In my 25 years of gaming there were games I absolutely adored, games I absolutely hated, games that were simply all right, and now there's Nier: Automata, that doesn't fit in any of these categories. Which might be a good thing, since I probably will remember N:A for a long time.

I picked Nier: Automata day one edition to simply kill time in 4 days between me finishing Mass Effect Trilogy and Andromeda being released. So a little 'mind numbing mindless action' will keep me busy I thought after looking at some Automata trailers. Needless to say, I just started playing Andromeda last night after sinking ~50 hours into story of androids.

So the game definitely kept me engaged - it's not often I manage to keep interest for such a long time - but I come out of the other end with mixed feeling, having achieved almost all endings and done most of interesting content.

There's a lot of things that Automata does great - battle system is fun, changing of game genres and perspectives felt fresh (having never played Yoko Taro game before), characters were reasonably engaging and plot twists brought plenty "Oh tha-a-at's why" revelations.

But it's not all fun and roses here. My main issue with the game is the consistent straightforward direction, or rather lack thereof. Consistency is the key for a good game or a movie, but in a crazy little world that Yoko-san inhabits, this is probably unheard of.

Let me get to the elephant in the room straight away - the pacing and story progression could be better. Say what you want, but there was little need to make routes A and B separate. In the final chapter stories of A2 and 9S are told in parallel, even though they are much more disconnected from one another, but stories of 2B and 9S, which are for 90% are a part of same narrative, are told separately. Consistency, yo! The route of 9S as a result becomes a bit of a grind, even though different mechanics are introduced. Yes, there are some interesting story developments in B route, but most of them come at the end, during the Abandoned factory mission, so this part could've been done much better.

Another issue with story telling is breaking up the narrative in such a way, that the revelation that would result in a much deeper emotional response at the end of route A only comes at the end of route C, some 25 hours later. Of course, it was still interesting and gave deeper understanding of what was happening, but the moment was lost. I was emotionally cold when I finished route A, because I couldn't really feel compassionate with 2B crying over the body of her partner, when her partner is an immortal android, who, probably at that very moment was being recreated at the Bunker, but by the time understanding came it was already too late.

Difficulty was also very inconsistent and jumping all over the place. When the starting chapter was rather challenging for me, who haven't played on a controller for a while, once you do a minimal amount of upgrading of your character with chips, you suddenly become practically un-killable, with obvious ramifications to the difficulty of the game. Route B was on the other hand entirely skill based, but once you learn and develop strategies for those ~20 levels used for the hacking game, any difficulty disappears. Hacking game was exhilarating and cathartic, all right, but way too repetitive.

Suddenly, at the start of route C difficulty ramps up by a large margin, mostly due to the fact that for the last 10 hours I've been exploding every enemy by hacking into them and any leveling that happened was not seen from my perspective. But again, once I figured to slot Taunt chip along with various healing chips, the difficulty faded away like morning fog. Final boss fight was a breeze and final-final fight ended in around 1 minute for either character.

World was not very believable in many aspects, and Automata designers should've had a look at Aleppo after "only" 4 years of armed conflict to realize that ravaged-by-thousands-years-of-war city ruins would not look as well preserved, not even taking into account simple environmental factors.

I'm usually not one to complain about graphics, but just to mention that for a PS4 release and year 2017 the detail level of both world and characters, the draw distance and loading times were sub-par to put it lightly. I often found myself contemplating whether I should use transporter or just run to my destination and mostly chose to run, even though I was playing on a PC with well above recommended specs.

And the music, while overall amazing, was a bit inconsistent, where most of compositions were exquisite, but intermixed with occasional absolutely generic track, like the one playing at resistance camp. And also the music, by the virtue of being so damn amazing sort of fails as a SOUNDTRACK as it doesn't live with the game, doesn't evolve, but represents a separate independent entity.

In conclusion, I was like "Wow! This was amazing!" at the end of route A, and I went to recommend this game to all my friends, but as I moved onward as advised by design team message, this excitement gradually faded. It's still a good game, easily an 8 in my ratings, but it could've been a game of the decade, and it's unfortunate, that it stopped short of being an all-time great.

P.S. Well, that was a wall of text. Kudos to everyone who managed to not fall asleep :)

P.P.S. Accidentally made it a question. Anyone knows how to make it just a normal post?

I agree with you about route B barely being justified as a seperate playthrough considering how similar it is. (I was honeslty getting DMC 4 flashbacks) especially considering route C bounced between characters like it was nothing. I realise one of the biggest draws to Yako Taro's games are that they are presented differently in many ways but a lot of the game still feels like filler, whether it's part of the grand design or not doesnt matter when it hurts the pacing and lessens the impact of the story.

I enjoyed the game but like you I have hard time recommending it to people due to how repetitive it can feel at times.

Thanks for your reply.

One thing I forgot to mention about the story is how I dislike the recent tendency of story telling seen for example in both Far Cry 3 and 4, where you take a interesting, well developed, relatable bad guy, kill him off in the beginning and replace him with a boring, generic dude.

Adam and Eve were both interesting and quite engaging manifestations of machine network consciousness, and it was easy to relate to them, especially with snippets from their life seen during B route. Then we kill them off and replace with boring, trollish and rather generic manifestations of machine network consciousness in the form of two girls.

I wonder, what would Angry Joe say about this? Oh yes: "You done f*cked it up!"

@spiritus_vini:

I feel the same way in general but a bit different than in specific.

The story was engaging at least the second part of the story and the mood shifted

I actually hated the fact there are so many genre combined. It's not consistent. Sometimes less is more. I feel they could have invested more time into the hack n slash element instead of the hacking or space shooter.

I literally beat all enemies with one press of a button. There's hardly any reason to equip another weapon or try a different combo aside from looking pretty because every enemies including bosses will take damage of any kind regardless the amount and this shows a lack of creativity in problem solving. Alot of people will tell me "just crank up the difficulty." But that just means i die faster and deal less damage it doesn't change the way I approach an obstacle.even in infamous second son, there are alot more reasons why you would revert to shooting projectile or melee or special skill moveset.

My other complaint is like yours. I thought route c should have just started right after the first play through. In the ps1 day, I would have seen this game as 2 disc game. Disc 1 or part 1 goes up till the fight with eve and disc 2 starts off where the route c starts. No matter how you put it, route b was horrible. 80-90% same with a weaker character and a boring meanie hack game. Basically, this game is saying "we are not giving you the main story unless you do extra optional stuff" I noticed that even side quest contained some heavy story elements that they should have added to main quest while some of the main quest felt like chores...im a strong believer that first impression matters. We should replay a game not because we have to but because we want to and we enjoy it so much we want to go through it again. If anything they could have done what resident eveil 1 or 2 did and let us chose between guy or girl on start or maybe at the beginning of each chapter.

I think the hack game was horribly misused in route b alot. Sometimes I run into a door or something and I would be forced to enter hacking game where all I do I pilot a ship from point a to point b with nothing to solve literally. I mean c'mon might as well just open the dam door for me. It's like this game is screaming to give us something to constantly do because at heart the devs know there's really nothing to do aside from hoards of enemies swarming at you. The only difference in b I'd that you see small fillers of cutscenes which are poorly done since they just randomly trigger when you arrive at a point.

Aside from the bad, which there are some more, I did like the good parts about this game. I enjoy the story alot. The fact that the characters are becoming more human and less robot. Also, the theme it touches on is pretty deep not just a good vs evil story. I thought it took a pretty big 180 turn on second half but for the better. Sadly, some Characters like the twin red headed sister's didn't get enough spotlight but became strangely important at the end. I happened to like Pascal alot because he was very life like. I wish he got the propper treatment and overcame his heartbreak instead of self defeats at the end.

I really like the last part of this game. It switches you up between two competing characters on the same path that are about to meet up at center point and you don't know if they will do battle or join forces but you play both. It creates a nice mix with the narrative even though some games have done this too. The best part about the combat were the skill chipset. They were the only thing that added variety and made me play differently.

Overall, the pros of the game didn't make me "wow" but the cons of the game made me literally fall asleep. I still think it's a good game. Primarily the story, music and the fact they were able to compromise visual and scale for better frame rate which I think alot of devs should do.