NieR:Automata
Platinum Games
Review/Critique: Back in 2017 during finals season, something really terrifying happened. While myself and all my friends were studying for finals, a massive fire was heading our way at a terrifying pace. As we all sat in our rooms ashe falling from the bright red sky, there was only one thing I could think of. I really, really, really wanted to play NieR:Automata. It was the new hotness in 2017, and unfortunately my hunk of junk PC at the time (bless her heart) couldn't handle it. It's kind of hard to say whether my desire was in fact an attempted distraction for the events surrounding me or a genuine desire to play the game, but either way that Christmas I was determined to get a new PC and play "NieR:Automata". The day before finals week was set to start, there was a mass power outage, during which all of us at UCSB got an alert. "Evacuate immediately". Finals were cancelled, we all headed home as conditions were deemed unsafe, and I got to work on building a PC in my budget that could run "NieR:Automata" at 60 fps. Looking back on it, it's honestly a pretty magical moment in memory. All that stress from both finals and the Thomas Fires - all I wanted to do was relax and play "NieR:Automata". Christmas came around, I built my PC... and I can't play it. See at the time I had no dedicated Steam controller, I used my Wii U GC adapter to play everything. This meant if the controller was incompatible with whatever game I was playing, it was a lost cause and unfortunately this was the case for NieR. It did however work with Hollow Knight, and boy did I get addicted to that game. It scratched the itch, and sadly NieR was put on the backburner for a long, long time. Looking back on it, no other game has been as important for me to play during YoC as NieR. There's an emotional weight behind the idea of the game I haven't felt before -with it holding this special place as the next gen game I just couldn't wait to play. The next gen game that distracted me from the overwhelming stress of that moment in life, and got me lost in the idea of a fun new game.
As you can see above though... and it does make me really sad to admit, I didn't love NieR. All of this climactic buildup, and no it isn't the game I thought it was going to be. It didn't blow my mind like everyone on the internet said it would, it wasn't a philosophically stimulating masterpiece, it was just... an okay game. One with a ton of recurring game-play issues, monotonous combat, and cheesy #i'm14andthisisdeep writing. I don't want it to come off as me saying this game doesn't have value or merit, it certainly does, it just did not live up to the hype like I really thought it would.
Let's start with what I like about NieR, since I generally like to lead with a positive note. That way if you really like the game you can nod in agreement until your opinions are challenged and then you have the option to take off. First off, the music, holy shit the music in this game is so fantastic. The soundtrack is massive, each track diverse enough to fit the particular moment and area without losing its sense of identity to the greater soundtrack as a whole. This paired with a visual style that I really like comes together to create really dense, rich atmospheres (my favorite word!) Walking into a new area and just taking some time to explore it is enchanting. My favorite moments in NieR were when I was taking it like a casual open world game, looking for hidden secrets and side quests. Unfortunately I was constantly taken out of my enchantment by a frequent sense of urgency on the story side of things. "NieR:Automata's" story moves at a very inconsistent pace. At times that pace is casual, at others it is just blazing forward. This haphazard attempt at pacing means that at any point while completing the main story line you can be swept away from what you're doing for a multi-hour long set of boss battles and cutscenes that sometimes ends up in the overall main world being completely altered. I wouldn't mind this aspect as much if NieR didn't present itself as an open world game. One of the best things about those titles is that you can take them at your own pace, while playing NieR though I was never sure when all of my progress within the game would be sidelined for an agonizingly long story quest that would end up placing me past the point of no return with all of my personal set progress being halted indefinitely. The game then is clearly trying to tell you that it is a story driven title, so how's the story? I can summarize my feelings towards the story as... a mixed bag.
"NieR:Automata's" story is honestly pretty solid when taken in a vacuum. There are plenty of twists and turns in it, and after doing some research online to fill in some of the parts I didn't understand, I'd say overall it's quite good. It's pretty engaging, has a good sense of mystery and intrigue, and concludes in a way where all of its major themes have been discussed and loosely tied up leaving for discussion beyond time itself. My major problem with the story, is how unforgivably poorly paced it is. To see all of "NieR:Automata's" story, you have to beat the game three times. The first two times you beat the game being almost entirely identical. I would be lying if I said 100%, you have a few new mini-games you have to complete here and there (which luckily take place during what are in my opinion the most tedious parts of the initial story), and the game does show you some new cutscenes (that all vaguely beat you over the head with its themes in ways you've seen before), but aside from that - the exact same. It didn't help then that the combat in my eyes, the thing that stayed completely the same, was incredibly monotonous.
This may in fact be the most disappointing element of "NieR:Automata" for me. Once I finished the game, I talked to my friend, someone who had a generally positive opinion about it and asked him what some of his favorite aspects of it are. He said pretty frankly that the combat in the game was nutty, and that you could do some crazy ass combos. I looked it up and indeed, the combat can be sick as hell. I was here mashing X and these guys are sending robots to the shadow realm. Let me ask you this though, am I at fault for not figuring out there was a bunch of depth to the combat? I'm going to argue that I'm in no way at fault for sticking to X mashing - and that NieR disincentives you from experimenting with its rich combat system. Death in this game works like in Dark Souls - when you die, you are sent back to your last save point and tasked with finding where you last died. You have a moderately short window to find your body, and if you don't (or die on the way there) all of your pod-chip progress is gone. Pod-Chips in the game operate like stat upgrades, and if you were to lose them all you would become incredibly weak. This means if you die in the game at a difficult section, and aren't able to make it back in time or die before you can get there, that section becomes about 10x more difficult. Most people agree that this is an issue, and suggest that if this happens to you - you should reload from your last save rather than playing it out. This meant that I was constantly oversaving (which is a problem in and of itself), and stressing about dying because if I died during the middle of this two hour long multi-boss fight / cut-scene I may have to do it all over again. I'm already hearing arguments that during some boss fights there are partial saves in the middle, and that is true. The problem is, you don't know for which boss fights that is the case - and often times that isn't true. This means it's safer to assume that every boss fight will send you back to your last point of safe than to assume it will be lenient (especially since the game literally tells you that it doesn't intend to be lenient). What does this all mean? Well, if the game has drilled into you that dying is very punishing, and enemies do a ton of damage, would you start experimenting with the combat system? Maybe if you're a pro gamer, but in my case the answer was "fuck no". So what would the right choice have been? In my opinion, if the game wants to have a super punishing death and combat system, they need to take some of the onus in teaching you a few advanced techniques. Then you know that there's a lot of tricks to the combat system, and may be interested in trying to link some nutty combat tricks together.
Now I'm going to bring things full circle. The punishing combat lead me to play it safe most of the time when fighting, meaning combat in general became really repetitive. The story though was intriguing, and was what was pulling me over the finish line and driving me to complete the game. I finally do so for the first time, in what was the grindiest last two hours I've experienced, with combat that just felt like it was never going to end... and you tell me I have to beat the same exact game, again if I actually want to enjoy it to the fullest? That frustrated me beyond belief, and no I don't think the new content in the second play through of the game was good enough to make up for this atrocity in pacing. It may have been okay if the game content was mostly story and if that story was greatly altered, but that's not the case. You have to beat the game again, and 80% of the content is spent on that tedious, monotonous, horseshit combat? And you're telling me that only an hour of the second play through will have new content? Absolutely unacceptable, but everyone online was telling me the third play through will absolutely blow your mind, and that if I didn't beat the game for the third time I wouldn't be able to have an opinion on it. So of course I had to beat the game a third time, and while I can definitely agree that it is the best part of the entire experience, and had some pretty awesome moments, it's not mind blowing. It feels more like the natural conclusion to the original story which was only halfway complete. And sadly I still had so many fucking questions that I had to look up and find answers to. I'm sure those answers are in the game somewhere, but they definitely weren't along the main story. I think this is on the whole very frustrating since the story was the one thing keeping me going. I kept wading through over saturated amounts of mediocre combat to get to the sparse number of story driven moments, and in the end I still don't know what or why the fuck? I finished the last cutscene of ending E, got up from my computer, went over to my girlfriend, and said simply, "Damn, that game was kind of trash".
Now once I had completed the game I did what any sane person does and looked up what people on the internet thought of it, and much to my dismay it was overwhelming appraisal. "NieR is my GOTY 2017", "NieR is the best game I've ever played" and my personal favorite, "Nier:Automata's Ending redefined the meaning of life". Why do these comments frustrate me? I want to make it clear that it's not for any of the reasons I stated above. Much of the above is on the subjective side, and aside from the combat (which I will stand by needs changes) is highly personal. Most of the above is not objectively bad - if you love grindy combat and over the top #i'm14andthisisdeep type stories then by all means the game is a masterpiece! No, the reason these comments annoy me is that I have so many more complaints about the game that are not in any way subjective. In no particular order, here are some more things which consistently pissed me off in NieR:Automata.
The game is littered with buggy clipping and invisible walls. Maybe it's just because I played BotW earlier this year, but those aspects of the game frustrated me beyond belief. If I see a place, and it looks like I can go there, I want to go there. The methods used to gate you from areas are so lazy and artificial (there's a black box in the way that I can only move once I've gone through the other way. Picking up things in the game is a fucking chore, this is a huge issue since picking up shiny objects on the floor should be fun not tedious and time consuming. You should be excited to find a room full of items not overwhelmed at the amount of time it will take you to pick it all up. The lock on mechanics in the game are so fucking frustrating, you'd think for a second you were actually not playing NieR at all, but The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. This aspect is completely fucking unforgivable. Hallways upon hallways, every enclosed area is really just a series of hallways with the illusion of exploration (not a great illusion at that). If you like killing bosses when you get their health bars to 0 then look elsewhere since you have a better chance at winning the lottery then actually killing a boss when you get its health to 0. Most of the time you just get a cut scene of your character going "there's too many of them!" or "he's too powerful"! This shit grinds my fucking gears and sadly, it's not an isolated incident. Do you like actually being able to open chests? Well fuck you because getting into the proper position to open a chest takes 4-5 attempts cause if you push forward a little too much you'll just run over the chest and have to loop back around in front of it. I also hope you won't get tired of hearing "how could a machine know/do this" because the main characters say it about 4-5 times every twenty minutes (you'd think by now that 9S would realize the machines have some level of consciousness but I guess not). I know I said thinking the dialogue is cheesy is subjective, but come on. Some of the lines you'll hear the characters say take the cake for most humorous lines you were supposed to take seriously in video games. Some things in the second play through are really cool but some things are just fucking broken. Some bosses and enemies are reset to their original level so they are the easiest fucking fights on the planet (you still lose them by the way because fuck you, who cares that you got a boss's health bar to 0 definitely not the game). I know this point is also subjective, but I hate how the game's story is just leading you from isolated incident to isolated incident rather than having you, the player, feel like you're leading the narrative forward. Every time you finish a story quest it's just, go outside and hope command gives you something else to do otherwise there is no story anymore (hint: command always has something for you to do). Another thing that's subjective, but one of the main characters you get to play as for a while is actually so fucking annoying. Maybe it's because I played the dub, but if I have to hear them talk about how much they hate machines one more time I will fucking lose it. It's also vague (because doing otherwise would go into spoiler territory) but I hate how many inconsistencies there are with the game. Almost always dying means going back to your last save point, but in one or two occasions you are supposed to die to trigger a cut-scene. Have fun losing all your health pots trying to stay alive only to find that you were supposed to die the whole time (this happens only once or twice in the entire fucking game even though there are countless moments you may think that you need to die to trigger a cutscene). Sometimes your character will scream in rage in a cut-scene only for them to let out a chirpy line of dialogue in the pursuing fight. The game like I said before presents as an open world game, but it's actually really small so get used to revisiting areas 3-4 times on multiple play-throughs and fighting the same fucking enemies and hearing the same fucking things about them. The game plays around with the idea of acting like the first two times you beat the game have overlap but doesn't commit to it at times that seem like they'd be really obvious and easy to execute on. This paragraph went on, and on, and on, and I could keep going on, and on, and on, about all the little things that irritated me about this game, but what I want you to take away is that the game has way too many issues outside of my somewhat subjective ones for me to understand how people could say it's their GOTY 2017 or their favorite game ever made.
Recommendation: Okay... this is getting to be the longest review I've done by a mile, I will try and be unbiased in my recommendation. I know I've said a lot of negative things above, but honestly... you'll probably like "NieR:Automata" alright. It's overall a solidly made game, with a good score and an interesting narrative. If you do play it though, my only advice is that you take it slow. So many of my favorite moments in the game didn't come from the main story quests (that's where most of my least favorite moments of the game came from). My favorite moments came from the exploration, the side quests, and the atmosphere. I think if you enjoy the hack and slash combat, you will really enjoy the game - even noticing all the little flaws I stated above. It's not a terrible game by any means, it just wasn't even close to being as good as I was expecting.
...
And that's my review of "NieR:Automata"! Sorry it took so damn long, the game took forever to beat. I'll be coming out with my Picks for October soon.
Until then!
Platinum Games
Review/Critique: Back in 2017 during finals season, something really terrifying happened. While myself and all my friends were studying for finals, a massive fire was heading our way at a terrifying pace. As we all sat in our rooms ashe falling from the bright red sky, there was only one thing I could think of. I really, really, really wanted to play NieR:Automata. It was the new hotness in 2017, and unfortunately my hunk of junk PC at the time (bless her heart) couldn't handle it. It's kind of hard to say whether my desire was in fact an attempted distraction for the events surrounding me or a genuine desire to play the game, but either way that Christmas I was determined to get a new PC and play "NieR:Automata". The day before finals week was set to start, there was a mass power outage, during which all of us at UCSB got an alert. "Evacuate immediately". Finals were cancelled, we all headed home as conditions were deemed unsafe, and I got to work on building a PC in my budget that could run "NieR:Automata" at 60 fps. Looking back on it, it's honestly a pretty magical moment in memory. All that stress from both finals and the Thomas Fires - all I wanted to do was relax and play "NieR:Automata". Christmas came around, I built my PC... and I can't play it. See at the time I had no dedicated Steam controller, I used my Wii U GC adapter to play everything. This meant if the controller was incompatible with whatever game I was playing, it was a lost cause and unfortunately this was the case for NieR. It did however work with Hollow Knight, and boy did I get addicted to that game. It scratched the itch, and sadly NieR was put on the backburner for a long, long time. Looking back on it, no other game has been as important for me to play during YoC as NieR. There's an emotional weight behind the idea of the game I haven't felt before -with it holding this special place as the next gen game I just couldn't wait to play. The next gen game that distracted me from the overwhelming stress of that moment in life, and got me lost in the idea of a fun new game.
As you can see above though... and it does make me really sad to admit, I didn't love NieR. All of this climactic buildup, and no it isn't the game I thought it was going to be. It didn't blow my mind like everyone on the internet said it would, it wasn't a philosophically stimulating masterpiece, it was just... an okay game. One with a ton of recurring game-play issues, monotonous combat, and cheesy #i'm14andthisisdeep writing. I don't want it to come off as me saying this game doesn't have value or merit, it certainly does, it just did not live up to the hype like I really thought it would.
Let's start with what I like about NieR, since I generally like to lead with a positive note. That way if you really like the game you can nod in agreement until your opinions are challenged and then you have the option to take off. First off, the music, holy shit the music in this game is so fantastic. The soundtrack is massive, each track diverse enough to fit the particular moment and area without losing its sense of identity to the greater soundtrack as a whole. This paired with a visual style that I really like comes together to create really dense, rich atmospheres (my favorite word!) Walking into a new area and just taking some time to explore it is enchanting. My favorite moments in NieR were when I was taking it like a casual open world game, looking for hidden secrets and side quests. Unfortunately I was constantly taken out of my enchantment by a frequent sense of urgency on the story side of things. "NieR:Automata's" story moves at a very inconsistent pace. At times that pace is casual, at others it is just blazing forward. This haphazard attempt at pacing means that at any point while completing the main story line you can be swept away from what you're doing for a multi-hour long set of boss battles and cutscenes that sometimes ends up in the overall main world being completely altered. I wouldn't mind this aspect as much if NieR didn't present itself as an open world game. One of the best things about those titles is that you can take them at your own pace, while playing NieR though I was never sure when all of my progress within the game would be sidelined for an agonizingly long story quest that would end up placing me past the point of no return with all of my personal set progress being halted indefinitely. The game then is clearly trying to tell you that it is a story driven title, so how's the story? I can summarize my feelings towards the story as... a mixed bag.
"NieR:Automata's" story is honestly pretty solid when taken in a vacuum. There are plenty of twists and turns in it, and after doing some research online to fill in some of the parts I didn't understand, I'd say overall it's quite good. It's pretty engaging, has a good sense of mystery and intrigue, and concludes in a way where all of its major themes have been discussed and loosely tied up leaving for discussion beyond time itself. My major problem with the story, is how unforgivably poorly paced it is. To see all of "NieR:Automata's" story, you have to beat the game three times. The first two times you beat the game being almost entirely identical. I would be lying if I said 100%, you have a few new mini-games you have to complete here and there (which luckily take place during what are in my opinion the most tedious parts of the initial story), and the game does show you some new cutscenes (that all vaguely beat you over the head with its themes in ways you've seen before), but aside from that - the exact same. It didn't help then that the combat in my eyes, the thing that stayed completely the same, was incredibly monotonous.
This may in fact be the most disappointing element of "NieR:Automata" for me. Once I finished the game, I talked to my friend, someone who had a generally positive opinion about it and asked him what some of his favorite aspects of it are. He said pretty frankly that the combat in the game was nutty, and that you could do some crazy ass combos. I looked it up and indeed, the combat can be sick as hell. I was here mashing X and these guys are sending robots to the shadow realm. Let me ask you this though, am I at fault for not figuring out there was a bunch of depth to the combat? I'm going to argue that I'm in no way at fault for sticking to X mashing - and that NieR disincentives you from experimenting with its rich combat system. Death in this game works like in Dark Souls - when you die, you are sent back to your last save point and tasked with finding where you last died. You have a moderately short window to find your body, and if you don't (or die on the way there) all of your pod-chip progress is gone. Pod-Chips in the game operate like stat upgrades, and if you were to lose them all you would become incredibly weak. This means if you die in the game at a difficult section, and aren't able to make it back in time or die before you can get there, that section becomes about 10x more difficult. Most people agree that this is an issue, and suggest that if this happens to you - you should reload from your last save rather than playing it out. This meant that I was constantly oversaving (which is a problem in and of itself), and stressing about dying because if I died during the middle of this two hour long multi-boss fight / cut-scene I may have to do it all over again. I'm already hearing arguments that during some boss fights there are partial saves in the middle, and that is true. The problem is, you don't know for which boss fights that is the case - and often times that isn't true. This means it's safer to assume that every boss fight will send you back to your last point of safe than to assume it will be lenient (especially since the game literally tells you that it doesn't intend to be lenient). What does this all mean? Well, if the game has drilled into you that dying is very punishing, and enemies do a ton of damage, would you start experimenting with the combat system? Maybe if you're a pro gamer, but in my case the answer was "fuck no". So what would the right choice have been? In my opinion, if the game wants to have a super punishing death and combat system, they need to take some of the onus in teaching you a few advanced techniques. Then you know that there's a lot of tricks to the combat system, and may be interested in trying to link some nutty combat tricks together.
Now I'm going to bring things full circle. The punishing combat lead me to play it safe most of the time when fighting, meaning combat in general became really repetitive. The story though was intriguing, and was what was pulling me over the finish line and driving me to complete the game. I finally do so for the first time, in what was the grindiest last two hours I've experienced, with combat that just felt like it was never going to end... and you tell me I have to beat the same exact game, again if I actually want to enjoy it to the fullest? That frustrated me beyond belief, and no I don't think the new content in the second play through of the game was good enough to make up for this atrocity in pacing. It may have been okay if the game content was mostly story and if that story was greatly altered, but that's not the case. You have to beat the game again, and 80% of the content is spent on that tedious, monotonous, horseshit combat? And you're telling me that only an hour of the second play through will have new content? Absolutely unacceptable, but everyone online was telling me the third play through will absolutely blow your mind, and that if I didn't beat the game for the third time I wouldn't be able to have an opinion on it. So of course I had to beat the game a third time, and while I can definitely agree that it is the best part of the entire experience, and had some pretty awesome moments, it's not mind blowing. It feels more like the natural conclusion to the original story which was only halfway complete. And sadly I still had so many fucking questions that I had to look up and find answers to. I'm sure those answers are in the game somewhere, but they definitely weren't along the main story. I think this is on the whole very frustrating since the story was the one thing keeping me going. I kept wading through over saturated amounts of mediocre combat to get to the sparse number of story driven moments, and in the end I still don't know what or why the fuck? I finished the last cutscene of ending E, got up from my computer, went over to my girlfriend, and said simply, "Damn, that game was kind of trash".
Now once I had completed the game I did what any sane person does and looked up what people on the internet thought of it, and much to my dismay it was overwhelming appraisal. "NieR is my GOTY 2017", "NieR is the best game I've ever played" and my personal favorite, "Nier:Automata's Ending redefined the meaning of life". Why do these comments frustrate me? I want to make it clear that it's not for any of the reasons I stated above. Much of the above is on the subjective side, and aside from the combat (which I will stand by needs changes) is highly personal. Most of the above is not objectively bad - if you love grindy combat and over the top #i'm14andthisisdeep type stories then by all means the game is a masterpiece! No, the reason these comments annoy me is that I have so many more complaints about the game that are not in any way subjective. In no particular order, here are some more things which consistently pissed me off in NieR:Automata.
The game is littered with buggy clipping and invisible walls. Maybe it's just because I played BotW earlier this year, but those aspects of the game frustrated me beyond belief. If I see a place, and it looks like I can go there, I want to go there. The methods used to gate you from areas are so lazy and artificial (there's a black box in the way that I can only move once I've gone through the other way. Picking up things in the game is a fucking chore, this is a huge issue since picking up shiny objects on the floor should be fun not tedious and time consuming. You should be excited to find a room full of items not overwhelmed at the amount of time it will take you to pick it all up. The lock on mechanics in the game are so fucking frustrating, you'd think for a second you were actually not playing NieR at all, but The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. This aspect is completely fucking unforgivable. Hallways upon hallways, every enclosed area is really just a series of hallways with the illusion of exploration (not a great illusion at that). If you like killing bosses when you get their health bars to 0 then look elsewhere since you have a better chance at winning the lottery then actually killing a boss when you get its health to 0. Most of the time you just get a cut scene of your character going "there's too many of them!" or "he's too powerful"! This shit grinds my fucking gears and sadly, it's not an isolated incident. Do you like actually being able to open chests? Well fuck you because getting into the proper position to open a chest takes 4-5 attempts cause if you push forward a little too much you'll just run over the chest and have to loop back around in front of it. I also hope you won't get tired of hearing "how could a machine know/do this" because the main characters say it about 4-5 times every twenty minutes (you'd think by now that 9S would realize the machines have some level of consciousness but I guess not). I know I said thinking the dialogue is cheesy is subjective, but come on. Some of the lines you'll hear the characters say take the cake for most humorous lines you were supposed to take seriously in video games. Some things in the second play through are really cool but some things are just fucking broken. Some bosses and enemies are reset to their original level so they are the easiest fucking fights on the planet (you still lose them by the way because fuck you, who cares that you got a boss's health bar to 0 definitely not the game). I know this point is also subjective, but I hate how the game's story is just leading you from isolated incident to isolated incident rather than having you, the player, feel like you're leading the narrative forward. Every time you finish a story quest it's just, go outside and hope command gives you something else to do otherwise there is no story anymore (hint: command always has something for you to do). Another thing that's subjective, but one of the main characters you get to play as for a while is actually so fucking annoying. Maybe it's because I played the dub, but if I have to hear them talk about how much they hate machines one more time I will fucking lose it. It's also vague (because doing otherwise would go into spoiler territory) but I hate how many inconsistencies there are with the game. Almost always dying means going back to your last save point, but in one or two occasions you are supposed to die to trigger a cut-scene. Have fun losing all your health pots trying to stay alive only to find that you were supposed to die the whole time (this happens only once or twice in the entire fucking game even though there are countless moments you may think that you need to die to trigger a cutscene). Sometimes your character will scream in rage in a cut-scene only for them to let out a chirpy line of dialogue in the pursuing fight. The game like I said before presents as an open world game, but it's actually really small so get used to revisiting areas 3-4 times on multiple play-throughs and fighting the same fucking enemies and hearing the same fucking things about them. The game plays around with the idea of acting like the first two times you beat the game have overlap but doesn't commit to it at times that seem like they'd be really obvious and easy to execute on. This paragraph went on, and on, and on, and I could keep going on, and on, and on, about all the little things that irritated me about this game, but what I want you to take away is that the game has way too many issues outside of my somewhat subjective ones for me to understand how people could say it's their GOTY 2017 or their favorite game ever made.
Recommendation: Okay... this is getting to be the longest review I've done by a mile, I will try and be unbiased in my recommendation. I know I've said a lot of negative things above, but honestly... you'll probably like "NieR:Automata" alright. It's overall a solidly made game, with a good score and an interesting narrative. If you do play it though, my only advice is that you take it slow. So many of my favorite moments in the game didn't come from the main story quests (that's where most of my least favorite moments of the game came from). My favorite moments came from the exploration, the side quests, and the atmosphere. I think if you enjoy the hack and slash combat, you will really enjoy the game - even noticing all the little flaws I stated above. It's not a terrible game by any means, it just wasn't even close to being as good as I was expecting.
...
And that's my review of "NieR:Automata"! Sorry it took so damn long, the game took forever to beat. I'll be coming out with my Picks for October soon.
Until then!
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