I forced myself through it expecting to be surprised at some point and it fell flat.
Some stuff is clever but parts of the story are terrible.
The character development is atrocious, in a single mission a character goes from "feelings aren't allowed" to "the mission doesn't matter I will literally die for you".
I know the average gamer wants MORE content for the same price, but I don't feel the same way, especially about story based games. TLOU and even Halo: Reach had great stories without being annoying long.
The game isn't over until the end of Ending E, and I think it is incredibly worth it.
The endings are endings, because of the game's idea of cyclic nature of events. It's hinted that the events of the game aren't happening for the first time, but in fact, are a repeat of history.
That is, you are replaying the game as part of that cyclic nature. It's perfectly fine to stop the game at the first "ending" - but you will miss the total message of the game imho.
Yeah I'm actually thankful Cyberpunk doesn't take a billion hours to complete if I just want to focus on the main story, just don't have time for that
I did go to youtube to explore all the endings and there's where I realized they got clever with them but I just threw the towel.
the game was definitely not for me.
It's good only in that it provides a handy indicator that I should disregard recommendations from people who enjoyed it.
Nobody tell them
Also it’s not particularly impressive technically, it looks like a launch Xbox 360 game so it’s not surprising that it runs on Switch.
I know people love this game but it seems to be a marmite experience.
You might call that problem with the format but the reason for that was explained later on. It's "oh, that's why the thing few hours earlier happened!" moment
I'm sorry, this is an incorrect reading of the situation on your part. If you finish the game, there is nothing incongruous there, aside from the localization making 2B a bit more curt than in the source material.
Just looked up boss list: I passed three bosses. I never encountered this amazing dramatic storyline people keep gushing about. My guess is that these people never read enough books or watched enough movies, because Nier is just boring and predictable
I read a ton of fantasy and fiction, and would say this game is a really unique story. You haven't even gotten a taste of it, you should really not judge the players who've enjoyed it.
How long of a time?
> the story doesn't even get very interesting until the second play through
I couldn't trudge through even once, how can I get to a second play through? :)
> You haven't even gotten a taste of it
So, to "get a taste of it" I need to a) play an unspecified long time and b) preferably two times
> this game is a really unique story
Robots have feelings and souls? Nothing is what it seems? Humans are the bad guys? With a few twists telegraphed two hours before they happen?
The main theme of the game is one only a game could have and it's nothing boring like "robots have feelings".
>Robots have feelings and souls? Nothing is what it seems? Humans are the bad guys? With a few twists telegraphed two hours before they happen?
These aren't even the twists in Nier Automata, these are surface-level readings of the story from the first few hours of the game. Although, humans are the bad guys isn't even in the game at all, the humans are long dead. Which I thought was one of the more obvious story twists.
Which chapter is robot village and Beuvoir?
> These aren't even the twists in Nier Automata, these are surface-level readings of the story from the first few hours of the game.
So, again, how many hours do I have to sink into the game before it becomes anything but a boring and predictable?
Chapter 1. Roughly 1 hour into the game, if you play it for the story.
Quitting at that point is like quitting The Fellowship of the Ring because you "predicted" that the Hobbits would leave the Shire.
Xbox profile tells me I've got 20 hours played, 20% achievements obtained, 7 endings acquired.
- Creation and Insurrection. Complete the alien ship. 23,21% players have this achievement
- We Await Your Next Visit. Complete the amusement park ruins. 28,60% players have this achievement
- It's a Healthy Baby Boy! Complete the desert area. 32,26% players have this achievement
- Ruler of the Deep. Complete the flooded city. 18,33% players have this achievement
For a game where "every action and beyond has its meaning", "unique storytelling", "the deepest game in its decade" etc. only perhaps a third of all players achieve even the most basic of objectives and probably give up soon after.
I can't even imagine an actual storytelling game that would fail to present any semblance of an engaging story 20 hours in.
The stats you cite are not as compelling an argument as you think. They're pretty much in line with what you see for most games. On PSN, Automata has a 30% completion rate, meaning seeing ending E specifically, which is about what you'd expect.
The fact that you weren't engaged by the story might simply have been because you spent the majority of your game time not engaging with it in any way whatsoever. The side quests you must've been doing are there largely to pad game time. Yoko Taro has a tendency to be thrifty in his game design, leading to both at times tedious side quests, and the several endings approach.
And at the same time somehow "because you spent the majority of your game time not engaging with it in any way whatsoever."
> The side quests you must've been doing are there largely to pad game time.
Funny that. Elsewhere in this conversation people claim that "side quests, meanwhile, are almost always tied into the main story or its themes - even if you don't realize it at the time you're doing the quest" and "Every action from the first boss and beyond has meaning, and it gets more dramatic onward"
Or perhaps, just perhaps, and hear me out on this: the game is really shit at presenting this "unique storytelling not seen elsewhere"? Perhaps, just perhaps, twenty hours, three (or more?) bosses, and four locations is more than enough to give the player a sense and a feel for this amazing story beyond the absolute boring and predictable?
It's also immensely funny to me that my repeated questions of "when does the actual story start" are met with absolute silence and people either deferring or questioning my abilities.
So? When does this amazing story start? 40 hours in? 60? Ever?
In regards to the side quests, I've never looked at them in much detail. The gameplay they put your through is largely the worst you'll find in the game, which is why I said they're there to pad time. Automata is a very short game if you just go from set piece to set piece. Nier: Gestalt/Replicant was the same way.
The question isn't about "most other games". The question is about "this unique game with an amazing story where every action is meaningful" etc.
Most other games don't have a starry-eyed following which can't explain how 20 hours in you can't see even a shred of this story.
> Not because they're particularly deep, or evocative, but because of how they tie into the themes, story, and gameplay of the game.
Not deep or evocative but ties into the themes and story of the game is Game Making 101. Every single game with a semblance of a story line has that.
I don't expect you to watch this or change your mind. I do hope though that others who might be reading along will give the video a look. For myself, it made the game into an experience.
For you, OP, I recommend you don't play this game. You are definitely not it's audience. Maybe you'd like another call of duty instead. I heard those have good stories.
This is funnier than you realize. First off, the game pushes those assumptions in your face to serve the greater narrative. Secondly, exactly those points, alongside "the game isn't deep just because it namedrops famous philosophers," are the most common critiques of those who didn't engage with the plot beyond the absolute surface.
Automata demands a lot from the player if they want to get to its core. You can turn off your brain and enjoy the spectacle, but you'll miss what makes it great that way.
Once you finish the first stage and get to explore the game world more openly, keep on the look out for situations where the game world presents small subversions or inversions of the assumptions the game made you think were your own. The game won’t call direct attention to this and relies on you feeling like something is amiss.
This is probably what’s so “confusing” to some, but it wouldn’t work if the game told you which of your expectations are being subverted, because telling the player what they’re expected to expect would ruin the mind trick it pulled to get all that stuff in your head without you realizing it came from an external source. I love how the fake-self-realization trick puts the player into the same headspace as their on-screen character, but does so in a way that the player can’t realize how much of the game was a shared experience until much later.
It’s such a cool inversion of the very concept of the video game, where the player is nominally in control of the character by pushing the buttons and moving the sticks, but everything the player causes to happen in the game instead compels the player toward introspection of their own existence in order to understand the growing disconnect they feel between the game-world-as-observed and the game-world-as-expected-to-expect.
Just like our character, the player is presented with an “open world” with a limited list of things we can choose to go do. We both get just enough freedom of choice to feel like we’re in control without ever noticing all the ways the world effectively made our decisions for us by defining our limitations before we even got here so we won’t even realize it’s possible to question them. Do you want to smash robots in the desert, or smash robots in the grassland, or smash robots in the flooded city? Do you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a computer programmer? Non-participation is only an option if you turn the game off, and that’s no fun.
So I play the closed-off open world where I could theoretically command my character to go anywhere and do anything if both of us somehow realized we could choose what to choose. Still unknowingly placed in the same headspace as some very attractive computer code, the player can keep thinking about the nagging disconnect between the world as observed and the world as expected, but doing so is frustrating, fruitless, and the bad feeling goes away as long as you can distract yourself from thinking about it. Next mission; kill some evil machine lifeforms.
The visibly robotic “machine lifeforms” are invading earth and threaten the fate of humanity itself. Their glowing angry eye-lamps look out from otherwise-featureless spherical metal heads on cylindrical bodies, stumbling/hopping around awkwardly, shrill agonized cartoon-robot vocoder wails when we smash them, brandishing oversized novelty-industrial weapons. They’re super cute. They’re the biggest threat to our survival.
Earth’s defense force are the androids(/gynoids) taking orders from the moon base refuge of the last living humans. It’s such a noble cause for the androids that they were literally made in mankind’s image, visually indistinguishable from human at their most basic, up to walking talking fighting idealized perfection in the case of the YoRHa androids, especially 2B and her delicious 絶対領域 :d
Over the course of the game, which group seems to be more human, and how? Which group embodies the essence of humanity? (What is the essence of humanity?) Which group are the mass-produced automatons just cycling through the few experiences they’re pre-programmed to live out? (Child. Child. Child.)
That’s about as spoiler-free as I can get. It’s the backdrop for all the individual character storylines which I won’t even touch, but the real storyline IMO is the hidden one every player is unknowingly offered as they’re incentivized to define their own self in order to be able to better define the events of the game.
The story threads weaved in from the original NieR (Replicant/Gestalt) tie it all together in a way that’s… I can’t really describe it. It’s good. I can’t think of any games that affected my perception of my own existence quite as much as these two. The climax for me wasn’t even any of the labeled “endings” as much as the instant realization of the way the two games fit together (and corresponding instant reversal of several assumptions about Automata’s backstory) when I suddenly found myself in the [redacted], instantly separated from the headspace of my on-screen character because I recognized the location but she never could. Then the optional quest line with [redacted] that comes across as joking fanservice at first until you unexpectedly find yourself back in [redacted]’s [redacted] where [redacted] [redacted] in the first game, but it’s too bittersweet because [redacted] doesn’t even [reeeedaaaccctttteeeddd] any more and aw fuck I’m crying again
The story of Nier auto is about breaking the cycle of fate and how to find meaning in "life" for androids and machines. A lot of what makes Nier auto's story great is the execution of story telling through gaming. Nier auto does everything it can to lead you into thinking its a traditional story with a standard gameplay loop and building you up as the key hero against the machine invasion after the first 2 endings/chapters.
Then the game really begins. And thats where you break with all the preconceived notions of what the game seemed to be about up until that point, along with probably a dozen other gaming tropes, and you feel the helplessness both in game and in story at that moment. Everything that was set up as a comfy gameplay loop is tore away and desperation just to survive takes over.
Afterwards, there are major shifts in tone, gameplay, environment, story, characters, etc. The remaining game's story builds to a climax that is probably of one the best payoffs in gaming history and is why this is considered a master class example of the gaming medium as art.
One illustrative difference is the side quests: I don't remember a single Horizon: Zero Dawn side quest. Nier Automata's side quests, meanwhile, are almost always tied into the main story or its themes - even if you don't realize it at the time you're doing the quest.
Nier Automata is rough around the edges, but the whole comes together to be greater than the sum of its parts. Horizon: Zero Dawn, on the other hand, is very polished and well-executed, but it doesn't "gel" as well as Nier Automata, nor does it take as many risks.
(SPOILER: You see a circle of metal flowers around Sobek's grave at her home, implying they're GAIA's memorial to Sobek)
Metal Gear Solid 2 is the quintessential example.
There are games who actually uniquely tell stories, but Nier isn't one of them
I can get you don't like gameplay or whatever and find it boring. But formulaic and predictable are the least descriptive words for this game.
It does take far too long on the setup to get to its actual points - especially if you don't enjoy the game-play or weirder grandiose moments (This cannot continue, Become as gods etc).
All quests are "get from point A to point B" and all side quests are basically "fetch X for a forgettable NPC number 15 000"
By the time I've beaten the third boss and gotten to the robot village or whatever it is, all I could do is run through the desert for half an hour and give up.
At which point does it become non-formulaic?