It's so, so easy for remasters and remakes to impose new meaning on an old work, decontextualizing old games and rewriting their style with something new and ill-fitting. In all other ways, this is a remaster that is lavishly devoted to the original. I ran into a few odd technical problems, too, like serious frame drops when I accidentally unplugged my controller, or a persistent issue where my mouse cursor kept reappearing on my screen during cutscenes, which was not great for the game's sense of gravitas. You can bump up or down texture filtering, shadows, reflections, and LOD, but there could have been so much more here. There are no options related to framerate, and it appears to cap at 60 fps. The technical aspects are much improved over the original, which struggled to maintain 30 fps, but they're not quite up to contemporary standards. Now, they're a lot more welcome, tied together by big, dramatic battles. Before, digressions into weirder gameplay territory felt like a drag, slowing down the pace of fighting and exploring that could already feel incredibly dull. Nier's famous genre shifts pop more, too, now that the core combat mechanics are so much more entertaining. Parts of the game that were obtuse before are more clearly explained, like a notorious fishing minigame that now is less of a roadblock than it is an extended gag for those who can't figure it out. Magic, once clunky and slow to use, is now integrated neatly into combat, letting you launch spells and ranged attacks parallel to standard melee fighting, which goes a long way toward making the player feel both powerful and fast. Taking after Automata, the combat is significantly more dynamic and fluid than it was in the original, with combos and dodges that feel graceful and responsive. What that means, in practice, is that you'll be spending most of your time running around lush fields and dank dungeons, doing quests and fighting ethereal monsters called Shades.
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