Finished all the (main) endings of Nier: Automata.
In Nier: Automata you initially play as 2B, a combat unit part of an android fighting force locked in an endless war with machines in a postapocalyptic world. The android forces have been tasked by the remnants of humanity, who were forced to flee their home and seek refuge on the moon, to eradicate the machine presence on Earth in order to facilitate their safe return. The machines, on the other hand, fight in service of aliens who invaded Earth millennia ago, making Earth more or less a sci-fi post-apo Vietnam on which the humans and the aliens duke it out by proxy. To go into further detail would be spoiling, but suffice it to say that the game features more plot twists than you can shake a stick at, and some of the weirder story elements I've seen in a video game. And yes, it's all very, very Japanese.
At its core, the game is a third person action game in the vein of Devil May Cry (he said, without having ever tried a DMC game). Most of N:A is spent hacking up windup toy-looking robots with a variety of ridiculously oversized melee weaponry. However, like the original Nier, the game is in fact a genre mashup of sorts, and also features side-scrolling and top down action, as well as shmup and twin-stick shooter segments, among other things. It's an interesting way of shaking up the gameplay and makes for some unique set-pieces as the game plays with camera angles, but unfortunately it also means that none of the different styles are that great on their own. I did enjoy the regular hack-and-slash action throughout, but it's not particularly deep, even for someone with basically no experience in the genre, and after a certain point I just sat back and enjoyed trying to blow up robots in inefficient but spectacular ways, much like how I played the Batman Arkham games. The shmup/twin-stick segments, during which you control a Transformers-ish body suit/fighter jet, are quite bare-bones, but rare enough that they don't become a nuisance.
The biggest problem I had with the game is its difficulty. Automata features four difficulty settings, the lower two of which are: Easy, on which the game literally plays itself (I am not actually exaggerating here, there's even in-universe justification for it); and Normal, which is still pretty damn easy. Then suddenly you move up to Hard, on which every other attack is a OHK, and Very Hard, on which every single attack is a OHK. This would be OK -- not great, mind you -- if the game didn't have a bullshit saving system obviously inspired by Dark Souls, where you save at special terminals scattered about the game world. The devs obviously didn't take note of what made that system work in Dark Souls, as here you'll encounter literally half-hour long scripted cutscene-driven story segments with no way to save. Some of these segments have auto-save, but many don't. Imagine if the run from the bonfire to the boss fog door took 20 minutes instead of 20 seconds, and you'll have an idea of how it works.
Moreover, this undermines Automata's otherwise ingenious upgrade system: Throughout the game you find a wide variety of computer chips providing a host of useful upgrades, like more attacking power, faster movement, improved counter damage, auto-heal, etc. These have to be equipped to your character's limited capacity chip slots in order to have an effect. They can also be upgraded by fusing two identical chips together, so two "HP up" chips become one "HP up +1" chip, two of those become one +2 chip, and so on. The cool bit about this is that the game also rips off the body retrieval system of Dark Souls, meaning that if you die, all the chips you had equipped remain in your now lifeless previous body. If you die again without retrieving them they're lost forever. However, once again the designers didn't consider what made this mechanic work in Dark Souls. Hint: when you die in that game you only lose the souls you have on you, you don't start again from level 1 every time. Now, a harsh penalty on dying isn't something I mind, but when the game allows you to carry a maximum of something like 500 healing items on your person, which can be used at any time from the pause menu, there isn't much room for making the game challenging short of making a whole bunch of attacks OHK even a character built for defence. Which is exactly what they did on Hard and above. Which is aggravating as hell when you have to rewatch 30 minutes of dramatic cutscenes and then pray to God that the game doesn't decide to pull out a OHK move you haven't seen before out of its ass before you have time to reach your previous body, thereby losing all your best chips and essentially starting from scratch. There is actually a persistent levelling mechanic in Nier: Automata, but it's just a boring boost to HP and damage with no choice involved. And while different chipsets can radically alter the way to efficiently play the game, you don't really need them to succeed. However, because I wanted to play around with chips and stuff, and because I don't hate myself, I played on Normal the entire time, and as far as I'm concerned you're an idiot if you don't do the same.
Now on a more pleasant note: Another unique thing about Automata is that it, much like gimmick games such as The Stanley Parable and Age of Decadence, features a plethora of different endings -- in fact, there's an ending for every letter of the alphabet. Most of these are of the joke, unique game over variety, in the vein of "2B suddenly decided she'd had enough of this whole scene and just walked away; then, everybody died" whenever you take a wrong turn on the way to the next quest trigger. But there are at least five proper endings to the game, and a few more interesting and involved game-ending ones on top. When you reach ending A, which is the first proper ending but by no means the first one you can achieve, you've barely seen half of what the game has to offer. By what is to my knowledge the final proper ending, you'll already have seen the end credits a minimum of four times. And there's plenty of pretentious mindfuckery on the way there, including, but not limited to, hacking into the pause menu, battling the end credits in an intense shmup segment and, if you have the DLC installed, duelling the CEOs of Square Enix and Platinum Games in an arena match. This probably isn't a game for jaded Codexers (not least because of the anime aesthetic, with combat robots prancing around in miniskirts and heels), but I had a lot of fun seeing whhere the game was going, it having left "over-the-top" behind pretty much by the end of the prologue. It's all intensely pretentious and presented in typical hamfistedly dramatic Japanese fashion, but I actually thought the game pulled it off in the end. Just don't think too hard about anything and enjoy the ride.
By my comments it may seem like I didn't like the game, but I very much did, for the storyfaggotry more than anything else. It's not a game for Codex storyfags, concerned with such trite stuff as "worldbuilding" and "things making sense," but I can absolutely recommend it if you like yourself some pretentious over-the-top weird storytelling, alongside a fairly entertaining hack-and-slasher.