After finishing NieR: Automata this week, I've kind of not been playing a lot else. I played through Genesis Noir which I have mixed feelings towards (trending towards negative), dipped my toe back into AC: Valhalla and started up Persona 5 Strikers. It MIGHT have had something to do with the news of the departures from this website. My feelings are shared by a lot of people who have expressed it a lot better than I could have, so I will leave it at that. I just wanna write about NieR now and get back to some semblance of normalcy.

NieR: Automata

Since last week, I managed to beat NieR: Automata and boy was that a ride I’m not going to forget anytime soon. There was a lot that I really liked, a few things I didn’t like and a few things I thought were done better in the first game. Well, technically the re-release of the first game since I didn’t actually play it back in 2010.

The worldbuilding is extremely good, with the sidequests fleshing out a lot of the world’s inner workings, motivations for characters, etc.

>> Full spoilers are going to follow, beware. <<

Things like the Emil quest where you ultimately end up visiting Kainé’s home, now lying in a field of Lunar Tears made me put my controller down and just take in the sights and listen to the music. There are also a handful of really annoying quests, but I ended the game at 53/60 quests completed so suffice it to say I did most of them anyway. Like in NieR: Replicant, I didn’t particularly mind the tedium of the actual gameplay of the quests, I did them happily and eagerly awaited the next little bit of worldbuilding or character development. Those escort quests can just go though.

The expansion of the world size in this installment was kind of jarring to begin with. In the first game, I moved through those same areas so many times that I knew them like the back of my hand. If there wouldn’t have been a map in the game, I wouldn’t have minded. In Automata, not only is the map necessary (I referred to it heavily during my playthroughs), the little dots that tell you there’s a side quest objective there were sorely needed and were instrumental in my desire to really do the quests at all. The world is big enough that just running around aimlessly looking for the exact place where something is would have been a nightmare, so hurray for getting a basic convenience in the form of quest markers. I would say that the feeling of learning and mastering the space was not quite as satisfying, but I did eventually stop using the minimap and relied mostly on landmarks to navigate, which is always a nice feeling when that’s possible.

Last week, I had just finished route A and was still somewhat lukewarm on the whole experience. With route B is where that started to change. It didn’t go all the way to “amazing” in one go, but route B is where I would say I started liking the game. I feel like yet another comparison to NieR: Replicant is apt here. In the first game, the second playthrough basically unlocked the ability to understand what the Shades were saying and recontextualized a lot of route A’s plot. Similarly, Automata uses a similar device and gives us insight into the machine lifeforms (starting with a small detail such as finally being able to read what the bosses’ names are), unlocking a few extra cutscenes and generally fleshing our enemies out to not be quite as two-dimensional as we might have first thought.

Route B also opens up combat scenarios quite a bit, giving you the option to basically bypass combat in favor of a hacking minigame. I relied on this heavily during my playthrough, because at that point enemies had started feeling quite spongy and taking way too long to kill. I was also doing the majority of the side content at this point, having taken most of route A pretty straightforwardly.

Route C however is when I fell for this game. The opening hour of that route completely gutted me and I ended up kind of not being able to put the game down until the final credits (ending E). During ending B, the game quickly flashes a “Preview”. I brushed it off as something that might be in a potential sequel or something. No, the game just puts you straight into that same preview, and the scope of the game that you thought you had mapped out in your head just changed right in front of you. Route C also plays so fast with the perspective swaps that it never really rests on its laurels, it propels you forward in a way that just GOES. And I’m glad it did.

There were a lot fewer callbacks to the proceedings of the first game than I expected, but the few that were there were done tastefully. Automata plays its card very close to the vest, slowly doling out tiny morsels of connective tissue. The thing that hits the hardest though is Devola and Popola’s backstory, unfortunately laid out in text form, which basically paints the events of the first game as the event horizon to the decimation of the human race. Basically, killing the Shadowlord to get Yonah back was what set in motion the extinction. Hearing their thoughts about how they were ostracized because of the actions of OTHER individual Devola and Popola units just made the world of NieR so much bigger, and something that I definitely want to explore more of, hopefully in a future installment.

Genesis Noir

I was kind of sold on this game in the opening sequence. The longer this game went on though, the more I lost interest in it. After a few hours, I was ready to put it down but figured it's so short that I may as well just stick it out and complete it. I love that this game exists, for the people that are primed to appreciate it. I really enjoyed the way the game looks, using a sort of monochrome old-timey cartoon aesthetic in mostly black and white (until crucially, there's some color). I was on board with the story telling device, where there were multiple threads being explored at once. There's the main plot, a love triangle you're plopped down in. You're watch guy, who loves the singing lady. Sax player also loves singing lady. Sax player shoots singing lady and BOOM. Time frozen, the bullet trail opening up to be a contained version of the big bang and the entire history of the universe.

You work your way through the stars in this field (and the timeline of the universe), where the game divides itself into vignettes with gameplay segments that reflect the theme of the star/point in time. This is the part where the game started to fall apart for me.

It plays with this neat framing device for its story, has a really cool aesthetic and the music is extremely good. But the part where you're actually playing the game are, to me, really boring. There were a few cool sections, like the part where you're jamming with a bass player, but I was ready for the game to be over about an hour before it was.