Nier Automata thoughts

Since I just finished the story for Nier Automata today, I decided to write something about this topic.

I just played the ending A, B, C, D, E within 3 days, so I am actually dead tired now.

Gameplay

I played the normal difficulty all the time.

At first, it started difficult for me as I got pounded near to death even when facing normal enemies and I always cheese through that by just using the gun pods all the time.

Though as the game progressed and I gained better plugin chips and weapons, the difficulty was just nice for me.

Near the end, I farmed too much and got too overleveled and the game got too easy for me. I mean I killed the final boss in 10 seconds.

The action was pretty intuitive and I got used to mix of long ranged pod shots  and close ranged combat.

The game also switched between 3D and 2D platforming sometimes and I have to say they are not making these extremely difficult to face for someone who practically suck in all kinds of platformers. They do save those that require precise actions and jumping for some optional stuff, but I am happy that to say I just skipped them if I failed enough times.

The hacking part is pretty weird but I do get used to that, although I failed in the hacking part a lot.

Music

The tone of the music of game just fits the ruined and desolate world.

One particular song that I really liked would be Weight of the World in the ending credits.

Different languages (Japanese/English/Unknown language) of the song are being used in different endings and they are all great.

That amusement park theme was also memorable.

Plot

It is kinda obvious on the first route of the game there will be a twist happening and something shady brewing in the backend.

The three routes of the game blended pretty well and showed the plot happening from different perspectives.

It was all despair near the end and I am really surprised the way they started showing credits on the start of third route.

It’s like showing first and second route to just a prelude to the real story.

Characters

The obvious two main characters 2B and 9S have their own routes and obviously we get to see how they think and feel in the different routes.

But we only get to know who they truly are only near the actual end of the game.

There is also one another main character that I get to use near the end which I feel is quite underdeveloped though, due to a short time I have spending time with.

Side character like Pascal is pretty likeable when we get to know more about him and the feels I have with him near the end.

Conclusion

In my opinion, this is a really good game and pretty accessible for someone like me who button mashes my ARPGs.

Main game + 80+% sidequests took me about 40 hours to finish which is pretty short.

This looks to be a good year for JRPGs and currently this ranks second in JRPGs I have played in PS4 only below Persona 5.

I have finished only about 5-6 JRPGs in my PS4 though.

 

When I have time, I’ll write another piece on Persona 5 which is my favourite.

First actual blog post?

I have been thinking on what to write on this site, but well nothing much comes to my mind.

I’ll just post few sentences review of Aikatsu Stars 56.

Nothing much happens this episode, just foreshadowing rivalry of Rei and Mahiru.

Ako also getting into cat mode after being triggered by Kirara.

For Idoltime Pripara 6, Lala randomly had a new Making Drama – Aozora Smile Sparkling.

Arrggh, I miss seeing her twintail form when she is in Pripara. Looking forward to Sophie next episode.

Just had two shitty gacha rolls in Photokatsu yesterday. 4 SR Dupes. Wasted 500 stars for nothing.

 

I’ll continue playing Nier: Automata. Hope to complete this before I get YS VIII.

Website is UP

After a few days of work in the server backend, finally I believe almost everything is up right now.

There are quite a lot of things that cause me issues in the backend.

DNS and Domain Issues

Firstly, I got my domain name and proceeded to register my DNS nameservers.

I waited for 3 days and thinking why the nameservers would not propagate to the world.

It turns out that I didn’t create the DNS zone in my hosting provider and assumed that I can only create the zone after the nameservers propagated.

I kept on getting an invalid hostname when trying to create a DNS zone on my hosting provider, and after I logged a ticket with them, they said I left an empty space after my domain name and causing the field being not validated correctly.

It seems like stupid stuff happens everywhere when I assumed empty spaces in strings should be already trimmed before being sent to server.

It is not as if I have not seen that before though so I reminded myself not be complacent anymore.

 

HTTPS Issues

HTTPS was pretty straight forward. After all the DNS records getting validated, getting Let’s Encrypt to obtain my cert was pretty easy.

Then it is all about getting Apache to use the certs and redirect all http requests to https.

The certs are having a validity of 90 days and can only be renewed after 60 days, so I just set a cronjob to run weekly to attempt to renew the cert.

Hopefully there are no issues with this, but I need to check 2 months later.

 

Security Issues

Within a few hours of bring up the server, I am already seeing frequent attempts to login to my server.

That means I have to do anything I can think of to make it secure, enabling SELinux, firewall, disable password login, disable root ssh login etc.

Hopefully it will remain secure, but I would need to check my logs often.

 

Email Issues

The website is not able to send out emails, and after some investigation, SELinux blocked Apache from sending emails.

After opening up the rule httpd_can_sendmail, everything was fine.

 

Contents

Not yet decided on what to post in this site yet.

I suppose it will mostly be about my personal interest.

 

Finally, welcome to my website, and don’t expect this to be updated.