Finished Ending E last night, and I'm pretty conflicted overall. I'm going to go back and have a go at upgrading all the weapons all the way (about ten left to max out), read all the Weapon Stories and Archives I've found, and try to fight Emil (though I need to grind out 30+ levels and they've patched out that rabbit statue exploit, so we'll see how that goes).
I played the first Nier back in 2015 after Automata was announced. It was one of those games I'd heard about, and thought sounded pretty interesting, but didn't think it was for me. I'm a die hard Platinum fan, though, so I knew I'd be playing Automata, and I wanted to go in with all the backstory I could. Sure enough, Nier really wasn't for me, and I found it a pretty frustrating experience overall. Loved the characters and the writing, really liked the story (though not the storytelling, more on that later), but hated the gameplay and the overall game design. Main path quests that told you to go into a dungeon and farm items that weren't guaranteed to drop, that one awful puzzle dungeon, all the fetchquests, following that girl through the desert; for every interesting one-off thing (loved that text adventure), there were so many more moments that I just hated.
Anyway, Nier's creative talents teamed up with Platinum's best-in-class game designers sounded like a match made in heaven, and sure enough I absolutely loved playing Automata. Even though the overall game design isn't all that different, it's amazing how far a great combat system will take you. Hell, I have fun just running around the city; Platinum just gets how to do player controls, y'know?
But now that I've seen the whole story play out, I think I just really dislike the way Yoko tells stories. For a guy who talks about never wanting to make the same game twice in his interviews, he's made a pretty damn similar game like four times in a row now. Automata even asks you if you want to delete your save when you're done, which makes no narrative sense here and is seemingly just an option because that's what the original Nier did.
I just don't get what the multiple playthroughs angle adds to the experience, other than confusion. Route A tells a pretty forgettable story, but you stick with it because you know something's up. Route B adds almost no new exposition or context, but you stick with it because, hey, the game's still fun, right? Then everything is dumped in the Route C, no matter whether it fits or not. Shit comes out of nowhere and then is wrapped up just as quickly. Pascal's whole village going nuts, all the way to you choosing whether to lobotomise him, is over and done with in like twenty minutes; no leadup to it, and it's never mentioned again. Anemone points you at some data terminals and you read a short story that fills out her backstory; a well-written short story, to be sure, but is a literal text-dump really the best way of doing this stuff?
And don't get me wrong, I really like the continuation of the story from the first Nier. When you plot it out step by step, it's a really interesting tale, but the game tells it in this bass-ackwards order and dumps so much exposition on you right at the very end (bonus points for when it dumps exposition at you while you're fighting a boss so you miss most of it and have to look it up on Youtube later) that it loses much of its impact.
Put it this way: when I learnt that the architect of my your woes has been these Life Concept things that formed within the machine AI network, I thought that was super cool, and my first thought was that I wished I'd known it earlier so it could actually sink in. Like, imagine if they told you that during your second playthrough, when you were just going through the motions, more or less just slashing away on autopilot waiting for anything new to pop up. Instead it's dumped on you right at the very end of your 40-hour playthrough. I'm sure there were events that happened throughout the game that would be recontextualised had I known certain things ahead of time, but they were ten, twenty, thirty hours ago and I've half-forgotten them already. And even though the game has repeat playthroughs built into its very design, it just wastes them.
It's similar to my feelings about Metal Gear Solid V's story, in some ways. That game has a part where your whole base gets infected by a mysterious, untreatable virus, and you have to go in and kill your own men while they beg for death. But this event happens in Chapter 2, after you've dealt with the main villain of the game. Skullface is a complete non-entity in Chapter 1, a wet fart of a villain who is very briefly characterised ten minutes before being weakly offed in a cutscene. The Mother Base infection incident would have been a perfect way to actually set Skullface up as a compelling villain if only it had happened earlier in the game, but dumping it in the second half of the game, alongside an assortment of other equally disjointed plot threads, just wastes the potential completely.
Anyway, that's way more than I planned to write. I liked the game overall, and I'm probably going to buy that DLC, and maybe I'll even do a second full playthrough at some point, but Yoko's storytelling is something that rubbed me up the wrong way in the first Nier and I really didn't warm up to it any more here.