Bavoom
Recent Activity
1 day ago
Bavoom is
now playing
Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament
1 day ago
4 days ago
Bavoom
reviewed
Black Stone: Magic & Steel
My god this was the longest five and half hours of my gaming life. Why does my roommate have nostalgia for such absolute garbage. This is the platonic ideal of a Bad Game, so bad in so many ways that you can near feel the heat from the dumpster fire that must have been its development.
The anime box-art looks nothing like any asset in the game. The opening cutscene looks nothing like any asset in the game. The in-game drawings of ANYTHING look nothing like any 3D model in the game.
There is one good music track. It plays in the tutorial level. It also serves as the theme for the final boss fight.
There are multiple copy-pasted tower levels that have the same 1 minute loop of music on them. That doesn't even loop. They cross fade into themselves not even on a beat.
If you did not choose to have a magic user in your party, you're fucked. I played as a pirate, and without a long-range attack, there were multiple bosses that I could not reach. I have no idea how the game is supposed to be finishable with anyone who isn't a warlock.
My experience with this game was running around trying to whack things with my sword, and I never did learn where the hitbox on my swing was supposed to be. Sometimes things died in front of me, or to the side of me, or sometimes I'd be turned around and facing a direction I never input. But maybe I never killed anything at all, and it was all my roommate's bouncing balls of magic that would routinely clear a room off-screen before I got to wander over.
There's no run button, but walking for a set amount of time will transition you to running, which has no change in animation but does change movement speed. Multiple in-game traps were timed for my roommate's Warlock running speed and nothing else. Or were timed for nothing. So it was impossible to purposefully avoid them. Except that sometimes their damage hitboxes didn't work. Until you got used to it, in which case you'd get stun-locked from the same floor trap you'd walked over five times already looking for the one switch you missed in a room full of bullshit.
Speaking of, enemies come out of generators so fast that lizardmen would literally appear to die faster than my sword swing animation. It was literally impossible for me to kill things faster than they appeared. Until my roommate used some phoenix fire warlock blast and killed everything. I'm pretty sure my pirate's Final Smash equivalent did not have a hitbox.
No one was paying attention to this. There was no game design, no balancing. Assets were programmed and jumbled together onto a disc.
Multiple times we had to restart levels because I accidentally hit a switch to open a door - but the game only wanted Player 1 to hit switches to open doors. So the door wouldn't open.
Routinely got stuck on level geometry. Or nothing. Destroying enemy generators left debris that had hit detection boxes, which, with no jump button, turned every cleared room into aa maze should you need to back-track. Which you needed to do a lot.
I do not have enough gaming history knowledge to know what the "good" game of this genre is that so many people tried to make one like it. The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games my roommate has made me play felt better than this one, but were still fundamentally terrible experiences. No impact for weapons interacting with enemies. No sound effects for feedback that anything is happening. Little alignment between hitboxes and animations. Just purely unpleasant lack of cohesion.
Whoever was translating this did not bother making sure what the narrator said matched what was on screen at all. Or maybe they did the "full" translation first, and then ran into character limits for the in-game text. The number of times I was asked to "go thru the teleport" on my way to hell was enough to stop being funny.
Ending each level gets the same "grandiose" music playing over a still generic fantasy image with a couple lines of text babbling on about nonsense that fails to stay consistent from one level to the next. Some white mages are mentioned that are never shown. The main villain is either a monster, or a dragon, or a dark mage, or a space flea, or something else - you kill him like five times. Each time with dialog like "Your mission: kill him forever" to be followed with "you slew the bad buy, but then he fled. He is weakened, but is growing stronger than ever!" I felt like I was being punked by a 5-year-old's level of storytelling.
Incidentally, this was the first game I ever played on the original Xbox, and boy howdy is that controller awful. What were they thinking with all those far and out of the way buttons? Everything is so mushy and the A / B button placement still feels like a sin.
I am so done. Why can treasure chests have rotten meat inside. Or half the gold of the cost of the key to open it. What is the point of the lives system. Why are they called credits. Was this a port of a Chinese arcade game??
F rank, no stars. My roommate was howling with laughter at my suffering for this god-awful experience. I am making him drive the van when I move.
The anime box-art looks nothing like any asset in the game. The opening cutscene looks nothing like any asset in the game. The in-game drawings of ANYTHING look nothing like any 3D model in the game.
There is one good music track. It plays in the tutorial level. It also serves as the theme for the final boss fight.
There are multiple copy-pasted tower levels that have the same 1 minute loop of music on them. That doesn't even loop. They cross fade into themselves not even on a beat.
If you did not choose to have a magic user in your party, you're fucked. I played as a pirate, and without a long-range attack, there were multiple bosses that I could not reach. I have no idea how the game is supposed to be finishable with anyone who isn't a warlock.
My experience with this game was running around trying to whack things with my sword, and I never did learn where the hitbox on my swing was supposed to be. Sometimes things died in front of me, or to the side of me, or sometimes I'd be turned around and facing a direction I never input. But maybe I never killed anything at all, and it was all my roommate's bouncing balls of magic that would routinely clear a room off-screen before I got to wander over.
There's no run button, but walking for a set amount of time will transition you to running, which has no change in animation but does change movement speed. Multiple in-game traps were timed for my roommate's Warlock running speed and nothing else. Or were timed for nothing. So it was impossible to purposefully avoid them. Except that sometimes their damage hitboxes didn't work. Until you got used to it, in which case you'd get stun-locked from the same floor trap you'd walked over five times already looking for the one switch you missed in a room full of bullshit.
Speaking of, enemies come out of generators so fast that lizardmen would literally appear to die faster than my sword swing animation. It was literally impossible for me to kill things faster than they appeared. Until my roommate used some phoenix fire warlock blast and killed everything. I'm pretty sure my pirate's Final Smash equivalent did not have a hitbox.
No one was paying attention to this. There was no game design, no balancing. Assets were programmed and jumbled together onto a disc.
Multiple times we had to restart levels because I accidentally hit a switch to open a door - but the game only wanted Player 1 to hit switches to open doors. So the door wouldn't open.
Routinely got stuck on level geometry. Or nothing. Destroying enemy generators left debris that had hit detection boxes, which, with no jump button, turned every cleared room into aa maze should you need to back-track. Which you needed to do a lot.
I do not have enough gaming history knowledge to know what the "good" game of this genre is that so many people tried to make one like it. The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games my roommate has made me play felt better than this one, but were still fundamentally terrible experiences. No impact for weapons interacting with enemies. No sound effects for feedback that anything is happening. Little alignment between hitboxes and animations. Just purely unpleasant lack of cohesion.
Whoever was translating this did not bother making sure what the narrator said matched what was on screen at all. Or maybe they did the "full" translation first, and then ran into character limits for the in-game text. The number of times I was asked to "go thru the teleport" on my way to hell was enough to stop being funny.
Ending each level gets the same "grandiose" music playing over a still generic fantasy image with a couple lines of text babbling on about nonsense that fails to stay consistent from one level to the next. Some white mages are mentioned that are never shown. The main villain is either a monster, or a dragon, or a dark mage, or a space flea, or something else - you kill him like five times. Each time with dialog like "Your mission: kill him forever" to be followed with "you slew the bad buy, but then he fled. He is weakened, but is growing stronger than ever!" I felt like I was being punked by a 5-year-old's level of storytelling.
Incidentally, this was the first game I ever played on the original Xbox, and boy howdy is that controller awful. What were they thinking with all those far and out of the way buttons? Everything is so mushy and the A / B button placement still feels like a sin.
I am so done. Why can treasure chests have rotten meat inside. Or half the gold of the cost of the key to open it. What is the point of the lives system. Why are they called credits. Was this a port of a Chinese arcade game??
F rank, no stars. My roommate was howling with laughter at my suffering for this god-awful experience. I am making him drive the van when I move.
5 days ago
Bavoom
finished
Black Stone: Magic & Steel
My god this was the longest five and half hours of my gaming life. Why does my roommate have nostalgia for such absolute garbage. This is the platonic ideal of a Bad Game, so bad in so many ways that you can near feel the heat from the dumpster fire that must have been its development.
The anime box-art looks nothing like any asset in the game. The opening cutscene looks nothing like any asset in the game. The in-game drawings of ANYTHING look nothing like any 3D model in the game.
There is one good music track. It plays in the tutorial level. It also serves as the theme for the final boss fight.
There are multiple copy-pasted tower levels that have the same 1 minute loop of music on them. That doesn't even loop. They cross fade into themselves not even on a beat.
If you did not choose to have a magic user in your party, you're fucked. I played as a pirate, and without a long-range attack, there were multiple bosses that I could not reach. I have no idea how the game is supposed to be finishable with anyone who isn't a warlock.
My experience with this game was running around trying to whack things with my sword, and I never did learn where the hitbox on my swing was supposed to be. Sometimes things died in front of me, or to the side of me, or sometimes I'd be turned around and facing a direction I never input. But maybe I never killed anything at all, and it was all my roommate's bouncing balls of magic that would routinely clear a room off-screen before I got to wander over.
There's no run button, but walking for a set amount of time will transition you to running, which has no change in animation but does change movement speed. Multiple in-game traps were timed for my roommate's Warlock running speed and nothing else. Or were timed for nothing. So it was impossible to purposefully avoid them. Except that sometimes their damage hitboxes didn't work. Until you got used to it, in which case you'd get stun-locked from the same floor trap you'd walked over five times already looking for the one switch you missed in a room full of bullshit.
Speaking of, enemies come out of generators so fast that lizardmen would literally appear to die faster than my sword swing animation. It was literally impossible for me to kill things faster than they appeared. Until my roommate used some phoenix fire warlock blast and killed everything. I'm pretty sure my pirate's Final Smash equivalent did not have a hitbox.
No one was paying attention to this. There was no game design, no balancing. Assets were programmed and jumbled together onto a disc.
Multiple times we had to restart levels because I accidentally hit a switch to open a door - but the game only wanted Player 1 to hit switches to open doors. So the door wouldn't open.
Routinely got stuck on level geometry. Or nothing. Destroying enemy generators left debris that had hit detection boxes, which, with no jump button, turned every cleared room into aa maze should you need to back-track. Which you needed to do a lot.
I do not have enough gaming history knowledge to know what the "good" game of this genre is that so many people tried to make one like it. The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games my roommate has made me play felt better than this one, but were still fundamentally terrible experiences. No impact for weapons interacting with enemies. No sound effects for feedback that anything is happening. Little alignment between hitboxes and animations. Just purely unpleasant lack of cohesion.
Whoever was translating this did not bother making sure what the narrator said matched what was on screen at all. Or maybe they did the "full" translation first, and then ran into character limits for the in-game text. The number of times I was asked to "go thru the teleport" on my way to hell was enough to stop being funny.
Ending each level gets the same "grandiose" music playing over a still generic fantasy image with a couple lines of text babbling on about nonsense that fails to stay consistent from one level to the next. Some white mages are mentioned that are never shown. The main villain is either a monster, or a dragon, or a dark mage, or a space flea, or something else - you kill him like five times. Each time with dialog like "Your mission: kill him forever" to be followed with "you slew the bad buy, but then he fled. He is weakened, but is growing stronger than ever!" I felt like I was being punked by a 5-year-old's level of storytelling.
Incidentally, this was the first game I ever played on the original Xbox, and boy howdy is that controller awful. What were they thinking with all those far and out of the way buttons? Everything is so mushy and the A / B button placement still feels like a sin.
I am so done. Why can treasure chests have rotten meat inside. Or half the gold of the cost of the key to open it. What is the point of the lives system. Why are they called credits. Was this a port of a Chinese arcade game??
F rank, no stars. My roommate was howling with laughter at my suffering for this god-awful experience. I am making him drive the van when I move.
The anime box-art looks nothing like any asset in the game. The opening cutscene looks nothing like any asset in the game. The in-game drawings of ANYTHING look nothing like any 3D model in the game.
There is one good music track. It plays in the tutorial level. It also serves as the theme for the final boss fight.
There are multiple copy-pasted tower levels that have the same 1 minute loop of music on them. That doesn't even loop. They cross fade into themselves not even on a beat.
If you did not choose to have a magic user in your party, you're fucked. I played as a pirate, and without a long-range attack, there were multiple bosses that I could not reach. I have no idea how the game is supposed to be finishable with anyone who isn't a warlock.
My experience with this game was running around trying to whack things with my sword, and I never did learn where the hitbox on my swing was supposed to be. Sometimes things died in front of me, or to the side of me, or sometimes I'd be turned around and facing a direction I never input. But maybe I never killed anything at all, and it was all my roommate's bouncing balls of magic that would routinely clear a room off-screen before I got to wander over.
There's no run button, but walking for a set amount of time will transition you to running, which has no change in animation but does change movement speed. Multiple in-game traps were timed for my roommate's Warlock running speed and nothing else. Or were timed for nothing. So it was impossible to purposefully avoid them. Except that sometimes their damage hitboxes didn't work. Until you got used to it, in which case you'd get stun-locked from the same floor trap you'd walked over five times already looking for the one switch you missed in a room full of bullshit.
Speaking of, enemies come out of generators so fast that lizardmen would literally appear to die faster than my sword swing animation. It was literally impossible for me to kill things faster than they appeared. Until my roommate used some phoenix fire warlock blast and killed everything. I'm pretty sure my pirate's Final Smash equivalent did not have a hitbox.
No one was paying attention to this. There was no game design, no balancing. Assets were programmed and jumbled together onto a disc.
Multiple times we had to restart levels because I accidentally hit a switch to open a door - but the game only wanted Player 1 to hit switches to open doors. So the door wouldn't open.
Routinely got stuck on level geometry. Or nothing. Destroying enemy generators left debris that had hit detection boxes, which, with no jump button, turned every cleared room into aa maze should you need to back-track. Which you needed to do a lot.
I do not have enough gaming history knowledge to know what the "good" game of this genre is that so many people tried to make one like it. The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games my roommate has made me play felt better than this one, but were still fundamentally terrible experiences. No impact for weapons interacting with enemies. No sound effects for feedback that anything is happening. Little alignment between hitboxes and animations. Just purely unpleasant lack of cohesion.
Whoever was translating this did not bother making sure what the narrator said matched what was on screen at all. Or maybe they did the "full" translation first, and then ran into character limits for the in-game text. The number of times I was asked to "go thru the teleport" on my way to hell was enough to stop being funny.
Ending each level gets the same "grandiose" music playing over a still generic fantasy image with a couple lines of text babbling on about nonsense that fails to stay consistent from one level to the next. Some white mages are mentioned that are never shown. The main villain is either a monster, or a dragon, or a dark mage, or a space flea, or something else - you kill him like five times. Each time with dialog like "Your mission: kill him forever" to be followed with "you slew the bad buy, but then he fled. He is weakened, but is growing stronger than ever!" I felt like I was being punked by a 5-year-old's level of storytelling.
Incidentally, this was the first game I ever played on the original Xbox, and boy howdy is that controller awful. What were they thinking with all those far and out of the way buttons? Everything is so mushy and the A / B button placement still feels like a sin.
I am so done. Why can treasure chests have rotten meat inside. Or half the gold of the cost of the key to open it. What is the point of the lives system. Why are they called credits. Was this a port of a Chinese arcade game??
F rank, no stars. My roommate was howling with laughter at my suffering for this god-awful experience. I am making him drive the van when I move.
5 days ago
Bavoom
finished
Klonoa: Empire of Dreams
5 days ago
10 days ago
Bavoom
reviewed
NieR: Automata
--- meaningless [C]ode ---
When I struggle to understand my reaction to any story, I ask myself, “Where is the love?”
NieR: Automata got me for the longest time because it seemed like a story about love. The set-up is a no-brainer: a pair of war buddy androids learn to open up to each other during their deployment. Because they are androids, it feels natural for them to question, often out loud and to the camera, their potential for emotions, evolution, and finding life paths outside the conventions of their manufacture. All in service of literally saving humanity.
Watching too-cool-for-emotions bombshell 2B play off socially starved twinklord 9S started out cute! The premise was endearing! 2B has such a cool design, I wanted to love her. (I wanted her in Smash Bros. just so I could see that dress in bright blue, tbh.)
But even in their story’s best moments, something felt off.
Because their robot bodies meant they could die in each other’s arms a billion times. They could lose their memories of each other and suffer inhuman anguishes. They could get corrupted by mind-controlling computer viruses and kill each other again and again. At some point, their cute banter, their requests for cute nicknames - it didn’t justify or counterweight the dramatic visuals of maimed bodies, crying faces, bleeding out, dying cold and feeling alone.
NieR: Automata is not a game about love. Whoever creates its stories only understands “love” as a pretext for suffering. Which is fucking tragic. Because it meant instead of mining the setting for the depth it inspired me to imagine, this game was much more fascinated with how it could shove absurd misery in my face like a moral-less episode of the Twilight Zone.
With this lens in mind, it was kind of pathetic how easily I could predict every “twist” in the game. Not in a lore accurate explanation sense - god no. I vaguely know the series’ plot template at this point, but none of it matters. Because in this game, everyone dies and is miserable, the end. Does an NPC have a friend? A lover? An endearing character trait? Then someone dies. Just everyone. All the time. Every time.
This is the game people meme’d Elden Ring to be.
In retrospect, none of this really surprises me, either? Nier: Automata is a puree of every writing sin I’ve written about for previous DrakeNier entries.
Drakengard - Pointless pontifications on violence in a game that doesn’t allow you to engage with itself any other way.
NieR - obsessed with the idea of “what is a person?” while drowning in the shallowest possible puddles.
Drakengard 3 - obsessed with “twists” at the expense of anything else, confusing curiosity for investment.
NieR Re-in-carnation - episodic misery porn
So you want to know what is unique about NieR: Automata? What special flavor gives it its own special repugnant aftertaste?
The “twist” that 9S is an incel - and secretly the main character. Every reveal of every other character’s secret backstory or motivation reinforced that 9S was the specialist boy. Everything that happened to every other character in the story happened for his “development”, and what he developed into was repulsive Hot Anime Nonsense disguised as an art house film. He. Sucks. His character has nothing to say. Nothing that drives him besides wanting to fuck 2B. A thing the game explicitly tells me when someone hacked his brain. 9S is a ball of impotent malice disguised as a tumblr soft-boy that lives for satisfying an unchecked id of violence and objectifying desire.
To anyone who wants to argue that means anything in the context of the premise, plot, or execution of NieR: Automata: gross. I am uninterested. I am not denying the possibility. I just don’t care.
--- just getting [S]tarted ---
Because here is where I do my DrakeNier style “gotcha!” moment and reveal that I actually don’t care about the story of Nier: Automata at all, and that my previous points were all merely pretense and introduction for talking about my real feelings for the game - how it is the slickest character action game I have ever played; derogatory.
For how much I “hate” the story of Nier: Automata, its three main routes sure went down smoothly. None of what I complained about above really congealed as a thought while I was playing. My brain didn’t catch up with what I had been consuming until the final act went off the deep end - I could feel during the finale my attention slowly lumbering back to ask “wait, really? That’s what we’re doing here?” Now that I’ve written even vague strokes about the plot, I can feel my memories of this story leaving my brain forever to better match the nothing of an emotional experience I had with it all.
Which I find very interesting! Because I ripped into every other entry in this series based on their stories more than anything else!
You know what NieR: Automata’s legacy in my life is and will be? Battling a single optional side quest boss named Father Servo. I was maybe level 30 at most. He was level 60. My damage output was miniscule, but non-zero. So I fought him. Between my auto-heal and vampirism skills, I could dance around enough to passively heal every time that I slipped up and took a hit, (which would knock out like ⅔ of my health).
This took over an hour. And then when I finally bested him, he got up with a SECOND HEALTH BAR. And I had to repeat the EXACT SAME FIGHT AGAIN. No new moves, no new gimmicks. Sunk-cost fallacy is a bitch, so I listened to this song for like two and a half hours, except you need to overlay gatling gun noises rattling in your skull the whole time for the full experience.
Now this song plays in my head when I’m doing something mindless and monotonous that somehow still feels necessary. Toweling off after a shower. Looking at my shopping list in a grocery store. I finished this fight weeks ago and it’s still happening! It’s so ridiculous and dumb that I’m equal parts endeared and exasperated.
So why did I talk about the plot of this game for a couple pages first? Because I needed to establish the profundity of what I didn’t think about while I was playing this game. Like the fact that I didn’t blink seeing an optional boss that was twice my level. The thought “maybe I should do this later” didn’t cross my mind. And, it was possible! The game let me do it! It sucked, but it wasn’t “hard”... just tedious.
Isn’t that weird??? Like, shouldn’t I have been scared off? Later, when I was level 60, I was killing dudes so fast that they barely had time to blink. Was that Father Servo fight supposed to be a joke I ruined by rushing to the punchline? When was I supposed to fight that guy??
Right before I would have unlocked fast-travel in this game, I unwittingly did every side-quest there was for me to do. Including the entirety of the Father Servo questline. Because this game kept crashing on my PS5 if I went near this one spot on the map that was necessary for advancing the plot. But I only thought to google my problem after I ran out of other things to do. I probably could have saved myself a couple hours of running alone by advancing the main plot just that one extra bit. So why was I content to run back and forth across the same map so many times, getting bobbles and trinkets and gold that I never used or looked at?
Because this game is slick.
--- an [O]asis of oil ---
Having played NieR, I was at first confused why people liked NieR: Automata so much better. Because structurally, it is the same. A barren “open world” made of a hub and spokes. The same respawning enemy placements. “Side quests” that are only ever visiting the same NPCs in the same locations and running between them. (NieR’s stories were far more interesting, and its enemy variety much more regional and profound!)
But what NieR: Automata has that NieR lacked was a satisfying run animation. Watching 2B’s thigh-high boots flash in the light while her short skirt swishes back and forth is fun to watch. Her gothic lace and katanas are inherently funny when she’s running up sand dunes or splashing through sewers.
More importantly, NieR: Automata has masterful conservation of momentum for other actions from a run. You jump farther with a running start. NieR: Automata has three different animations for mounting ladders depending on your movement speed: from a stand still, from a walk, or from a run. You can jump up the ladders. You have different animations for dismounting the top of a ladder depending on whether you were jumping and at what part of the jump animation you transitioned to a dismount animation. You have a different dismount animation if you jumped towards the top of the ladder part-way without climbing the top of it.
And all of these ladder clambering actions are smooth as hell. They’re effortless. How the characters in NieR: Automata vault over half-obstacles and bounce off walls show the first signs of all the stuff Square Enix lifted from this game when they made Kingdom Hearts III. 2B’s ladder descent animation is the kind of superb sexy fun that reminds you Bayonetta 2 just finished cooking down the hall. Running, vaulting, double jumping, hang-time glide falling - they all have a breathless weightlessness to them that makes environmental traversal thoughtless.
But the movement itself is only one part of three as to how this game feels so slick. Because the UI design is polished to a blinding sheen.
When you open the pause menu, the map is the first thing you see. Making the map take up the whole screen takes a single flick of the camera stick. Flicking the camera stick starts engaging the 3D map in some way, flipping or rotating it. I cannot overstate the genius of this. The actions of “map selection” and “map interaction” are merged. This means that even if the player is opening the map multiple times to check where they are and where they’re going, it minimizes the sensation that there’s a break in the action - they are still playing the game even as they’re reading and synthesizing information.
Both the main map and the mini-map have all available side-quests, including ones you haven’t started yet, indicated at all times. This means that if you take a wrong turn navigating the environment, if you’re close enough to something else of interest, the decision to change targets takes a short enough amount of time that it feels like it was always intentional.
Which will happen often, because the environment is filled with obstacles to jump over. You will miss jumps and end up on the wrong side of buildings. Because you will be running so fast and blindly all of the time, because why wouldn’t you be running all the time?
I normally develop a great mental map when playing video games, but I still got lost in Nier: Automata’s tiny hub world map through to the end of my playtime. Because the penalty for taking a wrong turn didn’t register as annoying enough for me to learn. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop the wrong way was as engaging as doing anything else. And then I got fast travel anyway, which eliminated the need further. I routinely got my fast travel points mixed up, too. And that also didn’t matter. Because zooming around was engaging and mindless.
Was it fun? I dunno. Maybe for a couple moments in the hours I ran around. But running felt better than waiting through the loading times of fast travel. It’s not like I was fighting anything during my zooming, anyway.
Which is where I get to the third pillar of this game’s slickness - the combat. And I want to linger on the confluence of slicknesses that stopped me from learning the map, and how that applies to combat.
Because the menu stays accessible during combat. You can chug potions at any time. You can change weapon load-outs and equipped skills at any time. And like, yeah, that feels awesome! Why wouldn’t I want to be able to access everything in the menus whenever I wanted? That feels so player-empowered!
But you know what else that stopped me from doing? Fucking dodging. Why would I bother paying attention to enemy attack patterns and my own movement if I could just drink health potions from a pause menu if it ever got dire? Each time I died in the early game was a genuine surprise, because my brain forgot that combat meant I was in danger.
So after something killed me a couple times and I figured I should rummage through the skill menu for the first time, I found I had an… auto-heal ability? If I could avoid taking damage for 6 seconds, then 2B would start getting health back for free. Awesome! Look at all the health potions I could save! (For context, a health potion costs like a dime. So this impulse to “save” on health potions is incredibly stupid.)
But now I had an incentive to not get hit. I started dodging all the time. And you know, that dodge animation is so slick. 2B glows in a highly abstracted way, time slows down, particle effects everywhere - in the drab world of NieR: Automata, dodging feels like the most importantly animated thing in the whole game. You can dodge out of most attack animations! You can dodge consecutively with very little consequence! And if you dodge at the right time, you can unleash a near-invincible counter-attack!
Now you might be thinking, “but you can’t beat a character action game just by dodging all the time,” and you would be correct. But NieR: Automata has something else in its combat to make you feel like you’re winning all the time, even when you objectively suck and are missing all your punches. A little flying robot companion who has an infinite ammo gatling gun. As long as you’re willing to hold down the fire button, he will shoot at anything you’re targeting. Is the damage a ton? Not to start. But non-zero damage is indeed damage. You can start shooting dudes before they’re in range of your sword! You can shoot flying enemies without having to jump up there!
Maybe astute readers can see how this came together to culminate in my Father Servo experience. That’s right, a good majority of the damage I did to him in that fight was from holding down the fire button on my robo buddy while running around trying not to get hit. Did I try to hit him with my sword? Of course I did! I had another skill where I got health back from dealing damage to enemies. But after so many dozens of minutes and so many close calls, it wasn’t worth it to try to do more than one or two swipes at a time and risk having to do the fight again later. Besides, I could just barely see his health bar going down, if I just held out a bit longer…!
--- all in the name of [L]ove ---
I want to stress that every individual design decision in NieR: Automata feels incredibly kind. Rarely have I felt so visibly cared for.
NieR: Automata has multiple sections where the camera zooms out and locks the player character into a 2D plane. Running up curved staircases, crossing long bridges, certain hub world areas - it makes a ton of sense! Navigating those kinds of environments is annoying in 3D with full character and camera control! By turning those same hallways into 2D spaces, you get some visual variety - seeing your character from a new angle, the camera now allowed to change its focus to capture a larger part of the environment. It’s such an elegant gesture that provides multiple boons at once.
I had multiple real-life friends talk this game up when they heard I was playing it. They loved it. Mind, these are the kind of people who play maybe half of one game a quarter on a busy gaming year. One of them even platinum’d the game. But when I asked them why NieR: Automata was “so good, dude”, everyone seemed to draw a blank. “Just play it man, you’ll see.”
Well I did.
I saw a game with really drab colors. Where the environments were rendered with enough loving detail to trick people into thinking it had an art direction. (Seriously, the androids, the robots, the realistic backgrounds, the surrealist liminal spaces - nothing goes together! Not even the player characters' combinations of gothic velvet, Japanese weaponry, and chibi robo companions make any visual sense!)
I saw a game with an incomprehensible story that seemed as unfocused and inconsequential as it did mean, nihilistic, and dumb.
I saw a game with lovingly flashy combat animations that made me think people really want to play Kingdom Hearts but with a “mature” aesthetic. Enough of a veneer that they’re playing a Real Game™ while being asked to do as little as possible to progress.
So hear me out.
Conceptually, NieR: Automata is not in the same wheelhouse as Bayonetta - it is a Kirby game.
Kirby Super Star has so much effort put into its 20 or so movesets. Each one is bursting with delightful animations and sparkles and sound effects that, in the SNES era, were straight damn opulent. Controlling Kirby is extremely satisfying, because all of his movements are fast and slick. By which I mean, the time between pressing a button and something loud and flashy and useful happening is measured in a miniscule amount of frames.
Yet all these crazy abilities can only be used on cutesy puffs of candy people whose concept of combat is, at best, the notion that maybe they should walk towards their adversary. They are moving targets, excuses to unleash all the fun and flashy spritework Kirby has at his disposal.
And you know what? You can just fly over all of it. Ignore it all.
You know how I usually die in Kirby Super Star? When I try to look really cool and style on a brainless enemy in such a way that I fall down a pit.
You know what the penalty is for doing so? Usually nothing, it’s a Kirby game lmao.
So let’s look at NieR: Automata.
2B can equip two weapons at a time, one for light attacks, one for heavy attacks. She can switch between load-outs of weapons mid-combat. Each combination of weapon types have different combos for attacking between the light and heavy attack buttons. You can upgrade weapons to extend their movesets. The world of NieR: Automata comes to life when you swing your sword, every stroke blazing with golden lights and particle effects.
2B can be equipped with myriad skills. Her aforementioned helper buddies have gatling guns, missiles, laser blasts, and use magic spells. All of these can be upgraded and customized. Not to mention that 9S fights alongside you, and you can tell him to specialize in one of many combat styles.
Yet all these crazy abilities can only be used on cutesy gumball head robots whose concept of combat is, at best, flailing their arms in the direction of their adversary. They are moving targets, excuses to unleash all the fun and flashy particle effects 2B has at her disposal.
And you know what? You can just run past all of it. Ignore it all.
You know how I died in NieR: Automata, when I could still die? When I was trying to look cool and style on brainless enemies with new weapons in such a way I forgot to heal.
You know what the penalty was for doing so? Running back to where I was. It’s a Kirby game.
Seriously, there’s no depth, no enemy or boss fight that made me unlearn my basic habits of “shoot gatling gun, run towards enemy, press light attack button until dead.” When my brain switched off, sometimes I’d forget to press an attack button, and just walk around picking up trinkets while my gatling gun sidekick friend killed everything for me. Which somehow was a viable strategy! There were some boss fights in the final act that started dying mid-diatribe from my auto-attack alone before I had time to find and walk towards them! And I never upgraded it once!
And that’s what’s at the heart of a Kirby game. They’re unbalanced in favor of the player in such a way that they are banking on the player button-mashing enough to not notice. You don’t need to get good at them. In fact, digging into whatever flashy abilities are most fun for you might make the game take longer than if you stuck to defaults.
All the proof I had of the uselessness of the combat in NieR: Automata came when 9S, instead of a strong attack, had the ability to “hack” enemies. That is, to play a twin-stick shooter mini-game. This mini-game lasts between 2 and 15 seconds. It deals colossal damage. If it weren’t for the visually necessary screen transitions between combat and hacking minigame, it would be a no-brainer to be doing this all the time from a pure damage-per-second perspective.
But I rarely did this on purpose outside of mini-bosses because I wanted the satisfaction of hitting the light attack button and punching dudes. Even if my auto-attack robo-buddy was killing things just as fast as I was anyway. I at least wanted the pretense of involvement to be maintained.
And for some people, that is enough. NieR: Automata loves those people, and they feel loved by it. You can tinker with your build like a mechanic, forget everything in the couple weeks before you play the game again, and still feel like you’ve retained all your skills as a gamer as you mow down dudes.
The story is shocking, but is so cheap that you don’t have to remember anything that happened before. Just follow the quest marker, bro. The spectacle of the moment is all that matters. Sure there is lore and terms swirling around you, but if you can understand the moment-to-moment surprise and drama, then maybe it feels like you’ve been paying better attention than you thought.
And playing the game is frictionless. It never gets frustrating. It always feels like it has thought of you, and what you most want to do in this exact moment, and make it as smooth as possible.
It loves you.
Right?
--- no ghost, all [M]achine ---
NieR: Automata is flawless in a way that does not make it perfect. I struggle to say it’s even good, because the totality of my experience can be summed up as engaging without being fun. But it’s so engaging that even now I’m unsure if I’m correctly remembering the difference.
2B is very clearly the daughter of NieR and Bayonetta. She inherited all their “best” features. But where is her soul?
Combat in NieR was slow and stiff, both for Nier and the monsters he fought. It was as if underwater. But the enemies behaved in ways that forced you to think about them differently. Some danced around to your back. Some had armor that needed to be broken. Some shot volleys of beams that needed to be dispersed or evaded. Even if you changed the difficulty to Easy, you still needed to be aware of your surroundings, mindful of the timing of your button presses.
Bayonetta is built around dodging at the last second, but with intentionality. Whiff a dodge, and you need to wait a beat to try again. Maybe if I’d put in more time to be more skilled, I’d know Bayonetta has the best combat system of all time, but between how enemies act and the elaborateness of the combos you need to combat them, engaging with combat in Bayonetta is a full brain experience. And it is fun. Because Bayonetta is fun, and styling as Bayonetta looks fun, and styling as Bayonetta makes you feel like a 4D chess grandmaster.
In both of those games, you will die. You will get hurt. And you will learn. With the learning comes fulfillment, with the knowledge comes mastery, with the mastery comes fun. They are different types, and Bayonetta’s is much easier to explain the appeal of than NieR’s, but there is fun to be had there.
NieR: Automata is too kind to let me get hurt. So concerned with giving me options to feel powerful to ever let me feel weak.
Fundamentally, NieR: Automata’s problems cannot be solved by “turning up the difficulty, bro”. I killed Father Servo with a 30+ level deficit! How would cranking up the difficulty have changed that experience? Made it take four hours instead of two? For as much as I called Nier: Automata a Kirby game, even the last Kirby game I played ended with Baby’s First Bloodborne Boss, (which was wild to watch my 9-year-old-nephew absolutely smoke). The secret final boss of NieR: Automata is nothing that can’t be taken down with the tried and true strategy of “shoot gatling gun, run towards enemy, press light attack button until dead” - except maybe with the spice of chugging more potions than normal.
I see the potential for this to be the best game of all time. The set-up has such immaculate ludo-narrative harmony. For as much as the visuals clash, they make readability for gameplay impeccable. You had the backing of a publisher who would let storytellers get absolutely crazy with their biggest IPs working with a studio that had proven they could make a damn fine combat system.
But this? What actually exists? I dunno what to tell you, man.
This game is like eating at McDonalds in the heart of Tuscany.
--- secret [E]nding ---
Hey, you know why I played this whole DrakeNier franchise?
Because I had a crush on someone who said this was their favorite game of all time.
And I wanted to talk to them about it.
So I played the whole franchise.
The end.
When I struggle to understand my reaction to any story, I ask myself, “Where is the love?”
NieR: Automata got me for the longest time because it seemed like a story about love. The set-up is a no-brainer: a pair of war buddy androids learn to open up to each other during their deployment. Because they are androids, it feels natural for them to question, often out loud and to the camera, their potential for emotions, evolution, and finding life paths outside the conventions of their manufacture. All in service of literally saving humanity.
Watching too-cool-for-emotions bombshell 2B play off socially starved twinklord 9S started out cute! The premise was endearing! 2B has such a cool design, I wanted to love her. (I wanted her in Smash Bros. just so I could see that dress in bright blue, tbh.)
But even in their story’s best moments, something felt off.
Because their robot bodies meant they could die in each other’s arms a billion times. They could lose their memories of each other and suffer inhuman anguishes. They could get corrupted by mind-controlling computer viruses and kill each other again and again. At some point, their cute banter, their requests for cute nicknames - it didn’t justify or counterweight the dramatic visuals of maimed bodies, crying faces, bleeding out, dying cold and feeling alone.
NieR: Automata is not a game about love. Whoever creates its stories only understands “love” as a pretext for suffering. Which is fucking tragic. Because it meant instead of mining the setting for the depth it inspired me to imagine, this game was much more fascinated with how it could shove absurd misery in my face like a moral-less episode of the Twilight Zone.
With this lens in mind, it was kind of pathetic how easily I could predict every “twist” in the game. Not in a lore accurate explanation sense - god no. I vaguely know the series’ plot template at this point, but none of it matters. Because in this game, everyone dies and is miserable, the end. Does an NPC have a friend? A lover? An endearing character trait? Then someone dies. Just everyone. All the time. Every time.
This is the game people meme’d Elden Ring to be.
In retrospect, none of this really surprises me, either? Nier: Automata is a puree of every writing sin I’ve written about for previous DrakeNier entries.
Drakengard - Pointless pontifications on violence in a game that doesn’t allow you to engage with itself any other way.
NieR - obsessed with the idea of “what is a person?” while drowning in the shallowest possible puddles.
Drakengard 3 - obsessed with “twists” at the expense of anything else, confusing curiosity for investment.
NieR Re-in-carnation - episodic misery porn
So you want to know what is unique about NieR: Automata? What special flavor gives it its own special repugnant aftertaste?
The “twist” that 9S is an incel - and secretly the main character. Every reveal of every other character’s secret backstory or motivation reinforced that 9S was the specialist boy. Everything that happened to every other character in the story happened for his “development”, and what he developed into was repulsive Hot Anime Nonsense disguised as an art house film. He. Sucks. His character has nothing to say. Nothing that drives him besides wanting to fuck 2B. A thing the game explicitly tells me when someone hacked his brain. 9S is a ball of impotent malice disguised as a tumblr soft-boy that lives for satisfying an unchecked id of violence and objectifying desire.
To anyone who wants to argue that means anything in the context of the premise, plot, or execution of NieR: Automata: gross. I am uninterested. I am not denying the possibility. I just don’t care.
--- just getting [S]tarted ---
Because here is where I do my DrakeNier style “gotcha!” moment and reveal that I actually don’t care about the story of Nier: Automata at all, and that my previous points were all merely pretense and introduction for talking about my real feelings for the game - how it is the slickest character action game I have ever played; derogatory.
For how much I “hate” the story of Nier: Automata, its three main routes sure went down smoothly. None of what I complained about above really congealed as a thought while I was playing. My brain didn’t catch up with what I had been consuming until the final act went off the deep end - I could feel during the finale my attention slowly lumbering back to ask “wait, really? That’s what we’re doing here?” Now that I’ve written even vague strokes about the plot, I can feel my memories of this story leaving my brain forever to better match the nothing of an emotional experience I had with it all.
Which I find very interesting! Because I ripped into every other entry in this series based on their stories more than anything else!
You know what NieR: Automata’s legacy in my life is and will be? Battling a single optional side quest boss named Father Servo. I was maybe level 30 at most. He was level 60. My damage output was miniscule, but non-zero. So I fought him. Between my auto-heal and vampirism skills, I could dance around enough to passively heal every time that I slipped up and took a hit, (which would knock out like ⅔ of my health).
This took over an hour. And then when I finally bested him, he got up with a SECOND HEALTH BAR. And I had to repeat the EXACT SAME FIGHT AGAIN. No new moves, no new gimmicks. Sunk-cost fallacy is a bitch, so I listened to this song for like two and a half hours, except you need to overlay gatling gun noises rattling in your skull the whole time for the full experience.
Now this song plays in my head when I’m doing something mindless and monotonous that somehow still feels necessary. Toweling off after a shower. Looking at my shopping list in a grocery store. I finished this fight weeks ago and it’s still happening! It’s so ridiculous and dumb that I’m equal parts endeared and exasperated.
So why did I talk about the plot of this game for a couple pages first? Because I needed to establish the profundity of what I didn’t think about while I was playing this game. Like the fact that I didn’t blink seeing an optional boss that was twice my level. The thought “maybe I should do this later” didn’t cross my mind. And, it was possible! The game let me do it! It sucked, but it wasn’t “hard”... just tedious.
Isn’t that weird??? Like, shouldn’t I have been scared off? Later, when I was level 60, I was killing dudes so fast that they barely had time to blink. Was that Father Servo fight supposed to be a joke I ruined by rushing to the punchline? When was I supposed to fight that guy??
Right before I would have unlocked fast-travel in this game, I unwittingly did every side-quest there was for me to do. Including the entirety of the Father Servo questline. Because this game kept crashing on my PS5 if I went near this one spot on the map that was necessary for advancing the plot. But I only thought to google my problem after I ran out of other things to do. I probably could have saved myself a couple hours of running alone by advancing the main plot just that one extra bit. So why was I content to run back and forth across the same map so many times, getting bobbles and trinkets and gold that I never used or looked at?
Because this game is slick.
--- an [O]asis of oil ---
Having played NieR, I was at first confused why people liked NieR: Automata so much better. Because structurally, it is the same. A barren “open world” made of a hub and spokes. The same respawning enemy placements. “Side quests” that are only ever visiting the same NPCs in the same locations and running between them. (NieR’s stories were far more interesting, and its enemy variety much more regional and profound!)
But what NieR: Automata has that NieR lacked was a satisfying run animation. Watching 2B’s thigh-high boots flash in the light while her short skirt swishes back and forth is fun to watch. Her gothic lace and katanas are inherently funny when she’s running up sand dunes or splashing through sewers.
More importantly, NieR: Automata has masterful conservation of momentum for other actions from a run. You jump farther with a running start. NieR: Automata has three different animations for mounting ladders depending on your movement speed: from a stand still, from a walk, or from a run. You can jump up the ladders. You have different animations for dismounting the top of a ladder depending on whether you were jumping and at what part of the jump animation you transitioned to a dismount animation. You have a different dismount animation if you jumped towards the top of the ladder part-way without climbing the top of it.
And all of these ladder clambering actions are smooth as hell. They’re effortless. How the characters in NieR: Automata vault over half-obstacles and bounce off walls show the first signs of all the stuff Square Enix lifted from this game when they made Kingdom Hearts III. 2B’s ladder descent animation is the kind of superb sexy fun that reminds you Bayonetta 2 just finished cooking down the hall. Running, vaulting, double jumping, hang-time glide falling - they all have a breathless weightlessness to them that makes environmental traversal thoughtless.
But the movement itself is only one part of three as to how this game feels so slick. Because the UI design is polished to a blinding sheen.
When you open the pause menu, the map is the first thing you see. Making the map take up the whole screen takes a single flick of the camera stick. Flicking the camera stick starts engaging the 3D map in some way, flipping or rotating it. I cannot overstate the genius of this. The actions of “map selection” and “map interaction” are merged. This means that even if the player is opening the map multiple times to check where they are and where they’re going, it minimizes the sensation that there’s a break in the action - they are still playing the game even as they’re reading and synthesizing information.
Both the main map and the mini-map have all available side-quests, including ones you haven’t started yet, indicated at all times. This means that if you take a wrong turn navigating the environment, if you’re close enough to something else of interest, the decision to change targets takes a short enough amount of time that it feels like it was always intentional.
Which will happen often, because the environment is filled with obstacles to jump over. You will miss jumps and end up on the wrong side of buildings. Because you will be running so fast and blindly all of the time, because why wouldn’t you be running all the time?
I normally develop a great mental map when playing video games, but I still got lost in Nier: Automata’s tiny hub world map through to the end of my playtime. Because the penalty for taking a wrong turn didn’t register as annoying enough for me to learn. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop the wrong way was as engaging as doing anything else. And then I got fast travel anyway, which eliminated the need further. I routinely got my fast travel points mixed up, too. And that also didn’t matter. Because zooming around was engaging and mindless.
Was it fun? I dunno. Maybe for a couple moments in the hours I ran around. But running felt better than waiting through the loading times of fast travel. It’s not like I was fighting anything during my zooming, anyway.
Which is where I get to the third pillar of this game’s slickness - the combat. And I want to linger on the confluence of slicknesses that stopped me from learning the map, and how that applies to combat.
Because the menu stays accessible during combat. You can chug potions at any time. You can change weapon load-outs and equipped skills at any time. And like, yeah, that feels awesome! Why wouldn’t I want to be able to access everything in the menus whenever I wanted? That feels so player-empowered!
But you know what else that stopped me from doing? Fucking dodging. Why would I bother paying attention to enemy attack patterns and my own movement if I could just drink health potions from a pause menu if it ever got dire? Each time I died in the early game was a genuine surprise, because my brain forgot that combat meant I was in danger.
So after something killed me a couple times and I figured I should rummage through the skill menu for the first time, I found I had an… auto-heal ability? If I could avoid taking damage for 6 seconds, then 2B would start getting health back for free. Awesome! Look at all the health potions I could save! (For context, a health potion costs like a dime. So this impulse to “save” on health potions is incredibly stupid.)
But now I had an incentive to not get hit. I started dodging all the time. And you know, that dodge animation is so slick. 2B glows in a highly abstracted way, time slows down, particle effects everywhere - in the drab world of NieR: Automata, dodging feels like the most importantly animated thing in the whole game. You can dodge out of most attack animations! You can dodge consecutively with very little consequence! And if you dodge at the right time, you can unleash a near-invincible counter-attack!
Now you might be thinking, “but you can’t beat a character action game just by dodging all the time,” and you would be correct. But NieR: Automata has something else in its combat to make you feel like you’re winning all the time, even when you objectively suck and are missing all your punches. A little flying robot companion who has an infinite ammo gatling gun. As long as you’re willing to hold down the fire button, he will shoot at anything you’re targeting. Is the damage a ton? Not to start. But non-zero damage is indeed damage. You can start shooting dudes before they’re in range of your sword! You can shoot flying enemies without having to jump up there!
Maybe astute readers can see how this came together to culminate in my Father Servo experience. That’s right, a good majority of the damage I did to him in that fight was from holding down the fire button on my robo buddy while running around trying not to get hit. Did I try to hit him with my sword? Of course I did! I had another skill where I got health back from dealing damage to enemies. But after so many dozens of minutes and so many close calls, it wasn’t worth it to try to do more than one or two swipes at a time and risk having to do the fight again later. Besides, I could just barely see his health bar going down, if I just held out a bit longer…!
--- all in the name of [L]ove ---
I want to stress that every individual design decision in NieR: Automata feels incredibly kind. Rarely have I felt so visibly cared for.
NieR: Automata has multiple sections where the camera zooms out and locks the player character into a 2D plane. Running up curved staircases, crossing long bridges, certain hub world areas - it makes a ton of sense! Navigating those kinds of environments is annoying in 3D with full character and camera control! By turning those same hallways into 2D spaces, you get some visual variety - seeing your character from a new angle, the camera now allowed to change its focus to capture a larger part of the environment. It’s such an elegant gesture that provides multiple boons at once.
I had multiple real-life friends talk this game up when they heard I was playing it. They loved it. Mind, these are the kind of people who play maybe half of one game a quarter on a busy gaming year. One of them even platinum’d the game. But when I asked them why NieR: Automata was “so good, dude”, everyone seemed to draw a blank. “Just play it man, you’ll see.”
Well I did.
I saw a game with really drab colors. Where the environments were rendered with enough loving detail to trick people into thinking it had an art direction. (Seriously, the androids, the robots, the realistic backgrounds, the surrealist liminal spaces - nothing goes together! Not even the player characters' combinations of gothic velvet, Japanese weaponry, and chibi robo companions make any visual sense!)
I saw a game with an incomprehensible story that seemed as unfocused and inconsequential as it did mean, nihilistic, and dumb.
I saw a game with lovingly flashy combat animations that made me think people really want to play Kingdom Hearts but with a “mature” aesthetic. Enough of a veneer that they’re playing a Real Game™ while being asked to do as little as possible to progress.
So hear me out.
Conceptually, NieR: Automata is not in the same wheelhouse as Bayonetta - it is a Kirby game.
Kirby Super Star has so much effort put into its 20 or so movesets. Each one is bursting with delightful animations and sparkles and sound effects that, in the SNES era, were straight damn opulent. Controlling Kirby is extremely satisfying, because all of his movements are fast and slick. By which I mean, the time between pressing a button and something loud and flashy and useful happening is measured in a miniscule amount of frames.
Yet all these crazy abilities can only be used on cutesy puffs of candy people whose concept of combat is, at best, the notion that maybe they should walk towards their adversary. They are moving targets, excuses to unleash all the fun and flashy spritework Kirby has at his disposal.
And you know what? You can just fly over all of it. Ignore it all.
You know how I usually die in Kirby Super Star? When I try to look really cool and style on a brainless enemy in such a way that I fall down a pit.
You know what the penalty is for doing so? Usually nothing, it’s a Kirby game lmao.
So let’s look at NieR: Automata.
2B can equip two weapons at a time, one for light attacks, one for heavy attacks. She can switch between load-outs of weapons mid-combat. Each combination of weapon types have different combos for attacking between the light and heavy attack buttons. You can upgrade weapons to extend their movesets. The world of NieR: Automata comes to life when you swing your sword, every stroke blazing with golden lights and particle effects.
2B can be equipped with myriad skills. Her aforementioned helper buddies have gatling guns, missiles, laser blasts, and use magic spells. All of these can be upgraded and customized. Not to mention that 9S fights alongside you, and you can tell him to specialize in one of many combat styles.
Yet all these crazy abilities can only be used on cutesy gumball head robots whose concept of combat is, at best, flailing their arms in the direction of their adversary. They are moving targets, excuses to unleash all the fun and flashy particle effects 2B has at her disposal.
And you know what? You can just run past all of it. Ignore it all.
You know how I died in NieR: Automata, when I could still die? When I was trying to look cool and style on brainless enemies with new weapons in such a way I forgot to heal.
You know what the penalty was for doing so? Running back to where I was. It’s a Kirby game.
Seriously, there’s no depth, no enemy or boss fight that made me unlearn my basic habits of “shoot gatling gun, run towards enemy, press light attack button until dead.” When my brain switched off, sometimes I’d forget to press an attack button, and just walk around picking up trinkets while my gatling gun sidekick friend killed everything for me. Which somehow was a viable strategy! There were some boss fights in the final act that started dying mid-diatribe from my auto-attack alone before I had time to find and walk towards them! And I never upgraded it once!
And that’s what’s at the heart of a Kirby game. They’re unbalanced in favor of the player in such a way that they are banking on the player button-mashing enough to not notice. You don’t need to get good at them. In fact, digging into whatever flashy abilities are most fun for you might make the game take longer than if you stuck to defaults.
All the proof I had of the uselessness of the combat in NieR: Automata came when 9S, instead of a strong attack, had the ability to “hack” enemies. That is, to play a twin-stick shooter mini-game. This mini-game lasts between 2 and 15 seconds. It deals colossal damage. If it weren’t for the visually necessary screen transitions between combat and hacking minigame, it would be a no-brainer to be doing this all the time from a pure damage-per-second perspective.
But I rarely did this on purpose outside of mini-bosses because I wanted the satisfaction of hitting the light attack button and punching dudes. Even if my auto-attack robo-buddy was killing things just as fast as I was anyway. I at least wanted the pretense of involvement to be maintained.
And for some people, that is enough. NieR: Automata loves those people, and they feel loved by it. You can tinker with your build like a mechanic, forget everything in the couple weeks before you play the game again, and still feel like you’ve retained all your skills as a gamer as you mow down dudes.
The story is shocking, but is so cheap that you don’t have to remember anything that happened before. Just follow the quest marker, bro. The spectacle of the moment is all that matters. Sure there is lore and terms swirling around you, but if you can understand the moment-to-moment surprise and drama, then maybe it feels like you’ve been paying better attention than you thought.
And playing the game is frictionless. It never gets frustrating. It always feels like it has thought of you, and what you most want to do in this exact moment, and make it as smooth as possible.
It loves you.
Right?
--- no ghost, all [M]achine ---
NieR: Automata is flawless in a way that does not make it perfect. I struggle to say it’s even good, because the totality of my experience can be summed up as engaging without being fun. But it’s so engaging that even now I’m unsure if I’m correctly remembering the difference.
2B is very clearly the daughter of NieR and Bayonetta. She inherited all their “best” features. But where is her soul?
Combat in NieR was slow and stiff, both for Nier and the monsters he fought. It was as if underwater. But the enemies behaved in ways that forced you to think about them differently. Some danced around to your back. Some had armor that needed to be broken. Some shot volleys of beams that needed to be dispersed or evaded. Even if you changed the difficulty to Easy, you still needed to be aware of your surroundings, mindful of the timing of your button presses.
Bayonetta is built around dodging at the last second, but with intentionality. Whiff a dodge, and you need to wait a beat to try again. Maybe if I’d put in more time to be more skilled, I’d know Bayonetta has the best combat system of all time, but between how enemies act and the elaborateness of the combos you need to combat them, engaging with combat in Bayonetta is a full brain experience. And it is fun. Because Bayonetta is fun, and styling as Bayonetta looks fun, and styling as Bayonetta makes you feel like a 4D chess grandmaster.
In both of those games, you will die. You will get hurt. And you will learn. With the learning comes fulfillment, with the knowledge comes mastery, with the mastery comes fun. They are different types, and Bayonetta’s is much easier to explain the appeal of than NieR’s, but there is fun to be had there.
NieR: Automata is too kind to let me get hurt. So concerned with giving me options to feel powerful to ever let me feel weak.
Fundamentally, NieR: Automata’s problems cannot be solved by “turning up the difficulty, bro”. I killed Father Servo with a 30+ level deficit! How would cranking up the difficulty have changed that experience? Made it take four hours instead of two? For as much as I called Nier: Automata a Kirby game, even the last Kirby game I played ended with Baby’s First Bloodborne Boss, (which was wild to watch my 9-year-old-nephew absolutely smoke). The secret final boss of NieR: Automata is nothing that can’t be taken down with the tried and true strategy of “shoot gatling gun, run towards enemy, press light attack button until dead” - except maybe with the spice of chugging more potions than normal.
I see the potential for this to be the best game of all time. The set-up has such immaculate ludo-narrative harmony. For as much as the visuals clash, they make readability for gameplay impeccable. You had the backing of a publisher who would let storytellers get absolutely crazy with their biggest IPs working with a studio that had proven they could make a damn fine combat system.
But this? What actually exists? I dunno what to tell you, man.
This game is like eating at McDonalds in the heart of Tuscany.
--- secret [E]nding ---
Hey, you know why I played this whole DrakeNier franchise?
Because I had a crush on someone who said this was their favorite game of all time.
And I wanted to talk to them about it.
So I played the whole franchise.
The end.
11 days ago
Bavoom is
now playing
Klonoa: Empire of Dreams
12 days ago
Bavoom
reviewed
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
I'm moving. I'm going through things. I'm scared.
I'm choosing what gets kept, what needs to go. I have so much to sell. I feel overwhelmed.
Today I gave away my Animal Crossing amiibo cards. I had a special binder I gave away, too. My friend and I, we couldn't help but paw through it.
Baabara was my first neighbor. Kevin was my first friend. I set his catchphrase to "bromeo," which pissed off my boyfriend to no end (and delighted me in equal measure.) I built a shrine of public works projects when Keaton left. I paid 17 million bells to a forum user for Eric. I wrote in my real world journal how much I wanted to cry when Annabelle left. She went to my sister's village - it wasn't the same.
The year I played Animal Crossing: New Leaf was the year I got and had depression the worst. I played 1,000+ hours of this game. I 100%'d it. There was not a square inch of my town that wasn't thoughtfully decorated. I had every piece of furniture, every holiday event item from every region, every piece of clothing. My house was immaculate, my museum a marvel. Places that I would legitimately enjoy spending time in. I stopped playing because I literally ran out of things to do.
I once spent 8 hours resetting my game because I was so particular about where Bianaca put her house and I refused to compromise. I didn't like the system of drawing my paths, so I covered them all with 4-leaf clover. I learned how to hack my 3DS because of this game. (Fuck you Isabelle, that bridge needs to be behind my house at an angle to get to the train station and like hell I care about your zoning laws. I OWN YOU!) Blue and gold roses, purple pansies, every square littered with opulences that made visitors describe my town of Merriam as a wonderland.
G3 B3 G4 G4 A4 G4(held) F4 E4 (rest) D4 E4 D4 C4
I spent so long writing that song and it still comes to mind so easily. (The first D4 is actually a wildcard in-game, but it’s a D4 when hummed correctly.) It worked so well as a chime entering a store. I remember how Pashmina always squeaked singing the first D4. It felt like such a wonderful anthem in so many ways for so many of its uses. I was always taken off guard when visiting another town with a different tune, and always felt so natural and at home whenever I came back to it.
Do you know how invested I was talking to that little hedgehog at the sewing machine until I became her friend? Knowing nothing about this franchise, not knowing that she was a series staple gimmick? I was ecstatic.
When Reese had a special on sharks I was at the island fishing sharks all day long.
The amount I loved these little animal critters is legitimately Fucked. Up.
Seriously.
It seemed so natural the stories that sprung up in my mind. Al and Ceaser were the weird gay couple that were ugly but happy. Cookie bullied Rhonda into moving, and then left herself when there was no one to control. Pashmina had her eye on Kevin, who only had his eye on the ball. Julian was the cool friend I didn't think I deserved to have, and Henry left because he felt the same way.
When they sang Happy Birthday to me I near bawled my eyes out. Because for as touching and heart-warming as it was to have these little spirits sharing love for me, spirits that I had loved so much, I was still, in the real world, alone and playing my 3DS on my birthday.
That's the real rub of the magic and terror of Animal Crossing. Magical because you feel real emotions. Terrifying because you can see the code. They're puppets. Dolls. Elaborate and adorable, but predictable - and you still love them all the same.
But they're kind. They're understanding. You can hurt their feelings, blow them off, mess up their yard - and they'll still write you letters when they live next door, give you presents, and stop by your house to see what you're up to. Maybe each individual interaction is annoying, or doesn't register as important. But in aggregate, those emotions stack up. Each time they give you that piece of fruit you were looking for. That rare piece of furniture that completes your set. Each time they change outfits into something so stupid or so cute that it sticks in your brain. You feel real little things. Imperfectly perfect little moments seeded in time enough to weave in with the passage of time in your real life.
When I had insomnia, Static stared at the moon with me. I remember naming my town at my sister's graduation party. I remember my parents watching the New Year's ball drop on the TV and then looking at the fireworks in Merriam. I remember sitting at the kitchen table when the town was covered in snow for the first time. I remember hunting for beetles at Tortimer Island while dying of summer heat at my uncle's place in Arizona.
I have memories. Good ones. Real places, real emotions of these happy little animal people. And yet these little animal people are not. fucking. real.
Somewhere on a back-up hard drive or a laptop I lost the charging cable to, I have the save data for the perfect date of Merriam. A day in May in a particular year. Where the hydrangeas are in bloom, and the weather is perfect, and everyone who is supposed to be there, is there.
Do you know how raw and cringe it is to talk about loving anything about this game? Like, if you don't understand the appeal of this series, GOOD. Be healthy. Have self-respect. Everyone over-shared about New Horizons because the pandemic ruined everyone's sense of shame. But loving this game is not good. It's not healthy.
At the same time.
That grammar is hiding a lot. Was loving this game healthy for me? No. But was I healthy? Would I have been healthy if I hadn’t been playing this game? Fuck no.
You need time to get invested in Animal Crossing. Real world time that you do not get back. Real world time that is, in fact, a valid currency for trying to make connections in the real world. The potential opportunity cost for getting "the most" out of Animal Crossing is wild.
I hated New Horizons because I could tell the villagers didn't want to be my friend. They wanted to be Instagram fodder. But maybe that is for the best. Because that recontextualizes the appeal of the game to being something that you show off to other humans. That the Animal Crossing aesthetic is there merely to facilitate a shared experience with other people of how you've played with your lego set.
I'm going to miss my friend. I'm putting my life into boxes. And now I get it, that once your life is in boxes, it's too late for anyone to change your mind, too late for your mind to even matter. You can't not go.
Going through those cards, reminiscing of which ones were my favorites, my sister's favorites, remembering the hours we spent cloning flowers - it made me realize how Animal Crossing gets its hooks in you. How the connection to the real world's time gets you invested, but there's no closure. You can always come back. Most of your villagers will still be there and know who you are. Your furniture will be just as you left it. So not playing means there's always the possibility of coming back, and things being a little different, but capable of being the same. But here, with these cards, I had a tangible thing to hold in my hands, in the real world. Unlocked memories. Recreating the paths I walked in that town for months. Something I could make peace with. Something I could give away. Something to pass off at the end of a season.
As I spoke with my friend, I let myself talk honestly about what these little dudes had meant to me for the first time aloud. Because I could trust him to understand what I had been going through. What it meant for me to be that invested. What I was really telling him with these silly nonsense stories. Because he had played New Horizons the same way. And he knew that when you can honestly describe how something made you feel, in a way that previously would have been so vulnerable, you've truly moved on. And I needed to know that I wasn't still the person who lost a year of his life and redirected it into Animal Crossing.
I had to take them back. He can keep the binder and Diva and the dozens of strangers who mean nothing to me. I needed to keep the cards of the villagers who were with me at the end. At the end of playing pretend. Of when I ran out of ways to play. I'm still missing Static and Zucker and Pierce.
Maybe there isn’t shame in using Animal Crossing for what it was. A bridge, a crutch, a reminder of what kindness and friendship looked like in a time where those were in short supply. Don’t we sometimes use real people the same way? Aren’t some real friendships just as shallow, but mean just as much? Few friendships last a lifetime, the same as few games are played forever.
I don't want to move. But I can't not move. I have to forgive myself for the people I used to be. I have to find grace in seeing what I learned from the experiences I would never wish on myself again. Including my ability to love Animal Crossing.
I'm choosing what gets kept, what needs to go. I have so much to sell. I feel overwhelmed.
Today I gave away my Animal Crossing amiibo cards. I had a special binder I gave away, too. My friend and I, we couldn't help but paw through it.
Baabara was my first neighbor. Kevin was my first friend. I set his catchphrase to "bromeo," which pissed off my boyfriend to no end (and delighted me in equal measure.) I built a shrine of public works projects when Keaton left. I paid 17 million bells to a forum user for Eric. I wrote in my real world journal how much I wanted to cry when Annabelle left. She went to my sister's village - it wasn't the same.
The year I played Animal Crossing: New Leaf was the year I got and had depression the worst. I played 1,000+ hours of this game. I 100%'d it. There was not a square inch of my town that wasn't thoughtfully decorated. I had every piece of furniture, every holiday event item from every region, every piece of clothing. My house was immaculate, my museum a marvel. Places that I would legitimately enjoy spending time in. I stopped playing because I literally ran out of things to do.
I once spent 8 hours resetting my game because I was so particular about where Bianaca put her house and I refused to compromise. I didn't like the system of drawing my paths, so I covered them all with 4-leaf clover. I learned how to hack my 3DS because of this game. (Fuck you Isabelle, that bridge needs to be behind my house at an angle to get to the train station and like hell I care about your zoning laws. I OWN YOU!) Blue and gold roses, purple pansies, every square littered with opulences that made visitors describe my town of Merriam as a wonderland.
G3 B3 G4 G4 A4 G4(held) F4 E4 (rest) D4 E4 D4 C4
I spent so long writing that song and it still comes to mind so easily. (The first D4 is actually a wildcard in-game, but it’s a D4 when hummed correctly.) It worked so well as a chime entering a store. I remember how Pashmina always squeaked singing the first D4. It felt like such a wonderful anthem in so many ways for so many of its uses. I was always taken off guard when visiting another town with a different tune, and always felt so natural and at home whenever I came back to it.
Do you know how invested I was talking to that little hedgehog at the sewing machine until I became her friend? Knowing nothing about this franchise, not knowing that she was a series staple gimmick? I was ecstatic.
When Reese had a special on sharks I was at the island fishing sharks all day long.
The amount I loved these little animal critters is legitimately Fucked. Up.
Seriously.
It seemed so natural the stories that sprung up in my mind. Al and Ceaser were the weird gay couple that were ugly but happy. Cookie bullied Rhonda into moving, and then left herself when there was no one to control. Pashmina had her eye on Kevin, who only had his eye on the ball. Julian was the cool friend I didn't think I deserved to have, and Henry left because he felt the same way.
When they sang Happy Birthday to me I near bawled my eyes out. Because for as touching and heart-warming as it was to have these little spirits sharing love for me, spirits that I had loved so much, I was still, in the real world, alone and playing my 3DS on my birthday.
That's the real rub of the magic and terror of Animal Crossing. Magical because you feel real emotions. Terrifying because you can see the code. They're puppets. Dolls. Elaborate and adorable, but predictable - and you still love them all the same.
But they're kind. They're understanding. You can hurt their feelings, blow them off, mess up their yard - and they'll still write you letters when they live next door, give you presents, and stop by your house to see what you're up to. Maybe each individual interaction is annoying, or doesn't register as important. But in aggregate, those emotions stack up. Each time they give you that piece of fruit you were looking for. That rare piece of furniture that completes your set. Each time they change outfits into something so stupid or so cute that it sticks in your brain. You feel real little things. Imperfectly perfect little moments seeded in time enough to weave in with the passage of time in your real life.
When I had insomnia, Static stared at the moon with me. I remember naming my town at my sister's graduation party. I remember my parents watching the New Year's ball drop on the TV and then looking at the fireworks in Merriam. I remember sitting at the kitchen table when the town was covered in snow for the first time. I remember hunting for beetles at Tortimer Island while dying of summer heat at my uncle's place in Arizona.
I have memories. Good ones. Real places, real emotions of these happy little animal people. And yet these little animal people are not. fucking. real.
Somewhere on a back-up hard drive or a laptop I lost the charging cable to, I have the save data for the perfect date of Merriam. A day in May in a particular year. Where the hydrangeas are in bloom, and the weather is perfect, and everyone who is supposed to be there, is there.
Do you know how raw and cringe it is to talk about loving anything about this game? Like, if you don't understand the appeal of this series, GOOD. Be healthy. Have self-respect. Everyone over-shared about New Horizons because the pandemic ruined everyone's sense of shame. But loving this game is not good. It's not healthy.
At the same time.
That grammar is hiding a lot. Was loving this game healthy for me? No. But was I healthy? Would I have been healthy if I hadn’t been playing this game? Fuck no.
You need time to get invested in Animal Crossing. Real world time that you do not get back. Real world time that is, in fact, a valid currency for trying to make connections in the real world. The potential opportunity cost for getting "the most" out of Animal Crossing is wild.
I hated New Horizons because I could tell the villagers didn't want to be my friend. They wanted to be Instagram fodder. But maybe that is for the best. Because that recontextualizes the appeal of the game to being something that you show off to other humans. That the Animal Crossing aesthetic is there merely to facilitate a shared experience with other people of how you've played with your lego set.
I'm going to miss my friend. I'm putting my life into boxes. And now I get it, that once your life is in boxes, it's too late for anyone to change your mind, too late for your mind to even matter. You can't not go.
Going through those cards, reminiscing of which ones were my favorites, my sister's favorites, remembering the hours we spent cloning flowers - it made me realize how Animal Crossing gets its hooks in you. How the connection to the real world's time gets you invested, but there's no closure. You can always come back. Most of your villagers will still be there and know who you are. Your furniture will be just as you left it. So not playing means there's always the possibility of coming back, and things being a little different, but capable of being the same. But here, with these cards, I had a tangible thing to hold in my hands, in the real world. Unlocked memories. Recreating the paths I walked in that town for months. Something I could make peace with. Something I could give away. Something to pass off at the end of a season.
As I spoke with my friend, I let myself talk honestly about what these little dudes had meant to me for the first time aloud. Because I could trust him to understand what I had been going through. What it meant for me to be that invested. What I was really telling him with these silly nonsense stories. Because he had played New Horizons the same way. And he knew that when you can honestly describe how something made you feel, in a way that previously would have been so vulnerable, you've truly moved on. And I needed to know that I wasn't still the person who lost a year of his life and redirected it into Animal Crossing.
I had to take them back. He can keep the binder and Diva and the dozens of strangers who mean nothing to me. I needed to keep the cards of the villagers who were with me at the end. At the end of playing pretend. Of when I ran out of ways to play. I'm still missing Static and Zucker and Pierce.
Maybe there isn’t shame in using Animal Crossing for what it was. A bridge, a crutch, a reminder of what kindness and friendship looked like in a time where those were in short supply. Don’t we sometimes use real people the same way? Aren’t some real friendships just as shallow, but mean just as much? Few friendships last a lifetime, the same as few games are played forever.
I don't want to move. But I can't not move. I have to forgive myself for the people I used to be. I have to find grace in seeing what I learned from the experiences I would never wish on myself again. Including my ability to love Animal Crossing.
12 days ago
Bavoom
played
Klonoa: Empire of Dreams
13 days ago
Bavoom is
now playing
Rocket: Robot on Wheels
14 days ago