The worst prologue I have ever seen in my life

[tcassat]

From the subliterature of the beginning to the lousy shoot'em up, I have never seen anything so annoying in my life playing video games.

I started playing straight on hard and after about an hour, I died from a single attack from the third boss in a row and now I have to watch my partners die to easily dodgeable lasers again.

Those fake credits make me think that I am playing some amateur garbage that I downloaded from itchi.io. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. What a piece of ♥♥♥♥.

[athenian200]

I had a lot of trouble with the tutorial even on Normal. Like I never died on the early parts, but I struggled to survive against that one waterwheel boss, and then kept dying over and over to the two waterwheels before the final boss. It was because I hadn't mastered the perfect dodge and it was very frustrating indeed. People were telling me to drop down to Easy to beat the tutorial, but I just didn't want to do that... good luck beating the tutorial on Hard. If you don't want to drop it down, I do get how you feel. I didn't like the game insinuating that I'm such a bad player that I'm below average, and I saw normal as "average," and was satisfied with that.

[TheSeek]

athenian200 a écrit :

a
nd then kept dying over and over to the two waterwheels before the final boss. It was because I hadn't mastered the perfect dodge and it was very frustrating indeed

Just saying, but perfect dodge is not a thing until much later in the game, the regular dodge window is extremely wide(i think it's about 0.7-1 sec), and you can interrupt a dodge with another dodge on repeat, which means that if you start spamming dodge 1 or even 2 seconds before the hit strikes, you're guaranteed to dodge it, it doesn't even require paying too much attention.

[deidian]

tcassat a écrit :

No. I am complaining that the prologue is a complete disaster. As I made clear, the shoot'em up part looks like an amateur's first project in Unity. It is that bad. Then there are about half an hour of redundant and repetitive battles with low tier enemies that are not capable of doing anything stimulating, only to end with a boss with one hit kill moves. As I said, I hope this is not indicative of what comes next because the game just seems like garbage to me at the moment, including the shoot'em up part, the level design, the enemy design, and the boss design.

Curious you didn't complained about the side-scroller adventure/platformer sections....It still remains for test fighting game esque boss battles. Oh! And the hacking games LOL.
The game will also shift more times between genres the same it does in the prologue.

tcassat a écrit :

you can't dodge an attack because you had your movement arbitrarily restricted by the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ camera without any indication.

You can dodge anytime(even when knocked down), with good or bad camera angle: press the button in time and dodge will happen. The game gives plenty of cues and they are all equal: tipical machine sound before hitting(check), eyes flashing before hitting(check). It's definitely Platinum Games action gameplay.

[Minneyar]

tcassat a écrit :

But it is undeniable that the prologue is terrible in basically every aspect.

Hmm. Nope, gonna deny that. The prologue is great, basically the only thing wrong with it is that it doesn't warn people that "hard" is hard.

[Major Fletcher]

When you choose hard the info says "can be killed by 1 hit" so i choosed normal and finished prologue on first try. Normally i love to play hard but not in platinum games. I guess thats why i survived Guess this prologue is very frustrating to a lot of people, especially when you are not familiar with platinum games, but i loved the unexpected genre mix. (Never watched any trailers or gameplay in the last years, just bought the game as the patch was out cause i was running out of games lol) Really like it so far.

[A Suspicious Crayon]

I bet some store has tissues on discount.

[Perdomai]

If I had to guess, it was intentionally designed that way. Yoko Taro must love to troll people that always play games on hard; especially with that joke ending for every death.

[Shiki Yui]

Perdomai a écrit :

If I had to guess, it was intentionally designed that way. Yoko Taro must love to troll people that always play games on hard; especially with that joke ending for every death.

If anyone remembers Drakengard 1 and 3 oh boy

[13LACK ORDER]

The thing is you don't even have to fight the enemies lol. you only have to defeat the group that block the door at the beginning and the chainsaw boss. the rest you can just run through it

[13LACK ORDER]

Shiki Yui a écrit :

Perdomai a écrit :

If I had to guess, it was intentionally designed that way. Yoko Taro must love to troll people that always play games on hard; especially with that joke ending for every death.

If anyone remembers Drakengard 1 and 3 oh boy

ikr? people already crying because they thought the prologue is too hard. just wait until they play ending D of Drakengard 3. they might have a stroke

[tcassat]

I find it funny that everyone immediately thinks that the criticism of the prologue is because it is "difficult", when the problem is that the prologue is bad.

I mean, the prologue was clearly made to be played on "medium", because on that difficulty it is practically impossible to die in it. Anyone playing on medium won't even notice why the prologue is bad. But here are the problems:

1. it doesn't allow skipping some scenes
2. redundant + prolix (killing the same boss 4 times is simply stupid, especially when after the fourth time he is still alive and kills you in the cutscene)
3. it does not serve to teach the player well
4. bosses include a lot of trial and error but on hard the error is punished with immediate death
5. bugs (in my second attempt one of the ships that was with me did not die, even so 2B said that all the ships were shot and immediately the ship that survived disappeared)
6. problems with the scripts (in a moment I died because the computer repositioned my robot to change the camera and in this movement energy balls that were still on the screen killed me)
7. It's like a big 30-40 minute level that is not well designed and not fun to play.

The prologue is just plain bad and playing on Hard makes all its flaws very clear.

As for the game itself, I played for 7.6 hours on hard and faced Adam and Eve now. My experience so far is this: the bosses are sponges that make me repeat the same procedure for several and several minutes. If you make a single mistake, or get impatient, you have a high chance of dying with a single hit. This is not exactly the most interesting kind of difficulty that a game can present. What I basically do is die several times until I learn all the boss patterns. From then on, it is an exercise in repetition and patience, without it being really difficult in the sense that you have to use your head a lot to create strategies. It's a very braindead gameplay.

Now I have this dilemma. If I change the difficulty to Medium, the game will have zero challenge and will be basically button mashing for hours. If I play on Hard, the gameplay will still be braindead, but an eventual mistake will be extremely penalized and since the bosses can take up to 10 minutes to die because they are sponges, it is extremely likely that even after I memorize all their attacks from trial and error, I will still die from some inattention or lack of patience to play more cautiously.

Frankly, in terms of pure gameplay, Nier Automata is a pretty mediocre game.

[Rastrelly]

tcassat a écrit :

1. it doesn't allow skipping some scenes
2. redundant + prolix (killing the same boss 4 times is simply stupid, especially when after the fourth time he is still alive and kills you in the cutscene)
3. it does not serve to teach the player well
4. bosses include a lot of trial and error but on hard the error is punished with immediate death
5. bugs (in my second attempt one of the ships that was with me did not die, even so 2B said that all the ships were shot and immediately the ship that survived disappeared)
6. problems with the scripts (in a moment I died because the computer repositioned my robot to change the camera and in this movement energy balls that were still on the screen killed me)
7. It's like a big 30-40 minute level that is not well designed and not fun to play.

1. Not good, but not unique to Automata. Automata at least allows to skip most.
2. A saw, 2 saws with entirely different patterns, and a huge saw-handed factory dude are not the same boss, and it's not 4 bosses, it's 3. Also, how low attention one has to have to think that at the end of prologue the first Engels is still alive? At least three more of Engels-type arrive.
3. Lolwut? It literally makes you either learn every significant tool you have, or start from the beginning.
4. What trial and error? Do you even know what that means? Just for you: trial and error in gameplay is the concept of unavoidable failstate caused by lack of foretelling of said failstate. In the prologue bosses make no attacks, moves or patterns that are not telegraphed. If you cannot dodge them on hard - it is your personal problem.
5. Bugs are not problems of the prologue itself, and this bug is irrelevant to gameplay.
6. How poorly one has to play so that balls from previous phase were still on screen in the next? I have never achieved this. They pop mid-cutscene.
7. Subjective statement expressed as an objective truth.

The prologue is just plain bad and playing on Hard makes all its flaws very clear.

Your skill is very low and complaints you make makes it very clear.

I played for 7.6 hours on hard and faced Adam and Eve now. My experience so far is this: the bosses are sponges that make me repeat the same procedure for several and several minutes.

Verdict: poor chip build, lack of boosters in use and probably no weapon upgrades. Also, "several and several"? What does that even mean? Should bosses die strictly under two minutes? If you make a proper build, use your tools and don't charge underlevelled they usually die exactly like that.

Now I have this dilemma.

No, you have a dilemma of - how do I make it so that my personal preferences in gameplay structure were not my personal issue, but an objective failure of the game. Spoiler: you don't.

The only thing I do agree on is that it would be indeed good for a difficulty level between hard and normal to exist, difference between normal and hard is too extreme. But it is not something that is desperately needed, it would be a nice addition considering the rest QoL features the game already has.

[tcassat]

No, you have a dilemma of - how do I make it so that my personal preferences in gameplay structure were not my personal issue, but an objective failure of the game. Spoiler: you don't.

You are basically defending a difficulty that makes the game more redundant. This is a classic example of bad game design. In good games the higher difficulties change the experience completely, the game requires new strategies, new approaches and a great level of mastering of the mechanics.

Bad games (like Nier Automata) just turn enemies into sponges. Oh but of course... You can make them less spongy by grinding for items...


EDIT:
To be fair, the game is not "bad" per se. The music is amazing, the story is interesting, and the controls are enjoyable.

The problem is clearly the implementation of difficulty (and look, I'm not saying the game is difficult, I've played romhacks of Super Mario World that make Nier Automata seem like a game for babies). In the Medium difficulty the game is simply a button mashing where you do not need to put any thought into it. On Hard, at least you have to deal with real risk of dying, but in return the game becomes very redundant.

The way the difficulty is implemented is totally deleterious to the game. I am honestly thinking of looking for mods that balance things better and make the game less braindead and repetitive.

[y_Sensei]

Geez same complaints as 4 years ago ... if "Hard" is too hard, play on any of the lower difficulty levels. And if you think this game is repetitive or grind-heavy, you obviously haven't played any games that actually deserve these labelings.

[deidian]

Bosses in the game are hardly sponges: they die generally fast. In hard the main thing is you die in few hits: one is a warning, two danger, third(you died). In some cases(mostly bosses) one is a warning, 2nd is dead. And in the prologue with 0 chips Engels slow arm strike or getting hit in a bullet hell is 1HKO.
In fact some bosses are killed too fast and their health is replenished because their discourse has to end. The battle against Adam & Eve is one of these situations: their chat has to end no matter what, so since its chat & fight if you kill them mid chat their health is replenished.

The thing with bullet hell in flying sections happens all over the game. Before clearing up a group of enemies ensure the screen is nearly clean of bullets, otherwise if a change of perspective happens you can get hit by remaining bullets or left in their way.

The prologue does its job: teaches the basics(through messages) and if played on hard you better start learning/figuring out some non shown stuff in the tutorial messages: some good combos which implies figuring out nearly all the moveset of the character, exact working of dodge function, when it's useful the pod and when to leave it aside and focus on melee/dodge.

You can say whatever about the last paragraph but no game has to tell about all it's mechanics in messages. If they choose to leave mechanics for the player to figure out by themselves it's their choice. Minimum is showing basic movement.

About the difficulties, yes maybe. Normal is too easy, hard is quite the jump and very hard is 1HKO period. But in all cases you're warned: hard description tells you to expect to die in 2 hits, which is a very narrow margin.

About grinding the game isn't at all a grind fest. Even if you want top tier stuff grinding it takes merely few hours. In fact grinding is dangerous because you can get overleveled easy and then you steamroll all around. I'm not the 1st one to warn about this.