i am v tender hearted and don’t know how much more i can take
i love nier ;_; i think i like near a tomato a little better than this tho?
the combat is less rote
love 2 play hot girl 2b hot robot girl love it
i think i gel with the visual and thematic language of a tomato a lot better.
the central irony of a tomato’s premise is so neat that it still makes me grin. a tomato is my second favourite game probably. its up there. so’s this
this game seems to spend a lot less time revealing to you what it is About so it has more time to stroke you with it. i thought a lot of the ‘moments’ were somehow more effective for feeling dramatically unearned? almost as if to say loneliness is so terrifying and love so precious that you cannot choose how to recieve it and who it belongs to and expect to hold on to it if you don’t hold on as tight as you fucking can
one thing that endears this thing to me is how achingly earnest it is, as i get older i appreciate earnesty a lot more
kaine is beautiful, everything she says makes me ache. this says nothing about me at all im a normal
Yeah, I am loving this game so far. I just got to the mansion, with its amusingly bad fixed camera angles and its goofy nods to Resident Evil. I love ambling around an awkward PS2-era survival horror haunted house where every time my characters encounter something spooky they go “waaagh!” like a toddler surprised by a jack-in-the-box. This is VIDEOGAMES!
This game still holds onto the new-media energy that video games had in the 90’s – the excitement of invention and discovery, pushing the boundaries of a new medium, willingness to experiment even when it might feel weird or silly. Disregarding logic and conventional good taste to stick a bunch of disparate parts together and make them just barely cohere. I’ve missed that in newer games.
Every single dumb side quest and camera angle change makes me smile inside. I am eating a good meal but my stomach never fills. This is probably my favourite game.
In the way it stretches against the abstractions that contain it, and in the way it gobbles up genres and spits them out to offer a series of bespoke emotional experiences - my ABDN bottom line review of Nier has always been "a jrpg from the year 2179"
I noticed a couple parallels (always need maps, grabbing bombs from a dispenser to break barricades, the prince’s got-an-item flourish), but I never connected the dots until I read your comment. Nier is totally a Zelda game!
oh yeah, as soon as i rolled out into the northern plains for the first time i was like oh word this is hyrule field let us thusly activate the appropriate neural cluster
of all zelda games this is definitely far and away my favourite one. i would love to see nier’s take on zelda’s ridiculous trading circuit quests
im curious to know if anyone else finds the pacing of the game as staccato as i do? the world and connective tissue feels very hangoutable and chill and easy to vibe in; by contrast all the Encounters are almost instantly climactic and breathless and hyper-urgent with barely any build-up. it was noticeable enough that i have to imagine this is intentional
Because I don’t have time to play games anymore I can only watch stuff these days but I still feel like automata missed the boat with its combat watching Replicant. Just the weight of the hits when you score a big hit and how the health bars go down in chunks give my brain the feel good sparks. Automata was just to smooth and while I’m probably the number 5 platinum apologist none of the big hits in that game felt that great and were relegated by strict cooldowns which feel less open to expression for the play to me.
Automata has alot of the Platinum action game toy box but in their proper games they were part of the path of mastery. Revengace was all about getting the perfect parry and learning the animations and timings to get fights done faster and cleaner. The reward for mastery was sometimes exclusive animations, audio/visual effects and quicker completion times. The nature of being a long form action RPG means less focus on that kind of experience but the tools being there to master brought no real rewards. Hardly felt like they even got fights done faster so it just felt like it took less brain power to just power through with combo strings and dodges.
OG Nier asks you to engage with its rules a lot more. Your spells are functional and do work. Use them then slash enemy bullets to recover magic faster to get back to the big hits. Managing a meter that reflects you actions just feels more like I’m engaged than just waiting for the game to say I can use a special again.
I also saw Taro tweet about Returnal and feel like its trying much harder at trying to bring arcade shoot em up signatures into a 3D space which is where I feel Automata failed the most in following up the original’s gameplay hook.
So I guess what I’m getting at is Automata was super smooth and broad in what it let you do but lacked the texture of the Original that I enjoyed.
idk, playing Automata is the experience, and feels like a continuation of their former work. Or rather, movement is the main means of traversal that stands out more than in, say, Vanquish.
Getting fluid movement right in Automata isn’t that easy to do when you switch around with different weapons, and it feels like they deliberately provided enough variance to fit different preferences and styles of playing - enough so to keep you busy for the time needed to reach the ending(s). Not sure whether that comes through when just watching it, but when comparing it to Vanquish, you can sense the difference between both, with Vanquish being the right kind of clunky (due to the suit, i suppose), whereas automata is looking effortless (and admittedly, probably too perfect for its own sake).
Still my favorite game of the PS4/XB3 era to move around in, and that includes Horizon 3 and 4(!).
I’m talking more just about the pure game part separated from the rest of the experience. I think it’s kinda telling that when you play 9S they give you the ability to play a different game to bypass the other game parts. I think the whole Automata experience is great but it feels more comfortable with letting the numbers do the driving instead of me as a player. And I felt this even playing as 2B and A2.
Automata’s gamefeel is indeed superb. I’m just a low level try hard that likes to feel challenged or pushed to do more and learn the hidden secrets to succeed.
sorry i edited my post in the mean time, which took a while… on tablet (at least) something’s amiss with typing ssometimes ddoubling bbeginning lletters, sth that drives me.ccrazy grmrbrlsfffffffhghghghggglllllrlrrrlrllllll
in short, i apologize for it looking like a stealth edit, because it was too damn slow for that.
The second full run of automata is too much, yes, absolutely.
The decision to retrieve your save at the end seems like a bad one at first, robbing the Lose/Lose quality in a game all about the persistence of memory AND YET!.. Playing what would by any other instance be a neat little DLC chapter the same way 15 nightmares is now crowbarred into this version, I like how the connective tissue between them is THESE ARE BOTH VIDEO GAMES! NONE OF THIS SHIT MATTERS! as Kaine sacrifices her OWN life to retrieve your own in a D<==>E ending loop that’s as simple as clicking restore file 80 hours in. Rather than deleting any evidence that you played the game to begin with, this game confronts you with it, never being able to attain a perfect file outside of a couple of external trophy markers letting you know you wasted your time.
y’all are tripping, it’s absolutely worth doing all the sidequests. some of the best writing in the game. complete contrast with nearly every other open world game where sidequests are completely rote generic mission templates. like, yes, all the sidequests basically amount to “gather x of y item” or “kill this sub boss”, but the stories themselves are often hilarious, heartbreaking, or contribute to greater mysteries of the game’s plot. none of them feel like padding because they build the world and the characters. if you like spending time with the four main characters, and are interested in the lore and backstory of the world, I can’t think of single one that isn’t worth completing.
I’m close to the end of my first playthrough and I dare say I might like the game better with brother nier when weighed in the balance, though I still miss papa nier a lot. the extent to which this game is a riff on ocarina of time (at times bordering on satire) is ~much~ clearer this way, and the character growth between eras is so much more pronounced. papa nier basically stays the same character after the time gap, except he’s kind of sometimes angrier. you really get the sense that brother nier has meaningfully matured and is kind of a sad, broken person, who still holds onto his ideals despite it all, and his story has more personality and pathos as a result. not that nier gestalt was lacking in pathos either.
I still wish they included papa nier in this version and I hope they release it as some kind of DLC though
