When last we spoke of gaming, it was Nier that had my attention and I was just picking up Dante’s Inferno, a relatively fresh title from EA developed by the aptly-named Visceral Games.

I expressed my interest in the game quite a while ago, largely because I am a fan of the original literature that inspired it, but also because notable game audio wonderman Garry Schyman (of Bioshock fame) was composing the score for the project. So when the packaging suggested I go to hell, it was difficult to resist. Now that I’ve had some time to reflect upon the experience, I wanted to share my thoughts.

My descent into the Stygian depths of this imagined realm was a patient one. Having been raised on a diet of Zelda and Mario, I am well accustomed to keeping a sharp eye out for collectible items, side-missions, mini-games, and other distractions from the main quest. Were I to ever find myself in a real situation wherein the world (princess, etc) needed saving and I was The Only Hope (Chosen One, etc), I am fairly certain that I would be the most useless hero ever. Admiral ADD to the rescue.

Anyone need help with their groceries? Need a package delivered to a friend in a distant town? There’s probably time for some fishing before I get on with saving things…after all, it’s the journey that counts, not the destination, right?

Besides, it was Hell I was heading into. One typically isn’t in a great hurry to get there.

Dante’s Inferno opens with one of the most visually impressive cutscenes I’ve ever seen. And it’s not just because of the liberal display of breasts. Everything from the cloth animations to the faces to the environment is expertly rendered, and the weird blend of 3D and graphic-novel-style 2D is both unexpected and strangely effective. Whether it was the plan all along or came about as a result of time or budgetary constraints is worth wondering about.

The opening cutscene is also notable for being the first and last time the game adheres with any accuracy to the content of the original verses. The opening voiceover is a recitation of the poem’s opening lines, and it seems that once they had established that little connection, Visceral figured they were good to go off and do their own thing. And they did, which I actually have no problem with. It can’t be said that their plot represents any milestone in video game narrative, but in a game about badassing your way into Satan’s pantry, a more sophisticated story just isn’t necessary. I mean the first thing you do when you gain control is kill Death, so they’re obviously not exploring subtlety in the game design.

The whole redemption and atonement for past sins angle is fine, but make no mistake about it: Dante’s Inferno is little more than a beat-shit-up simulator. It’s a very one-sided Mortal Kombat rampage to rescue Beatrice’s boobs. I mean soul. Rescue her soul.

What was I saying?

Oh right: combat rocks. For someone like me who mostly missed out on the Playstation craze, the endless nattering of critics that “it’s just like God of War!” did little to dissuade me. Okay, I thought, my only extended exposure to God of War was on the PSP, and it was a lot of fun, so what’s the problem here? I mean really, how many ways are there to make a game in this genre? The mechanics are obviously going to be similar.

Fighting unfolds like a manly ballet of death and improbable scythe physics. After you murder the Grim Reaper for doing his job, you steal his weapon of choice and immediately learn how to make it bend, stretch, and do other acrobatic things one doesn’t typically associate with farming tools. As far as main weapons go, it’s just plain awesome.

I could go into detail about how each of the nine circles of hell is crafted and what I encountered there, but I honestly don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t played through the game yet. I have simply never seen such unashamedly gruesome, disgusting, and creative art design in a game before.

Way up in Limbo, before even descending into the depths, I was struck by a thought. I remember being scared to fight some of the enemies in Zelda: Ocarina of Time on my first playthrough because they were so freaky looking. As I walked into a room and watched an unbaptized baby crawl out of an oven to attack me with its bladed arms, I was thinking “my my, times have changed.”

Plunging deeper, more strange and horrible things emerged to munch on my face, and I dutifully collected all the items and souls necessary to power up Dante’s attacks to the point of unfairness. The game was rarely challenging on the normal difficulty level, with only some of the bosses posing a significant threat. In fact, if you were to examine the game coldly, it would be a very tedious and linear descent into hell. The only thing that keeps it from feeling that way too often is the strength of the art design, which is uniformly top-notch.

Sadly, It’s true that some of the creativity falters near the last few circles, with no new and interesting monsters being introduced, but by then you’ll have become quite adept at fighting anyway so the latter half of the game should go by pretty quickly.

Garry Schyman and his colleague Paul Gorman outdid themselves with the musical score, providing an exquisite and downright evil depiction of the circles, with creative instrumentation, dark choral chants, and loud orchestral terror of the finest calibre. It won’t lull you to sleep at night, but it’s a damn fine score. Voice acting was minimal but effective, with Lucifer’s deep voice managing to bridge the gap between dark and deceptively kind.

In the end, as I pulled myself back out of the inferno, I guess you could say I considered it time well spent. Dante’s Inferno is by no means a brilliant game; it is simply a formulaic shell over which Visceral has draped the most amazing visual design cloak imaginable. But it’s still just a veil, and if you peel it back you’ll realize the shallowness and blandness of the underlying structure.

Still, worth a rental for sure if only just to explore the twisted creations hiding in the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno.

Parting thoughts:

• On the soundtrack, listen to “Storms of Lust”, “Crossing the Styx”, and “Whores of Babylon” for a good introduction to the music
• I don’t think Dante understands how tattoos work
• Good setup for a sequel, but what are we going to kill in Paradise/Purgatory?

I finished playing NIER the other day.

What, you ask? The game. The one no one has really heard about because it’s been marketed by— or actually, it hasn’t really been marketed very much at all. That’s probably because it was the product of some small-time new developer, right?

Wrong. It’s made by Square Enix.

I don’t get it either, but I did get the game and I played it and I finished it, so here are my impressions:

It’s fun. Everything else aside, the vast majority of the game is very entertaining to play. Combat is engaging, not too difficult, and you battle some big enemies. If you’ve played any of the console Zelda games, you’ll feel right at home. NIER basically plays like a kind of Ocarina of Time, only drenched in blood. Now I’m a huge fan of the Zelda series, so for me it was almost nostalgic, but for those who didn’t enjoy the Zelda games, you may find that NIER borrows just a bit too much from them.

For example, remember all those cool incidental things you could do in the Zelda games? Like fishing? Well you can fish in NIER too. You can also farm.

I have to go back to the fishing for a minute though just to express how utterly awful it is. Note to developers: if you’re going to implement a feature that will only add value to the game for perhaps 5-10% of your audience, you damn well better make sure it works so well and is so seamlessly integrated that the rest of your audience doesn’t get bothered by it.

NIER’s fishing mechanic operates on one of two levels: WTF and JFCIAPITODSGMBACITTCF (Jesus-Fucking-Christ-I-Am-Pulling-In-The-Opposite-Direction-Stop-Giving-Me-Buckets-And-Cans-I’m-Trying-To-Catch-Fish). Oh and by the way, Square Enix, I don’t know about where you live, but around here cans and buckets don’t swim away when you snag them in a fishing line.

It is the worst virtual fishing experience I have ever been subjected to in my life.

Moving past that (after an hour trying to catch a goddamn shaman fish. What the shit is a shaman fish anyhow?), I have to mention that the game has this thing about twisting perspectives on you. While the majority of the gameplay occurs in the standard third-person action RPG fashion, when you go indoors, or when you climb certain structures, you will find your world suddenly flattened into a Castlevania-esque platform hopping paradigm for no particular reason except because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Then, just as you’re getting comfortable with those two views, certain dungeon rooms will suddenly punt the camera to the ceiling where it will capture the action below as if it was some sort of strange Diablo world. This didn’t bother me though because, although they’re weird and arguably unnecessary, the perspective switches actually helped keep the game interesting and helped shake up the visuals a bit.

Which brings me to the past, which is where NIER’s graphics are from. Square Enix, what happened here? Clearly they spent all their Eye Candy budget on FFXIII because NIER looks like it would be right at home on last-gen systems. On the Xbox360 it looks underwhelming. Pity.

Story is an aspect of NIER that is truly excellent. Not only is the story interesting and a fascinating fusion of sci-fi and fantasy, but it actually pulls it off really well, albeit with some pretty confusing moments along the way. The premise is that you’re playing as a father searching for a cure for his daughter’s disease, The Black Scrawl, which turns people into nasty creatures called Shades. All of this is happening on earth, but thousands of years after humanity as we know it has succumbed to an (initially) unspecified cataclysm. Along the way, you meet a host of unique NPCs, and the conclusion is both powerful and satisfying. The last hour of the game is legitimately moving and interesting.

While the father is gruff and one of the ugliest characters in recent memory, he’s interesting because he’s not some young, brass badass…he’s an aging father. Still a badass by the end of the game, but it’s a nice emotional starting point. You have three traveling companions over the course of NIER’s quest, though some are not consistently with you: Grimoire Weiss, Kainé, and Emil.

Grimoire Weiss is what you would presumably get if you turned Alan Rickman into a sentient book. Seriously, he sounds just like him in his Snape mode. Weiss lets you cast spells and organize your inventory and do other neat things, and he’s with you for almost the entire game, so get used to him.

Emil is the necessary whiny kid. Square Enix, let’s talk. I understand that you have an inexplicable attachment to young children characters in your games, so by all means continue to include them. But is it really necessary to make them all so consistently aggravating, whiny, and kick-worthy? I mean you even made his head look like a soccer ball, how can you expect me not to want to punt him whenever he opens his mouth?

Kainé is the strange one for sure. She’s a young-ish woman who struts about in undergarments swearing like a sailor. Hmm. So I’ll file away the near-nakedness thing in my list of things I will never understand about Japanese games in the Clothing/Appearances section. But the swearing is interesting: is it an attempt to make the game “mature”? Is it comic relief? Does it work? In order…probably, unintentionally, and no.

Tip for Square Enix: you know the opening screen of the game, before the menu, where that quote from Kainé gets played with no visuals and completely out of context? Please remove it. Your game will instantly become 10% better. The thing about this character is that, although sometimes the swearing is refreshing and legitimately fun and appropriate, there are many times where the vulgarity falls flat. The character’s backstory is emotional but pretty basic; still, it’s enough to allow her a more dynamic behavioural range than this. You had a great character idea, and you mistook a gimmick for a fundamental aspect of her personality and thereby destroyed her potential to be a compelling person in the story.

The story itself is a solid 20 hours if you spend a reasonable amount of time on questing. Which I didn’t. Do you know why? Because there are only so many fetch quests I can take before contemplating suicide. I did a bunch, don’t get me wrong, and the funny relationship forged with the Lighthouse Lady was neat, but the actual quests were always just shopping lists. I swear to god the only quest idea that the developers seem to have been able to think up was something involving a grocery list. Every single time.

I stopped with all the “side-quest” nonsense when some old geezer asked me to catch him ten sardines. HAH. Fuck you, old man; you spend an hour wrestling with your game’s incapacitated excuse for a fishing mechanic. Let me know when you manage. He never got back to me so I’m assuming he’s still out there snagging cans and crying.

To wrap up, I’ll talk about my home turf: the audio. Voice acting is pretty solid across the board, with the exception of Emil’s whiny voice, but where things really shine is the musical score. I don’t typically like JRPG scores, but NIER is magnificent. Not only is the sound fresh and energetic, but there are strong melodies and some exquisite vocal work by Emi Evans. I honestly cannot stress enough how much you need to listen to this score, it’s one of my favourites of the year so far.

If someone were to ask me whether or not I’d recommend the game, I would almost definitely say yes. Despite my criticism above, I stand firmly by my first statement which was that NIER is fun. It has its quirks, it’s certainly not a conventional kind of game, it could have used some more polish on the production end of things (and a new goddamn fishing system!), but overall I thoroughly enjoyed it and the good does outweigh the bad. Depending on your tolerance for the genre, your mileage may vary, but you owe yourself a rental at least to check it out.

Parting thoughts:

• The seals that roll around on the beach in the seaside town are adorable
• Kainé is to NIER what Kenny is to South Park: the one that gets killed all the time and yet mysteriously never dies
• The Forest of Myth sequences don’t even come close to the text-based storytelling bar set by Lost Odyssey, but good effort
• Why the hell is the game called NIER? What does that mean? Where in the game is it mentioned? What does it have to do with anything?

My next gaming venture is Dante’s Inferno, which promises to take me to even more interesting places. The box says “Go To Hell”, so I’ll let you know how that goes.