You’ll be Nier to Automata-ically Buying Nier Automata

Nier Automata always managed to surprise me the more and more I played the game. A game that’s built on its side quests and the characters that they involve, it works with interesting concepts of life and consciousness that’ll leave you feeling confused about your own existence, and then you’ll pull off some sweet looking combat combo and all will be good again in the world.

If you have no major experience with the Nier franchise prior to this game, or even the Drakengard series of which Nier is a spin-off from, I’m not sure how as there’s a distinct lack of dragons in Nier, you might be worried that you might be missing some concepts from previous games, but fret not, as far as I can tell, outside a few references here and there, Nier Automata can be played blind and still be an incredibly enjoyable experience.

If you were like me, you may have first witnessed the game when Yoko Taro, the game’s director, stepped out onto the stage of the Square-Enix E3 nightmare of 2016 wearing some bizarre mask that seemed completely alien and just added to the already baffling press conference. Regardless of this, the Platinum Games collaboration had me, and many others, intrigued and as it turns out the game is very impressive and fun.

The story takes place several thousand years in the future in which a mysterious alien race almost wiped out all of mankind with its army of machines. The few remnants of the human race escaped to the moon and then created humanoid androids to fight on the front lines to take back Earth and clear out the machines. Glory to mankind, and all that.

Following 2B, a female android designed for battle in which the B literally stands for “Battle”, you’ll find yourself interacting with fellow androids of the resistance as well as machines themselves as you explore the land and try to rid the world of the vile machines. Except, not all machines are vile or, at least, evil. There are numerous machines out in the world who are more than friendly and want nothing more than to live a happy life, or as close to one as they can get. It’s these interactions that provide a large bulk of what makes the game so wonderful.

The side quests provided by various machines and androids can range from helping a lost child back to their parent, that’s a machine child and a machine parent, teaching a machine about various aspects of life and the human condition or even a machine that learns the tenements of martial arts, with a big axe. On the flipside, your fellow androids have quests that reflect the length of this war with the machines, as they’re all exhausted and tired, often looking for resources to repair themselves or their friends or even just hoping to learn what happened to their lost comrades.

If you wanted a game that’s main theme was that of heavy existentialism then this is the place to look. While 2B talks about the cycle of life and death, in reality it’s something that affects very few in this world of robots as there’s always another body that their consciousness can be put in to, or another version to take their place and a lot of people start questioning their identity when that starts happening. It’s this crossing of the darkness that is life itself with the lunacy of an amusement park and the unhinged nature to be found with beings that have no true concept of death that makes the game such a delight.

The game itself plays as any sort of action orientated adventure game, with plenty of stylish moves and combos to use when destroying waves and waves of machines. Nier Automata takes a spectacle fighter and mixes it up with constant changes in perspective, turning the game into a side scrolling brawler or even a top down shooter. Incorporating bullet hell mechanics into a third person combat game may sound like pure, unrivaled madness and yet it somehow works and leads to a lot of the bosses working in an oddly unique manner. This all adds up to unique take on an already stable system and it pays off surprisingly well, while the combat is nothing to blow your horn over, it’s by no means a terrible process.

The combos and combat of the game are beautiful pieces of choreography for each weapon and character that had me often just stood in the middle of nowhere admiring 2Bs sweet moves, AND NOTHING ELSE, don’t look at my search history.

Nier Automata manages to break the shackles of its predecessor, which was generally not very good, and struts hard and fast with a stylistic piece of existential panic and confusion. The story progresses into ever darker tones and you’ll see characters you grow to love over the game change in front of you and leave you feeling a little hollow. The story, or at least the pacing, takes a massive dip in the middle of it all as you’ll find yourself repeating certain parts, but there’s at least enough new aspects introduced that the game in its whole doesn’t completely grind to a dull stop.

It’ll keep you surprised as to how far the game is willing to go to tell a story and keep you second guessing yourself, one moment that truly blew me away was when I realized there was a dialogue conversation going on during a loading screen so as to “avoid detection”, or something. Every character and group of characters struggle with humanity as they develop more and more personality whether its simple machines, to the androids of your party and even going so far as the simple companion robots and watching this all take place is where the game really shines.

Some of the few faults I have with the game stem from the difficulty, or the lack of it. If you find yourself taking part in a fair number of side quests, which you should, you’ll find that the cataclysmic events that take place in the story die all too rapidly. When a large boss is shortly disintegrated by your small pod’s gunfire, when you’re really meant to be punching this robot in its dumb giant face, the boss fights no longer seem impactful, but then maybe you’re not meant to spend hours of time just doing almost everything.

Overall, Nier Automata is a wonderful game. It has one of the best sound designs that I’ve seen in some time with three different versions of each track that all cut into one another at just the right moment to really add to those heavy hitting quests. The side quests seem to be where a large portion of the game’s enjoyment comes from, just witnessing the strange characters in this world. That’s not to say that the main story isn’t interesting, but watching a machine commit suicide because it realized about the futility of life is something that’ll haunt me for some time. It’s a great game.