I was feeling bad about tweeting nonstop about videogames instead of getting work done on my own videogame

Tried to work today but I seem to be getting sick :/

Starting Nier Automata instead I guess

mute this thread if you don't want to hear me tweeting about videogames some more I guess

really glad I waited to play this until I'd played the first one

the music for the buzzsaw miniboss five minutes in is an orchestral version of Devola's song from the first game and aaaaaaaaaaaa

dude Platinum is *unbeliveably* good at character controllers holy crap

I'm literally just running around a room playing with the dodge and jump and run animations

Everything is so fast and responsive and stylish; they made a LEDGE GRAB animation feel good how on EARTH

"Emotions are prohibited"

YEAH UH I VERY MUCH DOUBT THAT YOKO TARO

solved the "floating scabbards" problem by just literally giving you hovering swords

kinda disappointed Automata doesn't cold-open with Laura Bailey shouting obscenities tbh

maaaaan even just the basic attack animations are absurdly good

"yeah the minimap kinda sucks" is a canon piece of lore in this game I love it

i felt a feel

So the chip system is literally the ability system from kingdoms hearts 1-2 just with way more options

I'm kind of amazed it took this long for games to start copying that because it's probably the best approach to action-RPG character progression ever designed?

Also I love how Platinum at this point have a stable of really good combat mechanics that they can just sprinkle across all their games like seasoning

Automata has Dodge Offset and the directional counter move from Bayonetta because, like, why would it NOT

Also enemies do the Platinum red flash thing to telegraph attacks, except only the machines do it. When you're fighting anything that *doesn't have giant glowing red eyes* there's no flash and you have to actually look for tells

oh cool I know what BECOME AS GODS means now

Finished "ending" A. Got there much faster than I was expecting but also there are about a billion unresolved plot threads at this point... def interested in how this game handles its structure in comparison to the first one

Nier 1's additional routes all start like 2/3 of the way through, so getting the first ending takes normal videogame length and then the rest of it goes pretty quickly

Automata first part is much shorter but the second route loops back to the very beginning

This is interesting

This might get addressed later in the actual plot, but the boot screen has an MP gauge, which suggests the androids run on magic. This... makes perfect sense as an extension of the first game's setting, and is EXTREMELY COOL

Like part of Nier's premise was that magic was *introduced* to Earth in 2003, and thus the preexisting military-industrial complex just scienced the heck out of it, so instead of wizards and spells we got bigger guns and weirder computers and horrifying human experiments

it's really cool okay

Automata's been out for over a year; if you're making a game and haven't added an Explode Pants button what are you even doing

Finished route B aaaaaaaaaa

ᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃᵃ

Automata shares the first game's weird problem where you get too overleveled and start blowing through fights so fast you miss dialogue

It does not appear to be balanced for the fact that I've been doing basically every side quest lol

I bumped the difficulty up to Hard and WOW IT'S HARD NOW I JUST REMEMBERED PLATINUM MADE THIS

Yeah going from normal to hard appears to apply roughly a 10x boost to enemy damage lmao

also you can't use lock-on anymore so getting consistent DPS with the pod requires aiming manually, which means constantly switching from buttons to right stick

also finished C aaaaaaaaa

I forget who it was but somebody a while back was tweeting about how "robots being sad" is the most powerful aesthetic possible, and like... yep

Finished D+E

I lack Takes at this time. Too many plot emotions; got sufficiently invested in the writing that I stopped analyzing anything from a game-design standpoint like... 20 hours ago

just... wow

that is an extremely good videogame

I need to rewind twitter by like a year and a half so I can watch the explosion of fanart without fear of spoilers

One thought: Automata's plot was actually way more straightforward than the first game? Like there are lots of dramatic twists and revelations but they're all readily comprehensible

Nier had a whole layer of "what's REALLY going on" that was left up to the player to figure out

I dunno how intentional this is but I feel like Automata's "This cannot continue" functions as a rebuttal of Popola's "No one stops" line from Nier. They're both pretty central to the themes of their respective games...

SPOILERS FOR BOTH NIERS AHEAD:

Like Nier is a *tragedy,* in the literary sense; everything's too far gone to change course and everyone proceeds inexorably to their doom bc No One Stops, bc no one possibly COULD stop

SPOILERS CONT'D

Automata is the still the same spiral of violence, 8000 years later, bc everything humanity touches is doomed to repeat our same mistakes forever

but critically it ends with... not *hope* exactly, but a conscious rejection of that fate

SPOILERS CONT'D

The machines' "This cannot continue" and the pods' (and arguably player's) "I cannot accept this resolution" are the same realization

The androids (the most human-like group) never quite reach that conclusion, but the ending is that they're given a second chance

NIER SPOILERS STILL:

It's good

I'm always a bit bothered that stories about existential horror can never reach a stronger conclusion than "we have to hold on because all we have is each other," but I mean... it's not like any human actually HAS a good answer for those questions

STILL SPOILING NIER:

I thought the 4th-wall stuff in E felt kinda misplaced, but on reflection... I think it plays into the idea of consciously rejecting humanity's failures. Everyone has to fight together to defy the ending and defeat the authors to save the characters you love

END SPOILERS

yeah it's v good

probably gonna be thinking about this for a long time

helps that the actual videogame gameplay stuff is really solid and interacts with the philosophical themes in a lot of cool ways