Huh. Wasn't nearly as sold on that run. Redoing stuff you already did for 75% of the second play just isn't super fun. I think the hacking minigame is supposed to tide you over but it, and I cannot emphasize this enough, suuuuucks lol. All of the highs of the first run are still there, but they feel really diluted having to redo stuff without any suspense. Losing the second heavy weapon is also just kinda punishment. Thankfully I could basically speed run the stuff I had seen before (hence this run being half the length), but still.... I imagine I'll appreciate this run in the grand scheme of things later on, and I feel like I see what they were trying to do for players in the moment too, but it was still a serious chore to push through.

Unlike the first run, I can really only think of two merits for the second one. First, the few new elements on the 2B side are decent. I liked seeing his perspective, and there were some fun gameplay times when he was alone. The highlights were his standalone contributions against Adam and Eve in the hacking platform, which leads to the second pro of the B run: once again, the story. You get some good tidbits in a cool way. Realizing who the narrator was (and watching him come to terms with what he was seeing) was great, and the Adam sequence in the copied city in particular was excellent. Still, I think that was the only moment I had the same sense of mind-melting awe that the A run inspired so regularly--even the bombshell of the run re: YorHa felt relatively uninspired compared to the insanity the early hours of the game held. You basically had to infer something along those lines by that point, and it kinda felt like the entire reason for the B run existing was to tell you that point nonetheless. Such a shame, I feel like there's a lot of wasted potential in the second run, but I still expect I'll come to appreciate it as I slowly unlock the alphabet in Automata.