Recent reviews by S1lv3r1

Beat in under 2 hours
Refunded
Greatest game ever made

NieR Replicant is perhaps the most divisive game I have ever played.

What you have here is a fantastic concept, a brilliant narrative, and an ethereal soundtrack, wrapped in a gift package of confusing and downright tedious game design choices. It almost feels as if the developer is daring you to keep playing, because you just KNOW it's going to be worth it. So the ultimate question at that point becomes, "is it?"

Newcomers beware, the first half of this game is SLOW. The majority of the first 7-8 hours of your experience will be spent doing fetch quests, mediocre to genuinely awful dungeons/puzzles, and escort missions for characters you have been given no reason to care about. You are completely overpowered in every difficulty to the point that the game lacks any real challenge, you will probably die once or twice at most, even on Hard. You will be bored, you will be uninterested, you may be even tempted to turn off the game and never come back.

All this to say, I felt this. I felt all of it. Every quest that overstayed it's welcome, the lack of any sort of challenge or engaging gameplay for the first 8 hours, a plot that seems to want to confuse you more than intrigue you, it's all there.

But...

There is a light at the end of this tunnel. I'm not going to spoil anything, but I implore you to go in as blind as you can, and stick it out. The second half of this game is phenomenal... until it isn't again... and then it is again. This game is a wild ride, man.

don't.

Update: dropped in 2022, gonna finish and give real review

Update 2: don't.

.. . .

Just finished 999. Honestly one of the best stories I've ever seen in a game. Such great characters and plot twists and unexpected things happening throughout the entire story. I would absolutely give this a 10/10. Some of the puzzles were kinda annoying for me, but nothing felt particularly unfair or TOO hard, this opinion is also completely subjective, and you might have a much easier time than I did on the puzzles depending on how you approach them. With that being the only gripe I have, and with it being entirely personal bias, this is an absolute masterpiece of a game. Side note: the OST of the game SLAPS and the voice acting was surprisingly good as well. I usually prefer sub to dub but the English VAs in this did a fantastic job voicing each character and no one really felt out of place at all. If you play it, get every ending. It is absolutely worth it to get the full story of what happened and see the entire picture for each character in the game. They all have something interesting about them and you won't see everything unless you get every ending. I did this in about 25 hours. definitely could have been faster, but I'm not the best at puzzles to be fully honest. Give this game a shot if you haven't, it is absolutely phenomenal.

(Will update this review when I 100% VLR)

Update: I recently finished Zero Time Dilemma. The reason for this, is because I wanted to see how it expands upon Virtue's Last Reward before forming a full opinion of it. After finishing VLR, (100% playthrough clocked in at 42 hours) I still had a lot of questions that, obviously, I won't get into here. Without spoiling anything, just know that VLR expands upon ideas introduced in 999 while adding in some brand new ones to some absolutely INSANE levels. The stakes feel a lot higher this time around and the gimmick of AB games was a lot more intense than that of the Digital Roots. Once again, I highly recommend getting every ending for the best experience with this game. It has some crazy "what the hell is going on" moments and the reveals that happen are so incredibly clever that I sometimes had to pause and take a minute to just try to process what I had just seen. The OST this time around is even better in my opinion, and also has some pretty solid remixes of songs from the 999 soundtrack. The voice acting is, once again, top notch. Every VA did a fantastic job portraying their character and I was absolutely hooked during the heights of this game. All of this, in theory, should make for an even better game than the first, right? Well...

VLR has a few glaring issues. The first, is the pacing. There's a lot of waiting you have to do just watching unskippable cutscenes that, in some cases, you've already seen before. The beginning of the game also takes about 1.5 hours before getting to the main story where you make your first decision. It doesn't really detract anything from the story, but it definitely did take quite a bit longer to get invested in this one than 999 did for me. The next of the issues I have with VLR are the puzzles. OHH BOY. The puzzles in this game are SIGNIFICANTLY harder than the ones in 999. I had to use a guide on several occasions. This might not come as an issue to people who enjoy the challenge they bring but, in my opinion, some of these puzzles simply go on for WAY too long. There were multiple times I thought I was at the end of a puzzle only to be introduced to another gimmick that is pretty difficult to figure out, or I got the wrong safe code and had to keep solving the room until I got the correct one. Maybe I'm just not as smart as some other people who will play this game, but the puzzles definitely began to become tedious and more of a nuisance that I HAD to get through in order to get back to the story rather than a fun challenge in-between rooms like they were in 999.

The final issue I have with VLR is the entire reason I held off on making this review in the first place, and that is that it feels OVERLY ambitious. Almost to a fault. I won't spoil anything here but it tries to do SO much that it almost, at times, felt like it was trying too hard. Fortunately, ZTD expands upon these twists and new concepts in a way that help them feel less far-fetched and I was able to appreciate them much more in retrospect, despite the fact that they are a far cry from the somewhat grounded nature of the twists of 999.

All in all, VLR is a fine addition to 999 that is bogged down by a couple of issues that, in my opinion, keep it from being quite as good as it's predecessor. 8/10

TL;DR buy this bundle. These are really REALLY good games.