At last, let's quickly talk about what the Arena mode was... it's time for PVP!
Above is a tier list from May 2022 by MrGuider.
Like most gacha games, there was indeed a meta in NieR Re[in]carnation ; I mean, you need to have a reason to pull for characters after all! This consisted of combat against other players with the power of... "exciting command-based combat" where you use your team against theirs.
This worked extremely differently from
Colosseum of SINoALICE and was only for 1V1s, so it was pretty much just throwing yourself into the Arena mode, grinding players and eventually getting matched with players closer to your level. Your PVP rank from how far you get a season, rewards from battle, weekly rewards, and Arena Points could all be used to build up and buy and purchase various items.
Yes, the main thing people bought was just a bunch of Zeniths. It always returns to that godforsaken cube.
If you want a look at some other tier lists from other points in time for the game, here are two of them! One is PVE and the other is PVP (both are saved to my own Google Drive so it doesn't get lost to time). They were made by the user Raon and quite popular tier lists for a long while, before tier lists eventually migrated to nierrein.guide with more collaborators working on it (an amazing database site, but don't go there yet to prevent spoilers from appearing). These tier lists were last updated in late 2022, so they don't include all the newer content or characters later, but they do have more in-depth explanations of the meta back in the day.
And yes, Joker from Persona 5 was meta.
While I won't be showing the full tier list, if you were curious about the end state of the game, here is the highest tier of meta from nierrein.guide's tier list.
You may be wondering why the tier is tier "X" and the answer is because these characters are just that ridiculously powerful. The tiers below it are SSS, SS, S, and then A to C and then separate tiers for some unique cases like damage, defense, and elemental buffers, debuffers, healers, and defense support/tanks. X is so high up because that is just how ridiculously good these above units are.
New Year's Belle has a red exclamation mark is because Sarafa with this costume is described as "the official face of toxicity in this game."
Gacha games.
And of course, we cannot talk about PVP without addressing and immortalizing Yvette (center left of the above image).
Back when the game first started, a bot account known as "Yvette" entered PVP and would constantly dominate. Yvette had an insanely powerful anniversary Gayle at the ready to destroy, and Yvette would also catch people off guard.
See, the game determines your team strength with a thing called "Force." It is based on memoirs, level of character, level of weapons, etc. and it helps for estimating your strength. You could have teams with 110k-120k Force who were extremely strong at the time, and that would be a force to reckon with (Force values later became higher as the game progressed).
Initially, Yvette had around 76k force and would still annihilate you.
To this day, Yvette's name will be known as a horrifying being, and mentioning her to any of the original PVP players may bring back memories of fear and terror.
Here's some footage of a quick battle in PVP. It's not really anything super different from what you've seen already in combat. That's pretty much Arena mode in a nutshell.
Here's some footage of a quick battle in PVP. It's not really anything super different from what you've seen already in combat. That's pretty much Arena mode in a nutshell.