Weekly Gaming Thread

So, I started playing NieR last week and beat ending B last night.

This game is really, really, really strange in a lot of ways. The first way is its kinda bizarre relationship with its genre - and how often it changes it. The boss and even regular battles skirt the line of becoming 3D-Bullet Hell games with how many elaborately crafted patterns of magical projectiles tend to get shot at you, there's an area of the world that has a tendency to suddenly shift into a Text Adventure, and it semi-frequently uses forced camera perspective shifts to transform into a 2.5D platformer.

Its kinda refreshing, to be honest. I have a lot of complaints about a lot of games relating to how they shoehorn in unnecessary elements/tropes of their genres into the narrative they establish to its detriment, as if trying to tick off every box on a checklist so as to avoid any chance of people complaining about it missing X stereotypical feature. So often the narrative or general flow of games gets constrained, damaged, or otherwise disrupted by a choice of an inappropriate genre that its just refreshing to see a game thats willing to abandon its own whenever it feels like another one is more fitting for the moment, or wouldn't interfere with what its trying to do like being an ARPG would.

Beyond that, the atmosphere is absolutely incredible. I've never played a game that has so repeatedly managed to make me feel like it just kicked me in the chest, only to then drag me back in to try and overcome the awfulness of everything happening - the balance of a crushing sense of dread from everything going on and the desire and hope to find some kind of peace in it, to defeat it, is pretty damn spectacularly handled.

I'd also really like to talk about the cast and the ending but that'd take like ten thousand words and also ruin the entire game for anyone interested in playing so just trust me on this instead: they're great.

Oh, and offhandedly, some complaints: upgrading weapons is incredibly grind heavy, completing many of the quests is incredibly grind heavy, the way the game has random drops spawn at random drop locations on the map with most of the important ones being at less than a

/r/SRSGaming Thread