LogFAQs > #877471779

I had unrealistic sky-high expectations for this game due to my fanboy love for Nier and it somehow met them. While I think the story and characters were slightly worse, the gameplay was bounds better and the music is almost as good which is nuts as Nier has my all-time favorite OST.

The way Automata tells its story is very different from Nier 1. Nier 1 is all about those emotional highs. There's not much subtlty in what happens - it just hits you over the head with emotion and pulls it off with gusto. It's also got a bunch of charming, memorable characters with great characterization and arcs. I think if there's one thing Nier 1 does better than Automata, it's characters. I really like some of the characters in Automata but no one matches up to Nier/Kaine/Emil.

Automata has a big lack of emotional high points with a few exceptions. That's by design though. The characters in Automata struggle with emotion due to their nature as androids and barely know how to express themselves most of the time. There's a ton of subtle writing about the nature of self, finding meaning in life, the pain of existence, the pointlessness of war and its endless cycle of death and revenge, all mixed in with androids and machines trying to come to terms with their budding humanity that is restricted and stifled by programming they can't defy. So much of their lives and what they do is pretedermined to be utterly meaningless. It's gooood shit. There's a ton of small moments in Automata that I adore. Probably the best one is the Wise Machine 'quest' which is totally optional and contains one of the most powerful moments in the game. You hack several random machines in a row, hearing them question why they were born and why life has to hurt so much, culminating in a furious rage against the heavens mini-speech followed by an immediate jump off a tall ledge. That one messed me up good.

I love how all the androids/machines in the game try to emulate humans. They've just now achieved some sort of consciousness, and in their complete confusion they turn to the only sentient life form they know of - humans. Someone should have told them how messed up we are! There's an incredible sadness in a lot of the things they do as they try to become more human. What little happiness they manage to build up is always cut short by their programming they can't escape from. If there's an actual villain in Automata, it's their programming which prevents the androids and machines from ever being able to escape their situation. There's a lot of goddamn robot suicide in this game - they simply can't reconcile their nature as weapons of war with their newfound sentience. Everyone in Automata is searching for their purpose in life...and for machines, if that purpose as a weapon is outdated, then what meaning is there to anything they do? Much of life is pain, and no one ever taught them how to deal with that pain.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.