What you need to know
- NieR Replicant is a retelling of the 2010 PS3 game releasing on April 21.
- The game is a prequel to the post-apocalyptic action RPG NieR: Automata.
- Square Enix released more than nine minutes of new gameplay for NieR Replicant today.
The video shows the protagonist entering a strange walled desert city with the help of his brooding companion Kaine, who gained entry because she once saved a local kid from a pack of wolves. She doesn't speak the language though, leaving you to puzzle out what the masked inhabitants are saying. Also of little help is Grimoire Weiss, a floating book with a smug British accent who explains "I am a brilliant book of unspeakable value, not some dog-eared travel guide."
The video then cuts to the Barren Temple, where the hero does some platforming and gets locked in a room sealed by arcane forcefields where he must learn to use combo attacks to dispatch increasingly fierce foes. It also provides a showcase of the game's magic system, where you can select from abilities like Dark Hand, which lets you pummel foes with a powerful magical arm that gets larger when charged, and Dark Lance, which lets you launch a devastating magical spear, releasing more spears when charged.
You get to show those off in a boss fight where you must rescue a child locked in a column of sentient cubes shooting out spheres that your hero must either blast or evade. The cubes then coalesce into a more humanoid shape that tries to pummel the hero with cube hands until Kaine shows up to bail him out with some massive swords.
NieR Replicant is a prequel to the 2017 game NieR: Automata, which is one of the best Xbox One role-playing games. The game is set 1,000 years earlier and follows on a young man trying to save his sister.
Discover why we fell
In this game set long before the events of NieR Automata, a young man seeks the Sealed verses in order to save his sister who has fallen ill. The visuals have been redone and there's likely other changes lying in wait.
