Now that I have finally played through the game the prerequisite 7 times, here are my impressions.
Note: I've never played any other games in the series and know very little about them, I don't ascribe to Yoko Taro's personality cult and don't care how well he may or may not have trolled me. I just want to share how I feel about Nier: Automata as a game and whether I had fun with it.
The good:
1. The setting - by far my favorite part of the game. I thought it was a very interesting take on post-apocalypse. Instead of the brutal savage post-nuclear desert that I've seen quite many times in different games, the post-apocalyptic world of Nier is a quiet, serene place inhabited by robots that dig through the ruins of human civilization and try to understand the various aspects of humanity and imitate them, often unsuccessfully. I had a lot of fun just running around, exploring the world and learning more about it and the various characters that inhabit it. Because of my interest in the setting I even enjoyed doing the shitty sidequests as quite often they revealed more interesting and weird stuff, like the fucked up Romeo and Juliet play or the animal-loving robot, that ranged from cute and funny to creepy and depressing. There's a lot of dark and depressing shit that goes on in the game world, but not the usual post-apocalyptic kind of dark that involves a character being beaten to death by a bunch of painted savages as they rape his family and pet dog before his eyes, but rather the kind of dark that focuses on loneliness, emptiness and constant failures of different characters that don't fully understand why they are failing and even what they are doing.
2. The combat. While the combat in Nier is definitely not as good as in Devil May Cry games, Bayonetta or Metal Gear Rising, I can't think of a single 3rd person action game with melee combat of comparable quality, and I think Nier is still head and shoulders above average in this regard. The combat is very fast-paced, there are quite a lot of different attacks and combos you can do. Launching, air combos, smashing enemies into the ground, dodging, counterattacking all feels fluid and fun. The controls are very responsive and you can cancel every animation (except the fucking ranged counterattack which I kept doing by accident) and quickly jump out of the way of incoming danger. I played on Hard difficulty and the game was reasonably challenging. Quite many enemies could oneshot me so I had to keep jumping, dodging and constantly moving around while finding a good opportunity to counterattack in order not to get killed. While the game is not as difficult as something like Dark Souls, there still were a lot of times when my butt cheeks were clenched firmly as I was going through the last 10% of a boss's HP bar while trying not to get hit by an instakill stray projectile or some melee attack with a difficult to see animation. There's a reasonable enemy variety (although it's kind of diminished by the fact that a lot of enemies look the same and shoot the same slow energy orbs or red lasers) and the bosses were epic and fun to fight. Also there were no quick time events, which is always a big plus in my book.
3. The customization. I liked the plug-in chip system. It let me improve almost any stats of my character and even add new combat mechanics if I wanted. It's possible to do different builds, like crit, ranged damage and skills, counterattack-focused and etc. There's also a lot of different weapons and pod skills you can find. While there aren't many differences between weapons of a single type, you can use different weapon types in pretty much any combination, which lets you use different combos. The pod skills are fun to use and can further customize your play style, although some, like the shockwave, are very broken.
4. The music. It's great and adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game, and most importantly - there's a lot of it. Every area, almost every boss or story-related event has its own theme. Even side quests and optional areas have their own appropriate themes sometimes.
5. The weirdness. Nier Automata is definitely one of the strangest games I've played. There's a lot of things, from the plot and setting to how the story is presented to the player, that made me go "what the fuck". Have you ever played a game where configuring the brightness and audio in the options is integrated into the flow of the story, or where it is possible to "unequip" elements of the UI to make room for more stat bonuses? I sure haven't.
The meh:
1. The visuals. The graphics look dated and I really disliked the color palette they went with. The interface is brown, the robots you're fighting are brown, the areas are mostly grey and brown, then you enter a bright yellow desert and your bright yellow projectiles start blending with the sand and then you fight a boss who also shoots bright yellow projectiles and that's pretty much what you'll be seeing for most of the game - grey, brown and yellow. Sometimes everything switches to black and white for some reason. Still it's not all bad - the animations look great, the spell effects, despite all of them being yellow, also look good and varied and the design on some of the enemies looks cool. Overall, I wouldn't say it's an unpleasant game to look at.
2. The main plot. It's by no means bad and I was always interested in seeing what happens next. However, it's paced very unevenly. During the first playthrough the plot barely moves forward and all of the main quests are just "go investigate this place", "go kill those guys". I liked the main quest missions and each of them had their own small story to tell, but overall I felt like I was just aimlessly wandering the wasteland and murdering robots that may or may not have deserved it. There's one major development in the middle and then you fight the two antagonists that basically came from nothing and then returned to nothing. Then in the second playthrough you do all the same shit again and get a new twist at the end but the 3rd playthrough felt to me like a game of "how many plot twists can we cram into these last 5 hours of gameplay?". Everything was rushing through at a breakneck pace and became difficult to follow. Also there were some elements that I found very confusing. The start of the 3rd playthrough was great, both story and gameplay-wise, but when you start climbing those towers the game takes a nosedive into "what the fuck is even happening anymore" territory. Those tower sections felt like trippy dream sequences, except they were actual physical objects in the game world and they just posed more questions than they answered. But the final tower and the way everything is resolved was pretty great, in my opinion.
3. Not a fan of the "play the game 7 times to see the entire story" thing the developers went with. I feel it's completely unnecessary. Multiple playthroughs are good in games with actual choices and consequences and non-linearity. Nier, however, is completely linear, save for the choice at the very end, which the game expects you to re-do anyway if you want to get the "true ending". The second playthrough as 9S seemed like pointless padding of what is already a pretty lengthy game. Yes, I kinda see what they were going for - 1st playthrough is basically a full-on action slasher with cool setpieces and good combat, while the second one has worse combat and minigame cancer but the game shows you more backstory of different events and characters and you get to see just how sad and broken some of them are. Still, they could have just shown them to the player through flashbacks or something, without making them replay the same content in no fun allowed mode. Also, I wonder how many people just quit the game after beating it the 1st time thinking it's done - probably quite a lot.
4. The open world. While there's a lot of hidden weapons, events and even some secret locations you can find, for the most part the open world aspect of the game doesn't add anything meaningful. It also feels very tiny - you're just running around the same several zones filled with mobs and there are no activities besides kill, collect shit and fish.
The bleh:
1. The difficulty is very poorly balanced. Normal means "impossible to lose if you have opposable thumbs" while on hard many things can kill you in one hit. I think there's supposed to be some sort of middle ground between these two modes. However, even playing on hard the game is only challenging if you gimp yourself further and that's because:
2. The consumable system is completely fucked. Being able to carry hundreds of healing items on yourself and just pause the game at any time and use how many you want completely breaks the flow of the combat and makes you immortal in many situations. As a result, the level of challenge a particular enemy poses depends entirely on its ability to kill you in one hit. Can the enemy kill you in a single hit? If yes, then the fight is actually challenging and requires you to dodge, pick the right opportunities to attack and use your reflexes. If no, then you cannot lose because every time you get hit you can instantly potion yourself back to full health. To get the most out of Nier's combat I had to not only play on hard but also limit the amount of healing items I carried and I hate when a game forces me to do shit like this in order to enjoy it. Sure, you can play on very hard but dying from every hit is just as retarded. I think the gameplay would have been much better if the damage the enemies do to you was decreased, but there would be no ways to restore health instantly.
3. The sidequests, As I said, I still enjoyed doing them because of my interest in the game world, but the quests themselves are the laziest kind of MMORPG hunter-gatherer shit. Go there and kill X shit, bring me Y units of Z, go talk to that guy over there and then that guy and then come back and etc. Most of them don't even have any unique enemies you have to fight - you just fight the same shit you've been fighting before except now they're higher level and thus much stronger and spongier. This brings us to another thing I hate:
4. The leveling system. The levels in Nier works similarly to shitty MMOs where a difference in levels can result in a substantial decrease in the damage you do to the enemy just because your level is lower even if your stats do not differ that much. I really fucking hate when games do that. A level should never amount to anything more than the stats and skills it gives you. Here the levels don't give you that many stats, but for example if you're level 30 and fight a level 40 mob, it will take some time but you'll still be able to kill it, but a level 50 mob will take you 15 times longer to kill because the larger level difference will exponentially decrease the damage you do to it. I think a game like this shouldn't even have levels to begin with.
5. The constant gameplay and camera shifts. I guess the devs were trying to be creative with this one, but when I pay €60 €40 for an action game developed by Platinum, I expect a lot of fast-paced melee combat with free movement in all 3 dimensions. I don't want to play space invaders or geometry wars or a retro-style sidescroller I can play in a browser for free. Ok the arcade shootemup sections I didn't mind too much because at least they offered something different, but all the sidescroller or top down levels were total horseshit because it was essentially the same game with the same controls but severely limited movement options and visibility. Most of the time it was difficult to see what was going on during these sections because of all the explosions and particle effects and the camera not following your character. Also, going from full 3D movement to a 2D sidescroller felt like going from driving a car to riding a unicycle.
6. The PC controls were designed by a complete fucking mongoloid. Having to double tap the move button to dodge is difficult to pull off in a heated situation and it's hardcoded so you cannot change that without mods. Changing your weapons or items is bound to alt + arrow keys. Again, you cannot change that, it has to be alt + something. It's like the developers have never played a PC game before and don't know that we have this thing called the mouse wheel or side buttons. Also, while the mouse controls are decent in the 3D sections, in the sidescroller or top down sections even the tiniest mouse movement can make your little gun bot snap at 45 degree angles. Same thing happens in the hacking minigames.
7. The hacking minigames. Fuck them. They get old so fast.
TL;DR - I liked the game a lot, but it does have some pretty severe flaws that some people may not be willing to look past. If I were to rate it as objectively as I could, taking into account all the good and the bad, I'd give it a 7-7.5/10. However, I personally enjoyed it a lot more, like a solid 9/10. I guess the setting really clicked with me and after playing Dark Souls 1&2 almost back to back, it felt so good to play a game where you can properly jump, where dying at the boss spawns you right back at the boss and where you can actually pause. You really learn to appreciate these tiny things after they've been taken away from you.
