NieR Re[in]carnation 17+

Honestly this is not a 5 stars game. But it's NieR so whatever.

GLORY FOR MANKIND!!!

The game has good graphics/artstyle/animations and interesting stories, but the rates are just so bad at 2% for a high-rarity (4*) character and 1.5% for on-banner characters. Looking at the discord and YouTube summon videos, the majority of high-rarity weapons that were summoned were off-banner, if they got any 4*s at all. The pity system requires 200 pulls at $30 CAD/10 pull. There aren’t any good deals, even at launch (e.g. double premium currency). And the pity system doesn’t carry over from banner to banner.

The worst part is that your characters aren’t viable with only 1 copy. You’re locked out of content if you only get 1 copy, you must get multiple (4) copies of a character in order to level them up to the highest potential. Everyone on the discord, YouTube and reddit are rerolling like crazy to make sure they have an account with a 4x limit broken character. Yes, the game gives you enough for 2 pities if you rush through all the content at the beginning, but consistent premium currency income is reduced to daily missions (50 gems) + watching 6 ads (where rates got nerfed, before the latest patch the average was 30 gems/ad, now it’s 10 gems/ad according to crowdsourced info). A reminder that a 10 pull is 3000 gems. So doing dailies+watching 6 ads per day = 1 roll / 3 days.

As for the gameplay, early game is all auto. Your characters are strong enough that you don’t need to manually play it. At higher force (80,000+) stages, some strategy might be required like bursting the boss down when it only has 1/4 bar of hp left, but eventually your goal is still to build your characters to be strong enough to auto again. You can move your character on the screen, but it doesn’t do anything. Farming the stages is just pressing the auto x10 button and waiting for results. The drop rates for high tier materials are really bad, endgame players who are farming cubes (the rarest material) are resorting to resetting the stage by force closing the app in order to preserve the limited once per day entries to the stage.

Currently during launch month, the stamina consumption is halved, but the stamina required for the majority of stages is already high. I emailed the customer service team with feedback on this, but they dismissed it with a rude email which essentially said don’t question our way of doing things. As for the latest twitter campaign, we didn’t reach the goal of 5000 interactions even though the game has 1 million downloads. We still got the prizes, but personally I’m worried if the game can sustain itself at this rate. Around 40% of my friends list have not logged on in a week already.

I really wanted to like it, really wanted to spend money on the game, but with the lack of deals, not great customer service and kinda toxic community (they like to trash a lot of other gacha games like genshin) I really couldn’t recommend this game to anyone.

Edit: It seems like my review was removed? Update, the game has given 3 pities if you started from the beginning, the login rewards have increase by a little bit. Unfortunately the game is already out of the top charts on global and it’s reported that the game only makes ~500K in Japan, which is really bad for a gacha game with Yoko Taro’s name + Nier branding on it. The update animation for summoning is really cool so there’s that. One last thing I want to mention is I don’t think this game respects your time, a lot of insane grinding is involved. But you are limited to an option of 10 stages per time, meaning every 5 min you have to come back and press retry, micro managing your game. Japan is 6 months ahead and the game seems to be pretty similar except they also have PVP.

The pacing of the game makes it seem like we’re trying to catch up to sync with Jp, meaning that we got a rush of limited banners where pity isn’t shared. The most powerful character 2p that was released at the beginning (as a 2 day global exclusive) was already power crept 2 weeks in when we got the 6 month anniversary banner that contained celebratory Gayle. This game is 3 weeks old. Not sure what the producers are thinking.

I just find it hilarious how it’s always either a 5 star “it’s amazing” or 1 star “I have a minor issue”