Just finished this last night and had some time to let it simmer. I love this game. Taro shows his brilliance once again! I'm going to share my thoughts on what I felt were the strong/weak points of the game, and how it compares to the original.
First on the gameplay. Platinum did a great job on this game. I love Metal Gear Rising, and this game plays extremely similar to that one did in terms of combat and combo flow. They even brought back Sam's taunt and gave it to A2. Two things they kinda fell flat on though was the difficulty scaling and the boss battles. For reference, I played the game on Hard mode from start to finish.
It started off brutally difficult, but as you get access to more powerful chips, the game is trivialized. I think the balance was off because if you screwed up and lost all or most of you powerful chips, you could end up very under powered. The option they went with was to design the game around having lower powered chips. But if you still have all your high powered ones, you just roll through everything without any difficulty.
Next, boss battles. IMO the original Nier had the more interesting and varied encounters by a long shot. In Automata.. idk they just all felt so samey and the majority were complete pushovers (which may be a result of the powerful chips I was talking about above). In Nier, you had to learn each bosses patterns and know when to go on the offensive or to play defensively. I just didn't get that feeling in Automata I just put up blades and attacked relentlessly until the boss died in about 10-15 seconds. There are some good ones though (the opera probably being my favorite).
Now on the story/characters and the different routes. Route A was solid. It properly set up the story and characters on both the android side and the machine side. At the end it left me craving more as it should have. I wanted to know more about Adam and Eve. I wanted to know why 2B seemed so emotionally attached to 9S even from very beginning of the game. I wanted some more backstory on A2. I wanted to know what secrets yorha command was hiding! I was successfully hooked in.
Then Route B started... and I found myself disappointed from the very start. This route was definitely the low point in the game for me. Don't get me wrong, I love 9S as a character, but playing as him was so incredibly boring. I felt like the enjoyable combat had been taken away and replaced with something even worse than the original Nier's simplistic system. I was mostly fine with this because I was going to get more character building and backstory on the machines, but by the end of the route, I felt that I didn't get the plot expansion and character development that I came to expect after playing the original's "route B". Adam and Eve should have gotten more screen time. I didn't learn much more about A2. It did setup the continuation of the story quite well, though.
Route C/D was fantastic. I really felt the characters' emotions. The plot bombs were heavy hitting, and the pacing was on point. The only gripe I have about this section of the game was again, I feel like there wasn't as much character building for A2 as there should have been. I guess that's more of a knock on route B than C/D though since A2 did have significant character building in this route, but I just didn't feel attached to the character when it was all said and done.
Another thing I loved was the subtle story telling in the side quests. Similar to the original, they are seemingly pointless and poorly designed. But once you have a full view of the story, they reveal themselves as heavy foreshadowing and world building. I really want to go back and play through every one of them again now that I have the perspective that I do now.
TLDR: This game lives up to the original. I was attached to (most of) the characters. (Even though nothing can match the banter between Weiss and Nier). The low points are most of the boss battles, Route B, and development of a few characters. Taro's genius confirmed.
