2.5/5 ★ – truewalrus's review of NieR: Automata.

Nier: Automata does not respect your time. This becomes clear during the hour long tutorial to start the game, where, if at any point you die, the game restarts from the beginning as if it's never been played before. When finally freed, the world opens up into a bottomless pool of bloat featuring long empty runs, perplexing invisible walls, and inane fetch quests, followed by way too many hours spent in the underwhelming hacking mini game. Side quests almost exclusively feature a character asking for an item, sending you on a wild goose chase to get it, and then thanking you for it with some items to unlock part two of the sidequest. If you manage to complete a character's entire range of running back and forth indefinitely, the game drip feeds you a few lines of lore as a reward. It's just... not enough. It's too boring and too long and I rarely found them worth the time investment. There's also some irritating situations where the game will advance unexpectedly causing some sidequests to lose all progress and have to be restarted later. One particular situation stuck with me - I accepted what I thought were three side quests from Pascal's town, went out and completed two of them and intended to complete the 3rd one before returning. Turns out the 3rd one advanced the story unexpectedly (they were all fetch quests, I thought it would at least let me return to the town... it did not) and I was unable to finish the other two at all. Nier also suffers in the combat department as its surface level implementations of hack-and-slash, RPG, and bullet hell are not deep enough to keep from quickly losing interest in exploring the options they offer. Oftentimes, they even act as a detriment to eachother as some of the camera angles used for the bullet hell parts completely conflict with the controls allowed. Enemies will get into positions that are just incredibly irritating to hit with any of the available attack options and you'll have to just wait for the enemy to get back in a hittable position. More filler. The RPG elements felt the most tacked on, hardly providing a noticeable difference at any point, mostly just being a level gate against enemies that drastically outleveled you. Some of the bosses are just HP soaks that go through the same few modes multiple times and last forever (looking at you Grün). A few equipment options are available to modify combat, but I pretty quickly lost interest in experimenting here due to the clunkyness of the UI and just used the automatic options throughout the game. Didn't really seem to make much difference. Also, hacking, another pseudocombat option that appears later is, for the most part, terrible and the game forces you to do it for a good half of your playthrough. Often times the hacking levels are just pure filler, not even requiring any actual gameplay. There are also just a bunch of really clunky implementations of various things. The map sucks, often pointing you at something which is difficult to find even when right on top of it. Many of the camera angles suck, gameplay frequently involves fighting against the various weird controls the camera angles stick you in. There are cut scene interruptions in almost every boss fight that switch up the combat style that mostly just serve as annoyances. Characters will often comment on things as though it has been a while since they've seen something immediately after seeing it serving as a drastic immersion breaker. The invisible walls are awful, tons and tons of paths force unreasonable long walks around which is unnacceptable for the movement options available. While playing, it all just feels very filler-ish, like it's all implemented to make everything take forever. I also felt that the story was pretty standard JRPG/anime fare, occasionally proving more wacky than interesting. But Nier: Automata does almost get by entirely on the strength of its leads and their arcs. Each of the lead characters has something to enjoy, providing strong dialogue and interesting growth, just enough of a hook for me to complete all the endings. That said, I don't think I'll ever come back to Nier and I don't have particularly fond memories of my playthrough. Playtime: 27.8 hours