NieR

If you've already played Nier, you probably know what to expect from this review. If you haven't, I guarantee that you don't. Check this review out for the biggest surprise of the year.

NIER is, in many ways, the kind of game critics of the Japanese RPG have been calling for: different, fresh, and in parts distinctly un-JRPG.

Nier is ugly and it can get really repetitive, forcing players to backtrack multiple times across familiar locations. But for every frustration I encountered in Nier, there were surprising gameplay twists, unsettling aesthetics and intriguing characters to meet. The ideas that Nier was built on are extremely solid -- the execution just falls short.

The quality of the work coming out of Square Enix seems to have taken a dip significantly in recent years, with even the mighty Final Fantasy succeeding in polarising opinions, not to mention a number of other recent misfires. It is hardly the end of an empire, but it does leave you wondering what the future holds for classic JRPG games. None of that really matters when it comes to NIER though, as...