to be Final Fantasy, God of War, Zelda, Monster Hunter and FarmVille all at once. And the problem with trying so many things is that every new feature you add is a new opportunity to screw the pooch. Let’s talk about Nier’s fishing game. Actually, let’s not — I don’t want to relive the pain. Just know that I flushed about an hour of my life down the drain because the game gives you incorrect instructions on how to fish.

Even once you figure out the mechanism, it’s tedious drudgery to catch all the fish that the quests ask you to. And once you do, there’s literally no reward. None. You just get to do the next fishing quest.

Nier also suffers from the odd design problem of getting easier as it goes on. It stumbles a little in the RPG half of “action RPG,” as you only rarely level up as you fight monsters, which in my case meant I lost that positive connection between killing things and making progress. But as the game progressed, I started leveling up like crazy, and the final two hours’ worth of dungeons and bosses were pitifully easy.

I could write a laundry list of other quibbles, other places in which Nier’s design commits tiny, glaring sins that should be unacceptable in triple-A game titles in 2010. Some of Nier is so messed up that it would quickly be resigned to the bargain bin of history were it not for its unique approach to design. But because of that, it’s practically a must-play.

WIRED Creative mashup design; polished, funny script; beautiful soundtrack.

TIRED Boring environments, lazy quests, some bad design elements.

$60, Square Enix

Rating:

Read Game|Lifes game ratings guide.

See Also:

• Q&A: Square Enix's Nier Combines Fighting, Farming
• Review: Beautiful, Boring Final Fantasy XIII Loses RPG Magic

What I played of Nier up to this point had some nice touches, like solid music and voice acting, but the game felt a generation or two behind what I’d hope for in an open-world action-RPG, specifically in terms of graphics and mission design. Also, the design team was seemingly in dire need of staff members in possession of human souls.

You know, so, just something to remember for Nier 2: Souls.

Hook, Line and Stinker: My failed Nier review originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 03 May 2010 18:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To see how games that aren’t Nier performed, check the list after the break.

[Via Kotaku]

Continue reading Nier sold far more than anything else in Japan last week

Nier sold far more than anything else in Japan last week originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To see how games that aren’t Nier performed, check the list after the break.

[Via Kotaku]

Continue reading Nier sold far more than anything else in Japan last week

Nier sold far more than anything else in Japan last week originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Square Enix’s will release its action-adventure RPG Nier on April 27 in North America, the company announced on Wednesday.

The game, which “blends traditional RPG gameplay mechanics with intense, bloody combat and powerful magic” (i.e., a hack-and-slash with leveling up), is developed by Cavia (Bullet Witch, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles).

Nier has many Square Enix fans baffled, for good reason — in Japan, the game will be released in two different versions for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, called Nier Gestalt and Nier Replicant. The two games have somewhat different graphical styles and slightly altered storylines: Gestalt features an old and grizzled protagonist named Nier who is trying to save his daughter named Yonah, while Replicant has a younger, much more effeminate Nier on a quest to save his sister, also named Yonah.

To make matters slightly less complicated (or more, depending on how you look at it), the U.S. version of the game, on both platforms, is Gestalt.

Oh and the game has a hermaphrodite in it. You know, just because.

Image courtesy Square Enix

See Also:

• Square Enix Unveils Hotly Anticipated Sequel
• Square Enix Kills Near Complete Chrono Trigger Fan Project
• Square Enix's Private Trailer Theater: The Report

Amazon knocked about $20 off the price of the Wii rail shooter, which features settings and characters from Resident Evil 2 and Code Veronica, as its Deal of the Day. The game just came out in November! We’re tempted to call it a Christmas miracle — though maybe we’ll save that declaration for when something is discounted to $20.

Resident Evil: The Discount Chronicles originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It does not answer any of those questions. In fact, we have several more questions after this trailer, which features the voice (but not much else) of the AI partner, Kaine. Questions like “what?”

Nier video is Nier-ly video-free originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After the break, enjoy a trailer featuring some alternate costumes for the playable characters, all of whom are made of meat, as far as we know.

Continue reading Resident Evil 2′s soy boy returns for Darkside Chronicles

Resident Evil 2′s soy boy returns for Darkside Chronicles originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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