NieR: Automata

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NieR: Automata is a new third-person action RPG follow-up to the 2010 cult hit, NieR. Offering a fresh blend of action and RPG gameplay styles, NieR: Automata is currently being developed in collaboration with PlatinumGames, the studio known for its groundbreaking advancements in the action genre.

The game’s all-star development team is helmed by producer Yosuke Saito, known for his work on DRAGON QUEST X and NieR. The previous game’s director, YOKO TARO returns for the new project as well as composer Keiichi Okabe, whose award-winning score to the original became one of the greatest accomplishments in gaming music.

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Open world action RPG with an interesting storyline, a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, memorable characters, a great soundtrack and several game modes. An RPG that is greater than the sum of its parts!
 
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Too Long; Won't Read: there’s plenty to dislike but some unique features and a fun world more than make up for it.

You start the game as 2B – a rather sexy android sent to fight evil robots infesting Earth while humanity cowers on the moon, waiting for the all clear. You’ll also find yourself playing a good, old fashioned arcade shooter. Yes, I know what you saw on the trailers. No, I didn’t post this to the wrong game. While the majority of this game is good old third person action, it also has arcade shooter and side-scrolling shooter systems built in and will jump seamlessly between them!

You’ll also find yourself in one of the first problems I had with the game: you can’t save in the tutorial. You have to complete the whole thing and it ends with a boss battle that isn’t at all trivial. I would highly suggest sticking the game on easy difficulty until you get to a point where you can finally save the game.

Speaking of saves, this game does have a few checkpoints here and there but it mostly lets you save only in save areas (like save points, just bigger). This can get to be annoying at times but, once you’re through that tutorial boss, it isn’t too much of an issue. There’s only three “save slots” for some reason but that worked out OK.

Other than a few quick jumps to The Bunker (the space station that 9S and an army of sexy androids operate out of), the game takes place in a fairly good sized open world. There’s some good exploration that can be done in this world and the landscape will change as various events happen. Some areas are blocked off at the start but I think it would be fair to call this an open world game.

A particularly interesting part of this game is the chip system which is used for skills. Chips can be bought in stores but you’ll get most of them from defeating enemies. Each one provides some bonus like increased attack power, regeneration, anti-chain damage (to prevent stun-locking), hoovering up items around you instead of having to pick them up, and even basic UI things like the mini-map. Each chip takes up a certain amount of space so you can’t just plug in everything you find. The game also provides three different templates so you can build out a set of chips for just running around and another for difficult battles. The extra nice thing about this is that, if you’re one of those folks that doesn’t like having a mini-map that goes and tells you exactly where you need to go, you can just yank the chip out and use the space for something else! It isn’t a lot of space but it’s better than nothing.

You’ll find another issue that seems quite terrible: sudden quest death syndrome. You can finish a seemingly innocent step on the main quest only to have an epic event start up and auto-fail several of your pending quests. This isn’t as bad as you might think. You see, you don’t play this game just once. When you finish off the evil bad guys, you don’t stop playing. Instead, you start again, this time playing as 2B’s trusty sidekick, 9S! Enemies will be higher level but you get to keep your levels and equipment. Any side quests you finished will not be there but any that were not finished can be done again plus you’ll get a few more designed around 9S’s unique hacking ability.

All in all, though, I’m still not sold on the replay. The best thing about this game are the surprises it throws at you and those surprises aren’t nearly as interesting the second time, even though 9S gets a bit more information about what’s going on. Still, the second play through is survivable and, once it completes, you get to continue the story instead of repeating the first part again.

You’ll hear plenty about this being a bad port and that’s certainly true. You’ll need the FAR mod to properly play the game. Huge kudos to Kaldaien for it!

The combat isn’t especially deep but it’s definitely fun, smooth, and flashy. I found one of the boss fights to be extremely frustrating and almost did a rage quit but there’s always the option of dropping difficulty to get through a rough spot. (And it’s the game designer’s fault you have to do this, you know, not your own skill level. Nonono, definitely not your skill at all! ;)

Another odd thing in this game is what happens when you get yourself killed. You pop back to your last save point and leave a corpse behind – along with a bit of your skills. You need to run back to that point and retrieve your corpse to get those skills back. That’s right, a good old corpse run! But there’s a twist. If you’re playing network connected, your corpse becomes available to everyone else at that location, too! Other players can choose to recover the corpse, which gives them a skill boost according to what you had equipped for a short period or re-animate it, in which case the corpse fights alongside for a minute or two and then explodes. I don’t think other people recovering your corpse has any effect on your play-through (i.e. you aren’t in a race to get to your own corpse first) but I’ll tell you it sure has a strong effect when you walk into a big area and see corpses covering the floor!

Graphics are so-so. They look to be from the PS3/Xbox360 era but the art direction is good enough to make them still look nice.

The big selling point, though, and the thing that lets me forgive so many issues, is the story. Not so much the overall story but the delightful bizarreness of the robots. Every example I might give would spoil the example, unfortunately, so I’ll just point out something you can see right in the tutorial and trailers: the little robots. 2B and 9S look great. They have nice animations, deadly swords, and pods that can shoot at range. Yet they are often fighting robots that look like they were put together in a junk yard by a five year old kid and attack by running forward and spinning their arms!? Somebody is messing with you.

There’s also the final credits once you finish all the good endings. It’s yet another thing I can’t talk about due to incredible spoiler effects but I certainly won’t ever forget them! Know this, though: when the pod addresses you by name, it isn’t lying.
 
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Nah - I never really even tried. Opinions vary on the boards. Some say its fine. Some say its fine except for the double-keypress to dodge. Some say no way.

In the second part of the game you use a "hacking" system where you control movement with the right analog stick and shooting direction with the left. (A bit like Robotron, if you can remember back that far.) I can see the keyboard replacing the right side but the left... ouch. 8 keys in a circle might not be accurate enough. The interface shows up in the arcadey parts, too, but I think 8 keys would be enough in those parts.
 
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Why would you use the kb for htat when you can use the mouse ?

Nah - I never really even tried. Opinions vary on the boards. Some say its fine. Some say its fine except for the double-keypress to dodge. Some say no way.

In the second part of the game you use a "hacking" system where you control movement with the right analog stick and shooting direction with the left. (A bit like Robotron, if you can remember back that far.) I can see the keyboard replacing the right side but the left… ouch. 8 keys in a circle might not be accurate enough. The interface shows up in the arcadey parts, too, but I think 8 keys would be enough in those parts.
 
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I don't think you could use the mouse, though maybe you could force something. Roll left to turn left - but you'll have to pick the mouse up and move it to the right if you want to keep turning left. A joystick or even a trackball would work (and an old paddle control would be perfect) but I don't see how to make a mouse work very well.
 
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