4.5/5 ★ – Bengerman10's review of NieR: Automata.

NieR: Automata is a complicated game to talk about. I first played Automata in 2017 and experienced the first "major" ending of the five or six that document an entire playthrough. I don't really blame myself for stopping there, as the elevator pitch for what was to follow was "experience the same story through a different character's perspective, and that character just happens to be the one who was attached to your hip for 90% of the game." And so I stopped, the idea of playing a game where everything felt good but not great immediately over again just wasn't appealing to me. Eight years later, I returned to Automata. Instead of picking up where I left off, I reset everything completely. I experienced ending A again, which was better than I remembered it, but the concept of playing Automata with slightly new twists on the story remained unappealing. But I had trusted friends pushing me through it, swearing that it's worth the payoff. Ending B, and the story that precedes it, is fine. It fills in a lot of gaps that were only gaps because of previous storytelling decisions. For instance, ending B has cutscenes interspersed throughout your time as 9S (the second controllable character) and there's no real reason we shouldn't have seen it for 2B (the first playable character). In a lot of ways, it really does feel like a strong NG+ kind of entry - we get some extra insight, some fun combat tools, and a handful of slightly modified segments. For some reason, I decided to fulfill a lot of the game's side quests in the second playthrough. Perhaps it was because 9S as a character generally felt more sympathetic to his surroundings, even if he second guessed the motive of those sympathies. It felt like something 9S would do, and as a result, I did it. And the more I played, the more I fell in love with the world around me. The areas were all areas I'd been to a handful of times, only now I had memories in those spaces. Oh, so that's what this game is about. Sort of, at least! It's also about suffering, it's about "what it means to be human," it's about war, it's about violence, it's about a lot of things. Automata doesn't shy away from commentary, and it's only occasionally when it dips into college freshman levels of philosophy that it feels a little too much. And even then, Automata is seemingly well aware of exactly how it's saying things, exactly how silly it might sound. Ending C and D are extensions of everything we experienced in ending A and B. Perhaps it was a case of justifying everything I'd just experienced and then re-experienced, but there was something to be said for how gratifying it felt to get to something new and different, in part because I had suffered through the exact same god damned story two times in a row (with slight modification). And in between all of that, I experienced game-breaking bugs, a hilarious instance of being juggled back and forth by massive machines as my character was meant to be in a dramatic death-walk sequence, and some of the more elaborate (as in bad) fetch quests I've ever come across. All with 9S and 2B complaining about what a chore it is. Yoko Toro and game developers across the world: just because your characters acknowledge the chore does not make the chore fun. And yet, I was having fun. I was experiencing the same villages, the same broken-down buildings, and even some of the same side quests that got stalled in previous playthroughs. And it was fun, or at least it was compelling. But the game does eventually reach that new terrain, and by that point, things are hurdling toward the finish line. The finish line is appropriately sad and difficult, with glimmers of hope scattered in between. Ultimately, Automata is a story about trying again, even when it feels fruitless. Even when it is fruitless. It's about that struggle point of knowing that it doesn't matter what you do, but you've gotta do it anyway. This game mattered something to me. And that's all while ignoring the glorious OST, the stylized movement (seriously, this game's movement rules, just watch 2B or 9S climb slide down a ladder) or the intense sense of scale. NieR: Automata is a game with something to say, and what that something is is probably going to vary upon the recipient. But for me, it's a game about memories and how memories pave the way for what is to come. The efforts we make to just to have something a little extra to hold onto the next time we go through process.