NieR: Automata

This is a special game. Having finished it, it’s going to stay with me for a long time.

I feel like we’re going to want a spoiler thread for this one.

I wish I had time to play so I could see what everyone is hinting at! I think I’ll put some time in tonight.

Definitely need a spoiler thread. It’s very hard to talk about what makes this game so interesting without spoilers. I have niggles about some aspects, but ultimately they don’t matter. Even when I head out to a point of interest only to discover I can’t find a way to get to it, the journey there is fun.

My favorite plugin so far: shock wave – not necessarily for combat efficacy, but for aesthetics, especially in sidescrolling and top-down modes.

Moving around and fighting is such a pleasure.

Like Tim, I’ve ended up sticking with “normal” difficulty. It makes combat pretty easy (most of the time) at this point, but it allows me space to admire the elegance of combat acrobatics. For the next playthrough, I’m going with “hard”.

Non-spoilery comment: the animations in this game are amazing. 2B’s in particular are such a fantastic mixture of cool and badass and sexy… it’s hard to even describe. It’s awesome.

Ending A achieved. 1 main ending done, 4 to go. :)

Same! Wasn’t quite expecting it to end at that point, but I’m looking forward to starting it back up again.

how do you know what to do to get other endings? Are the branching points marked out?

This looks a lot better than the original Nier, but I’ll bet it has a lot of the same flaws: grindy, repetitive environments and combat that can easily be borked to your advantage. I hope they removed the stupid fishing and flower breeding minigames, at least? I wonder if it’ll have another kind of special, mind-bending ending?

RPS looked really ecstatic about it, though.

The fetch quests are getting to me a bit. Combat can definitely be broken on normal with the upgrade chips. Those are easy enough to disable I guess.

I feel like I’m missing the game part of the fishing minigame. I just wait until the pod goes underwater and then press A?

I haven’t seen a flower minigame, though there are single bright flower models throughout the maps. I can’t do anything with them, but they look so distinctive that they feel like they should do something.

Everyone seems to be excited about the story and endings. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s a spoiler-free guide to the main endings in this very thread - post 50:

That’s an interesting way to do multiple playthroughs. I usually never replay a game, unless it’s decades later, but this system would tempt me into starting a second playthrough right away.

The way I read it, you’re not really done with the game until you’ve played all the paths.

The nice thing is once I’m done I’ll never have to play it again. One less game in the back of my mind!

Both of those things were certainly true of the first game. (probably Automata doesn’t pull the same trick, but the final ending in the original wipes all your saves.)

This is absolutely true. The game is just getting started after playing through the first route :)

I’m interested to see if it’s a subtle difference compared to The Witcher 2, where you’re missing out on a quarter of the game’s content by not playing the alternate Chapter 2, but you’re still technically finished. I suspect the order of things matters.

The second playthrough in the first game is dramatically different. The third and fourth only really vary at the end but you can get there super quickly and they are important to the overall story. Whereas the Witcher 2 has told your version of Gerald’s involvement in events after a first run. Going the other way will improve the player’s understanding of other events that were happening elsewhere and characters you weren’t helping the first time, but it’s not necessary to the story.

I don’t know whether Automata works the way the first one did but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Found ending G totally by accident. Whoops.

I’m about ten minutes into the second playthrough and it’s definitely not just “New Game+” so far.

Yeah, I started the second playthrough and it’s really interesting so far. A bit harder and weirder too, in a sense. I’m loving it.

playing the demo now… quite refreshing that weapons don’t break anymore… (I enjoy weapon degredation in the other game, though)