45 hours.

Nier: Automata

It starts with a prologue and a monologue. A female character, 2B, wonders whether she will have the chance to kill her Gods for the suffering they make people (or, in this case, androids) endure. We fly through the sky in a mech suit and shoot enemies out of the air as our colleagues are downed one-by-one. We eventually land and meet a male support unit, 9S, who has, and will continue to, provide assistance to us as we play. Sometimes over comms, something directly alongside us.

Once you’ve completed the prologue - which is the section that we played as a demo, a part action game, part twin-stick shooter, part side-scroller, part SHMUP run through a machine factory ending with a fight against a giant boss and a suicide bombing - you’ll find yourself back in “The Bunker”, a space station orbiting the Earth, being rebooted. The support character, 9S, speaks to you, 2B, and says he needs to check your visual and audio output. Oh, and this process is being recorded for posterity. It’s basically a way to set your brightness and the levels of the voices in the games, but I thought it was a nice touch and the dialogue was kinda cute. I remember setting the brightness up too high, then dropping it down a couple of notches, then finding the right level. For the audio I put it all the way up to full, down one notch, then back up because that sounded about right. There’s a reason I remember this.

Anyway, in this game you are 2B, a combat android on a mission to kill machines and reclaim the Earth for humanity - an absent force that occasionally sends you messages while hiding out on the moon. As with all androids, EMOTIONS ARE PROHIBITED. I know this because 2B chastises 9S for things such as feeling happy or thinking something is fun. Another thing I know is that THE MACHINES ARE JUST MINDLESS MONSTERS AND NOTHING THEY SAY MEANS ANYTHING. I know this, because when 2B seems a bit unsettled by machines suddenly starting to talk about concepts of pain or fear while she slaughters them, 9S promptly sets her right and tells her to kill them all. They have no thoughts, you see - they’re not like humans, or androids for that matter.

So, imagine my surprise when I get to the games third boss - an opera inspired psycho-diva - and, upon killing her (via stabbing relentlessly while 9S “supports” me), 9S seems a bit lost and openly ponders that it seemed like she was alive. It was weird, and not in a good way. It was a piece of inconsistent character development and it stuck out like a sore thumb. It was a small blight in a solid opening few hours.

So, the game continues and there’s lots of Platinum style action, and twin-stick and SHMUP sections, and there’s side quests and it’s all rather fun. No single element is anything other than 7/10. There are better platinum fighting games, like Bayonetta, and there are better twin-stick shooters and, although it’s not my genre of choice, i’d be surprised if there weren’t better SHMUPs for those who enjoy bullet hell. But it’s a game that is more than the sum of its parts - no single element would stand on its own, aye, but together, along with a charming little story and an amazeballs soundtrack, the while package is elevated.

There’s also a pair of twin baddies, unsubtly named Adam and Eve, a village of pacifistic machines who want nothing better than to live in peace and barter, a whole load of side-quests and background characters, and an attack on a castle in order to get to a machine named the “Forest King”. There’s quite a lot going on, but nothing is laboured upon and so the whole game moves along at a decent pace. A character is introduced, seems very important, and then disappears. Certain characters hint at unresolved backgrounds, then don’t embellish upon it, and before you know it the game is finished. No major twists and turns, just a solid moderately philosophical action journey centred around the nature of existence and being. Basically, if you’ve seen any Japanese anime featuring machines wondering what it is to be alive, you’ve seen this. The game ends and it asks you to save, I have seen ending A. Sum total, probably about 16 hours - anorexic by JRPG standards. And that important character who disappeared? She never came back. Once again, weird. Did I miss something?

At the end of the credits there’s a message from Square Enix. You have completed the game, well done, thanks for playing, but there’s more, play NG+, blah blah.
I had heard that Nier had a different way of doing NG+ to most games - this wasn’t gonna be just an identical run-through with higher level enemies. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to dive right back in and do it all over again that quickly, but I thought I’d have a look and see if I could spot anything.

There’s no opening monologue from 2B now. Instead we see a distraught machine shaking the dead body of a larger machine it is calling brother. We control it and try to find some oil for our brother. Then the perspective shifts again and we see the flyers from the prologue flying over us, and we are 9S. Now we need to take down the air defence systems by hacking into them. The main gameplay is different now. We still shoot and stab things, aye, but we can also hack them, and the whole screen transitions into a version of asteroids where the asteroids can strike back - upon completion of a hack the screen transitions back into traditional gameplay.

The prologue is completed and now I have to reboot 2B. 9S tells her to check her visual and audio levels and that this process is recorded for posterity. I watch as 2B sets the brightness up too high, then drops it down a couple of notches, then finds the right level. For the audio she puts it all the way up to full, down one notch, then back up because that sounds about right.

At that third boss, 2B runs around stabbing the diva, while I have to hack into her. But when I do I hear her thoughts and flashes of her past. Her vanity and lack of self-esteem, her quest for beauty, and the way it corrupted her. We kill her and 9S says out loud that it’s almost as if the machines are really alive. I remember that moment from 20 hours and 1 play through ago and I can’t stifle a surprised laugh.

Everything is different now. Sometimes I’m replaying story beats from the path to ending A , sometimes I’m off doing things that 9S did when he left 2B during the first playthough. I get to the end again, and defeat the boss again, except this time I understand vastly more than I had. A simple story that moved along like a train has become something complex and multi-layered. Stories flesh out, characters make sense, and nobody has access to all the information available except, perhaps, the player.

I get Ending B. The credits roll again, and I wonder what is going to happen for the third run. Will it be the same again? Will there be a new character? No and Yes, in that order. The culmination of that storyline, though, is switching between 2 characters to fight 2 bosses simultaneously across a variety of playstyles. It was absolutely mad and my heart was racing. The third run diverges massively, taking the player past the original storyline into another act and does a thing that i’ve never seen a game do before which, despite me saying there are some things i would spoil, I really can’t spoil.

And that’s kind of the problem. When you get ending A you have “completed” the game, but NG isn’t NG, it’s the first disc of a PSOne-era JRPG. You wouldn’t say you've completed the game just because you’ve done the first disc, or that you’ve finished watching a TV show because you got to the end of the first season. And yet I can imagine a lot of people walking away once they complete the game purely because of the semantics of the word “ending”. This is not a “you need to play it right” argument - it’s me saying the story and game isn’t over until it’s actually over. NG++ is Act 3 of the story, and finally takes the game to about 40-50 hours in length. It’s a commitment, and one that I’m not sure everyone will have the patience for, but it’s absolutely worth it. Even if it does get very, very, very, very, very fucking bleak.

A solid game made great by exciting gameplay and a genuinely mind-blowing multi-layered story that continues long after the credits roll for the first time. The best video game OST i can think of outside of FFVII, and a style of writing and story delivery i’ve not yet experienced in all my many years of playing games. Do yourself a favour and get it, if you have the time, money and inclination. Then play it all the way to the end.