Isaac Otherworld
Member
Overclock is a really fun ability. Really makes you feel like this superfast badass!
It's my favorite chip in the game. It's so cool.
I just finished Path A. It took me about 18 hours and I was looking to do as much of the side content as possible. And boy do I have a lot of feelings. Like the original NieR, this game showed me things I don't think I'll ever forget. For better and for worse. These are my mostly spoiler free impressions of the game.
I intend to platinum this game. I love this game. It's the best game Taro Yoka has done yet by a huge margin and could possibly be my Game of the Year. That said, like the original NieR it's a flawed game but it's ultimately more than the sum of it's parts. But god damn do those parts add up.
First things first, I cannot praise the combat system and movement in this game enough. This is one of those games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne and GW2 where the core feeling of combat and movement are so good that you can do just about anything and it's immensely engaging. Just the experience of moving throughout this huge world engaging enemies in packs as you go is immensely fun. The flow and rhythm of the combat might not be Bayonetta 2 levels, but when you add in traversing the world and the RPG elements I can't understate how much fun this aspect of the game is.
The soundtrack is once again excellent, and heartbreakingly beautiful and ethereal just like Nier 1's OST. Once I'm not worried about spoilers for the additional paths to the game that I have yet to complete, I am downloading that and putting it on my music player ASAP.
If there's any problem with the game, I feel it lies in focus and scale.
The intro stage of this game is the best one I feel. It's tightly made and features a lot of well thought out enemy encounters. Nothing else comes close to it in my opinion. I think one of the things this game needed was two or three more dungeon style areas that provide that carefully designed experience with level design and encounter design.
The game is also hurting for more enemy variety and more engaging boss battles. One or two extra weapon types wouldn't hurt, either.
The chip system is pretty cool and a great system for customizing your character. That said, I wish it was less focused on things like raw damage and increased health and more focused around making you chose between all the cooler chips that change the way combat works like Overclock and Evasion.
While the flow of exploration and combat are absolutely incredible, I think the game should of just had you automata-ically ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) pick up items on the ground as you run over them. There's something really unsatisfying about going though the world and darting about, engaging in a combat encounter, and then grinding the flow of the game to a halt as you stop dead in your tracks to pick up the loot from the enemies you've just killed.
I could also criticize the length of the game. But I think my feelings of feeling sad over beating it are more the result of the fact that I feel like I could run around endlessly doing anything in this game and still have fun. I feel like the game could have an endless flat plane with packets of enemies sprinkled about and some landmarks to platform on and no other content and I feel like I could just play that for 100 hours straight that's how good the core gameplay feels.
While 2B is immensely likable, the rest of the games party just isn't as engaging the way NieR 1's party was.
The banter between characters in that game and the group dynamic is just more interesting than Automata's main cast as a whole. 9S is just a yes man who get steamrolled by 2B's sheer force of personality as a no nonsense soldier. The POD unit is just an AI that despite suggesting murder as the optimal solution to problems a worrying amount of times, doesn't have much interesting to say.
While the story is weird and strange in all the wonderful ways Taro Yoko games are, I think it's missing that core through-line that NieR 1 had. Despite NieR's strange story turns, everything was tied together by Nier's goal of saving his daughter. Automata by comparison doesn't have an element like that to tie everything together. It feels more open ended. You have the set up, and the story can go anywhere and do anything because there's very little tying the various arcs in the main quest together. Again, I've only reached the end of the first route so my opinion on the story could change as I work towards 100% completion. Then again, you could say this fits the setting as the set up of this game is you fighting in an endless war against machines that has raged for thousands of years with no end in sight and that the directionless feeling of the story fits the setting.
All around amazing game despite my criticisms. I can't stop thinking about it.
