I absolutely adored the original Nier when I played it around 5 years ago (right before I joined this site, as coincidence has it), and I was really excited when I heard they were making a successor game to it. It then took me like years to buy Nier Automata, and over another 3 years to actually play the thing, but here I am. A little over 40 hours later (and a lot of contemplative writing on my own dissecting its themes), I got all of the main endings and did almost all of the quests (all but the most labor intensive ones).
Nier: Automata is the story of 2B and her partner 9S, two androids in the YoRHa project, a fighting force operated out of an orbital bunker that is trying to take back the Earth from invading aliens. The aliens invaded thousands of years ago with an army of constantly learning and adapting machines, and its these machines that YoRHa fight against while trying to find the aliens behind it all to end the war once and for all. Nier: Automata is a game much more about its themes rather than the overall narrative, but the overall narrative that is there is solid. It's also a game that is more in the same universe as the original Nier, rather than a direct sequel in the traditional sense. Like 2018's God of War, while there are elements in this game that have meaningful callbacks to past entries, this game stands very well on its own, and playing the previous game(s) in the series is by no means required to get something really meaningful out of the story. Where the original Nier asked questions about what it means to be alive, and what humanity really is, Automata takes that one step further. Okay, we're here, now what? What do we do since we're alive, and why should we? It's a very good companion piece to Nier 1, but I would say Automata on the whole does its storytelling in a bit of a better way than the original game does. While there are a lot of more obvious elements to the storytelling, there was a lot I didn't realize until I'd really sat down with it and thought about it for a while. Automata is a really well crafted piece of fiction, especially for a video game, that does something really interesting with the concept of replaying through a story (much like the original Nier did). That said, Automata has a lot less outright replaying of content than the first Nier did. It has 5 main endings, but really 3 main routes. Route A, Route B, and Routes C and D are more or less different sides of the same route, with Route E being the final ending after completing C and D. Thinking about it like an old PS1 game, Route A is disc 1, Route B is disc 1.5, and Routes C, D, and E are disc 2. It is absolutely intended that you play through all the routes, especially since Route C/D is just the second half of the game with no repeated content of any kind. This confusing approach to endings is a deliberate choice, but one I think this game handles clumsier than Nier 1 does it (where they're just straightforward replays of content), and it's really my only meaningful complaint with how the game's narrative is constructed. Nier: Automata doesn't really present in an obvious enough way that the "new playthroughs" are quite as dramatically different to one another as they imply. The gameplay loop of Automata is quite close to the first Nier, in that it's an open-ish world action RPG, but it's on a bigger scale with more to do and more quality of life improvements. Platinum handled the development of this game, and it really shows with JUST how much better the combat is in Automata than Nier 1 had (which was something much more simple like a Zelda game). In addition to the melee combat, there are also several shmup sections as well as a hacking minigame (which are really just more shmup-like sections). They vary up the gameplay in a fun way, and the tons of different weapons you can get really do vary up the combat as well. There's still a lot of walking around and talking to people, exploring for resources for quests, and upgrading weapons, sure, but it is all around a significant improvement on the first Nier. Great writing aside, I have no trouble saying that Nier: Automata is a game that is simply much more fun to play than the first Nier. The art style for the game is also very pretty. I imagine it looks even better on PC, but on the base-model PS4 I played it on, Nier: Automata is still quite a lovely looking game with really cool looking enemies. The music, like Nier 1, is also fantastic, and does a fantastic job of setting scenes and creating atmosphere. The songs which evolve out of dialogue (such as "This Cannot Continue") are particularly fantastic. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Nier: Automata is not only a worthy successor to Nier, but succeeds on its own merits on being a fantastic video game and piece of writing. It is easily one of the best games I've played this year, and one of my new favorite games I've played. Yoko Taro outdid himself yet again and made a really fun game to play to boot, and it's absolutely a game worth checking out if you dig open world games and love a good story in your games.
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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