Do you ever finish a game and just go “wow“?
Let me introduce you to Nier Automata, a game that is practically begging for you to underestimate it. I’m gonna really try to weigh my words in fear of not doing Nier Automata the justice it deserves, but this is one of those games that breaks all conventions we know of as players, to challenge us, to make us think, but most of all to make us feel.
I cannot understate how important it is go into this blind and experience this for yourself and through your own gameplay. Chock full of meta moments and delightfully freaky 4th wall breaks, Nier Automata takes full advantage of the agency of the player to put you into what may seem as a banal JRPG story: flashy main character, over the top action and combat, anime robots etc.. But it quickly flips these expectations on their heads over the course of the game to give the player progressive glimpses of it’s true form: a piece of art, philosophical and thematically charged in nature, detached and unlike anything else you may have played before.
With no punches held, Nier Automata transcends the gaming medium with constant genre switches from bullet hell to platformer to shooter to fighter (and so much more you probably wouldn’t believe), a masterclass in storytelling that really messes with your own emotions and, dare I say, some of the greatest level design and soundtrack work ever put to code. How insane is that.
I could write 3 more paragraphs and the truth is I wouldn’t even scratch the surface. There’s so much to unpack and replay and digest that I feel like this is a game I will play over and over again for a long time. But for a first experience? Nier Automata touched me in a powerful way, and left a unique imprint on me I don’t think a lot of games would be able to hold a candle too. Even now, a full day after I beat it, I find it quite hard to define all the things I liked so much about this game. It’s an elusive package that hides its true intentions so well and really feels more and more like a fever dream as you unpack this surreal and bizarre narrative.
If I were to put it shortly, Nier Automata is a masterful contradiction. It’s grand and epic but also quite and intimate, beautiful at times but just as much tragic, sad and somber but with just enough optimism to peer through the clouds. This game is incomparable and a monument to what can be achieved through art and humanity, utilizing every mechanic, concept, tool and pre established gimmick to enforce it’s incredible narrative and deeper messages from the second you boot up the game.
Never too corny or in your face, there’s a genuine moral element to the game which attempts to digest and exemplify philosophy and great life questions in almost bite sized, gameplay portions. From Nietzsche, Engels to Simone de Beauvoir and even Jean Paul Sartre, it’s an effective and admirable attempt to deepen the core messages and blur the lines of fiction and reality with questions and feelings that would be so easily justified in both settings.
Meaning? Identity? Purpose? These are all existential questions you never really get an explicit answer too. Life questions defining your existence and your sense of self, so easily defined by the good, the bad, and everything in between. And though the game may not seem like the most hopeful approach to these unanswerable meditations, through it’s constant repetition, depressing enemies and bizarre world, it uses that aforementioned perfect contradiction to break the boundary between the game and the player, to give you something real. Something so real it becomes hard to figure out if it’s your own reflection through the game or an odd message left behind. And, for old time’s sake, it does so with one last great contradiction.
"Everything that lives is designed to end. They are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. However, life is all about the struggle within this cycle. That is what 'we' believe."
A better future is always possible. Glory to mankind.
Let me introduce you to Nier Automata, a game that is practically begging for you to underestimate it. I’m gonna really try to weigh my words in fear of not doing Nier Automata the justice it deserves, but this is one of those games that breaks all conventions we know of as players, to challenge us, to make us think, but most of all to make us feel.
I cannot understate how important it is go into this blind and experience this for yourself and through your own gameplay. Chock full of meta moments and delightfully freaky 4th wall breaks, Nier Automata takes full advantage of the agency of the player to put you into what may seem as a banal JRPG story: flashy main character, over the top action and combat, anime robots etc.. But it quickly flips these expectations on their heads over the course of the game to give the player progressive glimpses of it’s true form: a piece of art, philosophical and thematically charged in nature, detached and unlike anything else you may have played before.
With no punches held, Nier Automata transcends the gaming medium with constant genre switches from bullet hell to platformer to shooter to fighter (and so much more you probably wouldn’t believe), a masterclass in storytelling that really messes with your own emotions and, dare I say, some of the greatest level design and soundtrack work ever put to code. How insane is that.
I could write 3 more paragraphs and the truth is I wouldn’t even scratch the surface. There’s so much to unpack and replay and digest that I feel like this is a game I will play over and over again for a long time. But for a first experience? Nier Automata touched me in a powerful way, and left a unique imprint on me I don’t think a lot of games would be able to hold a candle too. Even now, a full day after I beat it, I find it quite hard to define all the things I liked so much about this game. It’s an elusive package that hides its true intentions so well and really feels more and more like a fever dream as you unpack this surreal and bizarre narrative.
If I were to put it shortly, Nier Automata is a masterful contradiction. It’s grand and epic but also quite and intimate, beautiful at times but just as much tragic, sad and somber but with just enough optimism to peer through the clouds. This game is incomparable and a monument to what can be achieved through art and humanity, utilizing every mechanic, concept, tool and pre established gimmick to enforce it’s incredible narrative and deeper messages from the second you boot up the game.
Never too corny or in your face, there’s a genuine moral element to the game which attempts to digest and exemplify philosophy and great life questions in almost bite sized, gameplay portions. From Nietzsche, Engels to Simone de Beauvoir and even Jean Paul Sartre, it’s an effective and admirable attempt to deepen the core messages and blur the lines of fiction and reality with questions and feelings that would be so easily justified in both settings.
Meaning? Identity? Purpose? These are all existential questions you never really get an explicit answer too. Life questions defining your existence and your sense of self, so easily defined by the good, the bad, and everything in between. And though the game may not seem like the most hopeful approach to these unanswerable meditations, through it’s constant repetition, depressing enemies and bizarre world, it uses that aforementioned perfect contradiction to break the boundary between the game and the player, to give you something real. Something so real it becomes hard to figure out if it’s your own reflection through the game or an odd message left behind. And, for old time’s sake, it does so with one last great contradiction.
"Everything that lives is designed to end. They are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. However, life is all about the struggle within this cycle. That is what 'we' believe."
A better future is always possible. Glory to mankind.