All in all, it was a more than decent hack and slash with JRPG elements and curious shoot 'em up sections to spice things up. Interesting how the camera angles change in the middle of the campaign to give a whole new feeling to the gameplay. Platinum Games made sure to provide engaging combat with fluid animations and a stable frame rate, but little to no strategy is required on standard difficulty. Harder settings obviously offer more challenge for the player, but also make the gameplay quite tedious as it's the exact same mechanics with increased enemy health and damage.
Graphics are a little washed out and closer to a PS3 generation game, but still manage to conceive a unique and personal look. The whole game is set in the same open-world map, but the post-apocalyptic setting offers little detail and repetitive patterns within the same macro-areas. The most fascinating places are the smaller ones, like the machine village, the forest, the amusement park, and the copied city. The main campaign keeps asking you to go back and forth the same areas, but it was never a problem as the combat is fun, the story is interesting, and the background music is always good. Side missions tend to be a little more tedious, as they are primarily fetch-quests or extra backtracking just for the sake of it. After fast travel is unlocked, it just becomes a series of loading screens with a couple of dialogues in between.
I can't really see how the storytelling could be innovative, but it does deal with themes that are not so recurrent in recent video games. It may appeal to people who enjoyed "Ghost in the Shell", "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and the likes. I am aware the game didn't have a huge budget, but a better direction in the cutscenes and more fleshed-out dialogues could have helped to explore the plot and characters a little more. Like in the "Kingdom Hearts" saga, there are references to the previous games and other related media, but what can be actually found in-game is pretty basic.
I also didn't like how they force you to play the first half of the campaign twice to unlock the rest of the story. Nothing against replaying the same game with different characters and learning a few more details, but these should be facultative tasks to complete after the endgame.
Despite the rough edges and budget limitations, it was still an enjoyable game able to provide something different from its competitors. I am pretty interested in "Replicant" as it seems more plot-focused than "Automata", but I am not sure I want to beat the campaign four times to get to the ending.
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need some videogame nerds to get to work and come up with recommendations for games with writing like this cuz i've never really come across something similar yet and it's killing me... replaying this game over and over for the story experience isn't gonna keep me satisfied forever
Tbh the last act brings in a lot of shit that makes no sense at the very end. Maybe i need to play the first nier to understand it idk. But I wish they kept it a little more simple cuz besides that I think the game is pretty much perfect.