Looking back at this line:

That may be true, but the SNES processor was obviously still powerful enough to handle games like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, and Star Fox.

I later realized Star Fox might not have been the best example because of the SuperFX chip. I thought it only handled the polygonal graphics, like putting a better graphics card into your computer while the main processor still handles things like object coordinates, player input, and hit detection, and it seems like you could recreate the game with sprites if you wanted to. But then I read it was a "coprocessor", so maybe it's far more critical to the actual game than I was aware of? But shit, the way Zebbe talks about the SNES it's as if something like Brain Lord running mostly in slowmo couldn't be because the game was sloppily programmed and poorly optimized (on top of just being kinda shit), but because the system was such a piece of junk that six sprites was all it took to bring it to the verge of meltdown.

I also neglected to comment on Zebbe's final remark:

Phantasy Star IV is, to me, the best game ever, so we will never top that :)

What the fuck kind of attitude is this to have about your work? I'm also not sure why you would say that to somebody who was completely transparent on her opinion of Phantasy Star IV being that it was decent but overrated, but then again I've never found myself in the position of having to explain my ambitions to somebody who thought the same of Blaster Master. But even then, my attitude wouldn't be "I will never make a game as good as Blaster Master", it would be "I might not top Blaster Master, but I will try my damnedest to."

I got this email a few days ago, but I'm tossing it in here because I didn't feel like this was worth dedicating a full MOREC to (and judging by the first two lines, neither did the sender):

From: rebaz talei

Date: Feb 11, 2013, 9:20 am

Subject: shii

man, i'm not even gonna make this e-mail look decent nor properly.

i'm not even gonna give a shit about my grammer, but your review on BCR was of complete shit, you made some very bad statements. i know its your opinion, but i dont know whats wrong with your TV.

and i dont get it, how did you not like the last stage? are you a casual fuck gamer? if so, i'd like to know. this game was hard compared to the nes one, i basicaly completed the nes one in less than 30 minutes yesterday, its probaly the easiest game i have on the nes.

maybe you should rant on about how bad battletoads on the nes is, since you're not a fan of games that aquire some "skill" and its amazing that they pulled that off for a 2008 game. i have never seen a game that is hard/decent after 2006. (talking about viewtiful joe here)

i wish i could have just sent this e-mail with "ur a faggot" but i'd rather have a response how you think i'm worthless etc etc.

I don't know what I love better - that this guy obviously didn't lurk around the site before shooting his mouth off to make sure I didn't pick more competent trolls than him out of my teeth (although if he did and found out how inappropriate calling me a "faggot" would be, I imagine he would have sent me something about "fake nerd girls" instead), or that about a third of the way through the BCR review you'll find this line:

"The best part of all this is that for all my frustrations, the game's difficulty still felt like a huge downgrade from the NES version. Maybe it was because the NES version already taught me many of the tricks, but there's no denying some dumb-downing was involved."

So rebaz here is saying that if I thought the game was easy, I'm a casual gamer who hates hard games. Of course, considering his completely fucked up cognitive abilities ("Bionic Commando is the easiest NES game I own, and it's amazing that a game that rehashes all the levels and enemies is the only hard/good game since Viewitul Joe!" Um, what?), terrible spelling, liberal use of profanity, and total lack of reading comprehension, I have a feeling this is Bobby Jindra under a different email. But then again, he didn't call the review "shitfaced", and it's not like there's a shortage of Internet lamers around.

Also, while Bionic Commando isn't the hardest game on the NES, anyone who says it's the easiest game they own on the NES is either just saying that in a halfassed attempt to embarass the fans, or only owns four other games for the system. Or else they buy their games from some backwards fantasy land where Bionic Commando is easier than Wizards & Warriors, Wacky Races, Puss in Boots, Rockin' Kats, any of the Capcom Disney games, or any of the many, many children's games I could name. Which I guess is that same alternate dimension most people on the Internet get their games from, where Contra is unbeatable without the 30 lives code, Shadow of the Colossus is the only game ever made with bosses that require thinking, and Yoshi's Story is anything but terrible.

So a couple months have passed and given me time to chill out a bit, and now I'm going to ramble about NIER's ending and big reveal and why they bothered me so much. Massive spoilers obviously, so if you don't want to read them you can head back to the main MOREC page. Otherwise, scroll down a bit.






It wasn't that the Shades were really humans. Hell, I'd actually guessed that. But I thought the big twist was going to be was that the Black Scrawl really had two outcomes - it could kill the infected human, or turn them into a Shade. Or maybe it killed them, then later resurrected them as a Shade. But either way, the Black Scrawl nailed humans once, and the infected humans from ages ago now roam the earth as Shades.

I wasn't even bothered by the fact the main characters were clones. Although I thought the Nier and Yonah in the opening cinema were going to be the Nier and Yonah from the main game in a previous life, well hey, maybe the only thing the humans of the old world could do against the Black Scrawl was collect DNA from a bunch of survivors, then clone them to rebuild the world after the Black Scrawl blew over. But then time repeated itself, and it's nailing humans again.

No, it was that whole "It doesn't matter if you can think and have emotions, you're only human if you have a soul!" message. That's the kind of shit I expect to hear from religous hate groups. Yes, I realize not all the Shades were mindless, and in fact many of the bosses were just trying to protect themselves from you, but many of them were so badly relapsed they were just animals. And yet, everyone you grew attached to were less than them because they didn't have a soul. Or to put it another way, Lord Voldemort was more human than the cast of NIER.

I never understood how anyone or anything that can feel emotion couldn't have a "soul". Maybe it's just my misunderstanding of what a soul is even supposed to be. Or maybe I was supposed to be infurated with that notion. See, after you defeat Devola, while dying she mentions to Popola how strange it is that they were born without souls, but their tears still work. That made me think to the end of that episode of The Simpsons where Bart sells his soul to Milhouse, when Lisa says she doesn't believe people are born with souls, but that they develop one as they live their life. So maybe that's what happened with the Replicants - they didn't have souls at first, but over time they developed their own. Not to mention one boss was formed by the allegedly soulless Replicants turning into Shades and fusing together. And Gestalt Yonah was being driven mad by the screams of Replicant Yonah when her father put her in the allegedly empty body.

But no. The Replicants are soulless shells who all eventually die of the Black Scrawl because Nier did a great big stupid at the end of the game. Fuck you for growing attached to them.

Compounding the issue is that the backstory is rooted in bullshit. Drakengard had five completely different endings, but Drakengard 2 follows Ending A while NIER is a sequel to Ending E, which is already a steel baseball bat to the kneecap because it follows a non-canon "What if?" ending. Of course, I haven't played Drakengard 2, so maybe there's some Eternal Darkness-esque reveal that says all five of Drakengard 1's endings happened in different dimensions. That still doesn't change the fact that Ending E was fucking retarded.

But okay. Caim and Angelus fight the Grotesquerie Queen in Tokyo, and are then shot down by a fighter jet. Then all the magic they brought over from their world completely screws the earth and turns people into slaves of the Queen. And humanity's only option is to use a couple magic books to tear their souls from their bodies, create clones that are resistant to the disease to go out and kill the Queen's slaves, and finally recombine the two. Because that's way more practical than, say, sending radio-controlled robots out while all the humans hunker down in underground vaults. Except this plan goes on for 1,400 fucking years, in which two androids keep cloning the bodies while the original souls just sort of meander around, I guess. Um, why? Why weren't they recombined as soon as a batch of resistant bodies came out, instead giving Weiss plenty of time to forget his purpose and the clones to become sentient and screw up the whole plan?

Following a game's narrative is like watching somebody knit a sweater - if there's a twist, like that it's really a sweater for a dog, you need to start weaving it that way the start. If you start out knitting a shirt for a human, then change halfway through to knitting a dog sweater, you just end up with a shirt neither can wear. Or maybe you were weaving a red sweater, then ran out of red yarn and finished the shirt with blue yarn, and wound up with a shirt that's wearable, but hideous. Actually, it's not even that. Just as NIER is about to finish its sweater, it set its sewing needles down, pulls a loose string so the whole thing falls apart, and throws the pile of yarn on your lap. But what makes it so much worse is that it did it because of a terrible joke it older sibling made, presumably while drunk.

There's also that stuff about how the conflict between the Replicants and Shades/Gestalts was all because the two couldn't communicate with each other. Except I'm not giving NIER any points for that, because that was also the message of Crusader of Centy and NIER certainly doesn't handle it any better.

Incidentally, I read Emil was supposed to be gay for Nier. Um, I'm guessing that was removed from the English version, like how in the Japanese version of Drakengard Leonard was a pedophile and Caim's sister was all angsty because he wouldn't bone her, and possibly exclusive to NIER Replicant where Nier was a skinny teenager, because I'm just not seeing it.

I also read aliens invaded shortly after the game ended, but I don't know how to respond to that other than with whatever shows up after slamming my face against the keyboard.