I 100% mean it when I say Nier Automata changed my perspective on what video games and storytelling can be. I came into it expecting an average philosophical cyberpunk thinkpiece, which I am admittedly a huge sucker for if David Cage isn't the one behind it, but I came out of it thoroughly satisfied and a little traumatized. Now, I'm going to avoid any and all spoilers, and instead dispel some misconceptions a lot of people have about this game in the hopes of encouraging you to buy this masterpiece yourself:

"It relies too much on fanservice"
No. The fanservice is a completely optional experience. Blame the horny redditors for that one. Yoko Taro didn't help much either. And besides, A2 is where it's REALLY at in that department.

"It's pretentious"
This one I have to laugh at. You're going to tell me with a straight face that a man wearing his own mascot character on his head is AT ALL capable of being pretentious? That's actually hilarious.

"It's really not that deep"
Okay, this isn't NECESSARILY a misconception. Nier Automata actually has pretty simple themes. Themes of anti-nihilism, grief, and finding meaning in the small things in life. It's all pretty upfront about that stuff. Yoko Taro just likes to tell stories through emotions and lets you piece together what the message is. Any critical plot details are just there to provide context and worldbuilding. It's just one of his trademarks. So, yeah, no fucking shit. It really isn't that deep. If you state that as a criticism you're either a contrarian who would prefer if this game was about ham-fisted racism/Holocaust allegories all while Yoko Taro tries to deflect any and all such analysis, or you spent too much time staring at 2B's ass and hypocritically complaining about the tasteless fanservice.

Here's some ACTUAL criticism of Nier Automata:
- A lot of the sidequests are overly tedious, sometimes on purpose
- The hard/very hard difficulty settings are seemingly purely designed to punish you
- A surprising amount of the really hard-hitting stuff is optional and can be easily missed
- The platforming is more complex than it lets on and can be a bit counterintuitive
And lastly:
- The PC version is rife with texture and gameplay issues unless you have a military-grade computer

Well, that's about all I have to say. I've stayed up too late already. Fuckin go play it.

NieR Replicant is a game about found family, about not fitting into the world around you but finding people who love you regardless, who make you stronger and as a result more able to love yourself, or at least bear yourself. It's a game is about family, and community. It's about what makes someone human, and where the line lies with regards to personhood. About whether lying is worth it to save people pain, if such lies are even capable of doing so. NieR Replicant is a game doused in moral ambiguity.

It's also a game that is deeply about the feeling of loss. The kind of loss that drives you on through the harshest opposition, that makes you reckless, or that causes you to lose all sight of what is going on around you. The kind of loss that leads to you not returning home for as long as you can because you can't cope with the idea of seeing that empty bed again, the kind that leaves the landscape feeling deeply scarred for what is no longer there. The kind of gut-wrenching loss such that you can't bring yourself to repair the massive hole wrought upon your ceiling, even years later, because doing so would feel almost disrespectful to the fallen, because you can't bring yourself to accept that sometimes healing and letting go have to come hand-in-hand.

On a more subtle level, I can't help but feel that NieR Replicant is also a game about games, about the potential for the medium, about narrative, about iteration and the very concept of canon (or, how fickle canon is). The extent to which Replicant dives headlong into as many genres as it can is genuinely thrilling, with the introduction of the visual novel sections in the Forest of Myth being particularly startling, gorgeous and moving includes.

The biggest asset of the game however, beyond how moving it frequently is, beyond its earnestness, beyond this exuberant love of genre, is absolutely its cast. Kainé and Emil stand as two of the most deeply realised characters I've seen in any game, but even beyond this the cast at large has so many lovable characters, even many of the relatively minor ones, which is why even many of the game's smaller emotional beats still ring true and leave such an impact.

I will say that for all this NieR Replicant is a very imperfect, even downright frustrating, game sometimes. The story is honestly just kind of a mess in some regards, many of the sub-quests and even parts of the main quest feature gross amounts of being sent from Place A to Place B only to have the person there send you back to Place A where someone else sends you back to Place B again, and the structure of the extra routes/endings is very repetitive with Route C descending into a tedious grind that saps all but the very best moments in the bulk of this route of their emotional impact.

And yet whilst these flaws meant that it's hard for me to personally place Replicant alongside Automata, I find myself loving the game an awful lot. Replicant is a game of intense artistic ambition and of relentless heart, and so even though the low-points had me wishing that the late-game was even slightly more streamlined it's hard not to leave the experience feeling well-nourished.