Nier Automata: First impressions = boring

Yes, I am very late to the party on this one but this is because I have a general lack of trust when it comes to Square Enix after purchasing the only 2 games I have paid full price for in the past 2 years and being incredibly dissatisfied with both of them. These two titles were Final Fantasy 15 and Final Fantasy 7 remake. I have spoken about my great displeasure with both of these games in some detail already so I'll spare anyone out there that pays attention the redundancy other than to say that it has forever tarnished my idea of what Square-Enix does in a general sense.

For years I have been hearing glowing things about Nier Automata and how it was "game of the year" and what not so when it was on special for $10 about a month ago, I couldn't resist because I wanted to see what all the hype was about.

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_{Since it is called "Game of the YoRha edition" does this mean that they totally made this award up?}

I expect to take some flak for having this opinion but I am about 2 hours of gameplay in and I gotta say, I am dead bored already. I can't understand the hype. At the moment I am doing a bunch of fetch quests that are sadly mandatory and the excuse I find for this online is that they are "trying to familiarize you with the area" which in my opinion wouldn't be necessary if the area was interesting - which for the most part it isn't.

I also hear that the "story is amazing!" from a lot of people online and maybe it gets that way much later on but for now anyway, most of the dialogue is actually pretty trite and useless as far as I can tell. Cutscenes, which forever annoy me if they are used in excess, thankfully are used sparingly.

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The graphics are impressive, I will give the game that much especially when you consider that this game is 4 years old. Square has always delivered in the graphics department though, so this isn't much of a surprise. Final Fantasy 15 looked great but that doesn't mean that it is a good game (it wasn't.)

I am a casual gamer that will not devote a great deal of time into learning complicated mechanics of a game and on the surface it would appear as though Nier Automata would appeal to me since the controls are relatively simplistic. Simplistic they are, but that doesn't mean it is good. At least in the first 2 hours the robots that you meet are extremely easy to kill and if you don't want to engage them up close at all you don't have to.

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Combat can seem chaotic at first as you struggle to even realize which of the enemies you are actually focusing on and this was kind of a problem for me. I started playing the game on Easy mode and I can't stress enough that you do NOT do this, especially with the auto-dodge enabled. I forget what it is called in-game but the auto-dodge basically makes the game play itself and you don't really have to ever do anything. I think that for everything other than the boss fights you could probably just sit the controller on the table and on the easy setting you would defeat everything without even getting involved because your little robot friend automatically does damage as well.

I quickly turned this off because you can always reactivate it later. I thought that being more actively involved in the fighting process would make the game more fun and I guess it did for a little while but then I started to realize that basically every fight is exactly the same. There isn't really much of a technique to it at least not on the Easy or Normal settings.

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Dodging makes you complete invulnerable for a pretty long amount of time as well so this kind of makes it even less fun because you feel compelled to just charge and button mash with every enemy since this will always work... or at least it has in the first 2 hours of gameplay.

Now I realize that I haven't played the game for very long but at least in my mind, a game should actually be fun right out of the gate and while Nier: Automata did a good job of this with the initial opening sequence (of which, many complained was too long and difficult - I'm presuming on harder settings) after that first big fight the open world aspects begin and oh boy is it boring. Run here, get that thing, bring it back, get another objective, run over there, get that thing, bring it back, repeat. That's not fun!

Another thing that really annoys me about this title is something that Square does an awful lot in their games and that is to have lazy design on areas that you are not meant to access. There are open windows on buildings next to you that you can clearly jump as high as, yet you can not get into the building.

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_{You can easily jump that high but the invisible barrier prevents you from entering, unfortunately this is all too common in Squenix games}

So a lot of the time you are simply chasing a red dot in the minimap in a certain direction and every now and then easily defeated enemies will pop up to block your path and at least on Easy and Normal settings, these enemies are so mindlessly dispatched that if it weren't for the XP I wouldn't even bother with the fights.

Now I'm not expert in this game, certainly not after a mere two hours of playing but I did notice one other thing that is rather "meh" about this game. When you up the difficulty it doesn't appear to actually change any of the attack patterns of the robot enemies but just how much damage you take from them and how many bullets they throw at you. More lazy programming?

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_{back looking for another fetch quest}
Overall, I suppose you could say that I do not understand why this game has generated so much hype. Perhaps it is because it is a Square-Enix game and everyone in the mainstream review crew is terrified to ever say anything bad about them lest they get their ability to professionally review games revoked. Another point might be all the perving that people do on the character that you play and hopefully there is a secret achievement in there for people that change the camera angle to look up 2B's skirt for a certain amount of time.

I'm not going to give up on this game just yet because I truly want to understand what all the fanbois are on about but at least for me with a mere 2 hours of gameplay behind me, I really don't understand why people would consider this to be a great game, let alone a "Game of the Year."

Got any thoughts?