We're mere weeks away from the launch of Nier Reincarnation, the free-to-play mobile Nier game that launches in Japan first before coming to the West, and we still have absolutely no idea what it's about. And the latest trailer still doesn't do much to solve any of our many burning questions.
First announced back in March, Nier Reincarnation was touted by game director Yoko Taro as a "strangely startling type of game." And then there were a few snippets of gameplay that showed a whole lot of walking and little else.
Then a trailer released last summer that brought more questions than answers. Who is "Mama," and why is she a ghost? Why are there beautiful 3D environments if there seems to be so much walking in hand-painted 2D landscapes? And if traversing Nier Reincarnation takes place in 2D, why does turn-based combat occur in 3D?
We still don't know. And the most recent trailer which shows the game's opening cinematic doesn't help.
Everything is in Japanese, but even with Google translate doing it's best, the closed captions are hard to follow. Again, we see a combination of 2D and 3D environments with a turn-based combat system, and again there seems to be a lot of beautiful scenery, but beyond that, we're out of the loop.
All we know is that Nier Reincarnation will be free to play with microtransactions and gacha elements. It'll launch in Japan on February 18 with some weird Nier Automata crossover event and come to Western audiences at a later date, which Square Enix has yet to disclose.
Near-complete inscrutability is sort of a hallmark of the Nier series. For example, it took four years for the last secret of Nier Automata to be discovered. It's a cheat code that lets you skip to the final boss after beating the first boss, and then unlocks all the bonus modes.
Source: Square Enix