@dray2k: Thanks for the articles! I think this is very close to what I was trying to convey. I don't think knowing these terms will help me explain what I like in games like Nier or Dark Souls to someone else, but it gives me something to go on for my own lil research. Definitely gonna look more into it. Hard to define stuff like this is really fascinating. So many people share this phenomenon or feeling without being able to put it down in words that won't come out as reductive. And Mono no Aware I recognize as something I personally have appreciated for a really long time in any and all media. So yeah, thanks!

I love how the game plays with conventional video game standards. At the end of B, I'm sitting there looking bored and staring at the credits and then all of a sudden, it dawns on me.... the fuck....I'M LIVE!

I made a beeline to 9S's apartment, and didn't need prodding by the occasional NPC.

Bra-fucking-vo. That was an awesome moment.

Whenever you get hit during that section it will say in the corner of the screen "________'s data was lost", so I assume the way it works is that when you give up your save data it becomes one of the ships that can help a theoretically infinite number of people, but if someone is using your ship and it's destroyed your save data will be lost and won't help people anymore. So in practice if someone gets through the entire credits after accepting help without being hit and deletes their save they will add a net positive of 1 additional helper, someone who takes a single hit but sacrifices their save at the end will have a net zero affect on the pool of player data, and anyone who gets hit twice or more is removing more from the pool than they are adding.

Also it is in fact possible to get through the credits without help, but it's extremely hard to accomplish. I assume the developers started with a pool of "fake" players to pad the numbers just so that first way of people to complete the game could get through the credits.

I don't recall the last time I've seen such a massive push against a game just because it's very well liked by a good number of people. It seems you can't go anywhere on the Internet without someone telling you "this is why you shouldn't like NieR: Automata!".

Even on this site, there's been some push back. Neither Dan or Abby seem all that thrilled with the game, albeit for different reasons, and a few podcasts back, Jeff said that both Horizon Zero Dawn and Nier are essentially the same story. I'm thinking Nier will be lucky to win best music, and you'd think that would be a gimme, and honestly, I don't see much chance of it breaking the top 10 of best games.

Too bad, since I liked it, but I understand the criticisms. What can I say, the game made me cry.

If it wasn't for the music, I probably would've stopped early on. But something about it just sucked me into that world.

Then I grew to appreciate the visual design, the combat, the story, the storytelling, the customization, and all of its quirky presentation. It's a damn fine game, going from like number 20 on my list to the top 5.

As a hack and slash game, Nier gameplay is inferior than DMC, GoW but still decent. I still give this game 8/10. I like it for it's music, story, characters but there are times when this game really bore me such as all the hacking. The hacking part is so boring.

I second the 'Everything' argument. For me, personally, it just had best-in-class everything. It has its flaws, but so does everything. Its my most clear cut game of the year I've played for a long time (again, for me, personally).

Playing Nier Automata to me, feels like you're playing a classic - its the got feel of a game that is going to be talked about for a long time to come. As somebody who's spent a lot of his life studying and playing music - the soundtrack is also mind blowingly good. It hasn't left my playlist for the whole of this year and its not going anywhere, anytime soon.

I can't imagine what its like playing it now though with these expectations attached. Playing through it when it first came out and nobody knew what to expect made for an incredible experience.

@joey_ravn: Remember all the Undertale hate? It’s a lot like that push-back, just not quite as visceral as the hate Undertale got

I don't think I'll ever be able to describe what it's like to go down that elevator with the Emil "fragment" and see him almost mindlessly reconstructing Kaine's hut in that field and the song plays and holy fuck it actually puts me in tears. How he has his "valuables" that he moves around. Or the two "real" final bosses that really pound the theme of perseverance in extremely awful, terrible, hopeless times... well, that shit just works on me in a crazy way. Uplifting existentialism is the best way I've seen it described, even though ultimately the only uplifting part is that life doesn't care about you, your purpose, or your fears because your existence doesn't matter, but that's okay. How much your existence "matters" isn't the point, and both E and super secret ending hit that theme home. Even the famous four asterisks, philosophers in name and purpose (or lack thereof?), or side quests? They all link to that central theme in one way or another. It's thematically consistent and I fucking love it.

Plus a whole lot of my love comes from the first game's ties, and I'm okay with that. The stuff that exists adjacent to that game + Drakengard is still amazing, but the whole package gets pushed into my GOAT contenders.

@joey_ravn: Really? I thought that Nier: AM has the most stable circlejerk community of all the times. I've never seen hate for it.

Personally I love the game but it pales in comparision to NITW. Thats basically the only thing I can say to the matter without turning this into a 50 pages deep analysis about on why that is. Not only that but thats boring.