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Or at least not during your first play-through.

Because – in what can only be described as an utterly miscalculated decision – the writers decided that in order to fully explore these weighty themes and issues they needed to make us play the game more than once.

After finishing it the first time, with no real resolutions provided, we’re told we need to start this 25-hour plus game all over again to get the full Nier: Automata experience.

Now, to be clear, I wanted to know how the writers would answer the questions they’d posed. I was fascinated as I watched the game’s machines experience a strange need to create families, be part of communities, and try to understand religion. Some of the best scenes involve the androids (who don’t consider themselves machines, but something else altogether) meditating on who and what they are. For example, they can save and upload backups of themselves to be installed in new bodies in the Bunker should they die, but are these copies really them? Even ignoring that they’ll lack the experiences between the time the backup was made and when they die, isn’t a copy just a copy? (In service of this notion the game actually prohibits autosaves in favour of manual saves; it wants us to feel the risk of losing 2B’s experience. It’s annoying, but it gets the point across.)

However, being forced to play through the game a second time (and maybe a third or fourth, as there are apparently several different endings) to discover what the writers had to say – this time from the perspective of a different character, 2B’s companion 9S – seems a steep ask. The game just isn’t nearly fun enough to make me willing to make that investment. In fact, sometimes it’s a downright drag.