NieR: Automata

I can't say that for me it met all the high expectations derived from the amount of hype around it, but this is far from being your average game, and Yoko Taro's status as an auteur and his ambition are to "blame" for this.

See, as much as I admire this game as a package and the care that went into its narrative, I can't deny there is plenty bad with it that arises from Taro's attempts to make this game different. First off, you have to finish the game three times to get the real ending, an issue mitigated by the fact that the third playthrough's story is a continuation of the first/second's. What this means is that the second playthrough (route B) is filler asides from a few added scenes and lines of dialogue. Sure, it has a big reveal, but we could have had that without having to replay through the same few hours of story and frankly mediocre 2D space shooter segments (my God are they easy and overly long). Add the incessant hacking moments (they get boring quickly) which start from route B onwards and the pacing becomes all kinds of messed up.

The graphics are decent to look at, but disappointing for 2017. Lots of ground textures are thrown together with no regard for how they fit, and lip syncing missing completely outside of cutscenes is laughable. The game is full of invisible walls that baby you or inhibit exploration, and the grassy area in the city ruins fucks framepacing up really badly for no reason (at least on my One X which manages to admirably hold 60fps with seemingly no DRS).

The combat is merely serviceable at first, then legitimately enjoyable once you get used to it, but the poor macrovariety of enemies and ease with which you can break it (Deadly Heal makes the game a cakewalk) hold it back from greatness. The sheer number of sidequests is offset by how many of them are fetch quests or little more than that and few of them are memorable. I also hope you like running around the same 4 spots all the time and abusing fast travel because that's what you're in for if you want to get to 100% quest completion (which I won't get because fuck grinding for Emil or the battle arenas).

The dialog has the bad kind of anime feeling to it at times (the whole "Nines" thing for instance and just him in lots of points). The main first playthrough story is also disappointingly short if you were to ignore everything else. I also have to mention, of course, the elephant in the room that is 2B's outfit. It doesn't affect my judgment of this game as I don't care about this stuff in videogames, but this is the first time a skimpy outfit made me feel uncomfortable, probably because we didn't even get an in-game explanation for why she was built this way. It's literally just thirsty gamer bait.

But boy oh boy does the story deliver, and it is the main reason I kept playing all the way. It's as convoluted and cerebral as you'd expect a japanese big-name director game's story to be, but filled with emotional moments. The A ending in particular is heartbreaking and the story uses the beautiful in-game world really well. The main characters are all interesting and well-built. The subtle hints that the game drops and the whirlwind of emotions that is route C/D are great. And then there's the canon ending, which I won't spoil but I thought was genius in the way it was set up and shown.

People also love to fawn over the soundtrack but to me it was just good. Lots of reused tracks and in general not understanding what the lyrics are made me tired of it not too far in. The ambiental tracks are by far the best.

Calling this a "flawed masterpiece" would seem right, if it weren't actually as deeply flawed as it is, and a deeply flawed masterpiece is not actually a masterpiece. As it stands, it's an ambitious game with a wonderful narrative that pulls no punches and expects you to put in the effort to understand the story, lore and world. With better gameplay, this could have been one of the all-time greats and a personal favourite. As it is now, it just constantly oscillates between amazing and exhausting, with not much in between.

Cant stand playing it. Gameplay/combat is a joke. You just hold down the button. Visuals are generic

I barely remember anything that happened here despite the fact that I had to play the game twice. You wander through the world listening to people wonder about whether robots might have souls after all? who knows??, then the protagonists have an awkward misunderstanding that forces them to kill each other in dramatic fashion. The environments are mush, the characters act like toddlers and I muted the music because the vocals were getting on my nerves. Intensely boring.

very nice if youre a weeb, gets turned on by anime girls and thinks that nietzsche is a good philosopher (#im14andthisisdeep)

5/10, hope i change my mind someday

Nier: Automata is the Jaden Smith of Platinum games. It wants so badly to convey things of great importance about life in such a forceful yet earnest way that it's unlikely anyone will feel apathetic toward it. Like Smith, fans will overlook the lack of technical chops and presentation because the deeper message is, uhh, deep? While I can appreciate Automata's ambitions to present the player with greater concepts we don't usually see in games, it does this while forgoing the basic elements of plot and action that would compel the average player to begin with. If you are a "thing" person who can go along with abstract concepts in absence of compelling characters, you likely will enjoy Automata. For people like me who want compelling characters that have interesting personalities, clear intent, and established obstacles, you likely will find yourself so disinterested that when the big twists happen you won't care.

As a game, Automata fails even harder. It commits many of the sins of open-world games: big boring world, extreme repetition in mission design, item fetch-quests, combat that lacks depth, etc. During the first 12 hours, I enjoyed my time but after that I grew tired of just about everything the game had to offer. There was nothing new to learn and no challenges that forced me to adapt. Even worse, the difficulty is terrible. On medium, everything is a cakewalk making all conflict unengaging. On hard, 1/10 enemies will one-shot you without warning. Then you have glitches like the camera not resetting properly in a boss fight or enemies being able to stunlock you to death from full health.

Yoko Taro has said many times how much he detests violence in games and that joylessness has carried over into every aspect of Automata. Platinum did their best with what they had but it's not enough, given the game's long running time. It's nice to see a Japanese game in the vein of Xenogears and Terranigma that addresses concepts like God, existence and humanity. But games like SOMA and Talos Principle have tackled these subjects in a far more tasteful manner with compelling characters and tight narrative structure.

Like Jaden Smith, I can admire Automata for its ambitions and earnestness. I certainly don't want to take away what other people get out of it, but there is no way for me to see past its shortcomings and overt need to teach the player something (never a good thing in art -- good art comes from a creator exploring these questions themselves, not forcing an audience to learn what the creator believes to understand.) Automata fails on every level but it fails awesomely.

This is one of the most impressive ports I've seen. It runs at a near perfect 30fps, and it looks close enough to the PS4/XBONE versions to be near indistinguishable unless put side by side. It plays great too on the Switch. Yeah this is a fantastic port of a game that I feel like if I try describing it, I'll be put into a coma for the rest of my life, never to wake up.