Nier: Automata BECOME AS GODS Edition

I've replayed more RPGs than I can count, but NieR: Automata is one of the very few that has made me sit with my controller in my lap after a credits sequence, just processing. That reaction is the whole point. Yoko Taro's direction is singular and strange, and pairing it with PlatinumGames' combat engine was one of the smarter collaborative decisions in modern game development. What you get is an action-RPG that shifts genre under your feet without warning, swings from nihilism to absurdist comedy in the span of a cutscene, and somehow earns every one of those pivots. The combat is the foundation that makes the philosophical heavy lifting bearable. Playing as android 2B, you equip two melee weapons simultaneously, each mapped to light and heavy attacks, and you layer on a pod companion that handles ranged fire independently of your sword work. Mixing weapon types unlocks distinct combo animations, and the dodge window is tight enough to keep fights feeling active even on lower difficulties. The system does have an honest flaw worth naming: once you learn the dodge rhythm, difficulty ceases to scale with enemy health the way you might hope, and sidequest encounters can devolve into a war of attrition against stat-inflated machines. The chip loadout system, where you literally manage your android OS by slotting ability chips into a fixed memory grid, is more interesting in concept than in practice past the midgame, but it does reward players who think carefully about build priorities. The game also periodically yanks the camera into a side-scrolling hack-and-slash or a bullet hell twin-stick shooter, keeping the pacing from ever going stale. Where Automata genuinely earns its reputation is in the multi-route structure. The first playthrough, following 2B, is roughly fifteen hours and functions almost as a prologue. The second route with 9S recontextualizes what you saw in ways that are not subtle gimmicks but actual narrative reframes. The third run, with A2, is where the game closes its arguments. Each route unlocks on the same save file and is gated behind completion of the last, which is an unconventional design choice that some players bounce off hard. The payoff is real, but it requires trusting the game through a stretch that initially feels like repetition. If you trust it, the ending sequences hit harder than almost anything else in the genre. The BECOME AS GODS Edition bundles in the 3C3C1D119440927 DLC, which adds three colosseum-style battle challenge quests with alternate costumes for 2B, 9S, and A2, plus cosmetic pod skins including a Grimoire Weiss pod skin that is a genuinely charming nod to the original NieR. The DLC is not story-critical and the colosseums are primarily for players who want harder combat benchmarks. The PC port on Steam has a history worth acknowledging: the original release had well-documented performance problems around resolution handling and framerate caps. Community mods helped significantly, and the Steam version does allow for easier modding than other platforms, which the community has taken full advantage of. Cutscenes remain locked to 900p and 30fps, which is an annoyance that never fully goes away. If you care about character writing, NieR: Automata delivers three protagonists whose arcs genuinely develop across all routes. 2B's arc is cold and controlled on the surface and something else entirely underneath. 9S is written to frustrate you on purpose, and it works. A2 is the leanest and sharpest of the three. The machine lifeforms they fight are, in the best cases, more interesting than the villains in games with four times the budget. The soundtrack, composed by Keiichi Okabe, is an argument for game music as a standalone art form. It adapts dynamically to gameplay states in ways you will notice even if you are not consciously listening for them. This is not a game for people who want clean quest markers and a loot treadmill. The sidequests range from quietly devastating to filler, and the open world sections are sparse by current standards. But if you want a game that uses the medium to say something it could not say in any other form, this is one of the clearest cases I can point to.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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