NieR: Automata’s Combat Looks Way More Polished
One complaint I had with the latest Final Fantasy XV demo at E3 was that its combat and camera controls still felt as clunky as they did in the Episode Duscae demo, which was released a year ago. Locking on to enemies and hitting them felt unwieldy, and battling the Titan meant having to wrestle with a clumsy camera and imprecise button presses for quick-time events. Final Fantasy XV’s combat is worrisome, especially since it’s only three months away from official release.
NieR: Automata wasn’t playable, but it already looks like it’s going to have a far better combat experience than Final Fantasy XV. Square Enix and Platinum Games released a gameplay video of the two protagonists battling against a large machine boss, and we got a really good look at the smoothness of the combat and character motions. The characters were dodging and weaving in between the dangerous red orbs, executing big combo chains, Platinum Games-style, and alternating between their blades and bullet-shooting side mechs. In the middle of the battle, the fight suddenly turns into a bullet-hell segment where the characters have to jump between lines of red orbs as the camera shifts to a top-down view. The boss battle shown in NieR: Automata was pretty simple, and it definitely didn’t have the same scale of “epicness” as the fights we’ve seen in Final Fantasy XV, but this certainly looked far more interesting than the giant unwieldy monstrosities we’ve been facing in all of FFXV’s demos.
It’s also worth mentioning that NieR: Automata will run at 60 frames per second – something that’s deemed critical in many action RPGs these days, and also something that Final Fantasy XV, going by all of its demos and director Hajime Tabata’s comments, is not likely to have. Frame rate isn’t a big deal for me personally, but it’s still something to be aware of.
