I will put this disclaimer at the top: I do like the story of the game, but getting to that story is a pain and the era this game was originally released in shows.

Yoko Taro and Square Enix really need to look into which companies should be porting games to the PC and which should not. Despite the widespread success of Nier: Automata, Square Enix has decided it's ok to just shove a game into the PC market without actually doing some of the most basic QA testing to make sure it functions entirely as intended. In good conscious I cannot say that I recommend this game for the story alone. The fact that we have to rely on mods to actually play the game as intended forces me to not recommend this game. If you have a monitor over 60Hz and you do not cap this game the internal logic of the game is increased and you play in hyper speed. The fact that there is no option to manually cap the framerate in the game is a massive oversight in this regard. Another issue I have is that I have to personally restart the game 2-7 times in order to get my controller to work. When I start the game there is a high chance that it just won't recognize my controller and its inputs.

The game play itself is alright, but for a remaster/remake I was hoping that they could balance things out a bit. Playing on normal, nothing in this game is challenging. Most fights boil down to spamming magic and mashing the strong or heavy attack over and over again. If you play on hard, the game becomes a slog. Enemy health and armor is insanely increased, and your health is decreased. The fights themselves do not really become harder, it's just that they take longer.

Earning achievements and doing side quests can be a true nightmare. As mentioned, it's obvious that this game was designed a decade ago. Nearly all side quests are fetch quests, and the rest are go to X location to talk to Z NPC. The only exception is fishing, which I won't mention as it's a nightmare as well. For some achievements you will need to fully upgrade every single weapon. This might not sound too bad, except for the fact that there are very few enemies that drop some of the materials required to upgrade some weapons, and the actual drop rate for these materials is astronomically low. This makes grinding out achievements and doing quests more so a test of patience rather than skill.

When it comes to graphics, there are high and low points. The world itself seems fairly well done, and the main characters look pretty good. The standard NPCs on the other hand are a different story. At a glance they're passable, but if you get a closer look at their faces you'll see that many of them are nothing more than HD renders of PS2 styled faces.

The soundtrack is amazing. Yoko Taro spares no penny for the soundtrack and that I can appreciate.

So if you can look past the mediocre gameplay, the grinding nature of anything other than the main story, and need to use mods to fix some issues, then you'll find that there is a great story and phenomenal soundtrack to this game.