NieR: Automata Game of the Yorha Edition

A really difficult one to accurately judge, because so much about this game is put together with great care and consideration, and yet enough of it is clunky and unrefined to make the whole thing a bit jarring - especially as the good and bad elements regularly bleed into one another. This game builds up a really strong, rich world you're invited (and happy) to spend time exploring, and then fills it with frustrating invisible walls: open doorways you can't walk through even though they're bigger than you are, ledges you can't grab on to even though they look just like the ones you can grab, environmental features you can't jump over even though you can jump high enough to get clear air above them. It switches between perspectives and genres in a way that's very fluid and extremely cool at some points, but then proceeds to barely do it at all for long stretches of the game, and then do it so frenetically in the closing stages that it starts to feel a bit tiring and gimmicky. It leaves a trail of disparate story strands, promising an ending that ties them all together, and then ties up most of them....but leaves just enough of them dangling unresolved to be noticeable. One of its central selling points is that there are multiple playthroughs where you get to see the same events from different perspectives, and that's a great idea - but it doesn't really happen as much as you've been led to expect, and you do walk away with the sense that it doesn't do it enough, especially as the moments where the game leans heaviest on that are typically very good indeed. Most of the gameplay (when you're not bumping up against invisible walls you didn't expect) feels fluid and graceful, but there is one section in this game that is, without any doubt, the absolute worst thing I have come across in any game of this console generation, such an absolutely diabolical, infuriating bit of gameplay that I remain slackjawed in amazement, even now, that it made it past the playtesters (assuming there even were any). The game is dripping in references to philosophy, but many of them feel quite surface level; it's something that gives this world a lot of flavour and personality but does feel like there was a missed opportunity to go deeper and further with it. Some of the jokes are pleasingly witty (to support both of these last two points, we can refer to the way the character named after Blaise Pascal ends up involved in spats with characters named after other philosophers who criticised his writing in real life, or the fact that there's a side quest revolves around a machine named after Jean-Paul Sartre refusing to accept any praise whatsoever, including any from another machine named after Simone de Beauvoir), and some just go for the lowest hanging fruit imaginable. And most of all, thematically it ping pongs between some quite articulate, profound moments, and moments where it pretty much beats you about the head with its message. (Put it this way: the story takes place during an ongoing war between 'androids' and 'machines', and if you have literally any experience of science fiction at all, you will already know half of what this game has to say before even playing it. And boy, it is not subtle about it.)

So....I dunno. I enjoyed it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's a game where every compliment must come packaged with a criticism, and so too must the final conclusion: this is an extraordinarily ambitious game, and that ambition is crucial to all of its successes and all of its failures at the same time. It's deeply flawed, and I have to imagine that even its biggest fans would openly admit that - but I would far rather live in a world where this kind of game, on this kind of scale, has room to exist than one where every game executed its much smaller, safer vision flawlessly.