Couple of final thoughts on NieR. I sound down on the game but that& #39;s only compared to expectations set. I like so much of it (really loved the plug-in chips and the sense of weirdness and discovery on route A) but I think part of why I bounce of it is that it& #39;s a melodrama...

and that& #39;s a genre I struggle with most of the time. It& #39;s a lot of people shouting emotions and thoughts at each other or into the camera. I didn& #39;t connect with any of the characters and the serious questions the game asks: what is a soul? Does behaviour generate a soul?...

Is death what gives life meaning? grind against the melodramatic tone. Plus, the game doesn& #39;t explore those questions, it just poses them and that wasn& #39;t enough for me. The longer the game went on, the less interesting it became. The "reveals" in routes B,C,D harmed so much

*BIG SPOILERS* the sad, pointless death of a main character at the start of route C - they saved the world, immediately ground up in the endless machine of conflict; its meaning is eventually changed. I hate everything about the Red Girls (and it& #39;s a bad "walk away" boss).

I thought the moon stuff was meant to be obvious but unspoken, but then it& #39;s treated as a gasp-inducing reveal. The secret of 2B& #39;s relationship to 9S is incoherent with most of the rest of the world. And, for me, route C felt more like misery porn than tragedy. *END SPOILERS*

NieR is a unique, weird, ambitious, playful, earnest romp and I want more like it. The meta cuteness is wonderful. There& #39;s real inspiration in its structure but this game should not be 50 hrs on an "essential" playthrough; I came to resent the game for the tedium it demanded.

I played on Normal but reassigned the lock-on button so didn& #39;t use that function; I did not die once. Hard might have been more engaging, but also more arduous. There& #39;s something in NieR: Automata, but I didn& #39;t find the transendence a lot of people seemed to. Sorry, everyonehttps://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😔" title="Pensive face" aria-label="Emoji: Pensive face">.

Bonus thought: thank you to Dark Souls and everything else for making rooms like this happen. Absolute chills walking through this place. AND the generator of these corpses doesn& #39;t appear on the way in OR the way out. Lovely stuff.