Nier: Automata

Anybody else playing this masterpiece?

I just finished it--and when I say finished, I mean ending E finished--and I'm so fucking floored by how amazing this game was.

Seriously, I've not been this emotionally attached to a game since 2013's Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite, it is so good.

If you're on the fence about playing this game or haven't heard of it earlier, just go. Buy it, play it.

 

Do you like stories that stick with you for weeks after you've experienced it? Stories with events that are absolutely heartrending that registers with you emotionally on a very personal level? Then this game is your cup of tea.

 

Do it! It's sooooo good.


There's a moment in the end that's one of the most amazing pieces of game design I've ever seen, but it's full of spoilers. Despite that, I need to write about it, because it's so fucking amazing.

Spoiler

So after the A and B route of the game, it fucking kicks off. Pretty much the entirety of route C is just heartrending event after event; it's really just an "everybody dies, nobody wins" scenario with literally all player characters ending up dead in one way or the other.

Just after this depressing reality is setting in during the credits, two robot characters start talking about restoring the player characters memories and mechanical bodies, but they have to bypass a high-security system to do this.

At this point, the credits start over and you're given control over a little arrow that shoots laser, something the player is used to seeing throughout the game's hacking mini-games. Then you notice that the names in the credits are destructible and they're shooting back at you. The credits literally become a 2D bullet hell shooter symbolizing you hacking through the high-security system to restore the memories and bodies of the player characters. Reality suddenly sets in--if you do this, they can live.

Then this song kicks in and you're feeling the power, the motivation to succeed!

But it's hard

It's so hard.

You fail time after time and each time, the game asks you "WILL YOU GIVE UP HERE?" and each time I pick "NO", but it's so difficult, I die over and over again. That's when I see it.

Whenever I fail, messages appear in the backgrounds; messages from players that have succeeded where I've failed so many times; messages that tell me to keep going! They tell me to fight! To never surrender! More messages appear every time I fail until the screen is filled with them.

And I do what they say! I keep trying! But even so, I keep failing as it becomes nearly impossible. As I'm in the brink of what I can take, the game suddenly says "rescue attempt from [player name] received. Allow them to help?"

I say yes.

Suddenly, the music flares up and my little arrow is joined by several other arrows that protect me.

I feel unstoppable

With my fellow gamers behind me, I can do anything.

Each time I get hit, an arrow is destroyed and a message says "[player names]'s data has been lost", but they keep coming to protect me and see me all the way to the end.

I win!

They lived!

I get to see the ending where they all get to live and after that the game gives me a choice. I have the choice of aiding the weak by my data helping other players with the exact same thing I just went through, however, doing this will mean all my save data is lost.

That's when it hits me.

Every time I got hit when the other players where helping me and it said their data was lost, their save data was literally erased. But they had still sacrificed their data to help those like me that couldn't reach the end by their own strength.

I have NEVER experienced such a sense of community from gamers all over the world than I had in that moment. I literally burst into tears, it was so beautiful.

 

Right? The emotional attachment is real.