Developer: PlatinumGames
Available on: Playstation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
Recently I reached a significant milestone in my life. I moved out of my parents house once and for all and into an apartment of my own. I’m now a fully fledged accomplished adult with an education, a job and a place of my own.
It sucks.
My job takes up most of my time and energy, and when I’m not at work, I’m mostly doing chores and errands. Life as a responsible adult is hard and quite dull and I occasionally wonder why it’s even worth bothering.
Now makes for an interesting time to play NieR:Automata. What I thought at first was the standard sloppy writing we often get from Square Enix turned out to actually be a wonderful exploration of the struggle to find purpose and meaning in life.
In NieR:Automata, you play as a humanoid android nicknamed 2B and you’re part of an effort to reclaim the Earth, which has been taken over by alien-controlled machines. 2B and her companion 9S are sent to the Earth to fight the machines. The machines they encounter look like the Android logo except they’re made of rusty scrap metal. As the characters in the game repeatedly reminds you, they’re lifeless, mindless beings programmed to attack and kill. That’s all they do and that’s all they will ever do.
Except that’s clearly not true. Much to the surprise of our heroes, some of these machines begin to talk. Some not always attack. Some begin to mimic humans with a childlike innocence that makes you smile. They seem to be showing that they’re capable of thought and emotion. 2B and 9S both acknowledge these things and occasionally discuss them. They begin to ask themselves questions. Why are the machines behaving like this? Do we not always have to destroy them? Why are we even fighting?
They eventually discover a number of other lies, all designed to keep them fighting. Every lie they uncover paints a more bleak picture of the state of the world. Their struggle becomes more and more meaningless.
The writing, art and music all compliment this theme beautifully. The art style is predominately black and an off-color white. The world is dull and desolate yet strangely beautiful. The soundtrack hits hard, with music that’s peaceful and calming, yet also a little sad.
The tone and atmosphere of the game are very dark. There’s suffering at every turn. Androids and machines alike are constantly losing their friends. NPCs routinely express suicidal thoughts. What few efforts there are to end the fighting and create peace are almost completely overshadowed by a visceral hatred and distrust expressed by nearly everyone. However, this ultimately serves the themes behind the game. If there’s light even at the end of this horrible tunnel, then there is at the end of every tunnel.
The game itself is an open world game with real time combat. As I noted in my reviews for Final Fantasy XV and Final Fantasy VII Remake, games from Square Enix tend to not be so good at real time combat. However, I was delighted to see NieR:Automata does it right. Fights are dynamic and fast-paced. The controls are simple and reliable. The animations are satisfying and have a solid amount of variety. Hacking and slashing through enemies is quite fun.
There are also a variety of ways in which combat takes place. Sometimes you’re in a ship fighting enemies in a Galaga-like fashion, then as you approach your destination your ship will turn into a more humanoid robot and you begin shooting at enemies in all directions. The game is constantly introducing new angles and variations of it that keep it interesting.
There’s also hacking. While slicing and dicing enemies, at times you also have the option to hack into them, which takes you to an arcade-like shooter in which you must destroy all of the enemies’ anti-virus defenses in time. Sometimes enemies will try to hack into you, in which case you have to fend off their attacks in this virtual space. The transitions into and out of these hacking mini games are very smooth and satisfying.
What makes NieR:Automata especially interesting though is its dance with the fourth wall. Standard video game elements such as the HUD are a part of the android’s system itself. Booting up the game is the same as booting up 2B and the loading screen shows the status messages of her startup sequences. Your companion takes you on a a tutorial where he helps you adjust 2B’s settings, such as calibrating her vision (adjusting the screen’s brightness) and her hearing (adjusting the audio balance). Standard HUD elements, such as subtitles, the ability to see your health bar and the ability to see waypoints, are part of 2B’s upgrades (and if you really wanted to you could swap them out to make room for other stuff like greater attack power).
As the game tells its story, it constantly presents new and creative ways in which it bends the fourth wall, but not quite break it.
In spite of all it does well though, NieR:Automata has an almost fatal flaw that can make it difficult to enjoy, and it has to do with the way that game progression works. There are multiple endings to Nier:Automata, but not in the way that it normally means. Within a given save file, once you “beat” the game and reach one of the endings, you start up a new “play through”, which is actually just a continuation of the game. It’s a very odd system, and there’s practically no benefit to it. Additionally, the second “play through” of the game is actually the same as the first, just from 9S’ perspective (something that almost made me stop playing altogether). Additionally, in order to get the true ending, you have to do the fourth “play through” twice.
Also worth nothing is the game’s lack of an autosave, something that I think is practically mandatory these days (although to its credit, it explicitly warns you right away that there’s no autosave when you start a new game).
If you can press through these issues though, a wonderful story awaits.
Summary
The writing, art and music of Nier:Automata are excellent. Its story centering around the struggle to find meaning in a meaningless world is well told, and the gameplay is quite fun as well. Unfortunately, to beat the game you’ll have to effectively play it twice. However, if you can deal with this, a wonderful experience awaits.