Before we move onto the next chapter, let's take a moment to look at something quickly; the game UI and interface itself! That's right, we're stopping to look at... menus!
This is “Mama’s Room,” the main hub of the game. Normally, the center part leads you to new main story content you may not have done. On the left and right blank doors will be various time-related events. The button on the bottom right corner will bring up a menu…
Ta-da! Apologies for the spoiler-bar and subsequent low quality, these images are from a recording I did of my own game under an hour before end of service… Of course, the final banner had to have an extremely late-game character, so censoring it is.
From this menu, you could easily go and do pretty much anything.
Loadout is for assembling your main teams (of up to 3 characters, which is why you may see random characters in combat footage). Menu just led to various settings. Map was self-explanatory, though it also let you track and help find some secret collectables for extra lore around each area or revisit parts of the map. Quests let you play ongoing events, grindable arenas and areas and the like, and other gameplay stuff outside the main story.
Summons led to your gacha system for pulling characters. If you want to see what summoning looks like, here are some summons via YouTube back during the pre-release beta! That way, you’d see minimal character design spoilers in case that means anything to you, while also seeing the mechanics. If you don't want to accidentally see a character we'll be looking at in the future, you can skip this for now.
Library was quite cool, you could basically see and revisit any of the past events and stories and replay them, or read a written summary that used extremely similar wording to the actual scenes so you wouldn’t miss out on much.
You can also see the individual chapter art from this menu (like the ones on the previous page).
Enhance lets you select characters or weapons you had and upgrade them. Mythic Slab was one of the many areas you could enhance a character because gacha games need ways for you to spend money! Here, we have the menu for character selection and you can also see me flexing my cast of Replicant and Automata characters (plus Zero). You can also see my very noticeable lack of Persona 5 characters (save for the singular free P5 char). Clearly, my lack of spending on the Persona 5 collaboration is what killed Re[in]carnation.
Actually, speaking of, this game does have a few different collaborations it did! There are some for NieR Replicant, NieR: Automata, YoRHa, Drakengard 3, Final Fantasy XIV, Dragon Quest, and Persona 5. The collaborations always were focused on costumes, so outside of the crossover characters shown above (plus Joker, Queen, and Crow who are locked as I never pulled them), you were mostly getting a funny event story and outfit for the pre-existing cast.
And don't worry, we'll look at the other Yoko Taro collaboration stuff later!
Now, the character menu for enhancing! This would also be where those profile stories appear, as well as the character name and title (which I'm censoring for now since you haven't spent enough time with our girl clad in black yet). This kind of menu also existed for weapons. Fun fact for fans of previous entries, a lot of the upgrade materials for weapons were from prior titles, including the fabled Black Pearls…
Outside that, there are a few more things not shown that aren’t really important. Neither was this, but it’s nice to have an understanding of what the game is like to play outside of just the recordings!