Nier

Id probably spoiler tag all that since the actual spoiler is easy to infer from what you wrote.

EDIT: Some of the music has been ripped to YT. Clean version of the opera singer battle theme is litttttttttt

edited 23rd Feb '17 6:19:10 PM by Draghinazzo

I need a playlist of all the hacking chiptunes STAT.

Some impressions I've gotten from visiting GAF and other places:

- Apparently branches C and D are like the original Nier and change a lot of the context/perspective of the story. A lot of people didn't play the original and seem to be complaining about being unsatisfied, when they didn't get all the endings :p

- Instead of being a really personal character-driven feelsy story, Nier Automata is apparently more of a subdued, atmospheric philosophical thinkpiece, and a good one (someone compared it to Paradise Lost). That's real interesting and honestly that was sort of what I was expecting from this game.

- 9S apparently plays completely differently from 2B.

- Listening to the OST myself it's good, maybe people won't like it as much as the first game's but it's at least on par with D3 and in my opinion better.

- The game apparently has some performance issues when not on the PS 4 pro. I'm hearing stuff about framerate dips, and some poor performance when in the bigger areas.

- Apparently the 70% RPG and 30% combat ratio was correct but most people seem to like it. This isn't that far removed from the intent of the original Nie R so frankly I'm fine with it.

edited 23rd Feb '17 6:56:54 PM by Draghinazzo

9S fills a 1/3 of his combat with Hacking Minigames. Hacking minigames everywhere!

Part of his job.

Also besides the main confirmed endings we have a bunch of bad ends with a little text before the credits roll super fast and such. Enough to fill the entire alphabet to Z. [F] ending is missing however,leading people wondering where it is

edited 23rd Feb '17 7:01:35 PM by OmegaRadiance

That's hilarious.

Also apparently the opera boss's name is Beauvoir. Apparently she shares that name with a famous french feminist existentialist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir. Given that the other bosses are also named after philosophers/intellectuals I'm inclined to think it isn't a coincidence.

I Knew It!. As soon as I saw the other bots with names like Engels and Hegel and Pascal, I figured they'd give the most overtly female one Beauvoir since she's the only woman to make it into the list of famous modern moral philosophers.

Wait, the first game deleted your save data? Can anyone explain why it did that? Also, I hope it only deletes the file you last saved on and not ALL of it. Otherwise, I might have to see about backing up a save externally if I want to see all endings and variants.

As far as the first game is concerned, it isn't really what you think it is. It's actually brilliant, and I'll explain. The following is only spoilers for the first game btw, nothing on Automata here.

The gist of it is one of the main characters is going to turn into a mindless monster, and you have two choices: kill her to preserve her humanity and end her suffering (this gives you ending C), or you can choose to make a pact with someone in order to save her (which is Ending D).

But there's a catch: you have to forfeit your own existence. You will cease to be and nobody will have any memories of you. And so to reinforce that via Gameplay and Story Integration, you have to delete all your save data to save her, which is the proof of your existence as the player. You, the player, are basically being asked to make an actual, TANGIBLE sacrifice. IMHO it's genius.

The game explicitly tells you what's going to happen and asks you multiple times. It's entirely your choice to do it. You also will have basically 100%'d the game at that point, since it's the last ending of the game so erasing all the data only matters in the sense that all the proof of your hard work and playtime will vanish, but you'll have seen all the content in the game. After you do it you also can't create a file with the same name you used before.

I don't know if Automata does that since I'm only looking up impressions and non-major spoilers.

edited 23rd Feb '17 7:57:32 PM by Draghinazzo

PM me if you wnt answers. I'm trying really hard here to keep the spoilers to myself and my fellow degenerates who wanted to know the game early.

You can remove all that. a different reason for it.

edited 23rd Feb '17 7:53:09 PM by OmegaRadiance

That actually sounds pretty cool. I love Gameplay and Story Integration. Also, in the case of this game, you can always take a screenshot of whatever tells you what ending you got or your completion percent- if available- for proof that you've actually done it.

edited 23rd Feb '17 7:59:56 PM by Zelenal

The Romeo and Juliet scene is hilarious. I couldn't stop laughing.

I'll tear thy shit from thee

So does that Clothing Damage thing actually exists in the game or was it just Taro being himself as usual?

edited 24th Feb '17 10:00:56 AM by Moth13

If a hentai doujin doesn't take that and run with it, I'm going to be severely disappointed.

Yoko senpai knows what we want. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Starting to get the impression this might end up being like the first nier given some of the downsides i'm hearing.

It has better gameplay but its technical problems, "empty" open-world and multiple endings requirement will likely alienate a lot of the people who didnt play the first game and were expecting something that was less eough around the edges.

Im pretty fine with this though. Most people have said its still yokos most polished game ever and that the story is good, thats all i really cared about in the end.

Im expecting the reviews for this to be better than the first game's but not exceptionally high.

Having watched someone livestream the game, I think the multiple-endings thing will be better this time around. For whatever reason Square Enix PR put an explicit message after you beat the game the first time telling you to keep playing to get the full picture, and future playthroughs really do change things up enough that it's way less repetitive.

They did that because apparently a lot of reviewers didnt bother to play the first game beyond ending a.

I havent read many of the reviews from when it came out but i heard none of them mentioned the multiple endings or how the story changes on ng plus. This is pretty damning because as most of us know, the endings changed the entire game around.

So SE probably wanted to avoid that this time and i dont blame them.

edited 24th Feb '17 3:33:27 PM by Draghinazzo

An empty open world is part of the point. Machines trying to kill Androids and all that jazz and only some widlife. and they only start spawning in large numbers later on.

edited 24th Feb '17 3:47:46 PM by OmegaRadiance

I do have to give the game praise for actually successfully pulling off existentialist themes in a way that avoids making all the philosopher namedropping sound like Faux Symbolism, like so many other works do.

I'm getting the impression that this is going to be a little bit of a polarizing game mostly because of the expectations from having Platinum as the dev and people not being familiar with or fans of Yoko's work.

I think people who went in without having played the first game because of Platinum expecting Bayonetta or MGR are the ones who seem to be the most disappointed with the combat/overworld/etc, because it isn't really as arcade-y, in-depth and polished as those games from what I'm hearing. At the end of the day it's still mostly a game you are playing for the story, it seems. And as I said before they're very likely to be ones complaining about the game being short because they're not aware of how Yoko handles multiple endings and how you haven't actually seen the entire plot if you only got to the first ending.

Fans of the original game and the Drakengard series as a whole seem to be much more positive and some have even been outright glowing. I'm suspecting that it's because they're just glad to have a Yoko Taro game that's actually fun to play, and they were mostly in it for the story and characters which the game seems to have delivered on.

The music has been universally well-received of course.

At worst we're probably looking at another Cult Classic and not the superstar critical hit a lot of people were hoping for, and like I said before that's honestly fine by me.

edited 24th Feb '17 6:58:10 PM by Draghinazzo

Draghinazzo: Yahtzee, for one.

Yahtzee didn't like the first Nier as I recall.

He said the characters were somewhat above-average IIRC but generally found the game underwhelming in most other respects.

I believe Saint Deltora is pointing out that like many other critics he didn't play the game past the first ending and so his opinion of the story isn't exactly super well-informed. Though if he didn't like the game enough up until that point I don't think it would have made much of a difference beyond "ok this is a cool concept i guess".

edited 24th Feb '17 7:12:52 PM by Draghinazzo

I assure you, fans of Platinum are used to their games being short.