This game contains spoiler from the video game Nier: Automata.
One of the games I've been enjoying the most over the last few weeks have been Nier: Automata. This is a game I've known about for a long time but never got around to playing. Pretty much like all the other games I play.
I knew very little about the game going into it. I had of course heard of, and seen, 2B before. It's kinda impossible to not have heard about her when you hang around in gaming communities. Apart from that I only knew that the game was about androids, machines and saving humanity. And that I would have to play through it several times to get the full scope of the story.
First Impressions
This game caught me unawares from the get go. I was expecting an action RPG. What greeted me instead was an arcade style kinda gameplay. The game actually starts you out in flight suits in what feels like a bullet hell. It was clean and cool though so I didn't mind. I also knew that it would turn into and action RPG eventually.
When we do land however and get to take control of 2B in an action RPG style we're thrown right into a boss fight with a giant excavator. You'll have to learn the ins and outs of combat pretty quick to get through this. That's mostly about choosing between fast and heavy attacks while also dodging attacks. When dodging you get this kind of invulnerability for a second as long as you dodge at the right time. You also have a POD that can attack enemies with ranged attacks. It's cool but also kinda annoying that you have to hold in R1 pretty much all the time to use it.
The combat is really clean though. The game also runs fantastically on my PC. I get a stable 60 FPS without as much as a single framedrop and it looks pretty decent. It does suffer from a wee bit of pleb console graphics but it still manages to look good.
A mix of genres?
I found it really cool that the game has a mix of genres. It is deep down an action RPG but the different perspectives the game gives you at times makes the game feel completely different.
Like, suddenly you find yourself inside a bullet hell as mentioned earlier. This can be either from the standard 3rd person perspective or from an overhead top down view that the game sometimes uses. Next you might find yourself in a side-scroller metroidvania style. There's whole portions of the game that's played liket his.
I think this is a really neat thing about the game and one that I really did not expect.
Storytelling
Another thing I didn't know about this game is how it tells its story. This is a game you have to play through three times to get the whole story and ultimately finish it. The first playthrough, the one I'll be covering in this post, sees you playing as 2B. This playthrough seems to focus on setting up the story.
Throughout the story we learn that we are Androids from the Yorha-corporation. Yorha and the Androids were created by humans in the fight against the machines that have now taken over earth following an alien invasion. It all starts out as a bit of a "I don't know what I'm doing here. All I know is that I must kill", kinda situation.
KnowYourMeme
I do get the feeling quite early on that there's something off about this whoel Yorha business. Especially as we meet several Yorho-androids through the gameplay that we're ordered with killing.
We also learn that not all machines are as bad as we thought. Not to far into the game we make contact with a machine named Pascal who takes us to his village full of pacifist machines that have disconnected from the "network" and are now living individual lives. It's all really weird.
This whole playthrough does a good job of setting the scene. When you eventually finish up this playthrough you're mostly left there with more questions that answers. Especially when the last scene in the playthrough is of 2B sitting atop her companion 9S and choking him to death while saying "It always ends like this.". That made me feel like this was some weird kinda time loop thing.
And that's where the next playthrough comes in. We will now be getting the full story again only by playing as 9S and seeing things from his perspective. It's quite a creative way to tell the story in my opinion.
Verdict
Nier is a fantastic game. I've been hooked to it for the entire time I've been playing it. When I played through this first playthrough I didn't do a single side quest because the main story completely absorbed me. I was kinda disappointed to see that the main story ended after just about 5-6 hours of gameplay but that quickly turned around when I learned about the subsequent playthroughs.
I can only say that the game only gets better from here on out. I've completed the game already but have been kinda slow in getting these posts out. I'll be doing a few more posts about this game to flesh out all of my thoughts about it.
If you haven't played Nier: Automata yet you gotta go and get that done! It's often on sale and for quite cheap as well. You should be able to get it below $15 if you time it right. It's worth it and then some!
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.