Haven't played the original, only Automata, and damn this game has a lot of fetch quests. Pretty rewarding from time to time, but the gameplay of the side quests is ass. I hope I don't have to do much more fragile deliveries.
Damn man that's kinda disappointing to hear. I wanted to do this one eventually but not if it's going to highlight my death stranding work trauma. I can't keep just being a mule like that
Haven't played Death Stranding myself but at least the paths are pretty short in Nier at least compared to how I imagine Death Stranding. That doesn't make farming items more fun though.
I already did 3 fragile deliveries :D
The biggest "problem" is that you cannot tell beforehand if a quest will be good or not. The lighthouse lady and the old man's dog quests had an amazing conclusion, so they were totally worth it, even though gameplay wise they were boring.
I think you definitely feel that Automata is an improvement on the OG Nier (assuming that OG Nier and the remake aren't that different) in terms of quest design. That doesn't make Replicant bad though.
This might sound crazy, but I actually preferred Nier Replicant to Automata in terms of gameplay. I preferred Automata slightly on story and feel, but I also felt like Automata made some really bad mistakes that Nier didn't (the notorious prologue, for example)
If I could ONLY play one of the two once, I think it would be Automata. If I could only play one game 100 times, it would be Replicant. if that makes sense
"Game Over" having to rewatch the opening 6 times in a row was almost enough for me to toss the game out. I ended up putting "super-duper-easy" auto-fight mode on until I reached the first save point.
Who though that having a 1-hit-kill boss 15+ minutes into the game BEFORE the first save point was a good idea?
But that damn double-saw is one of few bosses that both have one-hit-kill situations that also attempt to hit you with one-hit kills (instead of them being incidental collisions). One could say it's one of the hardest bosses in the game.
It really sucked how many times I had to watch the opening cut-scenes. They went from beautiful to annoying.