Imagine an opening scene of high-tech jets flying into your field of view. A mission has been assigned to you — take down the Goliath (a giant robot). You gain control of a flight unit, a high-tech jet. Your friends in the other flight units are being shot down one-by-one from a gigantic laser. You can’t stop it from happening. You are fighting alone, against a creature you are not able to take down by yourself. What will happen next?

NieR: Automata is an action role-playing game (ARPG) in which players take the role of combat androids from the YoRHa units across an open world. Combat is hack and slash action-based, with the player fighting enemies in real-time in a variety of game environments.

I find music to be an overpowering part of a game, as well as sound design. I’ve found many games to have good music, but after hearing the same few songs over and over, I tend to feel more irritated by it rather than enjoying it. NieR: Automata — which is a sequel to the NieR series — shows a great span of amazing songs that I never get tired of. To explain why this is so important, I’ve played the game with almost 100% completion; which is stated to take about 61 1⁄2 hours to do — an average play through is 21 hours. Not once did I feel upset by hearing boss battle music restart over 100 times, because I refused to take the easy way out by turning on the AI function.

Speaking of the AI function, it’s a feature that allows you to switch from physically pushing buttons to attack, to the AI in the game attacking for you. Turning AI on is a great way to play without much worry of truly being good at fast-paced attacking (which is needed to get anywhere in the game). Being able to admire the game more without worrying about dying every two seconds is surprising to me because not all games offer this choice. The game is otherwise very skill-based to be able to progress how intended. I played this game for the challenge it brought and the story.

The story is vast with many small endings throughout the game with an overall, final ending. The story takes on many details that aren’t always so obvious — better described as hidden in plain sight. The scenery is vastly different with each divided area of the world. All locations bring a different feeling; whether that feeling is the fear of death looming in the next room, or an enchanted dream that has
come to life.

Seeing the characters react to one another and letting you build up a very clear description of their personalities allow you to see how they might really be feeling about a situation. There is also a great amount of detail within the characters alone. The main characters that you play as and follow you everywhere you go throughout the story are 2B and 9S, who are androids. Androids are a race of sentient robots. The androids are assigned Pods, and Pods are tactical support units that help with missions. Both 2B and 9S have their own pods named, Pod 042 and Pod 153.

I find the number of details to this game to be uncountable. Whether the details are about the history of its world or the past games, they have been placed in perfect spots around the playable world; just waiting for the player to find, and to help fill in on parts of the story that were mentioned in previous games of the NieR series.

Now, I’m not going to go in-depth about the words can't describe how outstanding they look and are to play. I always feel a sense of joy by simply hitting the right counterattacks in order to create a perfect knockback or kill. When fighting the enemy — commonly, robots — that have invaded the Earth’s surface, you have to learn how certain types of robots attack. They were built with different kinds of bodies and weapons, so learning to avoid getting hit is key to continuing the story.

NieR: Automata is my favorite game. Everything in this game has had so much dedication and creativity put into it by the developers. This game has represented the NieR timeline greatly, even with it being something far from the original games. The stories meet up nicely with some loose ends left for the players to contemplate what happened between the stories. I heavily recommend playing NieR and NieR Replicant, before NieR: Automata to get the previous story, and to get a better understanding of this review.