I wanted people from my group to also play the game, to the point where I promised them a free game of equal value if they picked up Nier:Automata, played through the whole thing, and said they didn’t feel it was worth full price. I REALLY wanted them to play it.
A Rambling Sort of Review of Nier:Automata and to a Lesser Extent Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen
How I started playing Nier:Automata is interesting to me (and probably only me) in that I was desperately trying to play through Dragon Age: Inquisition again but was bored senseless with the monotonous, MMO-inspired systems of the game. I decided I needed a change of pace. Why this is interesting is that the last time I tried to play DA:I, I got to about the same point in the game before getting distracted by yet a third title – Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. In both cases, I absolutely fell in love with the distraction as I quietly removed DA:I from my playlist in favor of something much more enjoyable.
The relevance here (again, probably only of interest to me) is that Dragon’s Dogma and Nier:Automata are the first Japanese games I’ve enjoyed since… well, I think the last one was The World Ends with You on the Nintendo DS, a whopping ten years ago, on a handheld system twice removed from the current generation. Before that, we’d have to go back to the Playstation 2. It wasn’t always like this though. I grew up playing both Western and Japanese games – the Western stuff on MS-DOS and the Japanese imports on the NES and SNES. I’d oscillate between grid-based dungeon crawls on my PC and games like Mario, Zelda, and dozens of JRPGs on the consoles.
Eye of the Beholder… WRPG!
The Secret of Mana… JRPG!
I’d stopped playing video games for a few years by the time Final Fantasy 7 was announced, but I was interested enough to save every bit of money I had for four months to be able to afford the game and a PS1 to play it on. It seemed like a watershed moment for the genre that promised so many new and exciting things to come, and my love of JRPGs was rekindled with the game’s twisting plot points and visually stunning presentation. Except it didn’t work like I’d envisioned. I found that with each new JRPG, my enthusiasm waned, and by the time the PS2 was well into its lifecycle, I was looking toward the PC and older console games again, going back to classic JRPGs on the SNES more and more. The new batch of games weren’t bad, but they felt tired and slow to me, spending hours on tedious plot with minimal gameplay, or excruciatingly slow tutorials that seemed to go on for far too long and forced you to do menial activities to advance a vanilla plot about saving the world yet again.
How far am I in this? 400+ words already? Cool! Making progress.
This is sort of a review of Nier:Automata, by the way. I wasn’t planning on writing a review for the game. Hell, I had no idea if I’d even enjoy the game when I picked it up. It was a bit of an impulse buy to get me away from DA:I, much like Dragon’s Dogma last time around. The reason I’m writing this now is because I play in a weekly tabletop RPG with some friends, including the editor of this website – Matt “Steerpike” Sakey. Matt and a few of the others were going on about Persona 5 like they have EVERY SINGLE WEEK since the game’s release*, and wanting to inject some of my own excitement for what I was playing, I started talking about Nier:Automata.
* Normally I’d insert some cutting, fabricated story about Armand at this point – his predilection for goats, his hatred of ice cream, something. But it wouldn’t be fair this time. To say that Brandon, Kristine, and I have “gone on” about Persona 5 is a crescendo of understatement; we’ve utterly dominated the conversation. Armand has shown the patience of a saint as the GM and frankly so have the other non-Persona-playing players. We keep telling them that the obvious solution is to start playing Persona 5 so they can join the conversation, but so far we’ve met with limited success. (–S)
When I first mentioned the game to them, I’d only played it a short while and I was interested, but not yet affected as I eventually would be. It was more like “oh, I started playing this game. It’s a bit weird, and there are way more panty shots than I expected (when you expect zero, anything more seems like a lot), but it’s pretty fun to play.” By the following week, this had escalated to “holy crap, this game is a load of fun to play, and is actually well written and interesting plot-wise!” And by the time I beat the game, I was pretty much ranting about it with far greater fervor than any of the group’s Persona 5 discussions†.
† It’s true! He’s shown great fervor. I’d go so far as to call him ‘fervorful.’ If that’s a word. Fervorious? (–S)
I wanted people from my group to also play the game, to the point where I promised them a free game of equal value if they picked up Nier:Automata, played through the whole thing, and said they didn’t feel it was worth full price. I REALLY wanted them to play it. Finally, tiring of my babbling, Matt suggested that he’d play the game provided I wrote a 2000 word review for his site (I’m only at about 700 so far? Really?!) So here we are. My review of Nier:Automata‡.
‡ I even sweetened the pot by offering to forgive his outstanding debt of $7.42 if he hooked a brother up with some sweet, sweet Armand-prose for the site. (–S)
Let’s go back to Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen though (wait, what? –S). Very much like Nier:Automata, this was an impulse buy that was meant to be a short distraction from the monotony of DA:I. I knew nothing about the game, but the screenshots looked kind of interesting, and I watched a 10 minute Youtube review for the title before making the plunge and picking it up. DD:DA is a weird fucking game. It’s terribly flawed, to the point where most people who pick it up will quickly give up in the face of wildly unpredictable difficulty spikes, a mind-numbingly dull story, comically bad voice acting, and a near impenetrable set of rules and game mechanics that DD:DA never bothers explaining to the player. It’s a hot mess. It’s also become one of my all time favorite games, because despite its myriad of issues, it’s just a lot of fun. Once you get past all its problems, it has one of the most exciting combat systems I’ve enjoyed, to the point where the combat can carry the whole game. The various classes all play differently, and you can switch between them freely, meaning one minute you’re a warrior swinging massive swords around and climbing onto the backs of thirty-foot tall monsters to stab them in the eye, and the next minute your wielding spells like massive tornadoes that tear up the entire countryside. It’s really something else!
DD:DA was Capcom’s attempt at doing a Western style RPG, and while they didn’t exactly pull that off, they created a strange hybrid that feels like neither a JRPG or the Skyrim-esque open world game it’s trying to mimic, but something entirely its own. It was refreshing, and exciting, and it opened me up to considering more Japanese titles for future gaming. It was also everything Dragon Age: Inquisition wasn’t. DA:I has some great writing and plot stuff going on, but god damned if it doesn’t waste time with what feels like thousands of meaningless fetch quests that don’t serve the game at all, and only distance the player from the game’s stronger aspects. I’d loved Dragon Age: Origins (played through it all 4-5 times), and while I wasn’t wild about Dragon Age 2, it was fun and engaging enough for me to see it through to the end. My two serious attempts at Inquisition were both massive failures though, leading instead to me playing much better games, so there is that.
1,100 or so words. More than halfway through and I haven’t even talked about Nier:Automata yet, except to mention the dumbest thing about the game, the panty shots. This is intentional. The problem with writing about the game is that I think the best way to play it is to go in with as little information as possible. This is a game with a lot of tricks in store for the player, and I really don’t want to spoil it at all. So I need to write about the game without actually telling you anything specific and that doesn’t take two thousand words. Maybe I can do it with the 750 or so remaining though. So without further ado, here is why you should play Nier:Automata.
It’s so good, ohmygodguysseriously. Nope. Let’s try that again.
Nier:Automata is a sort-of sequel to the game Nier, which came out on the PS3 and XBOX 360. Nier was a weird spin-off of another game, called Drakengard, a sort of beat-em-up meets grand-scale warfare plus sometimes you get to fly around on a dragon and fuck shit up. It’s an interesting and neat game that’s largely unplayable due to terrible controls, and if the game designer is to be believed, at times intentionally tiresome gameplay. Drakengard has a bunch of endings, and if you follow the story from its best ending, you get to the next Drakengard game. If you follow the plot to its worst ending, however, it leads to Nier. Oh, and Drakengard starts off some time after the events of Drakengard 3 (an arguably much better game) which also has a bunch of endings leading to different plot lines… it’s… complicated.
Nier’s plot is absolutely bananas and has many different endings just like all these other games, and one of those endings (which, if I understand correctly, is mostly detailed in a Japanese book called Grimoire Nier) leads to Nier:Automata, which takes place, like, thousands of years after Nier but is still very much tied into the plot of that game and the two mentioned Drakengard games§…
§ What is happening I don’t even (–S)
…look, you don’t really need to know any of this. You can still enjoy Nier:Automata as I did, ignorant even of the existence of all the other games. If you have played those other games, you’ve probably already played Nier:Automata as well, and don’t need me to tell you any of this.
So why should you play Nier:Automata? Well, in many ways it’s a lot like the first Nier game in the way it tells its stories, and mixes up gameplay mechanics from various unrelated genres, and has, like, just the best god damned music. It’s also developed by PlatinumGames, a studio that knows how to make a hell of a tight gameplay experience; indeed, it completely trumps eclipses the previous game’s near unworkable controls.
Wait, was the previous game Nier, or Drakeng… I’m so confused. I like what you did with “trump” there, though. There’s a reason we’re friends! (–S)
Nier:Automata is an absolute joy to play. Controlling your characters in combat is fast and visually impressive with wild, cinematic action in every fight. Despite Platinum’s reputation for making tough-as-nails games, Nier:Automata is carefully balanced to be approachable by both casual gamers and masochistic lovers of impossible challenge modes. The music, as mentioned, is phenomenal, and can be almost overwhelming in its pure emotional expressions of joy and sorrow. The writing is tight and consistent, with characters that are compelling and believable badasses with all the right sorts of flaws to bring out their humanity. It can be surprisingly funny, while wallowing in much heavier emotions at other times. The graphics aren’t mind blowing, but even in their simplicity the game world is impressive and fun to explore. It feels like a game that was made on a limited budget, but one that used that budget to its absolute maximum effect.
Its strongest aspect, though, is how it tells its story. Not specifically the story itself (though that’s fantastic) but the way in which it tells the story. The game’s director and writer, Yoko Taro, who was also responsible for the aforementioned games that led up to this title, has an understanding of video games as a storytelling medium that is unlike the vast majority of game designers out there. Nier:Automata doesn’t play out like a movie where you control the fight scenes but are otherwise watching a linear story. It doesn’t give you decision trees that affect the outcome of the plot but are largely just an updated Choose Your Own Adventure book from the 80s. It’s not an open world where you can do anything at your own pace while ignoring the main plot like a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game. In fact, for the first ten hours or so, it’s just your usual video game, not too different from the first example of what it isn’t listed above – fight some stuff, get some plot, fight more stuff, get more plot, so on. Then you reach a point in the game where many people are likely to think “well that was fun, what game should I play next.”
When you hit this point, the publisher Square Enix takes a moment to tell you “hey, I know you think you’re done with this game, but maybe keep playing?” So you keep playing, and you see some stuff you saw before, but it’s different now. I don’t want to say more on this because I’ve already said WAY TOO MUCH, but you should take their advice. If you see it through to its proper ending, you’ll find a story that draws upon every aspect of the video game as a storytelling medium, used expertly to push what this game is from a fun action RPG to a truly unique experience. Well, actually, the original Nier did a lot of the same tricks as this one, but there is a greater sense of refinement here. And also, like, nobody really played the original Nier so this should be a new experience for most people.
Yoko Taro designs his games so that they constantly surprise you and up the stakes. Every time you think you’ve seen what Nier:Automata has to offer, he’ll throw something new into the mix that pushes everything to new heights and has the player exclaiming “what the fuck!” out loud as they stare dumbfounded at their screen. At least, that’s how it played out with me. It’s a tight experience from beginning to end, crafted with love and a master game designer’s 20+ years of experience. This is the product of a lot of skilled people working together under one creative genius’s guidance to produce something unlike just about anything most of us have previously seen. Not only is it worth your time to play this game, regardless of what sorts of video games you prefer, but I encourage anyone interested to buy it at full price and let the gaming world know that we as gamers want something more than just Hollywood movies with computer graphics and repetitive gameplay.
Nier:Automata single-handedly restored my faith in Japanese games (But… what about Persona 5? –S). I’ve explored dozens of other titles from other Japanese designers since playing this one, looking to see what else I might have missed since moving firmly into the world of Western video games, and while I think Nier:Automata stands out above the vast majority of these other games, I do feel like my gaming options have expanded greatly. I can’t give the same blanket recommendation for Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen the way I can with Nier:Automata, but that too is worth looking into if it sounds at all interesting.
As for Dragon Age: Inquisition… I wonder if I’ll ever see that thing through to the end. Stupid single-player MMOs.
Okay. There you have it. Well over 2,000 words. Now go play Nier:Automata, Matt!
Honor demands that I do so, and also that I publicly manumit Armand from the burden of $7.42 he’s owed me since forcing a bunch of us to buy Terraria. Armand, sir, your wish is my command! It may have to wait until I’m done with Persona 5, but in the scheme of things, that’ll be just a blink. I hear Persona 5 is a really short game.
Thanks Armand!
Send manifestos about how awesome Persona 5 is to Armand.
I’ve heard much praise for this game, here and elsewhere. It’s definitely on my list right after Persona 5, which should only take me 6 months or so to finish ha ha. When I first heard of the game (pretty much right before it came out. Was the marketing just not very good or was I just not paying attention?) something about it struck me. It seemed as though it may be outside of the norm, in the best sense of that phrase.
I’m fascinated by your gaming history (and not just you but the subject in general). I took a similar path, except that consoles were completely off my radar until the PS2/GC/Xbox generation. So I found JRPGs, and Japanese games in general, fairly recently. I’ve come to almost prefer Japanese games and I find many (most?) WRPGs stale and boring.
So with that in mind, the obvious question is: have you tried Dark Souls? 🙂
I’ve tried getting into Dark Souls a handful of times, but it just doesn’t do it for me. The controls are too odd and cumbersome feeling for my tastes. With about ten hours into the first one, I was mostly bored and frustrated. I made it just past character creation on the second one, talked to some old ladies, then ran right off of a cliff after getting lost in the small starting area for a few minutes. With the third one, I didn’t even make it past character creation before getting tired of it. It just doesn’t do it for me.
While I’m pissing on some sacred cows, I also don’t care much for The Witcher games (except, oddly, the first one which I really liked).
Bluebogle, at the risk of high-jacking the comments for a review of Nier Automata with Dark Souls talk, I’m wondering if you could elaborate on your dislike of the controls. I ask since I consider Dark Souls (OK Bloodborne in particular, and I hated the DS2 controls) to be the pinnacle of third-person melee combat controls. Dark Souls itself wasn’t perfect, but it got so much of the “feel” right. Everything else feels floaty, imprecise, or button-mashy to me.
I guess it’s sort of the difference between an arcade racer and a simulation racing game. They’re both racing games, and they can both be fun and challenging, but they play very differently. With action games, we have the likes of Dark Souls and Monster Hunter with very specific and precise controls that require careful timing that don’t allow for any sort of button mashing, and you have the more arcade style games such as Bayonetta and Devil May Cry. In both cases, I prefer the more arcadey controls.
Nier:Automata is not a Dark Souls like game at all. The controls feel much more like a Bayonetta, only even more forgiving because the game is designed to be accessible to a much larger audience, unlike Dark Souls which caters to a more niche audience looking for a very specific experience. You can ramp up the difficulty setting in Nier:Automata to get something closer to a DS type experience, but you shouldn’t go into the game expecting Souls or you’ll be disappointed.
BTW I am the author of this review, I just signed in with the wrong account to comment. Just in case that wasn’t clear. 🙂
Doh! I didn’t make the connection at all. Thanks for engaging! 🙂
No, I don’t expect Nier to play like Dark Souls. I played the demo and liked it, although I admit that the odd (to me) button configuration took some getting used to. What I did notice was that the controls were very tight and responsive, and after I realized it was a Platinum game, I understood why. All of that (and also that I don’t consider them button-mashy) combines to make me think I’ll have no trouble at all with the controls.
TL;DR: I’m still very much looking forward to playing this one.
Argh! Why don’t the comments like my paragraphs?!
Seriously, my last comment was supposed to have two paragraph breaks!
Sorry guys! There’ve been some “upgrades” to the theme in the past few weeks… maybe they’ve broken something they shouldn’t have. I’ll unleash the Carriage Return Gremlins.
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I hesitate to use the phrase “not for everyone” because it usually sounds like an insult, which is not my intent here… Dark Souls is not for everyone; not in the sense that people who dislike it are wrong or simple or whatever, but in the sense that it’s not a game that’s going to resonate with all people and many of those people are fine examples of the human condition all the same.
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You’re not the only person I know who was infuriated by the Souls Controls (poet/know it), Armand. Falling off cliffs in particular, actually. Rough controls are one of my biggest pet peeves, yet Souls never really bothered me. I’m beginning to think it’s luck, that a person either CAN or CANNOT coexist with its controls. I know plenty of people who’ve tried and tried and just can’t get comfortable with them. People who are perfectly good at games and perfectly open-minded about the experience. Dark Souls is not the kind of game where you can force yourself to endure one facet because the rest is worth it.
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Dragon’s Dogma (vanilla) I played for some time on PS3 and found it… not bad, just completely unremarkable. Utterly forgettable. Your praise for the Dark Arisen DLC has been consistent enough that I want to give it a try, though, because there was so much promise even in the vanilla one. Plus Steam, you know, it’ll be on sale for $7.42 sooner or later.
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Okay, so Nier:Automata. I played the demo and was really impressed. If nothing else you can tell how many years of game design experience are behind it, because of its confidence in so seamlessly moving between mechanics. I’m excited to play it because it seems to be getting universal acclaim, I haven’t seen any negative reviews. Platinum’s doing okay, what with Bayonetta and the Vanquish PC port and such, but I feel like it’s deserved a runaway hit for a long time, and I seem to recall that N:A topped the Steam charts for a week or two when it came out.
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If you were to compare it to another game, what would that game be? Vanquish? Something more bullet-hellish? I’m curious.
Steerpike: “Dark Souls is not the kind of game where you can force yourself to endure one facet because the rest is worth it.” PARAGRAPH, YOU JERK!
Yeah that’s a good point. I’ve played games in which I endured some crappy mechanic or other because I wanted to see the story play out. But Dark Souls’ story is so embedded in the gameplay and exploration that if those things don’t appeal to you then there’s no point in pursuing the story as such. I’m not trying to be obtuse about the controls thing, I’m genuinely fascinated by the fact that what bounces off someone feels just right to someone else, particularly game controls and such which you might think are less open to subjective preference. PARAGRAPH, SUCKA!
I wonder what the deal is with N:A being on Steam and PS4. It’s fine by me b/c I refuse to buy another Microsoft product, which may mean I’m turning into a console fanboy.
Let’s try this again (my last, probably much longer post didn’t go through.)
I don’t know why DS never clicked with me. I enjoyed similar games like Hyper Light Drifter and Salt and Sanctuary, but Souls just doesn’t click for me.
Dragon’s Dogma may never work for you, Matt. It’s a pretty niche appeal type game I think, and as I said, I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone.
As far as what to compare N:A to, gameplay wise it’s probably a bit like Bayonetta but with more psudo-open-world and RPG elements. You also get a little robot that shoots stuff you control. Story and themes though? People compare this and other Yoko Taro games to Neon Genesis Evangelion, which I’m just watching now so I can’t really comment on. Otherwise, I don’t know. A lot of the appeal was in how new it all felt.
“A lot of the appeal was in how new it all felt.” That’s a strong selling point in itself. New experiences, fresh experiences, are rare. Indeed, one of the many reasons Souls worked (for me) was the sense of innovation and confidence I saw in it. Sounds like N:A has a lot of that.
You know, you say that (and this was in my original response that failed to go through), but my early impression of DS was “this game is doing everything game critics have been telling developers to stop doing for the last 15 years, except everyone is praising them for it.” Lack of accessibility to all but the most “hardcore gamer,” brutal difficulty, the kind of secrets no regular player would find without a guide, minimal save points, minimal explanation of the game’s systems, and you basically lose everything when you die. It’s almost like if the people who made Castlevania on the NES were kept cryogenically frozen and completely unaware of any new game development ideas past ’92, and then suddenly woken up and given modern tech with which to make a spiritual sequel to their game. Only the freezing process damaged their brains and now everything somehow got weirder than Castlevania ever was.
Nier Automata is currently $40 on Amazon
Can I read this article if I don’t really want any Nier Automata spoilers? It’s on my absolutely-going-to-play list, very soon.
This might be the least spoilery review of the game on the internet. You’ll be fine reading it, Max.
You totally can read the article xtal, I just did and you all know I’m spoiler-averse.
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Great write-up Armand. I tried playing The Witcher 2 over the weekend after drifting from Zelda: Breath of the Wild and I wasn’t really feeling it like I did with the first game either. I intend on playing it still just… not right now.
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I need a palate cleanser so I’m going through a load of shorter games first, but Nier: Automata sounds intriguing. I never know how I’ll feel about most games these days but I like Platinum and you’ve been gushing about this for a while. I know we don’t always see eye to eye but that doesn’t mean I won’t check things out 🙂
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Dark Souls is a funny one for me. I finished Demon’s Souls on PS3 and loved it. It was fresh and foreboding and totally unfamiliar. I played Dark Souls for a very long time before eventually losing interest. Perhaps I had the wrong class or perhaps the mechanics were starting to feel too familiar or something. I dunno. The world and its inhabitants were incredible and I honestly wouldn’t mind returning to it, but to think there’s been two more Dark Souls, Bloodborne and DLC since! Souls hunger is real.
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@Steerpike: Vanquish wasn’t really my bag. I think, much like Bayonetta, the tone is weird in that it’s dopey as fuck but tries to be serious too. Vanquish is a slick action game though, if a little repetitive. One of the reasons I love The Wonderful 101 so much is that it plays out like a Saturday morning cartoon and is just bonkers and awesome from start to finish. Set-piece after set-piece.
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Bayonetta is really worth checking out though. It’s tough but the controls and action is super slick and tight. There are some shitty sequences with dreadful QTEs and some cheap deaths but I enjoyed the game a lot overall. Bayonetta 2 I own on Wii U and hope to play at some point. I hear it’s the better game too.
I miss paragraph breaks.
I do too buddy. I do too. We had a theme update that broke the site horribly and now we’re waiting for the Great Big Update that’s coming soon, but I’m still trying to figure out what happened to our line breaks. /////
Mat C liked Vanquish a lot, I recall. Based on the demo, I’d say Nier Automata looks similar but feels quite different. One of the most striking things about it is the seamless way it moves fluidly between styles of game — essentially the same thing Saints Row IV does for humor, N:A does as an elegant design facet. It’s a bullet-hell shooter, then a Souls-ish melee combat game, then a side scroller, then a top down scroller, then an isometric action game. The transitions are so elegant you barely feel them. It allows the level designers to show off all kinds of setpiece moments.
Gregg I didn’t remember you saying you finished Demon’s Souls. I do remember you bouncing off of Dark Souls, which I find intriguing. Now it’s totally your fault I’m going to gush on Demon’s Souls. What an odd, unique thing it was. I remember gradually growing interested in it via internet word of mouth rumblings. I also remember being simultaneously terrified of and fascinated by it. Although I think Dark Souls surpassed it in almost every way, it had a vibe that no subsequent game quite matched and it will always hold a special place as the first of its kind.
PARAGRAPH!
I played Vanquish and recognized it as a great game but also that it wasn’t quite my bag.