This game is the pinnacle of Japanese RPGs. I don't know how else to put it…one day this game just randomly caught my interest, and I really wanted to play it. I like existentialism and I like robots, so naturally I'd like this game. After just a few days of owning this game it already gripped me. The gameplay, the story, the beautiful yet broken world, you can get a bad ending by eating mackerel (no that is not a joke), 2B IS REALLY COOL OH MY GOD I CAN'T PUT INTO WORDS HOW COOL I THINK 2B IS SHE MAKES THE GAME GREAT JUST BY BEING THERE, and it's the only game so far to make me downright sob. Video games have made me cry before, like Fire Emblem Fates, Persona 3, Yakuza 0 and Super Mario Galaxy, which I honestly did not see coming, but where they left me a little teary eyed, I was left bawling by NieR: Automata. Whilst the English voice acting can sound a bit generic in the same way English dubs of Japanese media tend to be, I feel like the voice acting is also what carries the emotion of the game's scenes. The performances of Kira Buckland as 2B and Kyle McCarley as 9S when they're both lamenting the other android's death in the first and second half of the game respectively hit really, REALLY hard. These Voice Actors are really good at crying. It's oddly arty for a AAA game. And I don't just mean arty in the way that games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are arty, where the game is aesthetically beautiful. I mean, it IS, the environments, particularly the ruins of the city reclaimed by nature in the absence of humanity, are stunning, but it's more than that. It's arty in the sense that it's experimental, and tackles themes you'd be hard pressed to find in other games like it. It's a game about existential dread, the Death of God, trying to find a meaning to one's existence and the pain that comes from being…well, NieR: Automata is about the pain that comes from simply being.

It can be very on the nose. Sometimes in ways that I like-I love that the first of the game's three protagonists is called 2B, that her partner is called 9S (which is a pun on "non esse", not to be) and that the third protagonist who betrayed the organisation 2B and 9S are fighting for is called A2 (Et tu Brute? Wow, what a trully horrible thing you've done. #Bravo you coward.), it's the same school of naming robots as the robot dog K9 from Doctor Who where you put a letter and a number together to make a pun and I absolutely love it-but sometimes it's on the nose in ways that I don't like-the villains being called Adam and Eve is just kind of cliche to me. It's got some more glaring issues too unfortunately. Aside from being occasionally pretentious with how it names its characters, the lack of autosave can be frustrating, 9S' hacking minigames can get repetitive, and the last 2B segment in the third playthrough, whilst intentionally unfair and gruelling (perhaps another way the game depicts the unfair nature of the world), goes too far if you ask me, and I'm not sure if I should praise the game for effectively conveying its artistic intent or be angry at it for the artistic intent being at the expense of MY sanity! Something else I don't like is the way 9S's Operator, 21O, gets used in the story. Whilst you do get some indication that she wants to have a family in Route B, said indication comes in the form of a message she sends 9S in his mailbox, and it doesn't get brought up again until just before she dies, and during the boss fight with her. It would have probably been really hard hitting if the game had actually gotten me invested in 21O's story, as opposed to bringing it up once in an area that's easily missed and making it seem like it's a character trait that came completely out of nowhere. This would have been a much harder hitting plot point if it revolved around 2B's relationship with her Operator, 6O, who’s very heavily implied to have a crush on 2B in her route and who you can complete a side quest for which gives her a goodbye scene at the start of the third playthrough. But again, why is it so easy to miss? If you want to make me feel sad for character deaths in video games and make those deaths a major part of the plot, don't make seeing the reasons why I should feel sad for those characters OPTIONAL. Reading about 6O's death made me feel more sad than having to fight 21O, which I think is a sign of bad writing, or at the very least poor execution of potentially very emotional writing.

Still, I can't say I've played many games that have made me sob…twice. And that makes up for the occasional dips in the story's quality. Ending A was the first scene in NieR: Automata, and any video game for that matter, to make me sob, which as mentioned previously is in no small part due to Kira Buckland's performance as 2B, but also due to how tragic the story is in a way that feels very specific to robot characters like 2B and 9S, where 2B has known 9S for a long time but because he keeps dying over and over again (often by 2B's hand as the game later reveals) and having his memory wiped, up until Ending A and B, 9S could never know her. And then Ending E, Oh GOD Ending E. The best part of the game for sure in how the rest of the game beforehand sets itself up as feeling rather cynical and often ending in tragedy, before becoming a beautiful rejection of nihilism with the message that, even when it's naïve and unreasonable to think so, the hope of the possibility of a better outcome is something to be believed in. I never thought an ending credits sequence in a video game would ever leave me with tears streaming out of my eyes, but here we are. This game made me feel a way that no other video game has made me feel. It is without doubt one of the most beautiful games I've ever played. Also you can get a bad ending by eating mackerel. I was still crying a few minutes after I turned the game off after beating every path, and I was still laughing for a few minutes after I got the Mackerel Ending. If not for Untitled Goose Game, the title of my favourite video game ever made would likely go to NieR: Automata.