As a video game, there are many complaints I can and will level at NieR:Automata.
The gameplay is also sorely lacking, not outright bad, just lacking. Unlike previous Platinum titles like Bayonetta or The Wonderful 101, the combo system is stripped down to basics and there is little variety between different types of attacks. The ranged-attack pod supports and chip powerup system are nice additions but are let down by the real biggest problem with the gameplay: the enemies. The enemy variety is sorely lacking. You will regularly see the same enemy types, even 10 minutes before the end of the game. They dress them up, change visual models, and give them different equipment once in a while, but the enemies themselves rarely change. Even bosses are reused, one boss in particular is used 4 times with only minor changes in attack patterns.
The questing system is another bad misstep. Automata's sidequests is somewhere between Skyrim's follow-arrow, kill-enemies, and do-thing and Rockstar's go-to-general-area, kill-enemies, and do-thing. Oh, and unlike the aforementioned games, Automata's map would be unforgivably bad if it weren't for the game openly acknowledging (several times) how bad it is. Most involve pointless side-characters and few advance the story or world.
The story is simply a strung-together bunch of non-sequitur plot points and bland villains whose motivations range from nonsensical to comically overwrought and even non-existent. Androids, made by humans but hiding on the Moon, fight robots which were made by aliens who invaded Earth. Automata's android and robots alike are merely stock characters who belong in a B-tier anime story about high school drama as opposed to a story about finding meaning in existence. I was equally surprised and dismayed at the story's end. I slept just fine that night thinking I had seen everything the game had to offer.
NieR: Automata's single largest strength is undoubtedly it's music. Like it's constantly-changing world, Keiichi Okabe's arrangement is ever-present, it's own character in the world. Every location has an excellent accompanying track and the vocals of Emi Evans, J'Nique Nicole, and Nami Nakagawa range from resolute to haunting, alien to theatrical. and bleak to triumphant.
After reading up a bit I realized I missed something, a post-credits comment from the developers urging the player to continue. How dismayed would I be to learn that I would be playing the game again, which at this point I could only call middling. However, right from the start something was different. Maybe it was the stark change in perspective. Perhaps it was the new gameplay wrinkle that completely changed the way the game played. I supposed what eventually won me over was the storytelling. Up to this point, everything seemed a nonsensical mess of half-baked ideas.
I was blindsided again and again by new revelations about characters, places, stories, and themes. The once-boring quests took shape in a way that started clever and subversive but eventually worked their way up to nothing less than profound and world-defining. What seemed like a time-waste suddenly came into a clarity that never left the game. Getting to know these characters over the first half of the game began to pay off in major ways. Instead of functioning like a long blockbuster movie, NieR: Automata instead works like a television show: getting you involved with the characters using longform storytelling and setting up every theme this game had to offer.
The early hours of the game deliberately hide many of the themes right before the player's eyes. Early quests hint at the real story being told but it isn't until later quests where the themes really begin to take form. Those quests about robots asking questions turn into them finding meaning in accomplishments, only to meet their demise willingly upon being bested. The philosophers give up, leave, die, or just fail to make any meaningful change or generate any truly transcendent ideas. The nihilism doesn't need to be called by name, the game exudes it from every corner. Androids and robots each search for meaning in every possible way.
When the first major revelation about the story happened, I was already hooked. Than came another, and another, and another, and another. To say that it subverted 15-20 hours of expectations would be an understatement. By the time it gets into the real story, the one it had been expertly building towards in my spite of my beliefs otherwise, I genuinely had no idea where it would go. Any semblance of conventional structure was shattered, leaving me guessing in sheer awe where it would go next.
My previous play sessions were a casual, laid-back experience, I thereafter spent my nights on the edge of my seat, hanging on every single excellently-delivered line of dialog from the English voice cast. My work-days spent barely able to focus, only able to think about what I had seen the night prior. This pattern occurred until I reached the end. Then I reached the end. Then the end reached me.
The themes suddenly and all at once became as clear as a cloudless summer day. All the hardship, all the suffering, all the characters, themes, story, music, and nihilism, it was all building to something. Something that was at once, and still is, some of the most powerfully constructed sequences that has ever, and maybe will ever, exist in a video game. The final scene plays and the game had one last thing to say. Something that defines the entire game more than any voice-acted line, or expertly composed music track ever could. A simple choice which at once reaffirmed everything the game had been building towards and cemented itself as something that exists above and beyond anything a video game was capable of doing. In a single moment, NieR: Automata ceased being a video game and became a work of genuine art unlike anything I had ever experienced before.
I am not an overly emotional person. I'm really not all that emotional at all. I have a difficult time expressing emotions of any kind. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of movies, tv shows, and any other piece of art has made me cry. Prior to NieR: Automata, I could count on one finger the number of video games which made me tear-up. None had extracted a single tear out of me.
First, NieR: Automata made me cry, then it made me openly weep, and both in the span of about 15 minutes and both for completely different reasons. By the time I finished NieR: Automata, there were no words remaining. I had lost the ability to form them. For the next 3 days I was in a literal haze. Able to think of little else other than what I had just experienced. Over those days the foggy reality of the situation formed into concrete thoughts I had just experienced something akin to trauma. Not a negative trauma, but something else. I'm not sure if I had ever felt emotions that powerful before, and didn't (and still don't) have the words to express those emotions. I couldn't even conceptualize the emotions only the day prior, yet I experienced them all the same.
I understand that NieR: Automata will not touch everyone the way that it touched me. Plenty of people will likely play the same game and think it fine, good, or very good but not be shaken to the core. That is okay with me. I will continue to listen the soundtrack, continue to think about my time with the game, and continue to occasionally weep for the memory, but never the way this game made me do on a warm winter morning in December 2020. But most importantly, I will continue to remember the way the game made me feel for days, weeks, and months later, which is nothing less than beautiful and triumphant.
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