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NieR: Automata |OT| "I wouldn't expect too much from this game if I were you."

BlakeofT

Member
I'm like really tired of route B. Really killed my interest in the game quite a bit and my progress has slowed to a crawl.

Limited combat plus retreading the same scenarios barring a few changes so far, ugh.
I feel the same.

Question about route B:
Is 9S a lot less fun to play as for anyone else? His attacks are a lot slower and when he throws the weapon, it takes forever and does crap damage. On top of that, the game seems to think that I want to do a charge hit all the time, which is another throw move for 9S, and his run attack is the same throw nonsense. I know he can hack but that's fun only the first 100 times.
 
I feel the same.

Question about route B:
Is 9S a lot less fun to play as for anyone else? His attacks are a lot slower and when he throws the weapon, it takes forever and does crap damage. On top of that, the game seems to think that I want to do a charge hit all the time, which is another throw move for 9S, and his run attack is the same throw nonsense. I know he can hack but that's fun only the first 100 times.

His abilities don't change. However, I learned much too late that if you press the attack button right after pressing jump, you do a launch attack and can juggle the enemy in the air, like you do with 2B's dodge counter. Makes combat as him a little more fun at least.
 

NexusCell

Member
I feel the same.

Question about route B:
Is 9S a lot less fun to play as for anyone else? His attacks are a lot slower and when he throws the weapon, it takes forever and does crap damage. On top of that, the game seems to think that I want to do a charge hit all the time, which is another throw move for 9S, and his run attack is the same throw nonsense. I know he can hack but that's fun only the first 100 times.

Yeah, it's a bit of a shame since I really enjoyed the two weapon combat with A2 and 2B. With 9S it feels more like button mashing or constant hacking, which gets pretty repetitive.
 

Grady

Member
This is one of those games I need break from. It's fun, but doesn't hold me very long. Horizon, noon and for honor are nice alternative​a to switch between playing sessions.
 

Astral

Member
His abilities don't change. However, I learned much too late that if you press the attack button right after pressing jump, you do a launch attack and can juggle the enemy in the air, like you do with 2B's dodge counter. Makes combat as him a little more fun at least.

You can do that with anyone actually. It's still best to just chuck spears at enemies and get combat over with though. He's just not very fun even with the juggling.
 

killatopak

Member
Kinda feeling overwhelmed by the amount of items you can buy in the beginning.

What do I focus on? Pod level/pod program/chips/weapon upgraded?
 
Kinda feeling overwhelmed by the amount of items you can buy in the beginning.

What do I focus on? Pod level/pod program/chips/weapon upgraded?

Chip storage space. Pod upgrades require very specific materials. To be honest, I only did my first Pod upgrade in route C and certainly not for a lack of money.
 
After completing Route C and reading the report you get at the end of it, who could have known that the game's true hero this whole time was
Jackass
.
 

BlakeofT

Member
His abilities don't change. However, I learned much too late that if you press the attack button right after pressing jump, you do a launch attack and can juggle the enemy in the air, like you do with 2B's dodge counter. Makes combat as him a little more fun at least.
Glad I'm not the only one. Yeah, I do the jump attack too because it's about the only thing I can stand to do. Come on mod support...
 

Mailbox

Member
For anyone whose having issues with
9s' Gameplay being less good than 2B's or A2's
I felt the same until I started using spears. Spears are your best friends
Holding attack makes them a long range pierce weapon so it feels like your shooting at a far away (even on different elevations)
 

AHA-Lambda

Member
Just a few thoughts and impressions 7 hours in, and having made it to the flooded city area

Love love love both the combat, music and the whole aesthetic style to everything :)

That said I must say... :/

The map is bad
The side quests so far have all been tedious fetch quests
And the plot so far has been surprisingly slow :(

And idk why I had to wait so long for fast travel but at least that fixed itself
 

Astral

Member
Just a few thoughts and impressions 7 hours in, and having made it to the flooded city area

Love love love both the combat, music and the whole aesthetic style to everything :)

That said I must say... :/

The map is bad
The side quests so far have all been tedious fetch quests
And the plot so far has been surprisingly slow :(

And idk why I had to wait so long for fast travel but at least that fixed itself

Flooded City is where shit gets real but yeah the plot is slow in the first two playthroughs.
 

Shahadan

Member
Started route C. Shit just got real.

how awesome was it when the opening credits started to appear holy shit. Like "the game starts now"
 

D-Man

Member
Just beat Route B and I'm loving it. I'll be packing things up for a move soon but hopefully I can beat this before Persona 5.
 

Hiltz

Member
I like the game, particularly for its music and combat , but overall Neir just feels kind of ho-hum so far. I just left the
robot village
about to confront a
Goliath-class boss in the City Ruins.
I don't like the whole plug-in stuff, it just confuses me, so I haven't bothered to buy and equip anything besides a few of the weapon upgrades. The side quests have been pretty boring so far. I feel like skipping out on most of it, and finding different endings too. Anyway, I've been playing on easy mode (kept auto-chips off) ever since the first boss who kicked my ass on normal mode a couple of times, and it didn't help having to start the game over from the beginning each time. Although, I may consider putting it back on normal mode since easy mode doesn't really offer any sense of challenge.
 
I like the game, particularly for its music and combat , but overall Neir just feels kind of ho-hum so far. I'm only at the robot village about to confront a
Goliath-class boss in the City Ruins.
I don't like the whole plug-in stuff, it just confuses me, so I haven't bothered to buy and equip anything besides a few of the weapon upgrades. The side quests is pretty boring so far. I feel like skipping out on most of it, and finding different endings too. Anyway, I've been playing on easy mode (kept auto-chips off).
Well, if you aren't going to attempt to engage the gameplay mechanics and systems, I don't know what to say. Playing on easy also seems crazy since normal is already too easy. My biggest complaint about the game is the gulf between Normal and Hard.
 

Astral

Member
Well, if you aren't going to attempt to engage the gameplay mechanics and systems, I don't know what to say. Playing on easy also seems crazy since normal is already too easy. My biggest complaint about the game is the gulf between Normal and Hard.

Normal isn't THAT easy imo. Hegel and 9S were hard I think and some enemies would two to three shot me. I guess it is pretty easy but I think it's a good balance. Isn't hard mode just normal with no lock on?
 

Hektor

Member
Normal isn't THAT easy imo. Hegel and 9S were hard I think and some enemies would two to three shot me. I guess it is pretty easy but I think it's a good balance. Isn't hard mode just normal with no lock on?

Enemies also deal roughly 3x times as much DMG
 
I feel the same.

Question about route B:
Is 9S a lot less fun to play as for anyone else? His attacks are a lot slower and when he throws the weapon, it takes forever and does crap damage. On top of that, the game seems to think that I want to do a charge hit all the time, which is another throw move for 9S, and his run attack is the same throw nonsense. I know he can hack but that's fun only the first 100 times.

Yea, that combat loop sucks. It has no flow and hacking is a boring mini-game.
 
Normal isn't THAT easy imo. Hegel and 9S were hard I think and some enemies would two to three shot me. I guess it is pretty easy but I think it's a good balance. Isn't hard mode just normal with no lock on?
If you don't level up, normal is decent. I restarted a game and have been rushing the main quests. When the enemies are 15-20 lvls higher, it feels like a proper difficulty.

On hard, little peons that normally hit for 10% of your health will hit for 50% of your bar
 
I feel like 9S would be a lot more fun if you could always choose to control enemy types, not just when you managed to hack into them unnoticed and if said enemy types weren't so clunky to play as themselves.
 
I just finished Route B (got the G ending in that as well lol) and started the opening of Route C. I found Route B to be alright, but the repetition set in.

I found combat a bit more annoying and repetitive in Route B with me mostly relying on 2B's hacking. Hacking was alright, but it got annoying some of the time and I just didn't really care for having one weapon in combat since it was mostly mashing square, though I upgraded 2B's blade to max. I skipped out on most of the cutscenes since they were ones from Route A. I honestly wish there was only two routes or Route B would have more new stuff to explore and do far as the story goes. The additional story cutscenes didn't do much for me.

Route C looks good from the preview and introduction so far and I'll get to it.

The OST has been so great with some tracks reminding me of the Xenoblade Chronicles OST in how they sound (different composers I know). That's great news since XBC has one of my favorite, if not is my favorite, video game OSTs of all time. *Insert Avatar Pic* :p
 
I feel like 9S would be a lot more fun if you could always choose to control enemy types, not just when you managed to hack into them unnoticed and if said enemy types weren't so clunky to play as themselves.
I guess i'm one of the few that liked the hacking as a nice change of pace. The chptunes help too. Just upgrade the iron pipe and equip some crit chips and watch enemies melt when you're tired of hacking.
 
OMG, I just encountered (Nier spoiler)
Emil! Or his head to be more precise lol. His death scene in the first game still gives me chills because of Laura Bailey's performance. Emiiiilllll!!!
 
Wow. Okay. Enormous Route E spoilers here, don't click on them if you don't want to be spoiled.

So I played through and got C and D endings and was like man...that's a real capper to the game. I really enjoyed what it was doing.

And then I got to the Route E part where
Pod 42 and Pod 153 or whatever interrupt the credits and I was all "What's this then?" and started the fight against the credits
which I found to be more amusing and funny.

And then I died. And I sorta half read the text and selected
No, I don't want to give up.

And died again. And noticed the text had changed. So I kept going. And died. And read the text. And saw the text in the background.

It asked me if
I thought games were meaningless
. It asked me
if there was a point to doing this
.

And then I died again. And then
it asked me if I wanted help
.

So I said yes.

And I kept fighting and when I took a hit and it said that the player's save data had been erased
I suddenly realized what was going on.

And I started bawling.

I don't know why. The emotional weight of what was happening just like...crushed me all at once. I kept getting hit and it kept just hitting me with the weight of my actions and failures and fuck man.

At the end I had to. I had to say yes.

If I come back to this game in like a day and want to finish up some stuff
and my save data is gone
then that is a perfectly acceptable ending to me.
 

LotusHD

Banned
I guess i'm one of the few that liked the hacking as a nice change of pace. The chptunes help too. Just upgrade the iron pipe and equip some crit chips and watch enemies melt when you're tired of hacking.

I enjoyed hacking too. Especially since I was pretty good at it, so things went by quickly lol
 

Sayad

Member
Enemies also deal roughly 3x times as much DMG
I hate it when games just do this, this is the first action-y game where I actually like the battle system but play it on normal in a long time. Not a fan of getting one shot-ed in an RPG with no check point system.
 

Ascheroth

Member
Well, if you aren't going to attempt to engage the gameplay mechanics and systems, I don't know what to say. Playing on easy also seems crazy since normal is already too easy. My biggest complaint about the game is the gulf between Normal and Hard.
Add me to that list.
Normal isn't THAT easy imo. Hegel and 9S were hard I think and some enemies would two to three shot me. I guess it is pretty easy but I think it's a good balance. Isn't hard mode just normal with no lock on?
Normal quickly becomes a joke if you like doing sidequests. Only Hegel was actually difficult and made me go 'holy shit, this is awesome, why can't the rest of the game be like this'.

Balancing open-world-ish action RPGs is hard as fuck, Dragon's Dogma had that exact same difficulty problem were the middle parts became too easy.

Usually it's just not a problem, because most of those games have combat that is only serviceable at best and no one gives a shit about getting it over with, it's just a means to the end of getting to the real good stuff (like story, writing, or just the pleasure of finding and leveling/upgrading stuff, etc).
It hurts in games like this where the combat is amazing and it makes me wish there was a mode with extreme experience scaling (like in the Falcom games, where it makes sure you're always around the level you're supposed to be and overleveling is hard as hell) or just outright doing away with the levels and just automatically put me at the 'optimal' strength for a given situation.
 
I enjoyed hacking too. Especially since I was pretty good at it, so things went by quickly lol
Yeah, i got quite good at it too. Completing some of the harder maps without getting hit or just narrowly surviving often made me feel like i bested a souls boss in a similar fashion.
 

LotusHD

Banned
Wow. Okay. Enormous Route E spoilers here, don't click on them if you don't want to be spoiled.

So I played through and got C and D endings and was like man...that's a real capper to the game. I really enjoyed what it was doing.

And then I got to the Route E part where
Pod 42 and Pod 153 or whatever interrupt the credits and I was all "What's this then?" and started the fight against the credits
which I found to be more amusing and funny.

And then I died. And I sorta half read the text and selected
No, I don't want to give up.

And died again. And noticed the text had changed. So I kept going. And died. And read the text. And saw the text in the background.

It asked me if
I thought games were meaningless
. It asked me
if there was a point to doing this
.

And then I died again. And then
it asked me if I wanted help
.

So I said yes.

And I kept fighting and when I took a hit and it said that the player's save data had been erased
I suddenly realized what was going on.

And I started bawling.

I don't know why. The emotional weight of what was happening just like...crushed me all at once. I kept getting hit and it kept just hitting me with the weight of my actions and failures and fuck man.

At the end I had to. I had to say yes.

If I come back to this game in like a day and want to finish up some stuff
and my save data is gone
then that is a perfectly acceptable ending to me.

Another one has joined us. Welcome.
 
Wow. Okay. Enormous Route E spoilers here, don't click on them if you don't want to be spoiled.

So I played through and got C and D endings and was like man...that's a real capper to the game. I really enjoyed what it was doing.

And then I got to the Route E part where
Pod 42 and Pod 153 or whatever interrupt the credits and I was all "What's this then?" and started the fight against the credits
which I found to be more amusing and funny.

And then I died. And I sorta half read the text and selected
No, I don't want to give up.

And died again. And noticed the text had changed. So I kept going. And died. And read the text. And saw the text in the background.

It asked me if
I thought games were meaningless
. It asked me
if there was a point to doing this
.

And then I died again. And then
it asked me if I wanted help
.

So I said yes.

And I kept fighting and when I took a hit and it said that the player's save data had been erased
I suddenly realized what was going on.

And I started bawling.

I don't know why. The emotional weight of what was happening just like...crushed me all at once. I kept getting hit and it kept just hitting me with the weight of my actions and failures and fuck man.

At the end I had to. I had to say yes.

If I come back to this game in like a day and want to finish up some stuff
and my save data is gone
then that is a perfectly acceptable ending to me.

Dude I cry just thinking about it, and I've already played that section like 3 times and watched 2 people on Twitch do it, too.
 
Wow. Okay. Enormous Route E spoilers here, don't click on them if you don't want to be spoiled.

So I played through and got C and D endings and was like man...that's a real capper to the game. I really enjoyed what it was doing.

And then I got to the Route E part where
Pod 42 and Pod 153 or whatever interrupt the credits and I was all "What's this then?" and started the fight against the credits
which I found to be more amusing and funny.

And then I died. And I sorta half read the text and selected
No, I don't want to give up.

And died again. And noticed the text had changed. So I kept going. And died. And read the text. And saw the text in the background.

It asked me if
I thought games were meaningless
. It asked me
if there was a point to doing this
.

And then I died again. And then
it asked me if I wanted help
.

So I said yes.

And I kept fighting and when I took a hit and it said that the player's save data had been erased
I suddenly realized what was going on.

And I started bawling.

I don't know why. The emotional weight of what was happening just like...crushed me all at once. I kept getting hit and it kept just hitting me with the weight of my actions and failures and fuck man.

At the end I had to. I had to say yes.

If I come back to this game in like a day and want to finish up some stuff
and my save data is gone
then that is a perfectly acceptable ending to me.
Now you understand why we said urging someone to finish this game was a little different.
 

LotusHD

Banned
Yeah, i got quite good at it too. Completing some of the harder maps without getting hit or just narrowly surviving often made me feel like i bested a souls boss in a similar fashion.

Lmao, this

I had several times where I was surprised af that I didn't get hit.

And this is all without the lock-on, I'm still shook that that was an option the entire time...
 

Sami+

Member
I hate it when games just do this, this is the first action-y game where I actually like the battle system but play it on normal in a long time. Not a fan of getting one shot-ed in an RPG with no check point system.

Yeah Normal is an actual joke. I kind of feel like I'm cheating the game because every boss or combat encounter just has me mashing heal after every hit because almost every single attack wipes out like 90% of my health. I really wish there was a better middle ground.
 

Ascheroth

Member
Wow. Okay. Enormous Route E spoilers here, don't click on them if you don't want to be spoiled.

So I played through and got C and D endings and was like man...that's a real capper to the game. I really enjoyed what it was doing.

And then I got to the Route E part where
Pod 42 and Pod 153 or whatever interrupt the credits and I was all "What's this then?" and started the fight against the credits
which I found to be more amusing and funny.

And then I died. And I sorta half read the text and selected
No, I don't want to give up.

And died again. And noticed the text had changed. So I kept going. And died. And read the text. And saw the text in the background.

It asked me if
I thought games were meaningless
. It asked me
if there was a point to doing this
.

And then I died again. And then
it asked me if I wanted help
.

So I said yes.

And I kept fighting and when I took a hit and it said that the player's save data had been erased
I suddenly realized what was going on.

And I started bawling.

I don't know why. The emotional weight of what was happening just like...crushed me all at once. I kept getting hit and it kept just hitting me with the weight of my actions and failures and fuck man.

At the end I had to. I had to say yes.

If I come back to this game in like a day and want to finish up some stuff
and my save data is gone
then that is a perfectly acceptable ending to me.

Some bits of the ending stretch fell a little flat for me (I blame not having played the Drakengards and the first Nier, I could tell some scenes didn't have as much impact as they should have on me), but Route E was the most the most amazing thing.
Just beautiful.
 
I feel the same.

Question about route B:
Is 9S a lot less fun to play as for anyone else? His attacks are a lot slower and when he throws the weapon, it takes forever and does crap damage. On top of that, the game seems to think that I want to do a charge hit all the time, which is another throw move for 9S, and his run attack is the same throw nonsense. I know he can hack but that's fun only the first 100 times.
I wasn't as bothered by the change in gameplay as some of ya'll, but I'm glad I'm not the only who kept throwing out charge moves when trying to do normal attacks. It's so annoying, especially with greatswords since their charge attack is worthless on 9S.
 

Taruranto

Member
Route B done.

Yep, called it. Even without the Nier's background, it was obvious the humans on the moon didn't exist, 9S mentioning how mechanical and repetitive their messages were tipped me off.

Other than that, it mostly felt redundant, though I liked the new Adam and Eve's scenes. Speaking of that, I wonder why they inserted that scene with Eve toward the end in A route? It really felt out of place and clearly belongs to the B route.

B route's ending doesn't even leave that many loose ends. There is just A2 I guess. I'm really curious what more is there to reveal.
 
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