>>715705663Yeah, the game's structure is definitely its weakest element. On the one hand, it makes some sense since Earth is meant to be desolate, but Nier did a good job with showing a post-humanity Earth and making it interesting. The shitty biomes suck, locking an area with unique suits behind doing a handful of side quests sucks, Eidos 9 as an area sucks, the Levoire areas are tedious after the first run and aren't skippable. Not only that, but in the desert areas, they're the only story relevant part of those areas.
Honestly the most wild thing is how they messed up skipping dialog/cutscenes in a way that makes replaying the game an absolute assache. You can skip some cutscenes but not others, the skippable ones usually don't skip all the way through to gameplay, it seems to me like if you don't skip them fast enough they become unskippable, many scenes aren't cutscenes but are dialog where you have to skip each line, but you can't immediately skip this dialog, you have to wait a few seconds into each line before it will skip, etc. It makes it so every time a scene comes up, you're waiting to find out what, if anything, you can do to get past it as quickly as possible. I don't think I've ever seen a game handle this so badly, especially one that's designed to be replayed as much as this.
I really enjoyed the game, but it could use a LOT of improvements in the sequel.