If I came away from my second playthrough of Automata with a stronger sense of what works about it, I'd say this third playthrough (and to clarify, I do mean playthrough in the sense of endings A to E, each time deleting my save file, on top of doing a healthy amount of side content in my third and latest playthrough) has been illuminating in what doesn't really work about Nier Automata. That being said, lemme start off with some new positive takeaways: I actually kinda like a lot of the side quests, the fact they contain both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards makes them feel like a welcome addition -- not all of them landed, but I think my favorite aspect with a few of them was you could get a special ambient music track that plays upon completion. It's cute! I also think the chip system is conceptually one of my favorite ways to customize characters in any game I've played, and it's a lot more engaging than the somewhat odd words system from Gestalt/Replicant. People have talked endlessly about the ludonarrative aspects of the system or whatever, so I won't get into that I just think it's cool as hell!

The chips themselves kinda fuckin' suck though and there really isn't a whole lot interesting they can do, like if Final Fantasy VII only had magic materia or something. By the end of the game you're basically a god if you're building your chip set correctly; spamming berserker mode with A2 is pretty easy when your chips don't let you die! While I'm a Drakengard 3 girl so having intoner mode with some tangible stakes is fucking awesome, there just isn't enough sauce to the gameplay and chips don't do a whole lot to alleviate that due to being boring as fuck in terms of effects, so you're kind of left choosing between busted ass chips or a more frustrating gameplay experience. It makes the shmup sections pretty toothless as well, which already feel especially tiring towards the end since literally nothing changes about them from the first hour all the way into the last.

But don't get me wrong, Nier Automata is still a pretty damn solid game, just in that Final Fantasy VIII/Twilight Princess sorta way where the script feels off at times and the gameplay is wonky or often tedious, but ultimately end up being pretty satisfying aesthetic experiences with several effective moments. The characters are kinda just a mixed bag, 2B had potential, but even with the metanarrative (and eventual in-universe confirmation? idfk the lore i hate lore) that she's a toned down Kainé-like, her best moments are often just her looking cool as hell in a cutscene where she's like cutting a giant robot in half or something, but even then it sometimes ends up feeling like a Disneyland cutscene version of an active gameplay mechanic in Metal Gear Rising. Which has value, don't get me wrong, she is definitely fucking cool, but as a character she's just kinda nothing outside of her lightly implied romantic interactions with 6O and her eventual familial (?) affection for 9S.

9S as the anti-Nier actually works better for me the more I play through this game. Probably one of the most common criticisms of the C&D plotline is that if 9S had just been given the reason why A2 killed 2B that the conflict would have been resolved, but the game itself directly subverts that assumption both when 9S is confronted with truth and still aims to murder A2 and in how it frames 9S's toxic relationship and possessiveness with 2B as bordering on obsessively violent. 9S doesn't respect the bodily autonomy of either A2 or 2B, which one could potentially interpret as a mirror of the average male gamer who might themselves be frustrated with the death of 2B and the loss of a figure of affection/lust. I think that's what it's going for? I like the whole "Shinji Ikari if he had his brain jacked into Reddit" dealie, but again you're either left with something thematically bare on the surface or a theme that assumes the audience to be something that may not really pertain to them. Which is fine honestly, I love throwing whiny incels under the bus as much as the next girl, and I think there's probably more to dig into in that regard, but at the same time Nier Automata can be a bit disappointingly surface level at times despite the implication that there's more going on, but whether due to rushed development or just out of some notion of simplifying the themes for a broader audience it sometimes leaves me more perplexed or patronized than entertained.

Anyways here's some more things that didn't work for me third time 'round that I don't really feel like expounding on too deeply: the children mass suicide scene feels awkward and unearned (though the Pascal's memory wipe aspect kinda works?), I'm increasingly not a fan of 2B's dodge since it's just a Happy Meal version of Bayonetta's Witch Time while also having a pretty unsatisfying animation on top of trivializing any incoming damage, and uh, pretty much anytime they try to do something with YoRHa and the Bunker it ends up being cringy or played way too straight? Like isn't the commander kind of a bad person? Idk man, it's just fuckin' weird! There are similar issues that pop in other Taro titles: some kinda unintentionally fucking bizarre cutscenes in DoD1 and the growth of Gestalt/Replicant's characters' relationships feel a bit rushed in the first half, but those two games have a lot more to make up for that imho.

The most glowing praise I can give Automata is that there's an almost EarthBoundian quality to how each line of dialogue means more than they say, yet the MOTHER series thrives on strong impressions to carry its emotional thrusts across gaps in characterization, which Automata can't quite manage. Like in EarthBound you know that Ness is brave to a fault, Paula is mature for her age and feels like a voice of strength and reason for the group, Jeff is a nerd who's out of his depths but is trying his best (also a softly implied romance with his best friend Tony), and Poo's a prince who everybody loves but has competency to justify the adoration he receives (and really the magic of EarthBound is somebody else might have a different interpretation of said characters, but that just goes to show how impressive it is that Itoi managed to do so much with so little). I don't really get that with every major character in Nier Automata despite them having substantially more dialogue; I couldn't really tell you any specific quality of 2B, 9S (in the first half), and the commander's characterizations. The standouts are probably 6O and Pascal (even if the latter can be a bit dull compared to Gestalt/Replicant's Emil), with 6O's relationship with 2B being particularly meaningful for both characters in a world where they don't have anybody else to lean on, which is kinda dampened by both of them, you know, dying. Square Enix has gotta stop burying their gays...

While I did find dollar store Kainé and Grimoire Weiss in the C&D playthrough pretty cute, A2 and Pod 042's banter feels like too little too late in a game whose moment-to-moment dialogue can feel notably dry compared to pretty much any other game in the series. It would prolly be less noticeable if 2B and 9S didn't often repeat the same kinda predictable lines about "but they are machines they have no feelings...", which ends up being particularly grating after you've just spent 3 hours doing side quests for robots who very obviously have feelings and desires and people they care about!! Overall the way Automata attempts to extend that theme of dehumanizing one's enemies from Gestalt/Replicant by directly confronting the characters with their enemy's inherent personhood is a mixed bag. Sometimes it's effective, and other times it can feel as if it's justifying the violence by portraying the machine's -- and by extension, YoHAa unit's -- personhood as inauthentic. But at the same time I can see how somebody else might interpret that as the creators not wanting to stand on a soapbox and instead opted for a more digestible version of the splotchy morality that the Drakengard series often goes for. I guess it just comes off to me, personally, as sometimes being intellectually incurious of the themes of morality and humanism that it's seemingly trying to tackle.

Automata is still undeniably a special game, but like its creative siblings it's def an imperfect experience. It'd probably be way better if playthrough B was condensed even further, or if the shmup sections were more varied, or any number of other things, but the older I get the less I get hung up on flaws in special games. Why deny ourselves of the parts that do work? There's this one side quest that you can access starting in playthrough A that involves running around a level you've already been to collecting objects that lack even a visual representation within the game engine. It's not particularly difficult and it's over pretty quickly, but it's the ending dialogue that stuck with me. I can't remember the exact words, and I think in this case it shouldn't matter because to me it's the thesis of Automata and something to consider that can enhance one's experience of any given piece of media: disregarding the objective state of a game or film or whatever, it's all happening inside our heads, an abstraction of an abstraction. In the end, it's up to us what to make of it.