I need to go back and finish out the side quests, because I'm only around 60% completion which I think is skewing my vision of the cast. I did play OG Nier and get all the endings back when, and part of getting all the endings there required doing a ton of side quests which brought up a lot more banter and cast interaction/fleshing out side characters that I think I might have missed out on so far in Automata. As it stands right now, there are a few standout side characters and the main cast is solid, but I'd say slightly less colorful than Nier and the overall world feels smaller and less populated. Which makes sense, but so far I'd give the OG Nier cast the edge for being memorable. That may change as I do more quests, since I think the way I played through it shortchanged at least one leading character in particular.
Story-wise I'm happy; after the first ending I was kind of underwhelmed with the overall plot, and thought maybe the game had 'lost' something/compromised in trying to be a better/more widely appealing game, but playing past the first ending is incredibly crucial here. I don't want to get into much more at risk of spoilers, but this was my reaction to starting the game again for the play through that eventually led to the true ending.
Ultimately it's a lot less janky than the original, but I don't think three-s any way to finish the end credits for the last time and not see it as a full-blooded Nier sequel with all the weirdness that entails. Not really a spoiler but kind of a game structure thing: I will say I was getting kind of worried after beating the game the first time, because
playthrough 2 feels extremely expected in a lot of ways if you've played the first game. It does more or less what you'd expect route B on a Nier game to do.
