Difficulty Spikes, Gacha Mechanics, and Luck-Based Progression: Is ‘NieR Reincarnation’ Worth Playing?
Despite my unending adoration for the storytelling in the NieR series, it took me half a year to dip my toes into NieR Reincarnation. As I explored briefly at the end of my article about my obsession with Pikmin Bloom, the first ongoing mobile game that I’ve been sucked into, I’ve always been reluctant to enter the miserly economy of gacha “pulls” and randomized loot. Against my better judgment, however, I found myself itching for more Yoko Taro content after exhaustively finishing one of his most recent games, Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars. Thus, I soon started up a new file in NieR Reincarnation and dove headfirst into the story. After about a dozen hours, I hit a massive, impenetrable difficulty spike that took nearly a week to surmount, causing my generally positive disposition towards Reincarnation to take a dramatic reassessment.
It’s hard to talk about NieR Reincarnation in a cohesive manner, for the story feels markedly distinct from the gameplay in many instances. This already fraught relationship is further complicated by the complex system of timed mechanics and reward-based currencies within the game. Not to mention the fact that NieR Reincarnation pulls the classic Yoko Taro storytelling trope of fake-out endings and hidden layers to the narrative that must be gradually tugged at and grinded for. As always with Yoko Taro games, it seems the game is far from over even once you’ve completed the main story, and that reality works both with and against the overall experience of Reincarnation.
The Narrative Conceit of NieR Reincarnation
The main narrative of NieR Reincarnation is relatively straightforward compared to much of Taro’s usual work, though markedly distinct from the aesthetic and worldbuilding found in NieR Replicant and NieR: Automata (not to mention the Drakengard universe). Reincarnation begins in The Cage, a winding vertical labyrinth of wispy stone structures and impossibly impractical architecture. Taro’s influence from Fumito Ueda’s games, particularly Ico, bleeds through in Reincarnation more than his other titles, most notably in the level design. Even the playable character evokes comparisons to Ico‘s Yorda.
In Reincarnation, you control a delicate little girl who isn’t named and doesn’t speak until much later; by the end of the first main story route, this girl is named Fio and she finally regains her voice, enabling her to banter with the game’s slim cast of main characters. For the first few hours, Fio is accompanied by the maternal guidance of Mama, a cartoonishly ghost-looking character who instructs Fio and provides narrative clarity until her voice is regained.
Mama guides Fio throughout The Cage, cleansing dark scarecrows that harbor the memories of people who have been faced with desolating tragedy in their lives. These dark scarecrows are introduced as “warped memories” that Fio must fix to restore the complete stories of these various characters. Later, the story suggests how Fio might be best understood as a human weapon. Each area of The Cage is visually distinct even as these dark scarecrows appear identical, with usually four scarecrows cleansed to complete the story of a character. You will follow the grim, sacrificial tales of Dimos, Akeha, Argo, 063y, F66x, Lars, Griff, and others — all original characters from NieR Reincarnation, none of which make an appearance in other Yoko Taro games.
Each of these distinct characters shares something in common: loss and the journey towards hopefulness. As with all of Taro’s major work, that hopeful journey is marred by the devastating stain of nihilism for each character’s arc, leaving the player with little certainty about their moral appraisal of the story. Is hope a pathway to transcendence or redemption, Taro seemingly wants to ask; Reincarnation, as I have grown to expect from Taro, is content with asymptotically approaching an answer to this question.
In Reincarnation, characters like Dimos and Akeha go on murderous rampages to protect the seemingly innocent youths under their supervision. Characters like 063y and F66x are trapped in the mind-controlling confines of a prison-like experiment, involuntarily squaring off against deadly enemies with no regard for their personal lives or concerns. Some characters have their limbs severed and replaced with machinery, others lose their loved ones to senseless destruction, while others watch their comrades and villages decimated in front of them. There is little, if any, hope to be found in the individual character stories of Reincarnation’s main quests. But still, Fio tries, uncovering the truth of these tragedies and extracting weapons that inherit these memories, strengthening them in combat.
Segmenting the Narrative
A menacing monster that has been leering at Fio and Mama throughout their ascent in The Cage is revealed to be a conscious being that seeks to feed off the dreams and nightmares that Fio experiences. As the first main story ends, causing Mama to depart and be replaced by the Carrier (a dark ghost equivalent), the perspective flips to that of this monster, Levania, who begins to recontextualize these memories as prophetic experiences abstracted from the real world — which we learn exists outside of The Cage. Somehow Fio has become imprisoned in The Cage, and she temporarily escapes each night through a little door portal, bound to return the following evening during her slumber.
Fio’s experience in this liminal space, The Cage, might be best understood through a silly analogy. It’s like NieR Reincarnation takes place in the Monster’s Inc. universe. In the same way that the characters in Monster’s Inc. invade the world of sleeping children, harvesting their fear as a power source, only to return to the “real world” of monsters, NieR Reincarnation frames its narrative journey as harboring a transient space where Fio is only accessible during her slumber, and the monster quite literally eats her dreams as a resource. For both, the boundary between the “real world” and the dream world is separated by a door-shaped portal. After the first narrative ending, these metaphysics become more explicit and apparent to the player, whereas much of this context is absent in Fio’s first several chapters with Mama.
Every chapter in NieR Reincarnation is physically divided into different levels of The Cage where the environments are contextually responsive to the character stories and themes contained in the dark scarecrows. Each dark scarecrow promises a few narrative panels that unpack a short story contributing to each character’s tragic arc, and these stories are worth slowly digesting. Each little story beat culminates in a battle, and these battles are at the heart of the gameplay that NieR Reincarnation centers its entire in-game economy around.
A Deceptively Simple Battle System
The battles in NieR Reincarnation are largely identical across the entire experience, including the main story, the subquests, subjugation battles, and arena fighting. Each battle is turn-based in a traditional JRPG sense, although there is no text-based menu to speak of. Instead of a menu that allows you to strategize specific moves, special abilities, items, and so forth, Reincarnation offers a limited window of engagement. Your combat party consists of three characters of your choosing who are equipped with weapons, companions, memoirs, and other small upgrades that you can make throughout your playthrough. Each move you can make arrives by virtue of a timer, meaning you must wait a fixed durational period before you can choose to attack with your weapon, companion, or character’s special ability.
Understanding combat in NieR Reincarnation is simple, but combat is so loaded down with initial nomenclature that it’s worth briefly unpacking each bit of terminology to understand the flow and rhythm of each battle. You can opt for the game to “auto” your loadout of characters, weapons, and so forth, or you can manually pick and choose these aspects of your party for each individual battle. The key is to maximize your “force,” which is a combined set of your entire party plus everything they have equipped and the abilities you have upgraded. I often selected my three highest leveled characters, though I sometimes swapped in a developing character for the sake of farming experience points, and commonly tweaked my weapon loadout to match the weakness of the enemies I was about to encounter. To this effect, the weakness system in combat is surprisingly simple, with dark beating light, water beating fire, and so forth. The rest of combat is straightforward enough that, if you simply pay attention to the timers in your party, you can emerge victorious from most combat scenarios without much of a fuss.
The real balance that I struggled to strike throughout my playthrough of Reincarnation was often between maximizing force versus exploiting weaknesses, though I was later faced with the additional complication of tailoring my companions and character abilities to the given situation. As the game progresses, the enemies get tougher, and so combat becomes a negotiation between bringing your most powerful characters and scaffolding them with enough firepower to overcome any force disparity between yourself and the enemy encounter. For the first half of the game, I found that it was better to load up my most powerful characters with fully leveled-up weapons; however, once the monster takes over as the primary playable character in The Cage, I started paying more attention to the weaknesses of enemy types, opting for a weaker weapon that was more likely to do critical damage.
Automating Combat and Adapting to New Strategies
For a bulk of my NieR Reincarnation playthrough, I selected the option to automate combat, which accelerates the pace of these largely repetitive turn-based battles. With “auto” enabled, I was able to focus more on the storytelling in between battles rather than the battles themselves. During combat, all I had to pay attention to was my characters’ health and when their special abilities had recharged enough to use again. It wasn’t until I started dipping myself into the subquests that I was forced to adapt around this “auto” strategy. Even then, I was able to retool my loadout and enhance my characters such that I could comfortably nest myself back into the “auto” confines until I hit a genuine brick wall of difficulty.
Somewhere in Chapter Eleven, I found myself outpaced by enemy encounters. The game recommends a force level for each combat scenario, and I had often kept my party leveled well above such recommendations. In Chapter Eleven, however, I met a dark scarecrow that I simply couldn’t pass. The recommended force level was around 60,000, which clocked in about 10,000 above my combined party members. I tried to cleanse this dark scarecrow about ten times before seriously reassessing my party, its loadout, and my general strategy. My smooth flow of alternating story and gameplay beats had been jarringly halted, and it seemed that I would need to invest every resource I had earned into these characters if I was to stand a chance at pushing the story any further.
Luckily, in NieR Reincarnation, there are a myriad of things to do in between the main quests, so hope was not immediately lost. Because JRPGs have conditioned me to expect occasional difficulty spikes, I assumed that I could overcome this barrier in Reincarnation’s story if I simply grinded my way into having better numbers for my party members. I gradually learned that this assumption was not entirely useful. After around three hours of serious reinvestment — meaning that I had dumped every bit of money, upgrade materials, etc., into my characters, their weapons and companions — I figured I’d be better equipped to surmount this difficulty spike. Within seconds, my first party member went down, with my remaining two characters lasting until the first blow of the third round before “LOSE” plastered across my screen. I was dumbfounded. Everything I had come to expect from this genre of game hadn’t served me well, and I felt like I had just squandered my limited time and resources.
What To Do When You Get Stuck in NieR Reincarnation
So I went back to the drawing board with my approach to combat. My first impulse was to examine my loadout once again, identifying potential weaknesses and gaps that I could fix. I noticed that I hadn’t spent time investing in the ascension and skills for each character, which increase the degree of impact that each character’s special ability has in combat, as well as which passive upgrades they bring into battle. I went to work tooling around in these menus, exchanging the game’s various tokens, medals, and so on, before reinvesting my resources into this same party.
My second impulse was to ensure I had fully upgraded each weapon type in a way that would be adaptable and dynamic for each combat scenario. Each character has a weapon class that they specialize in, though they can wield any type of weapon that you choose: a gun, a spear, a sword, etc. I went to work picking out a weapon for each character specialty before ensuring I had a weapon for each elemental type in my loadout to swap as needed. This meant selecting about five elements per weapon type and upgrading them to their maximum level — a time-consuming and resource-intensive task to say the least. Because each character carries more force if their weapon specialty is adapted to, and because each enemy type has an identifiable weakness, I figured I could double-up when optimizing my loadout before battle.
Finally, I decided to invest in upgrading the character companions that join you in combat. These companions take the form of something like Grimoire Weiss from Replicant or the Pods from Automata, floating alongside your characters during combat and offering supporting fire during particularly taxing encounters. Given the nature of the timed turn-based combat of Reincarnation, however, these companions provide a mere passive buff based on their given element, and you have to wait on their meter to fully charge before their special attack can be used. As with the characters and weapons, upgrading these companions makes their abilities more effective and increases your overall party’s force.
Though time consuming, tedious, and repetitive, I made each of these combat adjustments with the hope that I’d be able to reengage with the battle that had halted my progress. I figured that increasing the force, the abilities, and the attacks would be enough, but I was wrong. With my newly improved loadout, I finally approached that same dark scarecrow once again, determined to make it through the end of the third round, victorious. I got stomped before round three could even begin.
More than three hours of menu-fiddling, min-maxing stats, and enhancing my general party had amounted to an outcome that looked identical to my first fruitless attempts. Needless to say, I was discouraged. It felt like I had wasted my time and that all of the game’s various rewards — gems, coins, tokens, medals, etc. — had been arbitrarily meaningless. The game had clearly calculated and anticipated that I would get stuck at a certain point, causing me to open my wallet and invest in the game’s economy. But this realization provoked an obstinate desire to work around the system and overcome this artificial barrier through sheer stubbornness and brute force.
Should I Spend Real Money to Progress in NieR Reincarnation?
With my unreasonably high goal in mind, I began approaching the game with even more persistence and tact. At a certain threshold, NieR Reincarnation allows you to replay the main story quests on hard mode, presenting you with the same scenarios but with beefed up enemies. A group of enemies that formerly took 10,400 force to overcome on normal difficulty might take 21,000 force to overcome on hard difficulty, for instance. Replaying the game in this manner enabled me to reap greater rewards, gain additional experience with which to rank up my characters, thereby opening their character substories, etc. Through this cyclical and monotonous approach, I squeezed in a replay for each main quest, maximizing all the bonus rewards to apply to my nearly-maxed party. It soon seemed that I was putting myself back on track to progress the narrative.
When playing the main narrative of Reincarnation, each successful encounter rewards the player with bonus stamina points, which is the game’s gauge of how much energy your party has to bring to combat. Since each enemy encounter begins with a fully recharged group of party members, unlike many JRPGs that task you with health management, I was forced to improvise on my strategy. If your party runs out of stamina, you will have to use a stamina replenishing item — many of which are doled out as post-battle loot — or else sit out Reincarnation for the rest of the day. Since only items or main quests replenish stamina, your ability to grind for additional resources and upgrades is immediately halted unless you choose to purchase some items from the premium shop.
How to Overcome Your Limited Stamina Pool in NieR Reincarnation
There is, however, a workaround or two for this finite system of stamina. One such solution involves completing the game’s daily exploration mini-games, which take the form of a Flappy Bird-like and bullet-hell auto-shooter respectively. Both of these exploration mini-games reward a ton of player experience and replenish a significant chunk of stamina. The catch with exploration is that you can only complete one of these mini-games every few hours — again, unless you want to pay up with some tickets — so this only puts a band-aid on the amputation. You can also simply put the game down for the day and pick it up tomorrow when your stamina has somewhat recovered on its own.
Once I conceived my stamina pool as a finite resource and started playing Reincarnation in a way that worked around this constraint, my approach to level grinding and gear enhancement took a radical U-turn. Suddenly my daily goal with Reincarnation underwent a reappraisal of priorities where I would start by grinding through daily quests and substories, followed by spending all of my accumulated leveling materials, and then I would use whatever limited stamina remained to exhaust the stories I had already cleared by ratcheting up their difficulty to hard mode. My goal was no longer to preserve stamina, but to exhaust it, which meant I was maximizing my potential experience and rewards each day. The final step I would take is to confront that difficulty barrier in the main story, testing my newly reforged mettle a few more times to evaluate what remaining changes were left to make. Thus the cycle repeated itself on and off for a few days.
After a solid week of grinding my way up the gradual rungs of the difficulty ladder in Reincarnation, I eventually broke through — and you might say I managed this by complete accident. In a total fluke, I squared off against that dreaded enemy encounter boasting over 60,000 recommended force. Instead of my usual characters going down one by one in a progressively hopeless defeat, I noticed that my enemy no longer singled out my weakest member, offing them first; instead, the enemy attacks were more evenly distributed against my entire party. My characters were suddenly taking several hits in a way that enabled me to cast a healing spell, forestalling their incapacitation as they were wiped unconscious from my party. Purely because of this apparently random AI decision, my characters limped their half-dead way into the final round of the battle, where I was able to unleash a plethora of stored special attacks all at once on the final boss. Astonishingly, I watched the boss fall over and evaporate into shadow before the screen announced, “WIN!”
Do I Need to Grind, or is Progression Pure Luck?
This moment of miraculous victory was not a self-congratulatory one, for though I had dutifully sank in several strategic hours to improve my odds of overcoming this encounter, the reality is that I made it through by virtue of sheer luck. This realization recontextualized my head-against-brick-wall approach to this difficult encounter: perhaps my previous attempts were also the result of bad luck instead of pure, impossible difficulty. Nevertheless, it had felt impossible, and so I had treated it as such. Make no mistake, I had done everything to stack the deck in my favor, but this victory did not feel like an accomplishment, simply a relief that I could move on with the story.
(I hit a dark scarecrow immediately in the next room with an additional 5,000 recommended force, so it was like going right back to square one. Rinse and repeat. That being said, I defeated this next enemy the first time I booted up the game after writing this article. Go figure. Persistence seems to be as valuable as skill in Reincarnation.)
Is NieR Reincarnation Successful as a NieR Game?
At the point of this publication, I have completed the narrative of NieR Reincarnation, though doing so took roughly 100 days of daily logins. But now, by virtue of this game operating in some sense like an ongoing live service title, I have grown accustomed to not only the game’s hardest modes of combat but the “EX Hard” modes for timed events. There also appears to be more main story on the horizon that will arrive at a future date, so I am not worried about reaching the final ending just yet. The simple atmosphere, music, reward circuit, and routine of it all keeps me coming back for a few minutes each day and no more, a pleasant cycle that feels fitting for a thematic tale akin to what the NieR series is known for.
Playing NieR Reincarnation scratches the insatiable itch to get lost in another Yoko Taro world while filling the absent-minded void that I would otherwise fill by scrolling through social media. By virtue of its brevity and structure, Reincarnation offers me the narrative and aesthetic fulfillment that I cherish in these games while also enabling me to pick up and put down the experience in tiny bursts. One of the biggest discouraging factors when debating whether to spend my time playing games is how many hours of free time I have available; to me, there’s no point in dipping into a heavy game with philosophical themes like the NieR series if I don’t have a few hours to spare. Luckily, I think NieR Reincarnation succeeds at filling these two niches at once.
On the other hand, my experience hitting a dramatic difficulty spike and grinding fruitlessly amounted to meaningless luck, and I was deflated when I immediately hit another, similar wall once I had overcome the first. Hopefully, the final chapter of the main story will not present similarly impassable barriers, but I am not holding my breath. When I take a look at the incentives to engage in this experience, I can’t help but feel cynical about how realistic it is to complete the main story with my patient approach, as opposed to cracking open my wallet once or twice. I feel like that reality — only circumvented by excessive and meticulous grinding and stat adjusting — curtails player enthusiasm at the wrong point in the story, and that’s an understandable issue that many people may face if they give NieR Reincarnation a try.
On a first playthrough, just when it seems like I might get definitive answers to the game’s many mysteries — who is Fio and where does she come from, what is The Cage and why is Fio trapped there with talking ghosts, who is Levania, the monster, and why is it attempting to become human and how does the act of eating dreams help accomplish that goal, etc. — I worry that I will have to spend several weeks patiently accumulating the necessary resources to reach the threshold of recommended force that the game presents me with, or else open my wallet as I’ve feared. I completely understand the desire of a free-to-play game to monetize itself in ways that bring about a return on investment. I also want this game to succeed as I would want any NieR game to succeed, so I am entirely conflicted.
The suggestion that the NieR franchise could successfully translate into the mobile gaming medium felt dubious at best when announced. After several dozen hours with the game, I think those concerns were validated by the precarious balance that the game strikes between free-to-play mechanics and a gacha economy on one hand with the desire to tell an artistic, philosophical, meaningful story on the other. NieR Reincarnation does not always succeed in this balance, but it never blatantly failed hard or long enough to spurn my enthusiasm for this title. And while I wish that there were more realistic and forgiving outs from this grind-heavy numerical experience, I think reaching the next iteration of NieR Reincarnation has the potential to be something quite special.
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