I really tried to like NieR:Automata

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free so let's get back to the video alright girls boys and chips ahoys Nia automata I first discovered near automobile hilariously on an international women's day display in the PlayStation Store a good three or four years ago I can hardly remember now but what I do remember about the display is that I saw characters like Eloy Lara Croft and Jill Valentine all presented besides their respective titles but there was one game that I didn't recognize near automata I gave the front cover a good look

I was intrigued I love anime as an art style even though most anime tropes drive me up the wall I thought the little guy looked a bit plain but I loved the woman who I would soon learn was 2B her whole vibe the black and white Motif the sleek black dress her obvious framing is the main character the blindfold was mysterious she was cool I didn't buy it straight away for whatever reason but I tucked it into the back of my mind where I keep the names of dirty videos I like but feel too ashamed to

bookmark and kept an eye out for it should it ever go on sale I was very intrigued and I didn't have to wait long very kindly my friend Trey gifted me a copy I was excited and very grateful this was a combat focused game with light RPG elements and a really cool main character and apparently a Sci-Fi and philosophy heavy story it's set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia do you understand how perfect a game that is for me I love all of those things they are my favorite things it's like they were loo

king over my shoulder when I was browsing Incognito these guys really raked through my search history for this one unfortunately it didn't take me long to completely change my mind on this game I'm sorry Shri despite usually disliking anime RPGs I tried very fiercely to get into near automata a notorious cutscene Skipper I forced myself to diligently sit and let each one play remarking on my general observations to my twitch chat about the context the world's history and the characters and their

motivations I did all of the side quests as they popped top not only to level and get good loot but also just to get an idea of the world I was in give myself even more context and bond with 2B as a main character for a little bit and made a real effort with this game unfortunately it's pants I was so frustrated by my inability to get it that I ended up talking to a guy at work called Ed who I knew was a massive fan of the game I knew it was one of his favorite games ever I went and quizzed him

about his favorite moments hoping for some tips or general advice so I could experience less friction with the game as far as I remember the conversation went something like this hello Ed what up near automata was it 2b's ass yeah so I guess it was now before we get started please drop a like comment your own thoughts on their automata And subscribe for more content I cover games and TV as often as I humanly can so stick around for more furthermore check out my patreon in the link below I put o

ut five minute reviews every Tuesday at 4pm UK time with occasional bonus reviews on Saturdays patrons also get access to videos early sometimes up to a month early and extra content that I put out as often as I can special thanks to my patrons for making this video happen this was a patreon goal with an extra special thanks to Brendan Brodie Cullen duck Julia Carissa Fulcher and Sam Jones for being my highest year patrons now let's get started foreign now before we get to the bad mouthing let's

acknowledge some of the stuff that I did really enjoy one of the things I appreciate most about Neo Auto tomato is the gameplay the game starts with a bullet hell sequence that evolves in bits and pieces throughout all three of the playthroughs it will make sense later trust me and what I really appreciated about the combat specifically is the enemies fire two different kinds of projectiles some can only be destroyed with bullets and some can only be destroyed in melee so this means that not on

ly do you have to be keeping a watchful eye on your surroundings and killing enemies as they spawn but you also need to be flicking back and forth mentally between melee and range which adds an additional layer of priority to the mental load of combat not only that but Nia feels fun to like fundamentally move in 2B runs very fast and has super human jumping abilities which means you'll never slowly parkouring around you just leap and swoop which means that running from one end of the map to the

other is not an unpleasant experience I think this enjoyable movement is something a lot of games struggle to get right and teleportation is added a little way into the game adding an extra travel option which I really respect a lot of games such as like Dying Light don't offer any kind of fast travel because they're like moving around is the experience but sometimes even if you really like the movement you just need to pop over somewhere real quickly you've got a side quest to do and you really

can't be asked because it's like find five flowers and it becomes more of an inconvenience to go over and grab there like a fast travel is sometimes just a nice option to have I think it's a really smug attitude for a game to have to assume that you are perfectly happy to retread the same area 80 times for these optional Little Bits of quests that are just so not worth it I enormously respect near automata for allowing players the freedom of choice and not burdening them with the assumption tha

t the game is intended to be experienced on these very stringent self-indulgent terms it respects your time in this way you know thank you Nia the game has auto aim options as well which like in a lot of games can be finicky in areas but largely worked for really well I didn't have many issues with any sticky auto aim this is especially useful in the areas that flip very seamlessly between 2D and 3D adding additional Dimensions to locales that sincerely needed even the smallest bit of sprucing u

p I'll get on to this later but I felt like so much creative opportunity was missed with the locations of this game having the camera flip around you turning sections into Platformers and flip-flopping between Dimensions zooming in and out to show the breadth of massive areas that would feel inevitably straight and unimaginative otherwise is a really simple way of just adding a bit of spice to the game if not for that it would have been even worse the castle of the forest King for example is sup

er boring it's composed of almost entirely identical adjoining rooms with no visual dressing Beyond the Wall hangings and stairs you run along the bottom from left to right climbed at the top then run along from right to left then there's an interesting room that you have a short boss fight in and for a place that could have been spectacle it's like a place in your house you have no idea what to do with so you just put some some basic fake Ikea plant in the corner and call it a day so having thi

s flip into 2D was really welcome I liked the music too on the whole a lot of people Tout The Music In this game as the second coming of Christ and I don't quite see it but I do still like it some of the songs with heavy vocals make me cringe in a way that I couldn't explain there's one part during the story where you're in an exploding Factory and the music just it's really cringe I don't know I felt so embarrassed that I rushed out of there as fast as I could just to make the music end but my

favorite theme was the theme park theme I think it cultivates an air of eerie Intrigue and Fascination it's creepy in a beautiful way I love it beyond that there are a lot of battle themes that are sick and the Machine Village Theme is really lovely most of it is fairly standard action music but there's a great inclusion of violins or some kind of stringed apparatus I don't know music very well they added a unique Flair to the score finally I liked to a point the relationship to be had with her

pod the little drone that follows her around a lot of anime RPGs have a companion character whose job it is to dispense Exposition constantly no matter how much you need to hear it often to the point of stopping a game short just to bleed obvious facts at you about the action you're normally already in the process of trying to do like you're literally winding up to smack an enemy before you're stopped and told over the course of three minutes that you need to smack the enemy Neo mocks this Trope

in a way that actually feels very cathartic but also leans into 2b's characterization as a seasoned fighter during the tutorial the pot will point out facts that are useful to us but 2B will already know and thankfully doesn't pause the game to do so such as pointing out enemies are armored Auto notify us that ranged attacks work better in certain encounters and it's a tidbit for us that works but for 2B it's old news so she'll just flatly go yes I know I don't know after years of Navi and ishu

n panting down my ear hole it was a welcome break to hear someone equally unimpressed with this backseating as I was it doesn't exactly negate the fact that the Drone is stating the obvious but it's appreciated in a cathartic way and it fits in with the tutorial as a whole now on to the meat of this video hey foreign despite my general dislike of anime RPGs I will admit that I have learned to expect visual excellence in even the worst of them I thought for example that code vein was so crap that

it actually inspired me to make this YouTube channel in the first place because I just had to get that review out I couldn't sit on my feelings about that game but I still couldn't deny how fantastic it looked it was really impressively visual every boss had been so uniquely and creatively designed many of them were some of the most incredible looking bosses I have ever fought in gaming I think you could recognize even the minor enemies as being from code vein at a glance years after playing it

every map is designed with very specific care each one focused on different gimmicks that help them feel unique like despite how universally hated the animal Londo looking rip-off white towel one was I understood that it was intended to function as a confusing maze even if it didn't quite stick The Landing like it's boring and no amount of design decision is going to change that there's a lot of spectacle in these kinds of titles and Anime RPGs like for example the Final Fantasy 7 remake have t

his really impressive ability to find beauty in anything even the miserable so I have only myself to blame for my apparently unreasonable assumption that Nia Wallace and grommeter would look good when I first picked up the game I worked my way through the tutorial segment getting my little tips and tricks from the Pod as I familiarized myself with the basic combat mechanics and I remember vocalizing to my chat these tutorial enemies look really boring but I get what they're going for the Animes

in the tutorial look like combat mannequins except Rusty I suppose they're basic humanoid enemies short with simple movements and attacks they're all brown again supposedly from rust and there's not really much deviation from that besides height or armor this simplistic Anatomy means it's easy to discern what they're doing so they're good introductory enemies for a combat focused game I was like ah this is cool so I'm in some kind of robot production facility where they make the workers these de

signs are both to show the origins of what I'll see later but also keep their shapes simple so that I can just practice Combat on them without having to get into anything complex function over fashion respectable priorities I was fairly impressed and I was excited to see which enemies would await me once I breached the doors of the tutorial facility and got out into the big wide world and it turns out that not much besides the occasional paint job or simple costume these are the enemies you'll b

e fighting for pretty much the entire game bipedal enemies with the same attack stalling out the same damage for 30 hours yeah you know they introduce taller enemies enemies with shields some enemies in Hover carts occasionally enemies that have been built into drills and some in what are essentially Mech suits but they're mostly just the same brown rusted little dudes and in a bit of a weird design Choice they're so small on screen when you're playing that I didn't realize they even have altern

ative looks besides the amusement parked ones obviously until I've checked their designs online while writing this video there are some deviations such as ones that are spheres like long centipedes along with some anime characters you fight while they they make speeches but the vast majority of the enemies you fight will be almost identical in appearance for a game with a focus on free-flowing combat it definitely starts to get tired with any lack of fun visual variety even the bosses are unmemo

rable gray instead of brown the most memorable one I thought was some naked person and I think we can all understand why that was memorable he later gets a twin or a wife before being biblical and then they walk around in low-sitting leather chaps which is somehow even weirder than their Kendall nudity the design of the boss you fight in the prologue is really cool he's like a huge sentient oil rig but he then becomes every [ __ ] boss I make fun of Neo for reusing bosses but man this team reall

y did make one big enemy and call it a day didn't they I ended up so disappointed by the visuals of this game not only in terms of enemy variety either even the locales were just Bleak and as I've said before most anime RPGs I'm familiar with have an incredible ability to find beauty in Misery the crumbling cities of code vein the districts of Final Fantasy VII the caves of Okami so in the case of its bloop because it's supposed to be Bleak classic deflection that doesn't really fly with me the

even Shadow of the Colossus with its more realistic than stylized Graphics has mastered creating the feeling of a big empty dead open world while still cramming it full of intrigue it's possible to have both The Melancholy Vibes and something worth exploring yet near auto glass repair auto glass replace takes us through some truly [ __ ] geographies we have a standard crumbling City with copy pasted buildings that seem like they can be explored only for the player to discover that they are crown

ed full of invisible walls right at the point where a different game would have hidden an Easter egg or an item we have an extremely washed out desert we have a forest that looks like the colors run the factory is at least dimensionally interesting having you run around in there until the perspective starts zooming out the beach with the pillars is okay but is used solely to book end an action sequence and then is never visited again the place with the most potential is the amusement park which

is where I thought the visual design of this game would finally start to assert itself especially during the location's boss encounter which is by far the game's most most impressive both visually and story-wise but then again the amusement park was used to advertise the game at E3 prior to launch so no wonder they put the most effort into it it's really cool the best boss in the game contained in an abandoned theme park alongside creepy machines I was 100 on board and really excited to see wher

e the game would steer me next except the problem with the theme park is that it's like a 10 minute segment that you never return to it is so minor that I actually forgot about it until I wrote the script at which point all the memories came flooding back I really did think the Eerie dark art style of the park would follow me from this point on but we go right back to the washed out deserts and the washed out forests and that crap washed out city and man I thought how much I missed the amusement

park every step of the way washed out is really the key word with Nia and ironic that the theme park is abandoned maybe it's a metaphor the most interesting place you spend any extended time in is the little robot Village in the Treetops but Pascal lives there so we'll get to that everything about this game feels like someone's taking the saturation slider and cranked it right down the color scheme feels somewhere between pastel and gray it takes what little visual Intrigue there could be about

any location in this game and reduces it to zero how do you take a desert and make it more boring God alive near traipsing around doing my side quests and investing myself in this Hefty open world I marveled at how boring it insisted on being like every area is exaggerated reality enough that I can tell some thought went into making this game feel new and different but it never hits the Mark it's like the bits between in a video game for example at the start of the last of us when you leave Bos

ton just before you get into the two buildings that are leaning against each other and you're just walking through these like nameless featureless streets that's how Nia's City feels like an in-between area honestly that's how everything in Nia feels like somewhere cool is right around the corner but you never reach it and there are quite a lot of side quests a lot of criticisms of this game have labeled the side quests as filler but I don't think the term filler particularly applies to Side Que

sts since filler to me is often something mandatory that you have to work through to continue on with like the main story these side quests are very optional extras that you can embark on just I think the issue with the side quests in this game is that the world you're in isn't interesting enough for you to want to play around in it and explore it I don't care to troll through the desert to pick up little rabbit droppings in the sand I don't care to scour the city for materials the locales are s

o Bland that I feel like I've accidentally skipped out of bounds and I'm just running around in an outer area that lacks texture and substance what's more is that there are three stories in this game and you've not really finished the game until you've done all three of them since despite happening at the same time they all feed into one another story a follows 2B story B follows 9s her little twink companion and story C follows A2 a fugitive Android who is on the run I saw a lot of people defle

ct critics of neurotometer because whichever reviewer they were referring to had played all three stories so they would be like I mean if you didn't like the game then why did you play it three times but people who have actually played near Applebee's will understand that this is a really disingenuous argument to make each character you play as has a different perspective and while 9s has probably the least to offer of all of them extra side quests he can embark on will highlight how the facilit

y you work under you're her is not being entirely honest with you so he does have some value and he contributes to the game's wider theme of being in a pointless cycle so I don't entirely dislike his inclusion but what I'm trying to finally get around to communicating here is the fact that the full story of this game features three playthroughs of Nia all in the same areas fighting the same enemies killing the same bosses backtracking for side quests until you've run through the same boring City

the same boring desert the same boring Forest spared a quick SOB as you've rushed through the same boring amusement park over and over and over again I just found they could have done way more with this this one might be a bit of a hot take but I do not care I was once told that Nia was like anime Dark Souls and I took that with a massive pinch of salt nowadays anything with a combat Focus boss checkpoint system is burdened with this label of being a Souls like or a Souls clone or a Soul's rip-

off and it exhausts me however one new addition to near Autobahn that was distinctly different from replicant was the new save system the system that was implemented so half-assedly that I had to triple check it even existed in the first place when I was writing this or if it was just some terrible bad dream I had so unlike normal games for normal people there are two different kinds of safes in near Arsen of nowhere manual saves and auto saves I understand that sounds okay at first it sounds li

ke the standard but let me explain to you why it is so stupid that it left me genuinely confused the game wants to be a linear combat based game with thorough and consistent Auto saves that permit a die retry approach and sometimes it is that game with that combat only sometimes this combat will span a whole area or like 30 minutes so you definitely get into the habit of relying on the game to automatically save your progress throughout combat yet outside of combat and in a few select situations

the game uses a hard save checkpoint system you go up to the save machine you click quick save you make a hard save and that manual save slot you die you reload that hard save no matter how long ago it was but you don't carry anything forward from before dying so if you used all of your health potions and then died you will not have them when you respawn however let's say you make a hard save and then you do 45 minutes of combat during this segment you die a few times and it resets auto saves t

hroughout the combat and then the combat ends you walk on for a while and you die here where do you think you respawn yes you respawn at the Hard save the very first time I put this game down out of sheer annoyance because I ended up putting it down three times during my ordeal with it but kept coming back to it out of the sheer insistence of wanting to click with it and enjoy it was during 2b's story during a post Gauntlet that happens towards the end of her playthrough I completed the gauntlet

then died then realized all my auto saves were gone I had to load a hard save then I spawned all the way back at the base I had just left only to have to do an entire boss gauntlet again only I died after the boss Gauntlet so my previous body and all of my stuff was not accessible to me until I had done this Gauntlet when I tried to leave the area to find a store or vendor I could buy some health boosters from the game kept giving me all of its [ __ ] endings I'll get to those and then booting

me back so I had to fight this boss again without my stuff this game has a really frustrating way of flipping back and forth between its own conventions it can't make up its mind about what it wants to be you rely on one safe system and then it flips then you assimilate the new way into your playstyle and expectations and you forget to make a hard save and then it flips again and you get sent back to your last hard save I ended up having to constantly remind myself to be making hard saves even i

n moments when autosaves were active and a vast amount of my concentration ended up going into remembering to save each opportunity because if God forbid I forgot and I relied on the auto saves in place throughout the combat that I kept reloading at but would suddenly vanish as soon as I was out of the car on that area God forbid if I was enjoying myself and getting into the swing of this game I would be kicked back on my ass after 30 minutes because I had just done a 20 minute combat segment wa

lked into the next area died and my auto safes were gone I was back at the last hard save the constant back and forth also meant that I never got into the habit of returning to my previous body to collect my things meaning that I was constantly operating on below optimal conditions and the thing is I was already not enjoying the game I mean I enjoyed the combat system but I wasn't engaging with the mechanics in particular so I imagine if you were really enjoying this game you would more be able

to facilitate this constant flux but for me I was already experiencing a lot of friction with the title so this ended up just kicking me when I was down a lot of the times maybe if I was playing alone I would have more of the mental capacity to keep tabs on this like dumpster fire but I was streaming the game on Twitch since it was a gift and as many of you will know especially if you streamed on Twitch yourselves you have to keep an eye on chat and be engaging with them and be talking to them w

hich means that like 30 of your brain is elsewhere and your focus isn't entirely on the game which is like I said before my bad that's fine but man making a safe system 10 times more reliant on your concentration than it needs to be it's a choice you are fully within your own rights to make when you're designing your game but I am also fully in my rights to call it terrible because it was a it was a dumb idea I just found it stupid save mechanics are so intrinsic to games and one of the things y

ou need to do when building a safe mechanic is just make it reliable make it consistent it can just be manual saves if you want like I recently did Katamari Dynasty that's all manual saves but as long as you know it's on manual saves you can still operate on the Assumption and the knowledge that it's manual saves there are fundamental needs not a want they are a need that a user has to be able to save the game and it was beyond annoying to have to remain extremely conscious of the game's mechani

cs but because it put a barrier up between me and just being immersed in the game you know pick either or if you want me to make hard saves I'm happy to make hard saves if you don't mind me relying on auto save checkpoints that's cool too the big one stop messing me around I hated this this is compounded during the tutorial I know that this has been rehashed a load by a ton of different reviews which is why it's here in this section as an afterthought as even fans of the game agree that this is

bad but the tutorial can be anywhere up to an hour long depending on your adjustment to the game and its mechanics but there are no save points so if you die 40 minutes into your run through the tutorial you fly right back to the start of the game with no idea of how long you were expected to keep pushing through this one area before you are allowed to save it could be a three hour Gauntlet for all any new player is going to know this game felt so fundamentally spiteful about how it demanded it

be played I felt like it kept dangling player trust in my face consistency stuff I could rely on and then just whipped it away whenever I reached for it it felt cruel whereas I felt it was more just stuck between having its usual autosave system and wanting to try something new and never being able to commit to either of them foreign so as I mentioned before this game is structured into three different segments to be story 9s's story and A2 story if you rush through them 2B will take you about f

our hours I think 9s will take you maybe three and A2 can take you about six I'm sure people have done it in more or less but this is just a ballpark and that's if you rush the main quests too this game is littered with side quests so if you sit and properly concentrate on getting all of that done plus all the trophy requirements you're looking at anywhere between like I'd say 40 and 60 hours again it entirely depends on ability and efficiency but hey you know that's why I said ballpark now 9s's

story is almost identical to two views only with some extra law and a different combat system thematically having what is essentially a repeated playthrough is a great way to highlight the cyclical trapped nature of the world they're in the existentialism of living in the cycle of misery that needs to be broken but in reality it just ended up marking the second time I put this game down for what I thought was for good see some times things happen within the games mechanically because it makes s

ense in the story and that can be a genuine excuse and it can be a really effective way of hearing the story in the gameplay together but sometimes it tows the line between what is reasonable versus what is a bit much I do think this is a situation where yeah design wise it makes sense in the context but as far as gameplay goes this is one of the most miserable wasteful decisions they could have made 9s's segment isn't entirely panned a few people like it a lot of people hate us hacking mini gam

es but I actually really enjoyed them unfortunately the fact is that it is an almost shot for shot remake of 2b's playthrough that the player literally just finished complete with recycled cutscenes which means it is a horrible horrible drag and yeah you know that maybe is the point but that doesn't mean it isn't Daft in its execution Nia does do this meta storytelling in some really interesting ways for example all of the different ships you have installed you know like the map chip or the OS c

hip some of which can be deleted to to save space for new bigger and more useful chips at the cost of crippling your navigational abilities sometimes mechanics and storytelling align really well and Nia can do that however not with this I finished my nessa's story very slowly having long since abandoned playing this on stream because I was worried that having to maintain conversation with chat was preventing me from giving this game the best opportunity to show its quality but man this story is

Superfluous and I feel like the fact could have been trimmed to make his Arc something that felt more like a bridge between playthroughs rather than the middle seat passenger taking up both the armrest 9s's story concludes with the Handover to a new Android an Android you've seen periodically up until this point A2 and so the story starts again a third time as I learned later A2 segment is better than nine s's but at that moment the idea of replaying this whole story again with a bitter taste in

my mouth left by the ordeal of 9s was so unsavory that I couldn't face it the game was shelved for another few months this game shoots itself in the foot hard with 9s's Section no matter the Thematic intention of dragging your ass through his Midway point but that's not only my gripe with the piss take that this game felt entitled to be my other issue with near Auto my tomato was the endings this game very proudly touts itself as having 26 unique endings one for each letter of the alphabet and

there's even a trophy for seeing every single one of them so clearly somebody out there was proud of it enough to consider it a feat of engineering and storytelling a few of these as in maybe about five I think less than five are actual endings with actual cutscenes and actual dialogue and actual conclusions but most of them are crappy fake endings often in the form of a few lines of on-screen text which explains how exactly the game has ended I don't mind this is like a practical joke kind of t

hing but for the game too often Market itself on having 26 endings I heard about the 26 endings long before I ever touched this game implying a degree of consequence for each and then to drop this is not so much insulting as it is just a bizarre design choice that ended up being flagrantly mismarketed and I have two specific endings that wound me up so badly the first was ending I think L I can't quite remember but as I mentioned before during my save section I had died after a boss near the res

istance camp and could not physically retrieve my body and all of my stuff rendering my attempt at the boss again to be quite hard I thought well if I'm going to attempt this boss again I'm gonna need to buy some heels having used all of them up during my prior fight the resistance Camp shop isn't open because you know why the [ __ ] would it be it's only my safe spot before the boss fight why would they let me buy heels there so I think okay sure you know let's be resourceful and go the extra m

ile to make sure we can actually do this boss fight so I decided to go running off on the hunt for heels to see if I could find a shop nearby and I suddenly got given an ending to be abandoned her duties and fled the game said and back to my last hard save I went no heels in hand the second was ending G which I accidentally triggered after watching 9 is introductory cutscene I landed on the factory map starting playthrough 2. to my left I had a brightly colored horizontal crane reaching away fro

m me that looked walkable I couldn't see where else to go not that I looked super hard since I assumed the crane was my next stop I stepped onto it and immediately got the ending G some on-screen text informing me that 9s had abandoned his duties and fled and back to my last hard save I went a lot of people consider these endings to be joke endings but considering my Rising for humans for this title it felt more like acts of spite than actual jokes sending me back to saves from ages prior for th

e mistake of wanting to go and fetch supplies before I did a boss fight or exploring the environment bearing in mind I didn't have an opportunity to make hard saves as I began those chapters either which I probably would have done before fetching resources if I was able to I guess if I liked the game I would have taken these joke endings as jokes but it's like getting an insult from a friend versus a stranger I like my friend I know our boundaries and our mutual respect when they make fun of me

I laugh because there is an implicit understanding when a stranger or someone I dislike makes fun of me there's no mutual respect so it's not something I can appreciate that's how I would describe my relationship with this game as a whole actually for those of you who know how much I hate annoying anime tropes you'll probably agree that this deck was stacked against me from the beginning no matter how much I really wanted to like this game I was a huge Naruto fan as a teenager and never really b

ranched out Beyond mainstream anime Bleach D gray man Death Note uh occasionally I would dabble in things like Golden Boy which on review have probably aged catastrophically poorly but I struggle with anime purely because of and I will willingly admit this personal taste I don't like hammy acting I don't like the Reliance on filler I don't like when episodes are just flashbacks I.E scenes cut from previous episodes just relayed in sepia tone I mean I respect the resource limitations but you know

it's sometimes these filler rocks can be like 40 episodes long I don't like many of anime's more uncomfortable tropes and that is unfortunately just how I am it's just what I like and dislike so when I saw the less extreme darker and Slick Black and White motifs of two bees design I suppose I expected something a little bit less cringe and that's on me I was wrong that's on me I guess my biggest issue with the game is 9s on the whole I do really like to be as a character she's drying without be

ing condescending and she's straightforward in her Communications which bypasses a lot of the verbose over explaining that I typically find quite tiring about anime tropes also she's a massive nerd and a stickler for the rules known as to me is just some strange barely legal twink who runs around in a bizarre costume consisting of Schoolboy shorts and a choker collar a knee-high socks I think it's the shorts personally they de-age him this man could be 30 for all I know but his shorts make him l

ook like he's just come in from a day on his bike I think these overtly youthful but weirdly sexually aware tropes often fall on women so listening to him try and deny the fact that he desperately wants to [ __ ] to be getting strangely obsessed with her to the point of a weird hysteria was an experience but a well-implemented one I think actually like this is a good thing I think it was a relationship Dynamic that was demonstrated really well it was clearly unhealthy but made for a good story a

nd was well paced alongside the action it's quite organic too starting with little things like trying to insist in she uses a nickname for him despite her constant assertive no but also telling her to stay and rest at the bunker trying to spend more time with her despite not being required to continue working together as a partnership whatsoever she's quite cold with him and hostile and yeah you know there's some underlying stuff going on there but he definitely never has affirmative responses f

rom her I think having a discomfort with a man's weird fixation on the main character we've spent so much time with is very well done 9s's fixation is not played as healthy nor ideal the game wields a lot of nuance in this department which is a pleasant surprise when contrasted with a lot of particularly abundant trashy anime tropes that would normally play this dynamic as attractive cute or even healthy I guess my difficulty is in reconciling this with the fact that he looks and acts like a 12

year old Beyond this I didn't especially like his presence in the game at all my compliments to pod and to be aside I realized quite quickly that pod was only a red herring on the whole subverting the exposition Trope since 9s then nicely slaughtered in and started talking my ear off for the next 10 hours 9s is more or less a blank slate until he had embarks on his own story so for the first playthrough he is just someone to bounce Exposition off things like emotions are prohibited which to be s

naps whenever he shows any emotion whatsoever in fact the character's obsession with the motion was not especially well done emotions are prohibited definitely ranks in the top percentile of any interaction any of the cast have amongst each other especially with 2B at the helm which struck me as an unusual in-universe grievance to have considering they could just not teach the Android's emotion when we teach AI we give it a set of rules that's all AI is really it's not self-aware especially by o

ur standards of today it's just a set of rules like the AI that supposedly Pilots self-driving cars you know those captures you do where you have to select the boxes with the traffic lights that's a data that gets fed into a huge database for self-driving Ai and the rule is is it a traffic light or is it not a traffic light and if it is a traffic light you know how do we proceed to teach an AI emotion Not only would you have to teach it those rules but then you also have to give it instances whe

re those rules can be broken or ignored based on an ai's personal no preferences or motivations does it matter that it's a traffic light my friend is in danger maybe I drive past it despite the color or maybe I'm scared of something and I ignore the traffic light maybe I see it's on Amber and I want to rush through it quickly and at that point you'd have to teach them what a personal preference is and and what a personal motivation is and why would you do that if you didn't want them to have emo

tion and it's harder to teach an AI emotion than it is to teach it logic so why did you give them emotions and then ban them I don't understand it's arbitrary it's a huge plot hole that largely goes nowhere as far as I observed and at the same time sits at the Forefront of so many characters conversations without ever finding resolution and the more they bang on about it the more I'm like why did you teach an AI to feel grief if you don't want it to feel grief why did you specifically set up a f

ramework in their minds and teach them with thousands and thousands of pieces of like input data to respond to horrible events with like deep emotional pain who who did this whose idea was this it always ends like this the ban on emotion doesn't really work anyway the Androids all exhibit a wide and consistent variety of motions grief relief curiosity happiness anger not just basic primary color emotions there's a lot of complexity on display 2B seems to be the only one who follows the rule to a

ny extent which leads me to believe she just made it up or found it in the ancient company handbook and everyone else around her just tolerates her because they don't like getting a lecture like she's some strange Android evangelist most of the Androids experience emotions the Android that speaks to you from the bunker Giggles when she talks to you and at one point gets rejected by an Android she has feelings for and cries very loudly to you for a few minutes it's a lot less than an hour into th

e game 9s very dramatically dies after you beat the prologue bosses 2B very capably over the course of about like I don't know 10 minutes she stops and stares at the dying boss as it does this very blatant overhead swing the same overhead swing it's been doing since the fight started and you've been easily dodging I don't know why this is the cutscene attack that blows 2B away but what ever anyway 9s takes the shot instead and dies melodramatically he gets his leg and arm blown off but by the ti

me you get to him and kneel beside him he's like coughing and slowly dying it's a hilarious scene she's known him for less than an hour as well and then 2B is utterly distraught and extremely upset you know there's lots of emotion I don't know it bothers me why are we writing this big story about what it means to be human with all these weird contradictory contextual laws that the game fixates on but never does anything with and why is he wearing those [ __ ] shorts um this brings me on to my pe

nultimate criticism and this is a general criticism I've seen amongst other people who did not particularly like this game that being said to be clear and up front I don't know loads about philosophy but according to many fans of the series this is a good thing apparently the concepts found in these games on a specially novel so if you're well versed in philosophy you won't find this groundbreaking or interesting like on my end of things I am aware of what philosophy is and I am interested to he

ar about it but not so involved in it that I've heard it all before even so yeah I think the issue with this game is that it can't quite decide whether to leave breadcrumbs for you or just to tell you straight to your face what it's about many of the bosses and characters are named after Big Time philosophers but beyond that their relevance to the story is at best referential and at worst an exercise in autophallatio there's never quite a reveal in this game that you've not already either guesse

d or just been straight out told well in advance but the game seems to think that it's being subtle about all of them namely that robots are sentient we're told early on that humans are hiding from the robot enemies on the moon but later we find out that humans aren't on the moon they've been dead the whole time we're told that the robots were introduced by aliens turns out that the aliens were a red herring created to give robots and Androids a reason to fight because giving someone an enemy gi

ves them a reason to keep going and the Androids need something to do so long after the humans are dead the monologuing villain we meet two hours in isn't actually the villain etc etc the game gives us facts we accept them as true and then later on the game will show a subversion of them as if it's a reveal when in reality we already knew that and now we're just confused by the time we get to the desert we're fighting robots who are going I'm scared and go away please as we kill them and 9s goes

do you think they understand the concept of being scared and points out that they wear clothes it's not two hours in when you walk into a room with a robot rocking her baby in a cot and other robots telling each other that they love each other and you murder them all and they act in self-defense and you're like is this game going to seriously drag this what does it mean to be alive plot point out for the whole game spoiler alert yes the characters constantly recognize it too and they constantly

discuss it 9s will go hey to be why do these machines do this thing or think this way and 2B will go emotions are forbidden a 9s will go you're right I suppose we will have to kill it now the machine goes oh please don't kill me I'm alive I feel I have children no my family like 9s goes wow 2B are we really better than these machines 2B will tell them to stop talking in 9s would apologize these conversations are recycled Ad nauseam before we've even left the desert during our first few story be

ats we've figure out that the robots are alive will you meet Adam and Eve is born from his rib like within the first two hours and tried to kill them on site if I could change the structure of the game I would have vastly changed the first playthrough and removed all of the time spent meeting and helping friendly robots instead focusing more on your heart the organization that is lying to 2B I wouldn't have so much of an emphasis from the get-go on robots being sentient because it destroys any p

otential build up to difficult realizations I would have had two bees storyline just as blinkered as she is 2b is fixated on rules and following orders so I think her being in some kind of denial that permeates the entire playthrough would have been really interesting 9s asks why the robots could be wearing clothes and she dismisses him by snapping back at him that there's no point trying to work out unsolvable problems she's very actively ignorant she is determined to stay ignorant and just do

her job I think her attitude would have worked a lot better in like more of a rose tinted playthrough maybe literally with a chip that can be deleted like the map chip and stuff like that can be deleted that gobbles robot speech so that she can't hear what they're saying or even adds UI editions that actively blurs or pixelates aspects of a robot's life to make it easier for her to like dehumanize them and kill them you know have her storyline be about setting up assumptions murdering robots and

laying the groundwork for how the story develops in the next two playthroughs in my opinion have 9s's Story begin to show the cracks and then feature our big reveals in A2 storyline like when the story should be ending there is a little bit of this in the game but more in the case that 2B can't see that the bosses are named after philosophers the names above their health bars just show up as symbols to her whereas 9s can but that doesn't add anything to our understanding of the current situatio

n it's just a reveal that they have names I don't know as it stands the game is so proud of itself for all of these ideas that it can't help but beaters over the head with the inevitable Twist from the first minute meaning that most of the reveals fall completely flat because the aren't reveals at all even the narrative twists are fairly near there's a robot called Pascal who is Marked for Death from the start because they're super nice and they have that little baby voice so many mo anime chara

cters have which basically tells me that they are so innocent that they will be used as the emotional Crescendo of the game but they are also so insipidly frictionless that I'll be honest I was just not feeling it sorry Pascal near ends up retreading a lot of the surface level philosophical observations so many other games and TV have done for a long time before and since signalus Soma spec-ups the line Annihilation Donnie Darko The Matrix Westworld Etc but it never indulges in anything beyond s

urface level acknowledgments any discussion this game tries to raise and it does try to raise a significant amount of discussion ends up being so shallow that it draws attention to how Bare Bones the narrative reveals actually feel neo-automotive story is heavily focused on themes of existentialism that is to say the pointlessness of everything the characters and the machines do and their constant unending cycle to the point where it's referenced in the first spoken Line This Is The Meta justifi

cation for why the game has three playthroughs before you even see the true ending yet I think with the issues of pacing out the narrative beats and how desperate the game is to bombard you with breadcrumbs that are more like paddles to the cheek these themes aren't explored to their fullest potential and they really could have been explored in far more interesting ways Nia Achy Breaky Heart ends up building this feeling of smug gravitas that isn't really earned especially with the ending that i

nvolves the option to delete all of your saved data yes when the game ends for the final time ending e you will be faced with the option to wipe your save data clean entirely people tend to tell this as some big meta commentary on the cyclical nature of how games portray human conflict and also human conflict in the real world like this is some massive sacrifice that you make for the good of the world but first of all this choice is given to you at the end of the game so unless you plan to repla

y it which yeah some of you may but some of you also will not it's not exactly a loss but secondly this happens in basically every single game made by yokotaro the man has an Mo for sure losing permanent progress bringing up Concepts as a mini game with a Twist having you fight teammates in the finale but his is a major one the game got a lot of praise for this and it's like I think sacrificing your progress would be more effective if you you had the option to do it at the 11th Hour you know mak

e the good choice for the in-game world and sacrifice yourself in everything you have technically the morally good ending right at the Tipping Point or make the selfish Choice as the player because you want to see the rest of the game thereby dooming the world because you want the content I just think this design Choice gets much more Credence than it deserves your average player will likely only play most story games once so it's hardly a sacrifice there's definitely the air of a man who Huffs

his own farts here yeah you know that's rude of me to say but whatever you can say it about me too if you want but there's a lot of people cooing over this apparent genius and creative Visionary and then I look over at him and he's just some slimy little man who implemented an upskirt mechanic in a game whilst living in the country with an obscure issue so extreme that it is the reason the shutter sound on phones cannot be muted I'll discuss this more in detail later but every shot of 2B is care

fully angled so that you can see your purse good it is bizarre to me to have a man spoken about with such Collective reverence when he gives me the Vibes of a wheezing and individual that loudly masturbates on the back seat of a City boss I feel like Nia Archbishop was touted to me as a game that would change the way I thought about the world it ended up being a very derivative shallow attempt at covering philosophy in a way so many other games and films have covered so much better and so much m

ore thoroughly whilst the creator has just sat on a sofa in the corner of the room trying to see if he can wedge his penis between the cushions foreign Ed background reading before in my entire YouTube existence except maybe hellstar reminer but that doesn't count because I say so so I will offer a summary here if you can't be bothered to go and check out what I'm about to suggest but to Dan Olson from folding ideas actually one of my biggest Inspirations hello Dan if you ever see this but you p

robably won't want to read a video titled the thermian argument for those of you who have already seen it yeah you know where I'm going for those of you that haven't it's worth a look it's about five minutes long and it will put into words a lot of my logic When approaching this section of the video and give you a bit of context as to how the fermian argument can be applied to all kinds of media but for those of you that don't want to watch it it can be summarized as such the thermian argument i

nvolves two steps we will use Miss kobayashi's Dragon maid as an example step one someone criticizes a piece of fiction usually for problematic themes in our example we will cite the fact that this animation features many scenes involving children in sexual situations with the explicit intent on being titillating for the audience step two fans of the work defend it using an in-universe piece of context in this instance the character kanakamui only looks acts and dresses like a nine-year-old she

is actually 300 years old and she is a very powerful Dragon so according to the in-universe context kanakamui is not technically a child and therefore there is nothing wrong with her rubbing herself on other characters in a way that specifically arouses them and is framed in a way so as to be arousing to the audience so you see within Universe context it is not the illicit disgusting depiction that you a non-fan would see it as to be despite the things I like about her remains somehow just an in

sult she's like a creepy little flashlight I think the line of where female characters becomes gross is when they're designed to be sexy through the lens of what a man expects from a sexualized character it's like the idea of a trophy wife women who are prized based on what a guy assumes other men will find attractive and will therefore covered if you want to design a character you think other people will be attracted to you will imbue a trade you believe other people find attractive I guess whe

re it started to grow tired is just in the sheer volume of these Honeypot characters in gaming what I'm trying to say is just tells you like us guys just tell us you like sexy women and steering up their skirts just tell us you like it when their clothes fly off randomly look Yoko I completely respect your openness about liking sexy women and incorporating them into your game because you like looking at sexy women a lot of people insist that 2B and Kaine from replicant are sexy because the game

is trying to make a statement about the over-sexualization of characters in gaming it's clearly being tongue-in-cheek they're mocking the tropes by playing them completely straight which if you can't tell by my tone is something I regard as the center of a Venn diagram between delusion denial and wishful thinking I think more people need to be honest about why they put big titty women in bikinis and have them flop around on screen oh quiet breathe through her skin just say you want tits in your

face Kojima I'd respect you more for it just own it you [ __ ] child sexy TV is fine however 62b because it's actually within the law that she's sexy is cringe grow up this game through its thing veneer of good writing and pretending to paddle in the shallows of philosophical discussion is essentially just a big stare at harass Simulator the game is absolutely desperate for you to stare up to be skirt as you're walking around the world the camera always pulls itself slowly back and points upward

s slightly angling From Below up into 2B skirt so that you see constant slips of her bum I had to hold the analog stick very precariously the entire time so that I wasn't spending my Play Time wedged between her enormous pillowy ass cheeks I mean I love a bum I'm a widow man after all but there's something so intrinsically creepy about how the game constantly frames 2B I feel like it sat next to me throughout my entire playthrough a hand on my shoulder and a voice in my ear going hey let's look

at my skirt shall we no one will judge us she won't mind let's go it's gonna run a nice ladder or something and take a little peek oh look you can see it just a little bit there just just with the way the camera snakes backwards wow that's a nice bomb isn't it imagine being inside there isn't it hot isn't it sexy this weird voyeurism sits around to be like an audience of screaming during man I feel like that one scene from a Requiem for a Dream you know the one right at the end yeah you know the

one she feels isolated almost on a pedestal I feel uncomfortable for her and I have never felt like that was another gaming character in my life this is a very novel feeling I feel for 2B oh don't worry about her Fat donkey and her mini skirt the game slithers in my ear it's because she's an Android she's a combat unit she produces heat when she moves and she vents that heat out of her bum that's why it needs to be bare because it'll catch fire otherwise and that's why it has such a large surfa

ce area to add to this there's even an animation 2B does if you stare up her skirt specifically in the instance that you very carefully go to look at her pump she'll give you a few seconds to look and then coily step away an acknowledgment of you being a little bit cheeky but no real consequence not only that but using the self-destruct option causes a huge AOE explosion which can be useful but more serves as a way to remove 2B skirt which is for some reason the only item on her body that's vuln

erable to blast so after that she'll run around with her ass entirely out except when you self-destruct 9s and he's still wearing shorts the game knows and in encourages constant creepy voyeurism it gives you a wink and a little tap on the back of your hand when you do it like you're a naughty little boy who doesn't know any better because she's an Android and emotions are prohibited but she's still a fully anatomically correct woman with all the required bits and pieces for no explainable reaso

n except because she's an Android she's also completely clean and sterile no pee no poop no sweat none of the normal trimmings that come with yucky women this is a sex storm with emotions no real motivations though nothing Beyond following orders from her human owners so she's loyal and she will do whatever you tell her to and would never stand out for herself nor complain don't worry with just enough emotion that you can kid yourself that she'd like you but no don't worry she's loyal enough to

you to reassure you that you're not going to have to compete with anybody else who might be nicer or have a higher standard of personal hygiene everything about 2B is just the thermian argument incarnate she has been so explicitly designed for the activation of neurons in Monkey Brains sexy lady big bum yes sexy lady awesome but show me the bum now please I think the weird thing about creating as much in Universe justification as possible for small details like a fat ass is it it starts to draw

attention to other things why does she have to wear that outfit then and why does she do stupid belly flops every time she jumps why does her dress have such a massive slit in it that even in cut scenes it just fully opens at the front so you can see her white pants at the slightest gust of wind just a face full of vag does she know or care there's just something about her that is so explicitly common denominator that she's kind of insulting like throwing a steak to a dog and watching it lose co

ntrol over it there's something so abundantly animal about how to be is framed I love her design at face value I really do it was the thing that Drew me into playing this game for the first time but playing it on stream and just having these constant explanations for the in-universe reasoning as to why she needs to have a fat ass or why she needs to have her skirt blow off when she's self-destructing but an ins doesn't she feels kind of patronizing I don't know I have never felt this with any ot

her gaming character I appreciate the characters can be eye candy and I do encourage it drawing hot characters is awesome but there was something so desperate about the way 2B was designed and depicted that I felt seedy even looking at her when A2 appeared and I asked why she was wearing lingerie and someone said actually no she's not wearing lingerie her outer shell is falling away in pieces it just happens to be in the shape of lingerie by the way you're only about halfway through the game I w

as like yeah no I've had enough and down the game went again I did eventually finish dragging myself through near automata but I hated it so much I think it's best to finish a game in its entirety before you try critiquing it like imagine if I tried to critique this game based on the first two hours it would be so easy to debunk and laugh off and you know while I'm sure you were puzzled as to why I insisted on finishing it if I hated it that much I'm sure you can also appreciate the fact that I

wanted to give this game the benefit of the doubt and have an informed opinion there have been so many games that I've enjoyed so much more on a second playthrough so I I thought Neo automata would fall into this category and unfortunately I was wrong you know but thanks for watching thanks for being here feel free to drop a like if you enjoyed it a comment perhaps maybe some recommendations on games you thought approached these tropes and mechanics a lot better you know I'm always down for thos

e my own recommendations coming up in the next seconds a huge thank you again to Pia for sponsoring this video make sure to check them out again in the description link and the pin comment and make sure to check out my patreon for those sweet extra Awards and little bits of content in conclusion if you want a dark dystopian sci-fi game with hot anime characters a theme of futility fighting Cycles over and over again for something that will always be denied to you in the form that you want it the

difficult consideration of what makes a person a human and an examination of all sorts of awesome themes play signalus instead that game is amazing and the great thing about signalus is you only have to play it once