I guess in total honesty I spent the entire time fighting an uphill battle with automata because I was trying not to let my abhorrence for the first game color it, especially bc in a vacuum it should have been Extremely Up My Alley

it's got all kinds of "nonhuman life forms discovering and navigating proper sentience" which I love

and I really did like it like 10000% more than OG nier

which I guess isn't saying much bc when we started automata the bar was somewhere underneath the floor

the VA was incredible (including the little we heard of the JP voices when ello switched it for a couple of the alternate endings) and like... there was definitely a lot about the game I liked and I found myself more interested in it after marinating on plot points for a day or two

but as with OG nier I'm left with a lot of questions and mostly just feeling kind of stupid, like I'm just not smart enough somehow for this ~high art~ game

and it feels similarly head-up-its-own-ass to me but that's probably because I just don't really get why it is the way it is

games designed like this just aren't for me, like at risk of actually sounding stupid, I thoroughly dislike having to Think during video games and I don't like games that are highly conceptual or that are designed to puzzle the player

I hate unreliable narrator stuff, also (which I have seen in the past from some really rude people as being the only "good" form of writing and that people who trust narrators are dumb lemmings who should only be reading children's books)

I like games where I can just experience a straightforward story with only a few very clear-cut endings, where the facts of the thing are laid out in a way that's relatively easy to understand

vague or open-ended endings are troublesome for me because that's just how my brain works

so like I guess at the end of the day, automata for me was narrative: good, method of delivery: extremely not good

in the end I just wasn't moved at all even though I definitely became fond of and attached to 2B, 9S, and A2

like I was too confounded by... everything, all the time, to really have a significant emotional reaction other than like, that one time when you get a bad ending by murderating the entirety of pascal's village lmao

BUT other than my feelings about the game as a whole I was really impressed by 9S' absolutely bananas downward spiral and the authenticity of it

I wished I'd been able to feel more... gravity? when 2B's actual role was revealed, but it felt really hollow by that point because 9S had already completely fucking cracked

and since I don't think ahead about anything and trust narrators implicitly, I genuinely had no idea about it and probably should have been a good audience for a reveal like that but it was also unclear that 2B had killed 9S 392473847 times before or whatever and I only discovered that after looking at the fucking wiki lmao

but other than that like, telling him about it serves... what purpose? when you're like one boss fight away from the end of the game (barring fighting the credits) and he's already as far gone as he can go

like, is futility the point? I don't get it

I did miss 2B a lot once she was gone but also A2 was Good and I like her

I was kind of surprised that 2B just. died. but I'm also somebody who gets really offended when major characters get killed off so again, more just personal preference about what I like in a story than useful criticism lol

IDK man like I definitely liked it a lot more than original nier, which is good, but I still don't understand like. a lot of shit about the story and about the world and I feel like even after going through a whole bunch of nonsense endings there was so little lore that it all felt ineffective and kind of useless

I just want a machine village simulator game

toddling around as a baby machine all day

anyway sweet mercy this is a negative-ass plurk but I'm disappointed, like, in myself for not loving it more or being profoundly affected by it bc everybody else I know who played it was like losing their minds over it and crying and having an existential crisis

and I'm like "well it was ok" like why did I not have this experience also

oh also I'm kinda LARGE SIGH about 9S' ending where oh we rebuilt the androids maybe they'll not go nuts and get viruses and die this time

that annoys me in the same way ME3's red ending did though

like ALL OF THAT WAS FOR WHAT EXACTLY

oh wait another good thing though, the soundtrack was /kisses fingers like a chef

if the music hadn't been as effective as it was I probably would have had an even stronger negative reaction to the game as a whole, the music was incredible