The Dark Souls Of: Prepare to Cry Edition -And More Genre Switches- By Camellia
Well uh, that happened. Anyways, welcome to open world story heavy game where you play as your new video game waifu and her boytoy/twink companion. You play as a giant fuck off mech-suit shooting robots out of the sky, as a badass android with two honking massive swords, as a black triangle in a sepia bathed world. A 2D sidescroller, A 3D open world adventure, A top down shmup, a… Yeah, I don’t think we can get many more genre switches, sorry Camellia.
So yeah, 2B and 9S are YoRHa androids, a specialised team of combat androids who are designed to attack the alien’s robot forces on Earth while humanity waits from their bases on the moon for safety so that they can return to Earth once more. While I joke about the game being genre anarchy, most of the time you’re going to be either on foot or in a flight suit, and out of those it’s going to be majority on foot.
In a flight suit, you can move around the screen like in a normal shmup, shooting either upwards, or aiming with the stick depending on the situation, in order to navigate to your next objective or destroy giant Goliath Class machines. On foot, you play as 2B, a battle class android wielding a pair of swords. You have a light and heavy attack, as well as a dodge roll and your trusty Pod, who is both a combat machine gun and also a communication and assistant tool. You switch between these two modes as the story demands it.
NieR:Automata is super story heavy, like, there are so many details in the story that the game expects you to play it multiple times, and rewards you for doing so. Your second, and third, and forth runs all allow you to carry your levels and chips with you, and after completing all the main plot points, you recieve the ability to jump around through the different chapters of the story to clean up side quests and explore for more lore about the world. I shaln’t spoil the story as it is surprisingly moving, which is a surprise to my stoic ass.
This game comes with accessability settings but implements them in a slightly lacking way. You start with a set of “Auto” chips, but with the exception of “Auto Use Items”, you can’t equip them unless you’re on easy difficulty. While I’d be upset at them being chips instead of settings, all the “Auto” accessability chips only ever cost 1 unit of memory to equip, and you get 128 units in total, besides, if you need more room in your build, you can just take out “Damage Numbers” or “Enemy Health Bars” to make room.
On the other hand for accessibility, this game DOES NOT HAVE AUTOSAVE and it will make that fact very clear at every opportunity early on. It’s a particularly annoying quirk, especially when death means either doing a souls style corpse run or losing progress. You can only save at certain areas of the map, and only after unlocking the save stations there. There is a UI chip you can add to your build that gives you a pop-up whenever saving is possible, but after a while you just end up getting used to where those locations are. All in all not my favourite mechanic.
I played this game on the Steam Deck, and it ran like a charm, but my recommendation is to bind the padels to the shoulder buttons. I bound L4 and R4 to L and R, and L5 and R5 to L and R but as toggles instead of holds. In most combat, you’re going to want to hold the pod fire button, but as pod fire is on R and dodge is on RT, it makes it difficult for me to press both, hence moving the pod fire button to L4. It wasn’t until towards the end of my first run that I realised I could bind L5 to be a toggle button and then I started using that mostly.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/524220 £29.99
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/nier-automata-game-of-the-yorha-edition £29.99
Switch: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-games/NieR-Automata-The-End-of-YoRHa-Edition-2232461.html £34.99
Can I just go on a real quick tangent about the music in this game because good grief it’s so fucking gooooooooooood!!!! I’ve had music from this game stuck in my head ever since playing it, and it just has not stopped at all, even though I’ve not played for a couple weeks right now, heck even as I’m writing this I have the sombre tunes of the fairground rattling around in my head, and the fact that every song has a chiptune version that the game seamlessly switches to while hacking, I love it so much, Squeenix, Platinum, give me a damn album to buy on steam please I beg you. Hell the music and sound design in this game is so good that you really feel when it’s not there, that silence is deafening, the fact the game has the audacity to leave me with nothing but it’s incredibly heavy plot points and my own thoughts and emotions is just devilish, hats off to the devs for that.
Leave a Reply