I just beat it, and written down my thoughts. There's tons of spoilers but I don't want my entire post to be black, so you've been warned. I really love its ideas. I enjoyed the feeling of desolation that comes with the very concept of a war being fought via two proxy armies eons after both the races they fight on behalf of have gone extinct. This is one of the themes the game actually doesn't hit you over the head with, most character still go "yeah we gotta kill the bad machines" right up until the end, which makes sense for goal-oriented Androids, so it's up to the player to stop and think about the implications. I also like its concepts of how humanity can transcend flesh. The robots cheaply imitating human behavior is something the YoRHa units mock, as does the player most likely, but whose to say Androids aren't a cheap imitation either? Where do you draw the line? The music and atmosphere are also fantastic, namely in the Amusement Park; the first trip through there was amazing. Still, I don't think the game was able to deliver a strong narrative to really see these themes through to the end. The story in Route C just amounts to "omg character(s) died! feel bad!" once per chapter to raise tension. >ohh nooo other YoRHa units died >ohh nooo Operator 21O died >ohh nooo Commander and the bunker died >ohh nooo 2B died >ohh nooo people in the resistance camp died >ohh nooo the village robots died >ohh nooo Pascal died >ohh nooo the babies died >ohh nooo Devola died >ohh nooo Popola died >ohh nooo 9S died >ohh nooo A2 died Character deaths can be powerful, but if it's your go-to emotional hook for every story beat it loses its effect. Predicting the story came down to guessing which named character dies next. The Devola and Popola one felt especially cheap because they hit you with a text dump of their sad backstory right after, felt like when Drebin calls you in MGS4 to infodump tragedy about the BB Corps member you just killed.
There's some other things that aren't as fleshed out as they should have been. Its said that 2B was designed to kill 9S when he learned too much and hated doing it, but every time we see this in the game it just seemed like it happened as a necessity. Like when they're surrounded by machines and about to die and so it just makes sense to do a black box explosion, or he gets corrupted by a virus after the Eve fight (and even then in the second case manages to survive in the machine network, so 2B didn't actually kill him), or when they're piled on top of by machines again and do another black box reaction. They're all, "yeah no shit" self-destruct situations and 9S never actually feels like he got mindwiped from it (especially the second case because his present self survives). Because of this, the revelation of 2B being 2E had nearly no impact on me because you never really felt the tension of 2B ruthlessly having to kill 9S and 9S losing his sense of self every time. I did some cursory reading and apparently it's explained more in novellas, but things like that should have been in the game itself. The game also never really explores why YoRHa units are getting replaced. Machines and technology eventually become obsolete, yes, but the game never presents what they were being replaced by (the archives say "old units will be replaced after the bunker's destruction" but doesn't go deeper), or the Council of Humanity's endgame on why they wanted to stop. If humans had gone extinct long ago why did Androids autonomously decide to genocide themselves? The Council never gave any indication of being outright nihilistic. The game itself doesn't give any solid reason, and it doesn't feel like one of those things that's open to interpretation but instead a rather a roundabout way to half-assedly justify an emotional punch and create a futile situation for 9S and A2. Again, if this was elaborated on outside of the game, sue me.
I also don't think the game took full advantage of 9S' viewpoint in Route B. Having a story told from a different point of view, recontextualizing it and making you have new realizations about situations you already thought you knew is awesome on paper, but 9S' thoughts, new scenes and the extra quests are few and far between. For the most part, 9S just repeats his lines from Route A, and it doesn't feel enough to justify the second route. It's a shame because I think they could have done a lot with it, but as it stands it feels like Route A and B could be merged and not a lot would be lost.
Finally, I'll talk about the gameplay. It's alright, it's pretty unga bunga and less deep than even most turn-based jrpgs, but it gets the job done and minmaxing your plugins is fun enough to keep you going. It's pretty dumb how if you spam R2 you basically never get hit since there are no vulnerability frames between dodges, and the fact that you can pause and heal infinitely even on Hard, but I can accept the combat being a a means to an end since it's flashy enough to be satisfying. What I have a harder time forgiving are the sidequests. A lot of their stories are actually interesting, but other than that its MMO tier. If a game has repetitive sidequests you can usually ignore them, but here the game puts a lot of worldbuilding in quests in addition to there being a lot of them (plus most people insist you HAVE to do them to appreciate the story, and I did do all of them) so doing them starts to feel grating after. Every time I got another quest like "I need 3 things, you can find one in the desert, one in the amusement park and one in the forest" I just rolled my eyes. Yeah there's fast travel and movement speed up chips sure; they alleviate the design issue, but don't justify it.
The game doesn’t use character deaths as a universal hook, the point is that by the end of the game no one is alive except for two of the characters, and that is where the final climax happens. It’s like Hamlet.
Juan Allen
The game has SOUL in some parts, but not in others. An examples of soullessness is that for the joke ending loading screens where you die horribly, it still says things like "Black Box readings- ok. Health- ok" etc. It would have taken them 0 effort to replace that text with something funny and relevant to the dumb shit the player just did, and it seems like such an obvious thing to do, but they didn't, and that's immersion-breaking and soulless.
Overall I think it's a neat atmospheric ideas game that presents a uniquely bleak world, but stumbles the execution. I kind of feel the same way about Death Stranding, which I liked more than most people but didn't love. NieR Automata is about one notch better than it due to having less cheesy themes, but I honestly think both games are equally guilty of making the player do repetitive tasks.
Anyway, NieR/Automata thread. What are your thoughts?
>The game doesn’t use character deaths as a universal hook, the point is that by the end of the game no one is alive except for two of the characters, and that is where the final climax happens. It’s like Hamlet. I see your point. I've played games like that that executed the concept you described better in my opinion, for example Chapter 8 of Live A Live, but if you're gonna pull that off you have to execute the feeling of futility without seeming like you're just milking every sad moment. Like I said, things like Devola and Popola's text dump backstory cheapened the whole thing to me, things like that and Pascal's mind erasure felt drawn out since they were just more in a string of the same old story beats for the past few gameplay hours.
Not reading any of this, but the only flaw in this game that prevents it from being a 10/10 is the godawful 9S route, everyone can agree on this. The pacing in that route is so bad that it makes you not want to even finish it. It kills your will to replay the game again
Colton Flores
based reviewposter, I love threads like these, god bless you and the guy who reviewed ff7r after platinuming it and giving an honest impression over several detailed posts
Cameron Martin
The whole point is the irony the androids dont view themselves as machines
I disagree. The only thing I would have changed was to relegate 9S's hacking to a pod program, that way he can have light and heavy attacks that feel more natural rather than just pausing your light combos for a heavy.
Brandon Lopez
>The whole point is the irony the androids dont view themselves as machines Yes and like I said, that's one of the things I liked about the game since the Androids mock the machines for enacting human behavior, but could be considered cheap imitations of humans themselves. It's just that the game didn't deliver as strongly on a lot of its other narrative beats.
It's funny that at the beginning 2B is all "emotions are prohibited" but after visiting Pascals village for the first the she gets the call from her operator, crying about how her crush turned her down. Like they mock the machines for trying to be more human, and prohibit emotions, but in the end they feel just as humans do.
Blake Murphy
Agreed, I appreciate any high effort thread whether or not I fully agree with them. It's a shame they'll always get less replies than bait threads and inflammatory OPs. I know the FF7 thread you're talking about, for those who missed it, it's here
Don't feel bad, it's ok if you're a brainlet, life is simpler that way
Aaron Thompson
This is a honest review and a good thread op. I do appreciate your effort.
Actually the biggest thing that doesn't get discussed at all on v or I've never seen user point it out is: >The game has SOUL in some parts, but not in others. An examples of soullessness is that for the joke ending loading screens where you die horribly, it still says things like "Black Box readings- ok. Health- ok" etc. It would have taken them 0 effort to replace that text with something funny and relevant to the dumb shit the player just did, and it seems like such an obvious thing to do, but they didn't, and that's immersion-breaking and soulless.
Dylan Collins
Yeah, this borhered me too, like ffs it's just a bit of text to edit or lategame when not ded but obviously not 100% healthy either
Luke Wright
Who's cuter? 2B or A2?
Kevin Price
nier automata feels like a game that some nobody on youtube will make a feature-length review tearing to shreds in a couple of years and then a flood of retards will pretend they never liked it either, and always thought it was less than the sum of its parts
Ryan Diaz
Well this will definitely happen if some dev produces a game that will make nier:a look like a 5/10
Charles Fisher
pretty much my thoughts on the game.
A2
Aiden Fisher
Go ahead and post the example you have in mind.
Brody Hall
Dark Souls 2, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Ocarina of Time are games where a nobody or several nobodys have ruined discussion by releasing a video.
Samuel Wood
so at the end, which andriods are surviving? i know the ones in the jungle houses all die lol, but i dont remember Jackass's gang all dying out too.
Thomas Hall
The biggest issue I see with the game is the difficulty: Play on Normal and faceroll through every obstacle in the game, or play on Hard and spam healing items because you die in 3-4 hits. "Enemies do moar dameg." A recurring problem in video games. Even with "dodge cancel out of anything" you can make the game difficult but to me it seems they were more concerned with telling a story than making a game.
Cameron Jackson
I agree on most your points. The theme of what is humanity is okay but it's not explored in depth. Characters don't feel like they tackle it or anything. Deaths were very melodramatic. They should've spent more time developing the characters if they wanted me to care about them. 9S wasn't as expansive as it could have been. You didn't talk about A2 but I ultimately felt she was just a shell for 2B. She was just as survivor and then she became 2B's mouthpiece; she had no free will of her own at all.
The combat was still pretty bland. Not much enemy variety, enemies basically doing nothing. I don't know if you played the first nier but despite the combat being helped by Platinum, it's barely better than the original.
I think your review can be summed up as "a lot of ideas that are good on paper but are poorly executed."
Hudson Allen
you got those two ladies in the desert still doped up on E-Drugs
Jaxson Jenkins
Matt was right about Dark Souls II. He even said at the start of the video that he still thinks it's a pretty good game and better than the majority of games released that year, it's just that Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were so packed with soul and intelligent design that II disappointed. hbomberguy was also right about Fallout 3. The game was cool in using a new engine etc. but was outclassed good and proper by New Vegas, which had quality quests like F1/2 that 3 lacked but in the modern style. His other game videos are pretty dumb and now he just makes epic right-winger gets owned videos so I don't care for him I don't know which Skyrim video you're referring to. Egoraptor was dead fucking wrong about Ocarina of Time, his arguments were dumb as hell and he talked about the puzzles being simple when LttP's puzzles were shit like "kill every enemy in the room" or "lift every pot till you find the switch". OoT is a far more cerebral game than LttP. I don't remember the rest of his points but they were all pretty dumb for sure
Andrew Taylor
Nice read OP, but let me just check something. Did you think the Council of Humanity in the game ever existed? If so, you are misunderstanding. The Council is part of the Yorha Project to create the illusion of humanity being alive. It was made by androids we never even see to deceive androids around the world. The Commander knew about this, but she didn't know the rest of the plan. Yorha were the top of the line combat androids at the game's time. They are not the last survivors or something. So that's why they were gonna be discaded and the Bunker nuked like junk, a new line of shiny super combat androids was already planned or something like that.
Joseph Smith
>They are not the last survivors or something. So that's why they were gonna be discaded and the Bunker nuked like junk, a new line of shiny super combat androids was already planned or something like that. I never thought that the Council "existed" but rather was just a way to refer to the decision making body of the Androids that had all the info largely hidden from everyone else. We never see any other bunkers, hell they're not even implied to exist so when the main bunker which we know blows up and 2B/9S are stranded on Earth they never make any reference of being able to go to say the moon base or space bunker. It sealed the idea that they were truly alone now and that "the Council" was dead. So when it's revealed as an inside job it confused me. Where are the replacements being made? Who is still left alive on Team Androids to carry this out? If the Council and the Androids were one and the same why would they genocide themselves if that's their only base of operations (say humans weren't extinct and were the council; it would make more sense for humans to deem certain models obsolete and replace them ruthlessly because they're just machines, than for Androids to make that decision to commit suicide which makes less sense)? If the Commander was in on it why did she let 2B and 9S escape?
Michael Perry
>SOUL fuck off and die >soul is dumb autistic things no one cares about FUCK OFF AND DIE
Jayden Edwards
>character died to raise tension thats not a thing
Zachary Harris
Soul is the little touches that show passion, ambition, originality and the dev team having fun; details that a more corporate, focus-tested game would lack because most people are just doing their job to keep the game on-brand. Ice cubes you could easily miss melting if you wait and look in MGS2 is soul. Original characters and designs being replaced by generic Toads in Paper Mario Sticker Star is soulless. Similarly, just having the same generic loading screen for every situation (when it specifically mentions your health) remain unchanged when your characters are dying horribly is soulless. It's literally editing text, how could they miss something like that? It's the kind of oversight a big budget EA game would have because there's too many cooks in the kitchen.
Sebastian Hall
Nice, a NieR thread. I agree with most of your points, and that other user already brought up the deal with character deaths. The combat isn't that interesting, and sidequests are boring but important. But for me just wandering around the world was pretty enjoyable desu. The music and aesthetic of the game were great. And aside from a few minor issues, the story was also really good imo. It's far from perfect, and the PC port is ass, but it's still one of my favorites. You've played the first NieR, right?
