The much awaited NieR Reincarnation has finally been released and players can now download and dive into the fantastic new world created by the renowned Yoko Taro. Players who play this game can expect to find wonderful sights, interesting locations, an intriguing and confounding storyline, and breathtaking visuals as you journey across The Cage, which is where you begin the game and where you spend your time running around purifying dark statues.

Journey Through the Cage

In NieR Reincarnation, you play as the Girl of Light, a mysterious individual who awakens in The Cage, a purgatory-like place with sprawling labyrinthian corridors, massive stone structures, great halls and, quite frankly, spectacular views. As the Girl of Light, you are accompanied by Mama, a curious little ghost-like creature that serves as your guide through The Cage. Your objective, at first glance, is to ascend through the depths of this weird place, interacting with a series of black statues along the way to purify them and obtain the weapons they hold, also discovering the memories of other individuals locked within these pieces.

Without spoiling any of the story, the cutscenes that you can view as you work through the main quests by interacting with the statues can often be quite interesting and can often by themselves be an incentive to keep playing. While the general gameplay and combat can look really awesome and feel great, we’ve found ourselves more than once playing missions simply to see what happens next in the different stories you’ll come across.

A Simple Yet Satisfying Combat System

And speaking of the combat; while NieR Reincarnation does a good job of offering unique and intriguing storylines, the combat is pretty much a par for the course experience, consisting of turn-based encounters where your characters and the enemy attack each other in succession until one group is left standing. However, you can manually activate skills to unleash different effects and possibly shift the battle in your favor.

Every character has a unique “Character Skill” that they can activate in combat once the corresponding gauge is charged. The said gauge charges up whenever the character takes or deals damage. However, once used, these powerful skills can often make short work of the enemies, though this effect varies depending on the character, with some of them doing less damage but activating special effects and functioning as setups for combos.

The combat system in NieR Reincarnation also has a combo feature in place, which lets characters do more damage with every subsequent skill when used in succession. As the skills add up, the multiplier increases, which makes comboing one of the most effective ways to deal heavy damage. However, the current combo chain is broken whenever the characters take damage, which means that a degree of strategy and skill is necessary in order to unleash longer combos.

Lastly, the combo system in NieR Reincarnation also has an affinity mechanic in place, wherein attacks of certain elements deal additional or reduced damage depending on the element of the target. These affinities are determined by the weapon that the character has equipped, and consist of five different elements that interact in the following manner:

• Fire defeats Wind
• Wind defeats Water
• Water defeats Fire
• Light and Shadow are opposite affinities and they deal increased damage to one another

A Varied Cast of Characters

Despite featuring a unique perspective on storytelling and offering many different narratives, NieR Reincarnation still has the standard character collect system where you can bolster your roster with a variety of different heroes and champions. Some of these characters come from completing story quests and challenges, while others can only be obtained via summoning from the in-game gacha.

While you can progress through the story without spending a dime, those who want to unlock the best characters might prefer to invest a bit in order to summon from the available banners, or might prefer to reroll for them. Luckily, when it comes to the latter, NieR Reincarnation is quite thoughtful of the gamers who want to reroll, as they game not only gives you plenty of resources to perform a couple of 10x pulls, but it also opens up the summoning feature right at the start of the game so that players can reroll easily.

The Different Weapons and Proficiencies

Aside from collecting different characters, you can also summon and obtain a variety of different weapon types in Nier Reincarnation, each of which offer different abilities and stats. 

Just like each hero in the game has a unique Character Skills, the weapons they equip offer different Weapon Skills, which the wielder can use in combat whenever they’re off cooldown. However, in contrast to the Character Skills, which require taking and dealing damage to charge up, the Weapon Skills have a timed cooldown ánd you can use them as soon as these timers expire.

One important aspect about the weapons, however, is the Proficiency feature. Simply put, each character can be proficient with a specific weapon type. And when you equip them with the said weapon type, they can attack much more often in combat and will gain a boost to their stats. It’s very important to always equip the correct weapon type to all your characters in order to unleash their full potential.

Character and Weapon Enhancement

Though getting good characters and weapons from the gacha system is an important step towards maximizing your potential in NieR Reincarnation, you’ll need to upgrade each of these in order to increase their strength. Even the best heroes and armaments pale in comparison against counterparts that have been properly upgraded.

In order to upgrade both characters and weapons, you will need a variety of different materials alongside gold, the game’s most common type of currency. Luckily, you can find tons of these materials by completing the myriad quests available to you along your travels. From the main quests, to the sub-quest and daily missions, among others, farming these tasks is the best way of scoring rare materials. And as you progress through the main missions and unlock new features, you’ll be able to farm materials of increasing rarity.

NieR Reincarnation is a fantastic game and a good entry into the expanding NieR franchise. If you’re a fan of Yoko Taro games, from the NieR and Drakengard games on PC and consoles, to titles like SINoALICE on Android and iOS, then you’ll definitely love this game. Especially if you play NieR Reincarnation on PC with BlueStacks, you’ll find the best tools and features to optimize and enhance your experience.