Intensely likable Nier: Automata is a painful action RPG

I finally played Nier: Automata (the PS4’s Game of the YoRHa edition on PS5), which has been on my gaming backlog for several years. My response to it has been somewhat mixed-to-negative. Let’s start with the positives, ok?

The Upsides

The music is fantastic. Seriously, it’s the best part of the game. I don’t usually go for the ambient sort of thing, but there’s an element here that’s very similar to Ghost in the Shell’s soundtrack in some ways, specifically GITS’s Making of Cyborg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnhr2XlwPi8

The music isn’t quite on the level of Xenoblade or anything else by Yasunori Mitsuda, but I could see myself doing work with the soundtrack in the background. That’s a high compliment.

The graphical style is also pretty cool. It has this muted white-out element, where color is sometimes completely sucked out of the game at certain points. This culminates in the Copied City, which is entirely white and shadows. I love that gaming has moved on from “real” brown tones and has become more confident about expressing unique artistic style.

The character designs are perfectly OK. There’s a definite fandom around 2B which I’m not necessarily into, but the whole “black leather android mercenary” thing is definitely iconic. It’s kinda got that Grant-Morrison-New X-Men element to it where things just get stripped to stylized basics. It’s hard to explain the appeal… the design is definitely Japanese, but not remotely anime-like.

The core story? It’s also pretty good. For most of the story, you’re on an android mission to make the Earth safe for human return (they’re on the Moon). Unfortunately, the androids need to contend with attack robots, who were dispatched by alien conquerors. Let’s just go with that as a starting point; it gets infinitely different later.

So I’m cool with the music, the graphical style, the story, and the characters then. A+, right? Not so fast.

The Downsides

This is an action RPG, which is not my favorite sub-genre of JRPG to any extent. I find that these types of games offer neither enough action or RPG to satisfy anyone. With that said, though, the game basically can play itself if you want it to. I am more of a control freak, though, and turned off most ‘auto’ chips.

I don’t know that this type of game can be anything other than an action RPG, though. I feel like open world action games just naturally gravitate to the type of play that balances action with leveling and item management. I don’t know that the modern gamer has much patience for stopping gameplay for turn-based battles, and I think this game would be damaged by offering that play style.

I’d like to see an innovative attempt at something different within the open world framework, though. Thankfully, the slash-slash-slash mode of gameplay is periodically broken up by shoot-em-up missions and a very brief Kaiju-like battle.

The format of the story and endings are, at first, very cool and, at last, unending. There are a metric ton of endings throughout the game; some are just a wall of text, while others are more substantial. To see the best ending, you have to go through a minimum of four false endings. But you actually need to see five endings for the story to be even remotely satisfying.

This isn’t Xenoblade or Final Fantasy burnout either… it’s like the type of burnout you got after watching Haruhi Suzumiya’s Endless Eight episodes.

There’s also the weird time-jump issue where the first two paths exist effectively at the same time, with two more endings that move forward past those two false conclusions. By the end of it, you’ll likely hit some serious JRPG burnout and want to move on to something lighter and airier.

You will also find yourself fighting the camera as much as you will your opponents. Even then you change the settings to minimize the way the camera pans to various enemies, you’ll find that it seems to do it anyway.

There’s one particular part of the game where time is of the essence and your health is constantly wearing down, requiring you to run rather than fight. So what does your camera do? It refuses to stay in the direction you’re running in. It’s positively wretched.

I also own Nier: Replicant and was hoping to move onto that next, but I seriously don’t know if I have the energy for it at this point. The burnout is very real. I will probably push back my plans to start Replicant; I can just watch the Nier: Automata anime beforehand as a refresher.

I really wanted to like this game a lot more than I did. Maybe I’ll end up rose-tinting this game in my memory, thanks to some of the other upsides.

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