Squeenix NieR: Automata from Yoko Taro and Platinum Games

[Citizen]

I feel like the biggest flaw of this game is being an RPG (i.e. the leveling system), which makes it significantly different from the other Platinum's games. Instead of a well-balanced challenge with a fair learning curve (MGR:R, Bayonetta), it goes from challenging to godmode in a typical RPG fashion. I played it on hard, which was extremely challenging in the beginning (from the prologue until around the opera singer bossfight I was getting OHK by any mook), but since I did most of the sidequests, by the time I reached the final boss I was so overscaled I just annihilated him on the first try

Kinda sad, because the combat system itself is great and 2B's butt moveset is beautiful

 

[Sentinel]

Very hard difficulty stays consistent throughout. Everything consistently 1 shots you.

 

[Dayyālu]

I just hope it doesn't go full game of thrones in other endings

Hah. Ah. Ahah.

You did the sidequests

Hah

Don't worry, route B is essentially the same but you get the view of the twink. Then no spoilers, but ehhhhhhh

On the positive, you'll get to play the Standard Taro Angry Woman Protagonist that you barely see for the 70% of the game

 

[Roguey]

since I did most of the sidequests, by the time I reached the final boss I was so overscaled I just annihilated him on the first try

Did you actually beat the level 50 monsters? While you can beat them given enough grinding/time, you're encouraged to save them for 9S (who has a way of dealing with them that's far quicker than whittling down their health through physical attacks).

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Very hard difficulty stays consistent throughout. Everything consistently 1 shots you.

I beat the game on very hard for NG+, and I didn't realize this until like 3/4 the way through. It's kind of lame, honestly, as it renders all armor/health upgrades pointless. I did beat NG+ on very hard, but I skipped NG++ on very hard because I like the fun of creating builds for durability.

Honestly, the conventional combat portions are incredibly easy on Very Hard. However, the SHMUP segments are fucking annoying. They are the only difficult parts in the game.

 

[Citizen]

The game does a great job making you care about the characters tho, not just the main cast, but also the NPCs like Pascal, 6O or that lovable robot that saves the animals in the forest area. I just hope it doesn't go full game of thrones in other endings

fuck

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Gerrard]

Look at all those cucks in the comments.
E: the recent rating on Steam is 25% positive now.

 

[Citizen]

Look at all those cucks in the comments.
E: the recent rating on Steam is 25% positive now.

Wym? People should have done this on release, but instead they relied on fan-patches and let the publisher get away with a terrible port

 

[LESS T_T]

I'd expect them just making it even with the Microsoft Store version, not fixing any performance issues.

 

[yellowcake]

I'd expect them just making it even with the Microsoft Store version, not fixing any performance issues.

Wasn't the microsoft store release mostly fixed though? AFAIR the main issues were that sometimes screen resolution was not set correctly (the game was upscaling from 720p or some such), and Global Illumination was fixed on some super high level and gaining access to settings and dropping it a notch gave great performance improvements.

 

[Gerrard]

Look at all those cucks in the comments.
E: the recent rating on Steam is 25% positive now.

Wym? People should have done this on release, but instead they relied on fan-patches and let the publisher get away with a terrible port

People should've written negative reviews on release, or some time after they said they are "investigating issues" and then never did anything, not after that Xbox version came out and someone noticed. And now they are sucking their dicks, because you should be grateful that a dev fixes their game.

 

[ADL]

 

[Ivan]

Not watching it myself but thought I'd share

 

[ADL]

I'm a little annoyed by the fact that they fucked up things that they really shouldn't have touched at all and ignored the things that they didn't touch up but should have. Look at those slow ass animations for picking up items, look at the level design in general for Lost Shrine. The interaction with the big metal box for the "platforming" section at the top of the tower.

Happy to hear the tribal drums musical motif in Blu-Bird though. Thought they got rid of that after hearing the "Final Fantasy-ized" rearrangement of Gods Bound by Rules which still sucks and if I can mod it out in time for my first playthrough, I will.

 

[Saark]

Most important part at ~9:20: "All the original cast from the 2010 original have come back to re-record their voices".

 

[Anthedon]

Original release date: March 17, 2017.
Are the absolute madmen really going to patch it? That's provoking a bigger emotional response than the actual game did (inb4 nothing will be fixed ).

 

[aweigh]

Don't get excited, the upcoming Steam patch is simply a port of the "fixes" done to the Microsoft Store/Game Pass version of the game, nothing more.

The anti-aliasing/ambient occlusion glitch is still present and was NOT fixed, and the stutters as assets load in during world traversal are also still in there (NOT present in the console versions).

Only thing that was fixed is the incorrect internal rendering and some minor UI elements were touched up.

EDIT: For reference the AA/AO glitch causes the LoD and mip-maps to freak out if you have both features enabled at once. Still present in the UWP version (MS/GamePass version). Upcoming Steam patch is simply a port of the fixes done for the UWP version, nothing more, they are not going to fix things in the Steam version that were not fixed for the UWP version.

 

[Ba'al]

I noticed a lot of praise for this game recently (which I find odd given the game has been out for a few years now) and so I decided to play the game myself to see what all the fuss is about. All the talk about Yoko Taro and the 'true endings' and the big reveals got me hyped. It sounded like the kind of game I would like.

I finished it yesterday and feel disappointed. The combat was ok I guess, not really a fan of the whole Platinum style combat, I played Metal Gear Rising and I liked that more. Did not mind the shooty segments, the hacking I despised. The leveling seemed pointless. At one point I started to skip a lot of combat. As a result, I was slightly underleveled for some of the fights, which made them not harder, but more tedious. The chip system is nice but manually placing the chips is needlessly awkward. I found the world very bland. Not sure if this is a budget issue, but all the corridors in between large empty spaces made of copy pasted assets in washed out colours didn't do it for me. The amusement park level was the nicest albeit a bit small feeling. That and the frequent invisible walls coupled with shitty loot killed the exploration for me. I read that the side quests flesh out the world, but the ones I completed were too much of a chore for little to no payout so I skipped more than half of them.

All the above made me sprint through the game just to see the story unfold, it was the only saving grace left. Having finished endings A through E, I'm not sure which part I'm supposed to gasp at. I started to read around the net to see if I missed something, but it seems I didn't. I noticed that some stuff isn't even agreed upon, being more speculation than fact. I think that the story and all the sci-fi elements aren't meant to be taken too literally, so I guess what's left is the game's themes and atmosphere? The latter is at points great, I admit, but I think this is in large part due to the great soundtrack. For me this game has the 'Gothic 3 syndrome'; when you hear the soundtrack it evokes good feelings and recalls all the fond memories about the game, even making you want to play it again. But like Gothic 3, the game itself isn't actually fun to play (for me at least, even though I didn't enjoy Automata I realize that comparing the gameplay with that pile of shit is unfair).

To the people who enjoyed the game - what makes NieR: Automata great for you? I would appreciate if you could be specific and not say just 'the story' or 'the music'. I read the previous posts and all I got was "just play the game you'll see bro". Well, I played it, and now I'm trying to see if I can justify the 30 or so hours I spent on it by reading a different take on it.

 

[Citizen]

what makes NieR: Automata great for you

Overall aesthetics. The music and the visuals create a mystical, haunting atmosphere. Character design is superb, with machine lifeforms being portrayed as both cute and creepy, mysterious toy-like creatures. The combat, despite being pretty simple compared to other Platinum's titles, is insanely fluid and stylish. Especially 2b's and A2's movesets that look like a sensual dance with blades, which fits the lore pretty well (androids experience a near-sexual satisfaction from combat).

And this game is really just much more then the sum of its parts. It not only submerges you into a beautifully weird fairy-tale, but doesn't forget to provide an enjoyable gameplay to keep you on the edge of your seat for the whole 40+ hours of full playthrough

 

[Kruno]

All the above made me sprint through the game just to see the story unfold, it was the only saving grace left. Having finished endings A through E, I'm not sure which part I'm supposed to gasp at. I started to read around the net to see if I missed something, but it seems I didn't. I noticed that some stuff isn't even agreed upon, being more speculation than fact.

If you haven't seen the operas and the other sources of information about the game you will know almost nothing about what is going on throughout the game.

Yoko Taro's games tell a story that lives within a slice of time, and all the other information about that timeline is covered in external sources. Think about if I made a game about something that had happened in the year 987 BCE, and I just slapped you right in the middle of some war and told you nothing other than what was seen from the perspective of a few people. That is what Yoko Taro does with his games.

I bet you didn't know that Drakengard and Nier are a parallel timeline where in Nier humanity is dead, and in Drakengard humanity survives based on an event. There is even a time travelling android that goes between both timelines.

Here is a timeline summary:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DtXBGvR7rAxlApjf3n3uR3oH2keZ6c4RQvzUaJ2jj0U/edit#gid=0

This might clear some of the story:

 

[mogwaimon]

When I say I enjoyed the game for its story, I don't mean the specific twists and turns, I mean the overall themes and the execution thereof. The world Taro has created is just full of robots (on both sides of the conflict) trying desperately to attain some form of humanity , and sometimes they even succeed. Sometimes they just do something terrible. But in each case I found it incredibly charming and bittersweet whether it was a standard bot trying to shelter himself away in a hut to hide from his emotions that he shouldn't even be having, or that little bot trying to save its 'brother', or even

Spoiler

9S mourning the death of 2B to the point where he basically goes mad under the strain...even though 2B was his handler who was supposed to kill him if he found out too much

if you skipped the sidequests, you sort of missed a large part of what makes the world feel the way it does because a number of these stories about the pursuit of humanity take place in the sidequests. The reward in this game IS the story.

 

[Saark]

To me what made the game stand out among the variety of other games that released around the same time, is that it is one of the few games that feels like it had actual direction and script supervising. The attention to detail, from music fading out during the menu, to becoming 8-bit versions during hacking, or seeming inconsistencies within the writing turn out to be by design. Doing side-quests and having them lead to a handful of extra voicelines (i.e. gathering the flowers for the operator leads to an extra sound-bite during the destruction of the station which kinda tears at your heart) or foreshadowing some later plot-points in inconspicuous ways. Sound direction is superb, with vocals setting in when there are enemies abound while more gentle variations of the same track are played if you're just running around or exploring. A lot of the stuff in the game, whether good or bad or tedious or fun, feel very deliberate and as if someone purposefully made them that way. The game actually recording your initial configuration and playing it back to you (with some small hidden details) is a very simple way to highlight this attention to detail. Being offered two choices when dealing with Pascal in the later stages of the game, but also having a third unexplained (and much more "human") solution available is a much more direct way of showing that someone didn't just design this game, but also meant to play it and understand the player on a deeper level than just market researching what people like.

All of these ultimately lead to an experience that couldn't be duplicated in another medium, as your actions and gameplay choices as the player - not to be confused with actual choices and consequences from a narrative point of view - directly affect your visual and auditory experience. A lot of story-driven RPGs would probably work better as a book or movie, and while parts of Nier would lend itself well to a cinematic medium, the fact that it uses text, audio and the actual gameplay to create a more wholesome experience makes it worth playing. The frustration and helplessness when you run 2B to the bridge, or the frustration of being hacked the first time and not having bought remedies at a crucial plot-point are good examples of how the gameplay enhances the narrative.

 

[Jinn]

Sure would be awesome if they provided the original OST as an option to switch to. Highly unlikely though.

I'm willing to give the new arrangements a shot in-game mainly because Okabe was directly involved with their recording, but I have a feeling I'm going to want to switch fairly quickly.

 

[The Vanished One]

If you haven't seen the operas and the other sources of information about the game you will know almost nothing about what is going on throughout the game.

This is a huge source of annoyance to me. I shouldn't have to rely on supplementary materials to understand major plot points.

I'm not criticizing anyone for enjoying it, and I can see why some people may like to see an imaginary world revealed to them slowly, across multliple media. I find it tedious, though, and resent having to do so for some basic understanding of a game I like. To add to that, even when a game is very good, little of the media around it is ever quality writing, and almost none is properly localized.

It's fine if I have to piece something together for myself out of clues given in the game, or if I have to have it explained to me in a wiki article because I was too dumb to get it the first time around, but having to watch operas is too much. I am a classless idiot and I don't watch opera. And if I were classy and did watch opera, it would not be something based on a game.

Of course it may simply be that Yoko Taro did want to put all this extra info in a game, but the budget was never there and he's forced to parcel it out in bits and scraps...