Progressed the story up until the game gives the ability the fast travel and then spent the remainder of my session just completing side quests.
Took the liberty of raising the difficulty from [Normal] to [Hard] since the playthrough is mostly identical and figured the increased difficulty would freshen it up. However 9S's dampened melee capabilities means I'm maintaining my distance from enemies so it hasn't really effected the gameplay all that much.
Have to say I actually really enjoy the hacking and may even prefer 9S over 2B. Whenever this is a reflection on the quality of the combat or my poor taste (likely both) remains to be decided. Definitely unbalanced with the rest of the game though perhaps that was intentional to allow players to finish up content that missed out on the first playthrough.
Take Father Servo for instance. Regularly his bulky HP would take upwards of 15-30 minutes to bring down unless you were appropriately levelled which is unlikely due to how big the jump in LV is between each quest. But because hacking does percentage based damage the fights over in just under 2 minutes. Same can be said for the golden machines which when I first encountered in 2Bs route took over 20 minutes to defeat but hacking got the job done in a fraction of that time. Suppose I feel like this is cheating in a way as by hacking I avoid having to evade enemy attacks. Granted the bullet hell minigame substitutes the dodging you'd perform in the environment however this means skipping out on the boss specific moves and learning how to avoid those.
To continue on a critical tangent I don't think 48 stages is a large enough amount to carry the hacking through the entire game. Some bosses have unique hacking levels but often its taken from the list referenced above so bosses lack identity in 9S's route.
To mention some positives however, 9S also has unique side quests and I liked the goofy interactions within them. The reclusive son that doesn't want to leave his room locks himself away forcing 9S to hack it open; only inspiring the son to keep increasing the security and to create an unpickable lock. This pleases the mother who is glad that her son finally has a goal in life completely ignoring reason 9S tried to break him out in the first place. Likewise the machine who pretends to be stupid in order to exploit his fellow machines. The humour is lost in translation when describing it here in this log so you'll have to take my word for it.
Believe I'm mostly caught up on the stuff I missed during my first playthrough so next session I may go on and complete route B.
