NieR: Automata. Video Games With the Best Stories

When a game has a good plot, we remember it fondly. When the story is great, then we experience a whole range of emotions and remember it for a long time. And how do we describe a story that hurts us at emotional level and asks questions that can affect our worldview and perception of life? I would not afraid to call it a masterpiece.

Automata is the work of Yoko Taro, who gave us the first game in the NieR series and the three parts of Drakengard. These games never gained much popularity, but they enjoyed a cult following among a small number of fans. NieR: Automata explained the reason for that to the rest of the world. The game is an RPG married with an hack'n'slash combat system that could have been pulled straight from Bayonetta, Devil May Cry or the classic God of War games. The action takes place in the distant future, in which humanity has lost a war for Earth against machines of an alien race and has been forced to flee to the Moon. There, special combat androids were created, descending on the Blue Planet in our name and attempting to break it free from the control of the machines.

Automata's structure is so unusual that in order to fully understand its plot, we need to reach at least five of the available endings, which in turn requires us to complete the game at least three times – and the first two of these playthroughs are quite similar. However, it is worth bearing with this small dose of repetition, as the game makes up for it in spades – while the plot is "barely" very good the first time around, the subsequent playthroughs uncover new layers of the story and pulverizes our perception of the world. Route number three, on the other hand, is an emotional rollercoaster that destroys everything we believed in, tramples us into the ground, takes away all faith – and at the end, when we are reduced to emotional wrecks, it gives us a small hope.

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