I'll start by saying I love Automata, truthfully; NieR happens to be one of my favorite franchises and one that I'm really, really well versed and invested in the lore of. Those games have made me laugh, cry and suffer with the characters more times than I can say, and that's possibly even more the case with Automata. This port, however, was absolute hot garbage; it was done dirty and needed absolutely to be done better for the fans of the series who shelled out more money for a game they'd potentially purchased one or more times. That said, I'll itemize why this port was terrible:
-The graphical bugs: The lighting was awful and jumpy, and the textures themselves looked muddied like they'd taken them into photoshop and failed to correctly resize them. Not to mention that some of the areas and enemies straight up didn't load in right and that the visual occlusion seemed to be in that sweet spot of entirely breaking immersion by loading and deloading things within your range of view.
-If the graphics weren't bad enough, I had multiple functional errors as well, including when button prompts simply didn't load in, quests were bugged and repeated themselves upon using the chapter select. That, or enemies that were supposed to be in certain areas, or logged in the Unit Data, just weren't, leaving me with gaps in my ability to even 100% the game like I was intending to.
-Then lets talk about the weird spawn rates: I literally got both Pod B and the Iron Pipe the first go when finishing in the areas that they were in. I'd have dismissed it if it were just one of those things, but there's no way that happened because algorithmically that's like finding a unicorn standing on a four-leaf clover in the middle of a patch of grass that looks like a right-side-up horseshoe. And yes, you'd think I'd be happy about this but how can I be? This is one of my favorite games and struggling to get those things is part of the experience and especially in the Flooded City where you're contending with a large body of water that there's a very low rate of getting what you're fishing for.
-Another big issue is the enemy level scaling which seems to affect a very small subset of enemies, making the game tremendously harder in those areas and outright unbalanced. Why are the fliers in Route B your level? Or during the boss fight in the Flooded City? What's the point of that? There is none because Platinum rushed this out the door with checking those things over thoroughly.
-Finally, there's the issue of sanitization; Nintendo, Square Enix, whoever decided it was a good idea to sanitize some of the dialogue unnecessarily to take out instances of "potty" language. Yet, what they failed to realize is that's part of the plot and those lines are more than naughty-isms for the sake of it. In 9S's part, it's to convey something deeply emotional that he doesn't have the wherewithal to process because he's never had the ability to express those emotions in a positive manner. Removing that is undercutting the story in the same way they did with NieR: Gestalt, and is simply not a good look. Then there's the weird case of taking out the launching riser Pod animation for long jumps and replacing it with that lackluster spin animation instead for some reason. Why did they do that? I certainly couldn't tell you. It's just arbitrary entirely.
Now, there's probably more I've forgotten to mention, but at the end of the day it comes down to this: The End of YoRHa Edition was a blatant cash grab. It introduced very little into the game, weaseled money out of our pockets for new costumes and gave us less quality overall. That's why I gave this game a three star rating, one of my favorite games mind you, because it did it dirty in every way possible and I'm salty over that. In my eyes, maybe not others', NieR: Automata was a masterpiece in more ways than one and this just ruined those masterful parts of it by rushing out a clearly underdeveloped port. The story, of course, is great and some of the new costumes are cool, and that's why I gave it three stars, but beyond that it's completely not worth it to buy.
So, my verdict is this: If you don't have anything else to play it on and want to experience the gist of NieR: Automata, buy this version. If you can play it any other way though, do yourself a favor and get it on that other console, preferably a PS console because the other ports I've seen have had some issues too.
-The graphical bugs: The lighting was awful and jumpy, and the textures themselves looked muddied like they'd taken them into photoshop and failed to correctly resize them. Not to mention that some of the areas and enemies straight up didn't load in right and that the visual occlusion seemed to be in that sweet spot of entirely breaking immersion by loading and deloading things within your range of view.
-If the graphics weren't bad enough, I had multiple functional errors as well, including when button prompts simply didn't load in, quests were bugged and repeated themselves upon using the chapter select. That, or enemies that were supposed to be in certain areas, or logged in the Unit Data, just weren't, leaving me with gaps in my ability to even 100% the game like I was intending to.
-Then lets talk about the weird spawn rates: I literally got both Pod B and the Iron Pipe the first go when finishing in the areas that they were in. I'd have dismissed it if it were just one of those things, but there's no way that happened because algorithmically that's like finding a unicorn standing on a four-leaf clover in the middle of a patch of grass that looks like a right-side-up horseshoe. And yes, you'd think I'd be happy about this but how can I be? This is one of my favorite games and struggling to get those things is part of the experience and especially in the Flooded City where you're contending with a large body of water that there's a very low rate of getting what you're fishing for.
-Another big issue is the enemy level scaling which seems to affect a very small subset of enemies, making the game tremendously harder in those areas and outright unbalanced. Why are the fliers in Route B your level? Or during the boss fight in the Flooded City? What's the point of that? There is none because Platinum rushed this out the door with checking those things over thoroughly.
-Finally, there's the issue of sanitization; Nintendo, Square Enix, whoever decided it was a good idea to sanitize some of the dialogue unnecessarily to take out instances of "potty" language. Yet, what they failed to realize is that's part of the plot and those lines are more than naughty-isms for the sake of it. In 9S's part, it's to convey something deeply emotional that he doesn't have the wherewithal to process because he's never had the ability to express those emotions in a positive manner. Removing that is undercutting the story in the same way they did with NieR: Gestalt, and is simply not a good look. Then there's the weird case of taking out the launching riser Pod animation for long jumps and replacing it with that lackluster spin animation instead for some reason. Why did they do that? I certainly couldn't tell you. It's just arbitrary entirely.
Now, there's probably more I've forgotten to mention, but at the end of the day it comes down to this: The End of YoRHa Edition was a blatant cash grab. It introduced very little into the game, weaseled money out of our pockets for new costumes and gave us less quality overall. That's why I gave this game a three star rating, one of my favorite games mind you, because it did it dirty in every way possible and I'm salty over that. In my eyes, maybe not others', NieR: Automata was a masterpiece in more ways than one and this just ruined those masterful parts of it by rushing out a clearly underdeveloped port. The story, of course, is great and some of the new costumes are cool, and that's why I gave it three stars, but beyond that it's completely not worth it to buy.
So, my verdict is this: If you don't have anything else to play it on and want to experience the gist of NieR: Automata, buy this version. If you can play it any other way though, do yourself a favor and get it on that other console, preferably a PS console because the other ports I've seen have had some issues too.