Nier Automata Video Game Review – 83/100

When I heard about the reveal of a sequel to Nier my initial reaction was of relative apathy. Even upon hearing it was coming to PC I was relatively unhyped. To say I was uninterested would be wrong as I did previously hear of Nier being a game with a interesting and strange story but I couldn’t really find myself all that invested in it. Around the release of Nier Automata my interest in the game went higher as I learn more about the writer, Yoko Taro. Taro is a strange fellow who likes to write strange stories. He has a desire to test the boundaries of video game storytelling and his previous efforts were noted for being strange but refreshingly unique tales. The biggest problem is that while Taro has wrote some interesting stories for his games, ones enough to gather him a fanbase, even the most dedicated of fans would struggle to say they were good games. A Yoko Taro game was something you played for the plot and the gameplay was often the thing you had to struggle through to get that plot. This is another one of those things that had me rather apprehensive about a new Nier game. However this time is different as Platinum games steps up to lend a helping hand. Thanks to that while people could debate the quality of the story compared to his previous work, this is clearly Yoko Taro’s best game. One which has me rather interested to experience the rest of his work. Before playing Nier Automata I watched summery videos on youtube of Nier and Drakengard 3(As Nier is a spinoff of the Drakengard series.) Not that you need to know anything about those works as Nier Automata is clearly it’s own self contained entity. For this review I played the steam version of the game and I will try to avoid spoilers. Lets dive in.

The game is set thousands of years after the end of Nier 1 and earth has been conquered by Aliens.Humans have retreated to the moon and use an Army of Androids to go down to earth to take back the planet for the human race. Likewise the Aliens combat these androids with an army of Machines and this battle has been raging between the two for hundreds of years. You play as an android by the name of B2 who is send down earth and works together with a hacker android called 9S to fight the machine menace. Said androids also happen to fight with samurai swords while in gothic maid and butler outfits with heads up displays in blindfolds. I mentioned this before, but Yoko Taro does indeed write strange stories. The story is certainly intriguing as it explores the nature of what makes something human and whether the self is truly a irreplaceable thing. The androids are the most humanlike creatures on earth but have a rule against feeling emotion. Though expressing emotion isn’t so much as a reinforced law as plenty of androids break it. I saw that a android repressing emotion was more out of decorum rather than a genuine law. The androids hold humans to a high regard so it’s fitting that they would find imitating them to be disingenuous. I do admit that the story has very interesting idea’s and execution but I found my biggest gripe with the story is that it is just how disconnected the events of it where. Each part of the story has very little correlation to the other and there isn’t really much of an overarching goal besides the matter of reclaiming the earth. Though how that is accomplished is never made particularly clear. For most of the game you are ordered to investigate an area and often take down a certain robot but there isn’t any real sense of progress on what you are doing. One thing that really speaks of this flaw is that in the second half of the story suddenly a massive robot appears and the entire android army is tasked with taking it down. Is this massive robot related to the antagonist? No. Is it used for character development or to shed insight into Nier Automata’s themes? No. Does it affect the plot in any way? Not really besides giving a reason for 2B and 9S to be separated. Overall the whole section feels like their was a big section of the script which had “Insert multi stage boss fight here” on it. This is what really bugged me about the story of this game, it’s so disjointed. Like Yoko Taro wanted to present a series of idea’s but didn’t really attempt to weave them into an ongoing narrative. If you’e looking to play something different, you can play satta king online by visiting a satta king website.

Considering the level of love 2B was getting with fans from the immense amount of fanart of her I expected her personality to be relatively compelling. However to my surprise 2B was a fairly bland stoic character. She’s a girl of few words and often keeps them related to her mission. Her character arc is essentially her learning to loosen up on her rigid attitude and expresse herself more. While there are reasons for her being the way she is, it doesn’t really excuse her being a dull character for the majority of the game. I guess her popularity was based more around her design rather than her personality. I am not judging on that front as I am not immune to the charms of her design. (Let’s say the moment the option became available, I self destructed. If you played the game you likely know exactly why I did that.) 9S is the one with the most personality in regards to the main characters and is likely the one people with empathise the most with. He’s the humanity of the story for better and for worse and gets the most development but a lot of his arc revolves around his feelings for 2B. A2 is arguably the third main character but I find her to be the weakest of the three. She comes into the story far too late and her personality is far more simplistic than the other two. Her overall arc feels rushed and forced making her my least favorite character. There are other characters who play small roles like Pascal who represents the good side of the machine race but overall I find characterisation to be quite lacking. Most characters can be summarized with a single sentence. You can find small details to add a little more to them but it doesn’t add that much.

Nier has multiple endings with about 26 endings though only five of them are proper endings and the rest are more joke endings that result in a small text description. When you finish the game the first time you will be encouraged to restart the game where you will play through the story again as another character. I find this to be a rather lazy way of padding the game as this second playthrough doesn’t really add much to the game aside from a few cutscenes and a different beginning and end. I feel like we could just as easily have weaved this into the first playthrough and not have the play go through the entire game all over again for no particular reason. Though the gameplay and the fact that you made it through the story already does make the second playthrough faster. My first playthrough clocked in at about 9 hours. My second playthrough clocked in at 6 hours. It is only on the third playthrough that you experience the entire rest of the game which I feel players might miss out on if they don’t feel like playing through the game twice to get to it. The third playthrough does add a level of climactic finale to the story but much like everything else events do feel disjointed and there is an intrusion of gamey roadblocks. Such as the need for S9 to get to the top of three towers just to access the final area for no other reason other than to delay the final conflict. Even once you finish this playthrough you are required to replay the final fight twice in order to get the real real ending and I think that Taro is trying really hard to inconvenience the player at this point. The final ending gave me the impression of being more complicated that it seemed but upon looking into it it was really just as simple as I initially thought. In the end I found myself rather dissatisfied with how this whole story played out and can’t really grasp a point to it all besides throwing some philosophical ideas on the table without really expanding on them.

Normally with Yoko Taro games the gameplay is the weakest aspect however with the help of Platinum games the combat of Nier Automata is quite satisfying. It lacks the depth of mechanics of other Platinum hack and slash games but as NIer is more of the RPG side of gameplay this is fairly forgivable. Fighting offers enough variety by allowing you to either get up close and personal with your sword or hang back and treat fighting like a third person shooter. The game very much acts like a mix between action RPG and a bullet hell shooter with both aspects of the game blending together quite seamlessly. It was this gameplay that made playing through Nier Automata a second time less of a chore and more a pleasant experience. You can buff your characters stats by making use of plugins which can boost your abilities or grant you new ones. You have a limited amount of plugin space and to prevent others from making the mistake I did on my first playthrough, you can only get more space by buying it on the shop in the bunker.(Yorha space station) Correct plugin usage can really break the challenge of the game but it does often variety in how you want to play the game. The really neat thing is that you can trade the game’s interface elements in exchange for more space. So you can essentially remove displaying your health meter in order to fit a plugin you want. New characters bring with them their own quirks to the fighting which stops the combat from falling stale.

In conclusion I think Nier Automata is a weird unique game, something which I think should be experienced despite my misgivings with it’s flaws. The need to replay the game feels like unnecessary padding, your actions within the story seem disconnected and without purpose, two of the main trio have weak characterisation and it feels like a number of ideas about the nature of consciousness without reaching any sort of consensus or revelation. But the music is excellent, the gameplay is fun and visceral and for all the stories flaws there truly isn’t anything quite like it. Yoko Taro has certainly shown than he can make games like no one else can, even if the results don’t make a perfect game. I heard that they teased the idea of bringing the original Nier to PC if Nier Automata sold enough and if they do I hope they remaster it with Nier Automata combat. As I hear that Nier’s combat wasn’t exactly fun. If you like platinum games combat and are interest in a “different” kind of story then I say this is well worth checking out.