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Omobono posted:For the record: all of us (including me) have Stockholm Syndrome towards Yoko Taro, correct? ...Seems legit. While I've been vicariously experiencing the suffering through TDI LPs up to Automata I admit that there's definitely Stockholm Syndrome involved at some level. Though for me it's also largely "okay, what's he gonna pull this time around?" And there's no small amount of the fact that even with the suffering YT games are all pretty consistently entertaining in their own ways, both in pure schadenfreude and because there are legitimately likeable moments in them.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 19:38 |
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# ? May 23, 2024 16:00 |
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Momomo posted:I think this is a better example since I still have no idea why this was a thing That was such a perfect Drakengard! moment
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 19:38 |
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.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 20:06 |
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Episode CXXXI: Overdue Books Music: Rays of Light (Quiet) Let’s check it out. We’ll be getting back to the aftermath of that 2B series exploding in 9S’s face later. Fun fact: That wasn’t just a randomly chosen 2B to serve as the exploding model in the cutscene. It will spawn already downed behind 9S at some point during the fight. So the machine network actually just discretely dropped an explosives rigged 2B to be an rear end in a top hat to 9S. They’re real dicks. This final chapter will frequently be swapping between or two protagonists. Spoilers: 9S did not, in fact, get gibbed just before. The way to the Tower is clear of any machines and littered with quite a few scrapped robots. We can find the ones responsible as soon as we enter the gate. We... went ahead and opened the Tower. 9S is... already inside. ...... I see. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do except continue onward to the Tower. The only androids in the region left that were qualified to make repairs to jacked androids like Devola and Popola were err... Devola and Popola. Devola has one final thing to say while A2 waits for the elevator to come down. Did we... Did we... manage to help? ...You did. Music: The Tower (Quiet Vocal) Up we go to the Tower proper. If you’ll look to the top right there, there’s actually a save point in the first area here. If reloaded, it’ll spawn us back at the beginning of events here. This is the final save point in the game and we’re already locked into the endgame because this elevator doesn’t go back down. Much like the original NieR’s endgame, you’d best set aside a solid hour because there’s no stops between here and the ending credits. It is worth noting that the game actually does start doling out checkpoints for the final dungeon we can continue from if A2 or 9S dies at any point. They’re usually pretty generous. So that’s nice. Hypothesis: The corpse is likely a result of YoRHa unit 9S’s advance through the area. ...Let’s go. Yep, nothing but the corpses of everyone 9S killed to greet us in this first area. So we can just run straight back to the room where 9S officially cracked. Unknown. Proposal: Gather additional data. Someday I need to teach you how to be helpful. All the 2B corpses have been cleared out and all that remains of the battle is a caved in pit where 9S got blown up. So yes... 9S managed to fall down another hole. It just keeps happening! The gate beyond the 2B battle room is unlocked and A2 continues onward to another empty, very pretty walkway. Still no enemies to be found here. Nor will there be any for this segment of the game. A closed door is found at the end of the path. Nothing is stopping A2 from barging right in, so... Old Music: Song of the Ancients - Popola (Instrumental) Oh poo poo! If you didn’t take the hint and educate yourself on the original NieR, like a stupid idiot, then you’d miss that this place was a very important location. This was Popola’s Library, the central fixture of Nier’s hometown where he received all his quest directions and the battle site for the climax of the first half of the game. This is a 1:1 reconstruction of it... just with all the color removed, of course. Hypothesis: It is a representation of a library. What’s that? A library is a data-storage facility constructed by past human civilizations. Hmm. One of the books on the Library’s ground floor is suspiciously glowing. May as well investigate. Despite this being a very important location, I don’t think Papa Nier ever read a single book in here. He wasn’t exactly the reading type of guy... Unless that book happened to know blood magic and could murder Shades. He did fight a book in here once. Come to think of it, that dickish book sounded a lot like you Pod... Help me out, Pod. Affirmative. Hacking-interface access rights granted to YoRHa unit A2. Peachy. A2 can now hack books. Don’t ask me how that works. Just go with it. A2 isn’t the brightest android. For this first hack, we need to take a roundabout route along the perimeter of the hacking space to the core due to invulnerable white block barring any direct routes. Easy enough even for A2 to figure out. As soon as we complete the hack, we receive an Intel file. Great, they can probably cough out another Adam or Eve if they wanted. A lot of these records are stuff the machines would already have on file or stuff that was probably hacked from the Bunker infiltration. Kind of odd they’d have records on plants and animals too. But nothing the machines do has any meaning, right? That’s it for downstairs. So let’s head to the upper floor, where two more glowing books await to be hacked. We’ll get to those in a little bit. But first, there are two doors on the upper part of the Library. This door on the right of the staircase should lead to... ...Popola’s office. The machines really went all out copying this room. Not that there is anything to do in it. That treasure chest just contains a Small Recovery, if you’re wondering. Welp. That’s neat either way. Heading back out, there’s another door on the opposite side of the staircase. Back in the original NieR, this room was a weird shrine that slowly filled up with statues of the bosses Papa Nier and friends slayed during the course of the game. This time around... (Click for larger shot.) It’s a trophy room for all the important machines and bosses in NieR: Automata. Starting at the top left and moving left to right we’ve got:
Let’s get back on task. There’s two books to be hacked on either side of the room. The order doesn’t matter. Reading is its own reward. For this hack we need to destroy all four of those suspiciously isolated boxes over in the corners of hacking space before the core’s shield is deactivated. Once that’s sorted, we get... I guess the machines have info on the human genome now. Do with that what you want. Humans were huge dipshits. The machines hacked that deep into the system, huh? One more hack left on the opposite side of the room. Let’s see what we’ve got. This time there are four suspiciously taller blocks out among the field of black cubes. We need to shatter all four to get that core down again. This results in the unlocking of... The entire dooming of the human race can traced back to one little girl getting an incurable unspecified anime ailment. Well that and a rhythm battle between a dragon and a sociopath vs a 50 story tall salt mannequin. drat it, this is useless. There’s too many of them. If we return to the ground floor of the Library, a new book has begun glowing near the entrance. I suppose that’s worth investigating. Say! That’s talking about A2. That’s probably a book worth flipping through. Music: ENDS ...... <gasp> This data... So A2 is about to get interrupted and not explain what she read in about .05 seconds from now. A file silently gets added to our Intel menu from this cutscene. It’s really easy to miss reading since we’re immediately going to be onto something else in a moment. So let’s stop and take a look here. Huh... So the Executioner series of YoRHa androids were also derived from A2’s combat data during the Pearl Harbor Descent. That’s an odd factoid to pull out after 99% of YoRHa is already dead. Alright, then. Make of that what you will. Now resuming the cutscene... Did someone order a new spider-bot named after a Chinese philosopher? Tune in next time as we completely ignore that and go see what happened to 9S after he fell down the twelfth pit in his adventure as NieR: Automata’s endgame continues. Video: Episode 131 Highlight Reel (You should probably watch this.) Devola and Popola Concept Art – Ehh. I like their final outfits better than any of these. The Dark Id fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Dec 17, 2017 |
# ? Dec 16, 2017 20:27 |
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Oh good, another agressive chinese orb. How terrifying.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 20:34 |
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Interesting that this hacking doesn't go chiptune.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 20:34 |
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Wow, I think I completely missed that data file. They really should give you a chance to read it there.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 20:36 |
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The Dark Id posted:
Missing a line here, I think
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 20:44 |
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While it's definitely better to play Nier 1 before Automata, it's still fun seeing people do it in reverse, because when they first enter the library in Nier 1 their brain tends to do a hard reboot as they attempt to figure out the implications.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 20:46 |
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Also Devola and Popola.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 21:18 |
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Didn't someone or a file imply A2 was somehow related to the E series
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 21:27 |
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So yeah, this section is essentially why I don't tell people they can play Automata without having played the first Nier. If they weren't so explicit with the files, I could maybe say so, but they spell out too much of the previous games' story with these.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 21:28 |
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drat rumbling chinese balls. That might have come out wrong. This content has been deemed inappropriate for pretty much everyone. Please stand by.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 21:48 |
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The Tower might be one of my favorite areas in the game. It's such a great design. I always had a fun glitch happen in my playthroughs that I didn't see with Id's video, though. In that first area where you ascend the stairs to get to the 2B fight arena, there would always be an Android corpse that spawned at the ceiling over the center pit. And naturally it would fall down. And then when it got to the bottom it would respawn at the ceiling. The result was a constantly falling single Android corpse. Speaking of Android corpses, Id, are you going to show off the other thing that can happen when you repair them now?
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 21:59 |
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There's a lot of OH SHITs in this game, but the Library from NieR 1 might actually have been the biggest one to me. I really didn't expect that.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 22:12 |
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I'm starting to wonder if there's a symbolic nature to the holes 9S keeps falling down. Every time he drops through one his mental and emotional state gets way worse, like James Sunderland except the parties responsible are laughing their asses off.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 22:13 |
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Momomo posted:So yeah, this section is essentially why I don't tell people they can play Automata without having played the first Nier. If they weren't so explicit with the files, I could maybe say so, but they spell out too much of the previous games' story with these. And it's part of why I insist Automata isn't a standalone game. The library, Devola and Popola, Emil, etc. are important but the huge thing is that all of the records in the tower will just seem like pure gibberish and you're not going to get the full impact of this section. You can play Automata by itself and understand most of what's going on but it's such an inferior experience that I heavily advise against it. And Automata will ruin several parts of Nier 1 if you play the games out of order. Buy an old used PS3/X360 for cheap if you have to, but play Nier 1 before Automata. Edit: And finding out that Devola/Popola are androids is actually one of the huge plot twists at the end of Nier 1. Nobody even knew androids existed; you experience nearly the entire game thinking they're human. But if you play Automata first then you already know they're androids, which greatly diminishes the impact of the dramatic reveal. ...! fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Dec 16, 2017 |
# ? Dec 16, 2017 22:18 |
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...! posted:And it's part of why I insist Automata isn't a standalone game. The library, Devola and Popola, Emil, etc. are important but the huge thing is that all of the records in the tower will just seem like pure gibberish and you're not going to get the full impact of this section. You can play Automata by itself and understand most of what's going on but it's such an inferior experience that I heavily advise against it. And Automata will ruin several parts of Nier 1 if you play the games out of order. I disagree. Everything that carried over from the first game, they did a good job making you connect with or understand what's important, and what's more is very little of it is actually relevant to 2B, 9S and A2's story. Or at least- they conveyed the themes, but didn't get bogged down in the specifics. It's there for the people who know, but for the people who don't (I was one of them), it in no way diminishes things. Like the Yornah record, or the library itself. I was in A2's shoes. Clearly there was something weird and important(?) but not important or relevant to what's going on right now.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 22:36 |
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Yoko Taro's philosophies in these game as a whole is very Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame in that it's a nihilistic kind of optimism. It's like he's saying "We will all die, that is inevitable. Whether human, shade, android, whatever, all will perish, all will die meaningless unpleasant deaths in the service of some imagined irrelevant cause. But the Earth will keep living." Through thousands of years and 20 apocalypses the Earth still exists - it no longer turns, and humanity is dead 15 times over but the Earth itself still lives - life still thrives unflinching, nature will always subsume the ruins we left behind, and animals will move in and take shelter in whatever remains of our memories.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 23:29 |
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Kavak posted:I'm starting to wonder if there's a symbolic nature to the holes 9S keeps falling down. Every time he drops through one his mental and emotional state gets way worse, like James Sunderland except the parties responsible are laughing their asses off. In the next update we're going to find out 9S ended up in Dubai.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 23:34 |
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BioEnchanted posted:Yoko Taro's philosophies in these game as a whole is very Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame in that it's a nihilistic kind of optimism. It's like he's saying "We will all die, that is inevitable. Whether human, shade, android, whatever, all will perish, all will die meaningless unpleasant deaths in the service of some imagined irrelevant cause. But the Earth will keep living." Through thousands of years and 20 apocalypses the Earth still exists - it no longer turns, and humanity is dead 15 times over but the Earth itself still lives - life still thrives unflinching, nature will always subsume the ruins we left behind, and animals will move in and take shelter in whatever remains of our memories.
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# ? Dec 16, 2017 23:50 |
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I remember when my boyfriend first got here, he was like "oh huh a library", and turned to see me making a face. Doubly so for the trophy room. God drat I love this game
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 00:24 |
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I don't know where this is going, but if it turns out the machines are pulling some weird Titan A.E. sorta thing and we're gonna smash another convoluted plan to bring humans back....The Dark Id posted:The gate beyond the 2b battle room is unlocked
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 01:15 |
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Zagglezig posted:I don't know where this is going, but if it turns out the machines are pulling some weird Titan A.E. sorta thing and we're gonna smash another convoluted plan to bring humans back.... We already did though, with the death of Adam & Eve.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 03:59 |
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I played this 'blind' - no knowledge of NieR going in. So when I got here...Part of me was like A2, going 'huh, that is...a thing'. Like the office, or the room of statues - weird, but to me nothing more than an implication that the YorHa were being watched. The Yonah document, OTOH, spoke to the other part of me. I didn't know what happened in NieR, but I was trying to piece it together using Automata documents alone. No looking up anything, no asking friends, just coming up with theory after theory, revising with every bit of Project Gestalt I stumbled across. I did, afterward, go back and read TDI's LP of NieR. Turns out my final guess was kind of off, but close enough.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 04:08 |
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Kavak posted:So humanity IS hiding up on the moon, in a way. cirus posted:The massive increase in the Black Scrawl in NieR's second act is due to NieR slaughtering tons of shades. The Shadowlord was still producing his Maso. He got pissed because the Gestalt leadership kept telling him for a thousand years that they would fix Yonah soon so he decided to take matters into his own hands and fix her himself. Then NieR killed him and doomed the entire human race. My hypothesis is that on the moon or on earth, there absolutely are replicants- self aware replicants- running about, being all human in all but name, but they 'don't count' to the androids because their souls are 'wrong.' Idunno, it makes the Yorha deception all the more futile and meaningless if they're lying about something that they don't even need to lie about, or wouldn't if other Androids could see replicants as human.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 04:49 |
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Zagglezig posted:I don't know where this is going, but if it turns out the machines are pulling some weird Titan A.E. sorta thing and we're gonna smash another convoluted plan to bring humans back.... Earth is going to be renamed Emil?
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 04:53 |
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Ryushikaze posted:My hypothesis is that on the moon or on earth, there absolutely are replicants- self aware replicants- running about, being all human in all but name, but they 'don't count' to the androids because their souls are 'wrong.' Unlikely. We've already seen the supply logs. There's nothing there.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 04:54 |
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Vadoc posted:Earth is going to be renamed Emil? Other way around.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 04:54 |
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...aaaaaaaand finally finished Id's Nier 1 LP, just in time to get all the revisited tragedy rubbed in my face. This was a smart decision and totally didn't disembowel me. (Still don't understand what the gently caress was up with Ending C/D in that particular game.)
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 04:56 |
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Synthbuttrange posted:Unlikely. We've already seen the supply logs. There's nothing there. Yeah, IF they exist, and I admit it's a stretch, they're probably somewhere on earth. I just think it'd be a capstone of the machine vs android war's utter futility.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 05:01 |
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You cant have replicants without gestalts, and they're both pretty much hosed.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 05:06 |
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Vadoc posted:Earth is going to be renamed Emil? Kavak posted:Other way around. The reason why YorHA lost an entire hemisphere is because the earth is actually a giant Emil head, and that's the side the face is on. "EVERY DAY'S A SALE, EVERY SALE'S A WIIIIIIIIIN," Emearth screamed into the uncaring cosmos. The aliens kept their distance; they were no match for the Best Planet's unbeatable bargains.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 05:08 |
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Synthbuttrange posted:You cant have replicants without gestalts, and they're both pretty much hosed. I always interpreted Replicants developing souls at the end of Nier meant that they didn't need Gestalts any more, that they were technically complete humans, and that was why OG Yonah refused to merge with Replicant Yonah.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 05:10 |
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Ryushikaze posted:I always interpreted Replicants developing souls at the end of Nier meant that they didn't need Gestalts any more, that they were technically complete humans, and that was why OG Yonah refused to merge with Replicant Yonah. While this is true as far as consciousness goes, I believe that Replicants are sterile. So...yeeeeeah.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 05:14 |
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Ryushikaze posted:I always interpreted Replicants developing souls at the end of Nier meant that they didn't need Gestalts any more, that they were technically complete humans, and that was why OG Yonah refused to merge with Replicant Yonah. They still died of the black scrawl if their gestalt was killed, so they weren't entirely free.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 05:34 |
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Ryushikaze posted:I always interpreted Replicants developing souls at the end of Nier meant that they didn't need Gestalts any more, that they were technically complete humans, and that was why OG Yonah refused to merge with Replicant Yonah. The Replicants never broke the tie to their Gestalts. If a Gestalt died, so did its Replicant.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 06:21 |
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All caught up. And just in time for the end-game! So is Automata a good game because of the mechanics and combat, or is it because of the really weird story? It's sometimes difficult to figure out which bits of the game TDI actually likes. A lot of people do like this game, though Platinum also seems to like trolling completionists the same way that Cavia did.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 06:29 |
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Mostly the story, but the unlike the previous Drakenier games the mechanics are pretty good too.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 06:33 |
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# ? May 23, 2024 16:00 |
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The combat is functional enough to get you through the good story.
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# ? Dec 17, 2017 06:34 |