Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

@darkfenrir "Second/Third playthrough" impliess finishing.

If its not beating the game then why is it referred to as a second playthrough?

@Knuckles-Fajita its just semantics, think of the “playthrough” as chapters since every “restart” is different. If you get hung up on semantics then thats you

@Dezzy DS2 can't be that bad, right?

@NEStalgia Nier Automata is interesting. I never made it to the second ''chapter'' (or playthrough whatever you want to call it). I did almost all side quests I could find, and that got boring pretty fast. So I'm going to give it another shot this summer. Only doing main quests. It seems like that's the way to go, because the action parts were very good. I didn't really care for the story, but maybe that's because I've spend way too much time running around the map doing errands.

@Knuckles-Fajita Probably because it's called Ending A, then B. Even though when you do the Route after... it's straight up continuation

@diwdiws If I get hung up on a suddenly different interpretation of a word that has been used for decades that refers to finishing a game, that now suddenly means "Only finishing part of a game", and you find that annoying, thats YOUR problem.

@darkfenrir What would you call a playthrough, say on YouTube, of Nier: Automata? The entire game right? Or just one of the endings?

A playthrough would logically be....everything, right?

@Knuckles-Fajita thats why: semantics

Addedum: you basically proven my point

@Knuckles-Fajita All until Ending E. Because if you stop at Ending A... that's seriously a lot like stopping at the first Arc of a book.

It's really not the end of the story.

@Knuckles-Fajita Nah. The way people describe it, the game is structured around multiple short playthroughs that come together to create a whole experience. Like Virtue's Last Reward. Saying you have to "beat the game twice before it gets good" is disingenuous, because an actual playthrough comprises multiple, shorter playthroughs.

As someone else said, you could think of each playthrough as a chapter and your problem would disappear entirely.

@Ralizah But that's not how a playthrough is defined!

As @darkfenrir just said a playthrough is until Ending E, so how can you have smaller playthroughs within a playthrough?

Whatever, I'm done with this conversation. Y'all gonna get arsey because I'm confused about the structure of a game because the English language is absolute ass.

@Knuckles-Fajita I still don't get the whole "it gets good after your second playthrough" thing I often hear....I can't help but thing it's a bad representation of a Bravely Default type situation (which....was bad...but also because of how grindy endless boss battles became. It would have been less awful with trash mobs instead of just bosses like a Mega Man game gone horribly wrong) I think people don't discuss it right like diwdiws said....I don't know how it actually works but my interpretation before experiencing it is that, "second play through" does not mean "new game" but "continue" to a new part of the story after the credits roll. Like Phantasy Star games that set it up like a TV series that the credits roll after the boss and you have to sit through the themesong again I don't know myself yet, but I think maybe that's what people mean. It makes no sense that new things happen on a second "new game" play-through....so clearly it's not actually a new game even if it's re-using maps. I get the sense there's a Groundhog Day kind of thing going on in the game and eventually the character has a "wait....this isn't right....I've been here before..." kind of moment. That's only my theory though....I've played one full hour of the game.

@darkfenrir Haha, well I don't feel so bad turning on auto fire auto dodge easy mode now I tried 3 times to get through that first hour...they game says "play the game to find out how to save" so I kept waiting for a Moogle or something to tell me to save. Instead after each hour I got that stinking tower boss and got butchered. I finally turned on easy only at the end of it though.....and turned it off once I got to save

@NEStalgia Yeah, it's fine to turn on those Autos, they are for helping after all

Also if you want to do side quests, I would say wait until you get the fast travel system (I think this is fine to spoil right?), that way you won't trudge the same map a lot of times.

@Knuckles-Fajita It's not really that confusing.

A full playthrough is achieved when you see a certain ending. But, to get to that ending, you have to play through multiple small campaigns that have their own endings.

Those smaller campaigns and endings coalesce to form one larger experience, one fuller playthrough.

Just to add, i think people started to call it a playthrough simply because there is a credits at the “end” and that the game doesn’t really indicate that you should replay it. It’s basically a mind f*ck.

@diwdiws Nah, after Route A, there's a message from the SE PR person to replay it actually.

I mean, it's not that confusing. Gravity Rush 2 had a similar thing with credits in the middle of the game. But you just continue and there's more of it. You can stop if you want, just like you can stop playing any game at any point.

@darkfenrir That's a good tip. Yeah that's not a spoiler. An RPG without a fast travel system would suck pretty awfully At least it's not Xenoblade levels of confusing that most of the side quests you can't actually DO when you get them, you have to travel back later after the story makes it sound like you can't I sometimes feel like playing Xenoblade games requries you to understand the game design and how to predict what the designers expect you to know by having played other similar games.

@Ralizah @Octane Seems to be a thing Japanese devs do when they want it to feel like you're playing an anime. with the episodic campaign. "Stay tuned for the next episode, thank's for playing! roll credits) Do all your skills/stats/protagonist remain between "playthroughs" or do you reset your skills/stats/protagonist each time and work from zero?

@darkfenrir huh, watched my wife finished 2 playthroughs and never saw that. I learned something new.

@NEStalgia Xenoblade is a little weird like that, but to be honest... when I see that I can't defeat a side quest? I decide to put it off and do it at latter date usually.

And to answer your other questions, everything stays, including items and levels. The one's gone are the things that are locked behind story progression.

@diwdiws Yeah... it only appears at the end of Route A (And I think you can search it with "Nier Automata Square Enix message")

@NEStalgia I think they're maybe going for a ''shock'' effect. You think you're done, but then there's more left to do. And not some tedious post-credit content, but actual story content. Whether it works or not is hard to say. I knew there were multiple chapters in Nier before I bought the game, so the internet spoiled me before I could discover it myself.

Or it's some Japanese thing I don't get, that wouldn't surprise me either