SAILERIUS'S PROFILE

FFXIII was the worst FF game ever made, until XV came out. Just like XII was the worst ever, until XIII came out. Just like X was the worst ever, until XII came out. Just like IX was the worst ever, until X came out, and so on.

It's always cool and edgy to hate on whatever the latest FF is, until a new one comes out and that becomes the new meme. When XVI comes out, you can guarantee kids on the internet will be whimpering about how they don't make great games like XV anymore, just like they've started to say about XIII.

The XIII trilogy games are all pretty different from each other. They all have good and bad points, and they differ by entry.

So I just put down Horizon: Zero Dawn, this time for the foreseeable future. The plot and characters so far are pretty mediocre, just barely scraping above the cutoff line of my caring that I was willing to advance the story to see how it all turned out.

I just got to this plot quest where my character build is completely useless (the third in a row where this has happened). For those who haven't played, the narrative and opening segments put a huge emphasis on a stealth angle for the main character and gameplay, where she's supposed to be this amazing huntress who slinks around and stalks her prey and assassinates them. So, I figured that was probably the intended playstyle and invested all of my levels into one of the stealth tech trees.

The problem is that so far, every single plot quest past the prologue has been set up to make stealth useless and strongly favors a brute force playstyle. By useless, I mean being stuck in a huge open field with no cover (or enemies that can magically sense you through cover), and the enemies are immune to sneak attacks. I managed to barely scrape by a few of these encounters by cheesing it (the enemy AI is really stupid and easy to kite).

Unfortunately, the battle I'm on now really doesn't seem to be winnable without a substantially higher DPS and defense. This came right on the tail end of my spending all of the money I had been saving up for the past 10ish hours on the ultimate stealth gear, which I stupidly assumed would be useful.

I did some googling around and found a lot of other players stuck in a similar situation, and the common advice seems to be that you need to grind levels into one of the offensive tech trees. Unfortunately, I'm high enough level now that each level takes an hour or more of tedious grinding, and the sidequests are your typical MMO gather-10-bear-asses fare.

And maybe if the writing was a little better-executed, I'd be inclined to continue, but it's just... not. I do not care about these soulless, cardboard cutout "characters" or the shallow, stereotypical world they live in. The writing in the last sidequest was so cringey that I actually had to pause the game because I was covering my face in vicarious shame for whoever had written the dialogue and the poor voice actors who had to read it.

I guess an important takeaway is: if your game has permanent character advancement choices, every option better be equally useful in required content. And if not, don't strongly encourage the player to invest hard-earned levels in abilities that you constantly disable.

EDIT: On a related note, the other day, I managed to clear the last sidequest in Nier Automata. The sidequests in the game are kind of a mixed bag, where some of them are really good and some of them are boring. Unfortunately, it's kind of a spoiler which ones are worth doing (because they tend to start out unassuming but then develop unexpectedly in an interesting direction). It could really do with trimming out some of the sidequests, but it's thankfully not as grindy as the original Nier.

So returning to the Nier universe has piqued my curiosity in the Drakengard games, which I never played. Are they worth checking out for someone who enjoyed the Nier games?

It's not bad, it's just the worst open world action RPG released yet this month. It picked pretty much the worst possible time to launch. Compared to Horizon and Nier, it just feels... clunky and lifeless and boring.

Nier Automata is a beautiful experience and everyone should play it. It's one of the best games I've played in a long, long time.

Maybe my opinion will improve as I progress further, but so far the story has ranged from uninspired at its best to grossly offensive at its worst. Seriously, if I see one more white person dressed in a stereotypical Native American costume and talking like a Hollywood "noble savage"...

It's not a bad game per se, but there was another open world post-apocalyptic science fiction action RPG starring a female protagonist fighting robots that have overrun the ruins of human civilization released that week and it's a much better game.