It could really do with trimming out some of the sidequests, but it's thankfully not as grindy as the original Nier. Unfortunately, it's kind of a spoiler which ones are worth doing (because they tend to start out unassuming but then develop unexpectedly in an interesting direction). The sidequests in the game are kind of a mixed bag, where some of them are really good and some of them are boring. EDIT: On a related note, the other day, I managed to clear the last sidequest in Nier Automata. And if not, don't strongly encourage the player to invest hard-earned levels in abilities that you constantly disable. I guess an important takeaway is: if your game has permanent character advancement choices, every option better be equally useful in required content. The writing in the last sidequest was so cringey that I actually had to pause the game because I was covering my face in vicarious shame for whoever had written the dialogue and the poor voice actors who had to read it. I do not care about these soulless, cardboard cutout 'characters' or the shallow, stereotypical world they live in. And maybe if the writing was a little better-executed, I'd be inclined to continue, but it's just. Unfortunately, I'm high enough level now that each level takes an hour or more of tedious grinding, and the sidequests are your typical MMO gather-10-bear-asses fare.

I did some googling around and found a lot of other players stuck in a similar situation, and the common advice seems to be that you need to grind levels into one of the offensive tech trees. This came right on the tail end of my spending all of the money I had been saving up for the past 10ish hours on the ultimate stealth gear, which I stupidly assumed would be useful. Unfortunately, the battle I'm on now really doesn't seem to be winnable without a substantially higher DPS and defense. I managed to barely scrape by a few of these encounters by cheesing it (the enemy AI is really stupid and easy to kite). By useless, I mean being stuck in a huge open field with no cover (or enemies that can magically sense you through cover), and the enemies are immune to sneak attacks. The problem is that so far, every single plot quest past the prologue has been set up to make stealth useless and strongly favors a brute force playstyle. So, I figured that was probably the intended playstyle and invested all of my levels into one of the stealth tech trees. For those who haven't played, the narrative and opening segments put a huge emphasis on a stealth angle for the main character and gameplay, where she's supposed to be this amazing huntress who slinks around and stalks her prey and assassinates them. I just got to this plot quest where my character build is completely useless (the third in a row where this has happened). The plot and characters so far are pretty mediocre, just barely scraping above the cutoff line of my caring that I was willing to advance the story to see how it all turned out. So I just put down Horizon: Zero Dawn, this time for the foreseeable future.

Tales of berseria eleanor arte combos