The Worst Difficulty Scaling I’ve Ever Seen 

Honestly I'm glad I entered this series with Automata because somehow this story is better experienced backwards rather than forwards.

I completed 98% of sidequests, got a few of the best words, a level four Phoenix Spear, went through the entire C route then switched to Hard just to spice up the Shadowlord's Castle a bit... it felt fair, the enemies just needed to be knocked down to be insta-killed and the bosses lasted only slightly longer than the dialogue. Which is a problem because if Hard Mode is fair at the very end of the game when I've almost 100% the entire thing, I can't imagine how awful it must be to play on Hard from the beginning.

Difficulty is always a slippery slope for games. It's difficult to find that balance between natural challenge and monotony where health arbitrarily increased and more damage is dealt. That's kind of why I always pick normal mode for any game. I'm very casual with games and I just want to experience what the developer intended for me to. As you said though accessibility is a great thing. If a person wants more challenge then increased difficulty is nice. I would just like if developers also included which mode the game was tailored around. I don't mind challenging games if that's how they were intended. Just let me know damn it so I can get the best experience a casual like me can get. Lol

For Replicant, I actually appreciate the added hp on normal enemies since I started experimenting with combos and juggling (like the crazy one you can see online). I mean, if I was going to be stuck trying to kill an enemy, may as well look stylish while doing it, eh? With Automata, enemies die in a few hits as long as you’re not significantly underleveled, although you can juggle humanoid bosses like Adam, which is cool since Replicant doesn’t allow that.

Dont just hold down the dark blast, you do less damage, tap it you'll do double damage each time

Hell nah, you are 10000% CORRECT HERE. I absolutely HATE increased stats as a difficulty because publishers use it as a means to cheap out on difficulty rather than actually try to balance those stats at the higher setting just for time padding. I actually have beef with crap like that. As a developer I'll try my best to never do this as its just doesn't feel right, I would feel scummy trying to pad time like that for content.

i think this is less of a difficulty problem and more of an enemy design problem. Cus lets face it if they arent spamming projectiles they are using slow telegraphed moves most of the time. automata spoilers ahead: The final battle in nier automata when you are facing either 9s or a2 are fights worth building off of, very engaging especially fighting off 9s trying to hack you and also trying to avoid his pod abilities felt really cool.

Okay okay, so basically queen beast - the last boss of drakengard 1 - gets magically transported to early 2000's Tokyo along with the main character of drakengard 1- Caim and his dragon angelus dubbed the red dragon by the humans of our earth. The queen beast dies ans releases massive amounts of maso wich is essentially just magic dust. Inhaling maso would cause humans to be infected with white chlorination and be forced to either turn into a pile of salt or make a pact with an unknown god forcing the human to become part of the rising red eye legion. In response to this some weapons company manufactured two successful weapons made with magic dust called number 6 and number 7, Halua and her brother Emil. Each possessing incredible power at the cost of Halua's human appearance and Emil's eyesight. The gestalt and replicant project was also started along with grimoire Weiss and Noir in case anything goes wrong, they are the force resets in case the "sHadOw LorD" decides to disobey his duty to fuse together sould and body after white chlorination is eradicated. In 2040-50 something a sick Yonah and Nier are hiding in a trashed convience store scrounging for food and then relapsed gestalts appear wanting to attack them, Nier has to use the power of grimoire noir and it turns out hes the perfect soul fit to be the shadow lord. Nier succesfully defeats the shadows. However, his victory is shortlived as Yonah touched grimoire noir in an attempt to help her brother, she wasnt fit to use noir and was infected with the black scrawl. Her soul going haywire and her physical body breaking down. Nier is promised a cure for his sister if he promises to be the shadow lord and fulfill his duty. Shinjuku is walled off to stop the spreading of the legion and later nuked by all big world powers. This wouldn't eradicate the legion or white chlorination, but only spread it more as the nuke couldn't destroy the maso instead sending it everywhere on earth. Somewhere between then and later the gestalt project is finalised. Two androids are put in place to watch over and protect the replicants, factory made humans, while the gestalts are sleeping. During the two thousand or so years between 2006 and whenever nier replicant starts, the replicants gain consciousness and some gestalts start to relapse. The relapsing of gestalts causes the corresponding replicanr to be infected with the black scrawl as they cannot exist without their gestalt counter part. The games events happen and the replicants die out with the last gestalts relapsing. There are no longer and souls for the bodys to inherit and no longer and androids to make new replicants. Humanity is wiped out, but emil prevails, he is ageless. Some thousand years after the game the aliens attack earth and emil splits himself into 1 million something copies of himself, each inheriting a small part of the original emil to combat the ever increasing aliens and later their machine army. After a while the aliens just die out in hiding, but the machine continue to evolve. A robot that learned consciousness in nier replicant crawls out and teaches it to the machines, thus the machines start to evolve beyond what the aliens intended, they start to gain consciousness. Some 10 years before automata yorha is formed and shit happens.

Fair assessment on replicants scaling tbh. I enjoyed the game so much on normal but on hard mode the game is genuinely a waste of time ngl

I played Replicant on Normal difficulty, and I found some parts pretty difficult. Yes this is the part where y'all laugh at me. But there's one thing that's maybe less about power scaling details that I know nothing about, but I still found very interesting: When you restart the game from Act 2 (to get the other endings) your level doesn't reset, but the enemies and bosses don't get harder. That just means each time you replay the game gets easier and easier. Which, okay, I'm a scrub, thanks for that. But at the same time, fighting the boss battles kinda gets harder _emotionally._ It's like, the first time I fought the giant shade in seafront I died sooo much, and by the 3rd time I pulled off an early finisher. But at the same time... it was kinda hard to bring myself to actually DO that! I didn't WANT to kill her, but I HAD to, because the story can't continue otherwise, and... it becomes mechanically easier to kill enemies and progress, and you know you want to progress, but maaan did I feel bad about it. And I just wonder if that aspect was intentional game design. Or maybe I'm just sentimental and seeing things.

My favorite difficulty mechanic is the Fiend Cauldron from Kid Icarus Uprising. I actually haven't played that game in forever, but remembered just how good it is.

This is a game that shouldn't have had a Character level System in any way whatsoever. Surely not the dumb way they came up with what is in the game. Also kudos for calling this out. This game gets plenty of praise but the reality is it has far more gameplay and design issues than people are willing to admit.

This is why I love how Dead Cells handles difficulty. After you beat the game for the first time (also known as tutorial). You get a Boss Stem Cell, applying that Cell in your starting area causes Difficulty to rise. It doesn't however make enemies tankier, or make you take more damage. What it does is it introduces new enemies, biomes and bosses, changes boss patterns, decreases the amount of times you can refill your health flask and on top of that gives you more options to be more powerful, making the game much harder but also providing the reward for that newfound difficulty. This incentivizes players to try the higher difficulties as some weapons can only be unlocked there (after you unlock them you can find them on lower difficulties). It's a prime example of difficulty not made lazy.

Tbh, Automata has a perfect difficulty curve for me (played on Hard) as I love to mess around with combat systems, so finding ways to juggle enemies and move "efficiently" was so much fun. Very Hard was so much fun for me to finally master the game. For Replicant, I also played that on Hard and the few tips I can give you for that is parry (it's pretty fun to do so), go for knockdown executions, and "overcharge" Weiss so he sends a barrage that is spammable every 3 or so seconds. Not doing these are probably some of the reasons as to why you found Replicant to be a slog, although I will admit that unlike Automata it somewhat falls into a pit of gameplay repetition. Unlike Automata, spamming blasts is not the most efficient form of damage, the most efficient form of this is: Hold for 3 secs -> Overcharge Weiss -> Release Barrage -> Repeat This is also best done with Magic damage+ Words. I 100% both games (Achievements and Game Data) and never felt like the games were too difficult or too easy, that is until I reached LV 99 and fought Emil, as that was two amazing yet challenging fights, in terms of story, spectacle, and difficulty. The boar example you used was somewhat misleading, as if you want to speed kill it you spam melee's in its face and use Weiss' spear attack (forgot the name) to stun the boar, which resets the windup animation. The way you killed it is one of the slowest ways you could have. Regarding the Boss Timers, make sure you're at a decent level and upgrade your weapons to a good spot, although the latter could get annoying as resources are a pain in Replicant. Character damage and defense scales with level, and this can also be boosted by understanding the combos and using the best Words for the situation. For the few times I actually missed a Timer on Hard, it didn't take me a long time to get back to the Timer, so it was basically a non factor. For the armored enemies, it's better to go for parries and use large weapons like the Iron Will, as those do the best at destroying their armor and making them easier to kill. Their armor can also be chipped away by using either Weiss' Spear or Punch (still can't remember their names). Using Heavy attacks is also advised, as it allows for easier stagger and armor damage. You also could've executed the one you used in the example. To be able to tell, if they seem to struggle getting up, then that means you can execute them, basically just like Automata but simpler and is much more common.

Bad story won't make an enjoyable game unplayable. Bad gameplay can make even the most well done narrative games just not worth playing because getting to the story is just tedious or miserable. part of why i'm a gameplay over story kinda guy

Ok as much as I can see the issue with Hard in Nier Replicant, this video has a perfect exemple of why people makes it more tedious for themselves at 5:47........ he is on the ground just use the Finishing Blow by pressing Circle, even on Hard this usually One-Shot mobs and it goes through Armor, it honnestly makes me go nuts how this little mechanic is so overlooked by people. Other than that honnestly Hard feel like Normal to me, it's tedious at the beginning, but honnestly you can end up dealing so much damage to bosses later on in the game that in Normal you could end the boss fights without seeing half of their attacks, and you deal so much damage that even with Triple HP I didn't find the bosses to tedious, and it also gives more time to listen to the soundtrack like Song of the Ancient Fate is a song you'll barely hear in the game in Normal cause the bosses against which it plays die way to quickly on Normal, mobs however are definitly tedious and pretty much forces you to rely on either the Guard-Counter and Finishing Blow mechanic to make them not dragging for to long, most mobs becomes a matter of just use Dark Hand or Dark Execution to put them on the ground and perform a finisher.

You do far more damage with dark blast with the explosion after holding the attack down for about 3 seconds "letting go and than starting again". That alone would take a 20 minute fight down to 15 minutes, even if you were too afraid to fight enemies in Melee. The boar can be taken down in about 8-10 minutes even at the beginning of the game if you aim to use Melee and stunlock him in combos. Your reward for playing better and taking risks is a far more dynamic and less tedious fight. The Hard mode in replicant when you need to deal enough damage to overcharge Grimoire Weiss can almost always be met the first time by utilizing your best verses and builds availiable to you at the time. I've beaten both games on Hard twice and while regular mobs do have slightly too much health at times you ALWAYS have the tools to take them down quickly. Running in circles and dark blasting most enemies the whole game will suffice if you want to double the time you play, however ideally you should be in a rhythm where you are using both melee/magic in unison. In that case most enemies are not much of a slog, but rather an exercise in consistency.

I think the HP buff is more of a relic from turn based rpgs and older arcade games, where fatigue becomes a factor in games that demand constant attention and focus. It's proof of endurance rather than proof of skill, because devs rarely know how high the skill cap of their own games can be until release.

Yeah even NES games didn't have this kind of bs. It's a problem with RPGs specifically, not pure action games. Generally the only way to win on these modes is using any temporary power ups to buff while fighting for more damage.

Even as someone who finished sekiro and elden ring completly, i still play nier on normal difficulty because a hack and slash game is not meant to be difficult,when i played dmc 3 and 5 i didn't care much about the enemy pattern yet i had so much fun trying different combo variants

Nier Replicant hard mode is a lot easier if you use strength drops and magic drops but some bosses are still awful

I feel you man. I was playing hard at first, then I realize I turn it into a shooting game. Then I decide to play on normal instead, since I don't want to shoot an enemy for 30 min while running in circle.

While I do agree that the normal mode of replicant is just far too easy, I also have to say that after watching your footage, it more or less also boils down to it being a hack and slash game. Through my own playthrough for example, I realized the boar quest is kinda meant to not be done that early in the game, or to switch to certain weapons and certain Weiss spells for the timers in Bossfights, or how certain combos are really effective against armored enemies making them more easily killable. What I am basically trying to say is, while I see your problem with them having more health, one of the reasons the devs did that - also on normal difficulty - at times is so that dialogue won't be accidentally skipped, and the other one being that the game is a hack'n slash game so you really need to do some serious combos, that I didn't really see in your footage. But I gotta add, I too am not really good at hack'n slash games and simply used certain combos, weapons and spells I found out by testing are beyond broken. Still, I definitely agree that the game in general is plainly unbalanced as heck.

This is going to sound like a hot take but let me finish: the games are tedious by design and thats a good thing. Both games deal with existentialism. I'm going to spoil the story, so you've been warned (the story is more impactful when you are the one playing). The whole point of existentialism is that none of your actions matter in the very grand scheme of things. They might in that moment, but because this is a game, it railroads and reinforces that the story is pre-determined. Nier's fate and that of his world cant be changed. Same with 2B. Humanity is dead, the aliens are dead, both sides are locked in a pointless forever war. Now, making an unfun game for stylistic reasons does still mean you made an unfun, potential bad game. However, tedious is the correct word to use for both. Both games clearly dont want you going for 100% completion. All of Nier's sidequests end on a sad note; good for world building but depressing as hell. The longest sidequest literally gives you no reward and involves a truly insane amount of backtracking in a game without fast travel.In both games, upgrading all weapons is a chore in repetition because of how much grinding is involved. And for what? It reinforces the idea that everything you did in game was kind of pointless in the long run. You'll feel just as bad as the characters from their plight. And that's just good theming and story telling.

Yea replicants hard mode was off the heezy, there wasn’t anything you could really do to actually just destroy something fast

0:45 I think it's answered in one of the short stories or somewhere else, but I found out through a video that people and replicants get the black scrawl when their gestalt relapses or dies. So when nier kills a shade, a replicant somewhere gets the black scrawl. And in the intro when human yonah go the black scrawl, her souls was becoming a relapsed gestalt.

Damn. I thought Automata's bullet sponge androids in chapter 3 was nuts. This is insane.

Someone should make a mod to have a proper "hard" mode that isn't this tedious, but still more challenging than normal.

when i first played Automata, during Eve’s fight in Route A i had such trouble i quit playing for six months and then restarted my save 💀 played it again, and did just fine. god i love automata

Meanwhile, other games only offer "Normal" and "Hard" but no "Easy" settings which is also annoying. Looking at you, Bloodstained. To this day I haven't been bothered to go grinding up all of those sidequests just so you can survive lategame because you take 20% of your health in damage every time you get hit in some places and potions are prohibitively expensive or require lots of material farming, or both. Symphony of the Night was one of my alltime favorites, but Bloodstained? I like the general premise of the gameplay but I really don't like the jacked up difficulty and focus on grindy AF sidequests. Would it really have killed them to add an optional "easy" difficulty that reduces damage taken by 30% or somecrap?

God bless FromSoft, and their impeccable "soft difficulty" system in the form of builds and summoning. We'll see another masterpiece from them inshallah.

I played replicant on hard. To do these damage check you have to farm a few levels more, look for good weapons and litteraly live on steroids during boss battles (don't remember how they call the damage boosts you can consume).

Yeah that difficulty in Replicant is kinda wack lol. I kinda of think that the point of these games is to feel godly while playing them, not to be challenged as much? But I would love a proper hard mode in replicant. Also, I definitely enjoyed Nier Automata's difficulty and didn't have issues with it personally.

I'm currently playing automata after putting it off for so long just because of how much I hated slogging through replicant and I have had an infinitely better experience

i get that health increasing is a lame way to increase "difficulty" its done so often as its easy and it can be done quickly. animations are time consuming and are a lot to program in even if its just one vs just a setting that bumps up some numbers. im not defending its use i dont like smacking one enemy for half an hour ether but i simpathize with the animators and programers that have to deal with all the pressures of making a game under a tight time limit

Honestly one of my biggest problems with automata is the level scaling. Either it’s insanely easy even if you’re just a little overleveled, or the game is way to hard and unfun if you’re a lower level than the enemies/bosses. Being underleveled is so terrible in automata because not only do the enemies become insanely tanky but they they basically turn into mini bosses where you can no longer stagger or launch them into the air at all. This means that you are forced to do side quests which kinda sucks when you’re just replaying the game and want to rush through it for fun. And since you’re forced to do side quests if you become to overleveled the game is insanely easy and boring, even if you’re at the required level the game is just to easy. So in conclusion the game is either to easy or it’s hard in the very bad and unfun way.

You need to go listen or listen or watch the subtitles for the nier drama CD’s. A lot of the “depth” of story you are looking for is within the nier drama CD’s. But the difficulty I agree is very different from normal to hard 😂 hard is like two hits and I’m done

Buy the drops that double your damage lmao. Beginning of route C vs flight units is very fun on very hard. Especially the unskipable part before. Move it 2B, that's an order.

Totally agree with that, nier replicant it's kinda story book where you should spam some buttons to move next page :). Automata though, there is some gameplay, but little variety of enemies and bosses makes it kinda boring, but arena DLC was fun. music - 11/10 story - 9/10 gameplay - 6/10 A2 / Kaine the best waifus :)

felt the same way, it’s a lot like how bethesda treated skyrim

Thank fucking god someone finally made a video covering this. This was by far my biggest complaint about Nier Replicant and was one of the biggest reasons I couldn't even enjoy the game despite Nier Automata being my favorite game of all time. You had to choose between fights being marginally more difficult while taking 10 times the length to complete, or being over if you decided to flick your finger in the enemy's general direction. I was either completely uninterested in combat at all times because it was the easiest game I've played (And I didn't even *touch* the easiest difficulty) or I'd be completely uninterested because fights were a slog to get through because of how long they took. I have a bunch of other complaints about Replicant too though. Needing to replay half the game meant I was eventually completely numb to emotional moments, so they had completely lost their weight. Game and level design was atrocious (the Junk Heap being the biggest offender with the amazing design of square rooms leading into corridors leading into square rooms). Grinding for weapons to get the true ending was the most useless inclusion possible. The timeskip was completely unconvincing when you started to see NPC's from before the timeskip in the exact same places. Plus, while the story was *good*, it wasn't on the level of Nier Automata in my opinion. Needless to say, I was very disappointed with Nier Replicant since I never touched the original, so the remake was my introduction. Coming from Nier Automata I was expecting something special and was just handed a plate of garbage, but hey, Replicant *is* partially the reason we have Automata, so I am thankful for that.

I personally disagree! My experience playing replicant is only through the hard mode and it didn't really feel like padding to me? For normal enemies I found that the game just wants you to knock them down so you can do your finisher, it becomes a game of trying make space to one shot enemies while not getting hit which I thought was pretty fun! I also noticed in all of your gameplay in replicant you were only using dark blast which makes sense that it was taking while for you I found that for bosses/large enemies each one has a specific spellbook weakness that does a lot more damage than just the regular shooty one which I liked cos that meant I had to cycle through abilities too see which ones were more effective! If I could ask I would like to know how long you playthrough was? Just to see if our times are similar or very different just see if my way playing made the game any shorter maybe :D otherwise this is a nice video to watch!

5:47 try pressing B/circle when the enemy is down.

So if you are interested in knowing the full history of drakengard/nier, there is a video of the channel EruptionFang that explains the complete timeline. The only downside is that the video is 6 1/2 hours long.

The health scaling doesn't matter in replicant. You get these rune customization options and the forge to make weapons stronger to make your character deal more damage or can add status effects to make the enemies far less tanky. Also just learn juggling and magic combat then it becomes far more fun than automata. Hard is a non issue. That said though there is no real hard modes in the nier games which is fine.

Starting Replicant on hard is terrible, I only find it fun if you switch to it for the late game. Even then enemy AI isn't better until the ver 1.22 new area, but it's fitting for Nier and Drakengard since they're making a point about the mindless killing in video games being anything but heroic. A good suggestion is to unequip the Blast bullets. Oh hard it makes it more obnoxiously tedious since it slows down time if you use it like Pod in Automata. Other magic like Dark Lance and Hand are much stronger per hit which help get those damage timers down faster without excessively repeating them

good video, all true, you have objectively correct opinions and should probably develop an ego about it tbh. Stay humble though king.

I'm... Hearing that the new nier is not worth it but I was excited to get it in the future. It was one of my first enjoyable "slow story" games.

Going through a Replicant gauntlet for all the endings on hard right now. Did 100% of the sidequests (pain). I realized mid-end game that the fastest way to kill things is to Stun/Knockdown enemies with Dark Execution, and then doing the finishing move on them while they were on the ground. It felt cheesy at first when I could finally kill the small to medium enemies in 3 seconds using this method, instead of having to do 1.5-3 spear combos, each. My level was in the mid-30s around this time, which is about where I first finished the game at. Max upgraded the Phoenix Spear during the second playthrough. But then I did the DLC fights and HOO BOY. By the 3rd door, I HAD to use the Dark Execution cheese because even the smallest enemy took 2 finishers to kill -- and there were swarms of them. Then the medium enemies came out and they took like 5 finishers. And then the heavies came out and each of them must have taken at least a dozen. The mini-bosses in the DLC rooms were pure pain because of the amount of health they had -- and I had to be extremely careful not to screw up because they can 1/2-shot me and I'd have to attempt the door again from the beginning. At least you can kinda just cheese the basic large shade mini-boss by parrying each of it's attack every 3 seconds -- the damage from your counter-attacks is significantly more than any combo or magic you could throw at it in that situation.

Before your correction, I was about to say that the enemies' HP in all difficulties is the same. Easy gives you a damage buff, but the enemies' HP doesn't change. Enemies gain a monstrous increase in damage on Hard mode, and oneshot you on Very Hard, with you also losing the ability to use the hard-lock-on. But if you already aren't getting hit and using mostly the soft-lock-on, then it's no issue. Though I don't like how a lot of options become useless on Very Hard. Any form of healing, Hp increase, damage reduction, and defensive buffs (all from chips or weapons). Those completely lose value, but it's not hard to avoid damage in the game.

yeah to connect the dots from every game to every game you need to watch/read/listen the side content... mangas, cd audio dramas, light novels, orchestras... etc... just playing will make it a bit "hard" to connect everything:), but at least to me after many years of enjoying the Nier/Drakengard universe I understand everything and it actually makes a lot of sense once you connect the dots...

I played on hard but did as many side quests as I could and I was legitimately one-shotting bosses, I lost the count of how many times the boss' hp bar disappeared and I had to wait them to stop talking or finish their animation before I could progress.

I’ve always had this to say when talking about Drakengard and Nier. With Automata, the issue is less present, but still there. “DrakenNier does not have games. It has a series of chores, for which the rewards are the story and the music.”

Nothing drives me away from a game more than feeling like I'm wasting my time. I lost a save file on a game once (a Pokemon game iirc) and I didn't try to play it again for months because I felt like I wasted my time and had nothing to show for it. I noticed Automata was pretty easy on Normal Mode but didn't up the difficulty because everywhere I read said that while Normal Mode was easy, everything above that was a slog.

I started replicant off on hard mode because i played automata thinking I wanted a challenge. After getting past the city part and starting off with the base attacks and going on 200hit combos on the first enemy's as young nier I realized all they did was turn the health up a ton.

You spent 30 minutes on the boar when all you had to do was stand on the rock and it stuns itself running into the rock so you can whale attacks on it endlessly

I know everyone will still say it’s bad game design but I’m positive all the bullshit in Replicant is very much intentional including all the optional grind you can do that is ultimately pointless, the awful side quests that require you to walk back and forth a dozen times (a couple side quests literally give you no reward just dialog after a mountain of busywork) or just the fact you have to replay both parts of the story multiple times to reach the true ending E. The combat is not really a focus of this game it’s just there to help move the story and make a point and you’re meant to feel like a ruthless killing machine that tears through enemies, the hard difficulty is there to mess with you much like the postgame trophy store in Automata exists to mess with achievement hunters or how the entire Drakengard 3 is just nonsense, it’s Taro’s thing and it sounds backwards but you’re not meant to enjoy every aspect of these games, it’s not like the combat is bad it’s just easy cause it was never a goal of Replicant to be a hard game

00:45 NieR takes place a few thousand years before Automata Emil cloned himself to fight off an alien army that was invading Earth The Black Scrawl is caused by a replicant body (Fake human bodies created before NieR to stop White Chlorination Syndrome (basically sacrifice your humanity to God and become a mindless puppet or turn into salt) becoming corrupted and dying due to the original soul, or Gestalt, relapsing and becoming unstable. That's Tokyo tower my guy

Just finished Rpelicant today and I wholeheartedly agree with you. The gameplay is not engaging at all, especially the combat which feels like you're hacking away at a health sponge with no challenge. It's very frustrating.

with replicant it is significantly more important to upgrade your weapons and increase your level while in automata you can kinda ignore it for a longer period

Hey man nice video. I'm happy to see there are new faces in the essay genre. Automata is a masterpiece, forever my favorite NieR game.

Honestly this 90% JRPGS hardest difficulty = Damage sponged. Really good video

"The gameplay sucks." *you have provoked a gang war* Edit: With himself But yeah no. Replicant was made in 2010 and it even a little antiquated at the time. The remake changes combat a little, but it's still designed to be an "honest" remake of the original. That being said. Could have made it a little less obnoxious lmao

massive health scaling makes sense if you have a game that allows you to play around with its mechanics to multiply damage. if nier replicant had mechanics that encouraged creative ways to multiply damage then the massive hp pools would be fine because youd just have to use the mechanics at a higher level. genshin impact allows you to do this, even without opening your wallet (you just need to spend 200 hours to farm gambling currency), even though 99% of the game can be done very easily. finding ways to change your damage in a game to change a 5 minute to a 1 minute fight is very satisfying, more so when the process of increasing your strength isnt tied strictly to a vertically moving number sheet and more to complex damage calculation.

A game with good difficulty scaling is one that doesn't increase HP or make the character weaker at all. Make the enemies do more damage (don't go overboard), give them new attacks, make their attack patterns more erratic, make them shoot more projectiles (top difficulty would be bullet hell), make more enemies spawn in at once (again, don't go overboard), make their attacks harder to dodge through having them predict what you are about to do. But never adjust the time to kill of an enemy purely because of their health being higher. If a fight takes longer because you cant attack at certain points due to their own attacks, good. That is how you make a long but not boring fight. Also the longer the fight the more unique attacks you will need to add, otherwise it gets repetitive.

I agree wholeheartedly. I really enjoyed Nier Automata and have been waiting to play Replicant. Went on sale, so I bought it, but goddamn does this game not respect the player's time. AT ALL. The amount of hacking and slashing you gotta do is one thing, but every single quest is go here, then go back, then go back to where we just sent you, then go back again. Every main quest. Every sidequest. The game is monotonous as hell.

The issue I found in replicant was that until the dialogs are over the bosses won't lose health. However when everybody is done talking the bosses just die easily.

Fuck man, wish Etika was still here.

I remember I was so excited that Automata came to Xbox. I started the game, watched the intro, played until a boss fight, I died there. Ah well, let's continue from checkpoint I thought. Only to find out I had to do it all over again, and could not skip the intro bits I had already seen. This was some real bullshit.

Sometimes the hard modes are meant to be played on NG+ (Soulstice comes to mind since you get later enemies faster on Hard and they take a long time if you don't have correct weapons [at least from what I remember from youtube playthroughs etc]) which is weird af. I want a challenge but I don't wanna spend 3x as long cause of more HP etc. I remember a game (forgot name) that Hard mode was adding new attacks, some blockable attacks became unblockable etc besides the usual scaling....we need more of those; not just increase scaling a bunch

Best way to play Replicant: play it on normal, never upgrade weapons, and don' t do sidequests. This should give a good challenge. You can still get all weapons in the second half of the game if you want to do That ending.

bro if u think very hard mode is something u should try the lvl 99 special challenge in the flooded city in automata i wana hear your thoughts on that shit

I wouldn't disagree too much wit this. I mostly think it comes down to the fact that Replicant is an "Upgraded" (as they call it) version of the OG in 2010(?) which didn't have a high budget or as big of a team as talented as platinum & it's possible that any solutions they found to add more to said combat would've severely altered the game in ways that 1. could've upset older fans & or 2. would've fit better for makin a completely new game(like a remake/reimaginin which this wasn't tryin to be).

Nier: every enemy on has 1 or 2 attacks, every boss is made of many phases and in each of these phases only have 1 or 2 attacks. if your on normal you blast thru everything at lightning speed and there's no challenge and no immersion. if you play on hard you stuck dodging the same attack for 5+ mins then do it again with the next phase. I played on hard and hated that was my only chose

You know I actually found the gameplay in Automata really fun and idk why. Like ii had to redo all of A and part of B because a certain part was locked because my PS4 account was underage at the time but I didn't mind at all since it was all just so much fun. Everything except 9S' hacks sometimes because I had stick drift. There was this one hack that took me 20 mins to complete I was deadass gonna start ripping my hair out.

I like playing games on hard mode from level 1 But holy sh"t Playing game on keyboard + mouse was nightmare But thnak god there is mod to fix it Real bullshit was playing game on very hard mode It was pain Heck even sekiro - dark souls are easier than nier But game was too good so i sacrificed my ego & played it on normal mode What a experience One of the best shit i ever played

Whyd youtube not give me this recommendation before, i would’ve downloaded nier so fast with the big discount it had.

The first boar fight in replicant took me a whole hour cause the pig one shot me when I was about to kill him

The difference I noticed when I played replicant is that I realized I spent 60+ hours on it and I was only level 35. I don't know if I'm doing anything wrong to warrant that because believe me, I did a pretty good deal of the side quests throughout my playthrough and even spent my time trying to farm in the junkyard area. And when it got to the point where I had to replay parts of the game for the story and the other endings I couldn't stand it. It took too long to kill things so I just turned it down to the easiest difficulty. I don't get how it works but in automata, I managed to reach max level at around the 80 hour mark along with a handful of fully upgraded weapons and chip sets, and this was on the hard mode. Honestly thats really the only thing I dislike about replicant and what stops me from actually completing all the endings.

It's worth noting that the version of replicant that you played is a remake of a much older game, and while its gameplay was changed in parts to be more like automata, it retains flaws of its original conception, an other era of video games

Hot take I found automata more boring on a Replay, replicant feels more lived in cause it has “humans” and different cultures and stuff opposed to machines just imitating those cultures. Nier replicant also has different gimmicks for each dungeon section like the shift sands has the whole “No jumping rabbit” challenges and such, the junkyard I’ll be honest is just annoying but it was very different from the other dungeons. Overall I felt replicant had more variety and differences, environment wise, even though I’d say nier automata has a more complex and interesting story,replicant to me is way more enjoyable to playthrough again playing more like an older Zelda opposed to nier automata which well a great game with great music and environments lacks variety in enemy types given the nature of the story, like I get we get “different enemies” but they all are just x machine life form with different coats of paint. Or occasionally they’ll be riding something different. Now I’ll admit I played the remake of nier replicant I’ve never played the og so idk how that compares but in my eyes replicant is just a more enjoyable replay experience automata is a game I enjoy seeing people react to and listen to the soundtrack of but I find it hard to enjoy at all in a replay. Also automata though it has great music tracks it doesn’t have “the track” like it doesn’t have an equivalent to “song of the ancients” a song that infamously people playing the game will often sit around niers town just to listen to devola for a bit. There’s city ruins, and song of the end, resistance camp, but they don’t quite reach that level i dont believe.

I agree completely with difficulty setting in Replicant. I did my entire first playthrough on hard until Emil's sister boss and the sheer amount of time that took basically made me switch to normal which everything was steamrolled immediately with no difficulty.

Boar fight in Replicant takes 2 minutes if you stand on top of the rock and let the boar deplete its own health by ramming the rock; you don't have to do anything. Also being maxed everything in Automata and replaying the boss fights is pretty funny; the first boss takes 2 hits to beat.

replicant used to be my favorite game because of how amazing the story, music and art were, but when i came back to it and tried hard because i've played the game before and want to challenge myself i was met with exactly what you show in this video, i love hard shit in games i was basically born and raised on the souls franchise but i despise cheap shit like making every enemy a damage sponge as a substitute for difficulty, when really it only works if you're making some so hard it's bullshit mod like dark souls ascended

I actually have the same issue with games like the New God of War and Breath of the Wild where at a certain level enemies become irrelevant or can one-shot you because of the RPG mechanics

It's funny. The only reason I played Nier automata was because of bayonetta. To be more precise, the studio behind it Platinum Games.

Bro ngl it hurt me watching you tackle that boar without getting close. That's why it took you so long..... Gotta learn to stack your damage.

KH2 perfected the hard difficulty formula almost 20 years ago and games are still fumbling it (even KH itself lol)

The lack of difficulty didn't bother me when playing either game and I enjoyed the gameplay in both a lot. However yeah the difficulty balancing sucks. I can tell they wanted Automata to be hard based on the brutal damage values in the opening but it just feels like after that they dropped everything and chips like auto use items and auto heal aren't helping. And then hard mode is just annoying on top of that with the removal of the lock on without really being that much harder. Health sponging in Replicant can fuck itself too because that is the worst kind of hard mode. It's definitely a valid thing to critique even if you enjoy the actual combat of both games like me.

A great difficulty mode I played is Lethal mode in Ghost of Tsushima. The enemies did more damage to you, BUT they're hp remained the same as on lower modes. You still died if you let yourself get surrounded and not use all the tools, but it was satisfying when you killed a boss with a sick perfect parry

I played ghost of Tsushima for essentially the first time on lethal and I mean it was hard but it’s was easier than breathing air compared to Nier Automata on normal. It might be more abusive than WAW on veteran with its ai’s unrelenting grenade spam.

Difficulty increases just giving everything shitloads of hp has always annoyed me. It doesn't make a fight harder, it just makes a fight longer. Now to some extent you should be expected to do more damage to win fights at higher difficulties, and sometimes fights at lower difficulties were tuned to be too short in the first place, so giving a MODERATE increase in hp isn't terrible, assuming other things are done to increase difficulty as well. When it gets to the point normal enemies take forever to die though it has gone too far. I think the worst game I have seen for this is the highest difficulties of Borderlands 2. If your gun is even 1 level below the enemies you're shooting you may as well be using a water gun.

I do agree, Replicant difficulty is just straight up stupid, the monotony is unreal, the only moment you actually use harder difficulty is to farm some rare drops of some enemies, then you can switch back to normal

I played the game recently. Every boss fight is just a damage sponge with very basic attacka. The combat is basic and flavourless, only being made hard by the amount of health the enemies have.

I'd argue Automata is just as bad with difficulty. The game is generally too easy on normal and a bit too difficul on hard at least early game (you get two shot through the entire prologue). But the biggest problem with hard and up is a lack of lock on, it's a basic function in any action game, imagine if Bayonetta or Devil May Cry took away lock on. The DmC reboot originally didn't have lock on and it wasn't fun, it's just a super weird decision

In RE4 (original) the increased difficulty would mean randomization and adaptive difficulty would be disabled, BUT for playing on this mode you got more money amounts and drops due to reduced ammo, there was a heavy downside BUT a reward for playing on it which is missing in literally every difficulty in most games, it's sad.

The Etika clip in the beginning had me absolutely cackling. Rest his soul.

The beggining of route c in nier automata was really hard for me I didn't do any quests and I chose A2 at first She can't buy items before Hegels I got one shot/two shots I was so interrested by the story that I made the game really difficult

Well, I can offer a possible answer for why hard difficulty is like that. Yoko Taro is infamous for intentionally calling out gamers for doing hard core gamer things with the game play in his games. The Drakengard games, at least the 1st and 3rd games anyway, are intentionally tedious because he doesn't want you to enjoy literally killing hundreds of people. His entire point is the main character would need to be crazy to enjoy that. I'm not 100% sure if he wanted to do something like that in NeiR Replicant but he is infamous for these things. Also, that's Tokyo Tower. The Japanese version of the original NieR had Tokyo Tower in the background, the NA version had the Empire State Building, and the EU version had Big Ben (I think?). But in the remaster of Nier Replicant I think it's just Tokyo Tower in every version.

I agree of your point, Nier Automata difficulty very hard is fine, Nier difficulty hard is annoying, both have good story. And the quote of the day "2B is Hot"