Combat That Makes You Look Cool Without Trying
YoRHa battle android 2B is sent to reclaim Earth from machines, and she does it with the effortless grace of someone who was literally built for violence. Third-person hack-and-slash is the default mode, and PlatinumGames — the studio behind Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising — made sure every three-button combo animates like a choreographed fight scene. Swift cuts, spinning swords, boomeranging blades launched from 2B's hands while her Pod drone sprays a constant stream of bullets aimed with the right stick. Switch weapons mid-combo and watch a katana uppercut transition into a two-handed axe slam that sends robot parts flying at sixty frames per second.
Then the camera swings overhead and suddenly you're playing a bullet-hell shoot-em-up. Round a corner and it's a side-scrolling platformer. Enter a hacking sequence and you're in a twin-stick shooter. NieR Automata treats genre boundaries the way 2B treats robots — something to cut through without slowing down. Yoko Taro's original NieR did this too, but PlatinumGames gave the sequel the mechanical polish to make every perspective shift feel like a new game that happens to be excellent.
I've played through all five main endings, and the combat never stopped being satisfying. That's rare for a forty-hour action RPG. The dodge mechanic is borderline broken — 2B slides through attacks with jet-thruster precision that can bail you out of terrible positioning. Combined with the plug-in chip system (auto-heal, damage buffs, counter-attacks, all customizable), there's a real risk of the game being too easy on Normal. But here's the thing: NieR Automata isn't really about challenge. It's about feel. And it feels incredible.
An Empty World That's Full of Questions
Earth is empty. Not in the "open world that needs more content" way — genuinely, deliberately empty. Washed-out color palette. Crumbling buildings eaten by overgrowth. The wildlife is mostly moose and boars. Treasure chests sit in corners of ruined apartments that nobody has lived in for thousands of years. It should feel boring. It doesn't. The emptiness is the point.
2B and her companion 9S are androids fighting machines on behalf of humanity, who supposedly evacuated to the Moon. The machines they're fighting were built by aliens to conquer Earth. Both sides are fighting a proxy war for masters who may or may not still care. And scattered across this dead planet, machines are doing something unexpected: they're imitating humanity. Some have formed cults. Others built a kingdom with a baby robot king. There's a village of pacifist machines that want nothing but peace, and a carnival of confetti-throwing robots who seem to exist purely for the joy of it.
NieR Automata presents these communities as case studies without telling you what to conclude. A machine that seeks love. A machine that mourns a dead sibling. A machine philosopher who reads Nietzsche. The side quests that explore these stories are where the game's writing hits hardest — quiet, strange, and often devastating. I spent twenty minutes helping a robot find a gift for a robot it had decided to love, and the resolution made me stare at the wall for a while after.
The Plug-In Chip System — Your Brain Is Your Build
2B is a combat android, and the game takes that literally. Her HUD elements — health bar, minimap, damage numbers, even the pause menu — are plug-in chips that take up memory space. Remove your OS chip and she dies instantly. It's a UI decision that doubles as world-building: everything about 2B's experience is modular, removable, and ultimately artificial. Including her emotions. The game tells you that upfront. You should listen.
Practically, the chip system lets you build 2B (and later 9S and A2) however you want. Stack auto-heal chips and become nearly unkillable. Load up on melee damage for glass cannon runs. Install counter-attack chips that punish every missed enemy swing. The customization is deep enough to matter without being complex enough to overwhelm, which is the sweet spot for a game that wants you focused on story more than spreadsheets. It sits somewhere between traditional JRPG builds and Platinum's pure action instincts.
Five Endings — And You Need All of Them
This is where NieR Automata either becomes one of the greatest games ever made or loses you entirely. Route A is a complete story. Route B replays events from 9S's perspective, adding his hacking mechanic and internal monologue — and this is the playthrough that demands patience. It's largely the same events with a different camera and occasional new scenes. Some players bounce here. I almost did.
Don't. Route C is where NieR Automata becomes something else entirely. The story fractures. Everything you understood gets recontextualized. Characters you thought you knew reveal what they've been hiding, and the game introduces a third playable character whose rage rewrites the tone from melancholy to fury. Routes C, D, and E are not replays — they're the second half of the story, and they contain the best writing, the hardest fights, and the single most emotionally gutting credits sequence I've experienced in gaming.
I won't spoil Ending E. I'll just say it does something with the medium of videogames that no other game has attempted, and it made me cry in a way that felt earned rather than manipulated. It asks you a question about sacrifice, and your answer matters. Not to the characters — to other real players. That's all I'll say.
Keiichi Okabe's Soundtrack — The Soul of an Empty World
If PlatinumGames gave NieR Automata its body, Keiichi Okabe gave it a soul. The soundtrack uses a fictional language for most of its vocals — a choice that makes every track feel otherworldly and deeply emotional at the same time. "Weight of the World" builds from a whisper to an anthem across three different versions (English, Japanese, and the chaos language), each tied to a different ending. The amusement park theme is simultaneously joyful and haunting. The desert zone music captures loneliness better than any empty terrain could alone.
What makes the score special is how it shifts dynamically. Enter combat and the instrumentation intensifies without a loading break. Walk into a building and the mix goes quiet and intimate. The soundtrack is essentially a second narrator — telling you what the androids can't express because their emotions are "prohibited." Emotional storytelling in games often depends on cutscenes and dialogue. NieR Automata trusts its music to do the heavy lifting, and Okabe delivers.
What NieR Automata Is Actually About
Existentialism. Obviously. The game name-drops Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Pascal through its boss names and NPC philosophers. But NieR Automata isn't a philosophy lecture — it's a philosophy lab. Every character is an experiment in what happens when beings designed for a single purpose start asking "why."
2B follows orders. 9S questions everything. A2 has already found her answer and it involves a lot of violence. The machines mirror human history — building kingdoms, waging wars, falling in love — not because they understand it, but because mimicry is the closest they can get to meaning. And the androids, who fight for a humanity that may no longer exist, face the same void from the opposite direction: what do you do when the thing you were made for doesn't need you anymore?
The game doesn't answer that question. It shows you characters grappling with it, failing at it, and occasionally finding something that looks enough like purpose to keep going. That's more honest than most stories about the meaning of life, and it sticks with you long after the credits (all five sets of them) roll.
Does NieR Automata Hold Up in 2026?
The PC port was rough at launch. The modding community fixed most issues (FAR mod is still essential), and the game runs beautifully now. The open world is small by modern standards, but that's a feature — no bloat, no filler map markers, no twenty-hour padding. You can reach Ending E in thirty-five hours if you focus, and every one of those hours earns its place.
What hasn't aged is the ambition. Nine years later, no game has replicated NieR Automata's trick of using genre shifts as narrative devices, or its willingness to make the player complicit in the story's meaning. Yoko Taro made a game about androids discovering emotions, and then made the player discover their own. The combat is PlatinumGames at their most accessible. The music is transcendent. And Ending E still hits like a freight train.
If you bounced off Route B — go back. The best RPGs don't always reveal themselves on the first pass. NieR Automata hides its greatest moments behind a patience check, and what waits on the other side is worth every minute of 9S's hacking minigame. I promise.
All images are official screenshots from NieR:Automata. NieR:Automata © Square Enix / PlatinumGames. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Originally published March 2017. Last updated March 2026.