Welcome to First Five, where I specifically review shorter games that respect your time. Don’t have the free time for a 100-hour open world megasaga? Looking for a palette cleanser between epic JRPGs? I've got you covered. I play a game for five hours, and then I tell you if those five hours can give a satisfying experience.
The only people I know who don't like the game are people who couldn't tell me what it's actually about. They'll say something silly like its about Androids fighting Machines.
Lighton is a great game that I completed in 26 hours but it fits the weekend schedule because you can usually solve one puzzle per day. Someone on steam completed this in 5 hours so, yes, you could finish in less than 6 hours. This simple game starts off really easy but gets very difficult at the end. Really great review -- Thanks First Five!
I do feel privileged to be able to reset my expectations for every piece of fiction I ever play/read/watch. I put my faith (and more importantly, my time) into a piece of fiction and trust that it will successfully tell me the story it attempts to, and I will embrace any amount of awkwardness and jank for that payoff. Sometimes, I am disappointed, but at least I know that I gave it a chance.
Thanks for the video. Great first hours of a game. Felt a lot like this war of mine. I never felt like I really lost, but I always felt like I could. Like there was something to lose. Like what I did had consequences.
As the first time I played this game, I scolded this game so hard. That, it's literally the most unreasonable shit in the world. No else is than automata. It's so uncommonly specific. But now, if u wanna me answer this question again, i would admit that, It is. But not really is. The whole story is expressed in a very special way compared to the whole game industry. The undercurrent is soo thick and unclear. As to the whole story, it is managed way fragmentedly, BUT alsoo kinda in a vision of an extremely realistic way, and so as to you can see the whole tale is very fluent in its own way. and there's also a Nier game on mobile called incarnation. The whole story is telling in another parallel universe with tons of separated small montages and explaining multiple details about Nier series. If they operating games in this way, not all players would know what's the designers talking about. Being scolded is its retribution. For both questions, is automata a chaotic trash, or a well designed and reasonable masterpiece like others, I would tell both, maybe it is, but not really is.
I've been jonesing for some Descent gameplay since my PS1 broke, but I only just found out that this game existed. Exactly what I was looking for! My only complaints are that the levels tend to be needlessly dark sometimes, and that there is rarely ever big open spaces. It's almost entirely tight corridors. Also, the levels are less organic and twisty than in Descent. Apart from the cave sections, most of the architecture sticks to the X,Y and Z axes. It doesn't feel like they fully capitalised on the 360° rotation, at least not in the first half of the game. I wouldn't have minded a few more levels. 15 is enough, but 20 or 30 would have been better. Hint for newbies; Make sure to periodically save, because it only autosaves when you finish a level! I'm also bummed out that there is no level editor on the PS4 version.
Thank you. The game presents a lot of creative ways to rethink narrative and how to integrate its systems into the gameplay in a meta way, but everyone claiming this game is a masterpiece is high on the perceived depth the game is trying desperately to push on the player. It asks a lot of questions through its story without ever really connecting them with any narrative throughline, and the repetitive gameplay seems almost entirely removed from the story itself. The only redeeming thing I walked away with was that the game was clearly approached in a more thoughtful way than most other games are, and that sense is communicated through the tone of the game, both through its music and atmosphere as well as the small vignettes that they failed to tie together in any meaningful way.
Hey you are IGNORING the MOST important population of RETIREES that are the most important supporters of the gaming industry FINANCIALLY. Many baby boomers started to play video games before you were even born. Reviewing a game based on the assumption that people would never spend hundreds and even thousands of hours on video games is like telling all the seniors to dig graves for themselves cause no one will ever care about their existence ever again.
I wanted to like Nier, I really did. I had only heard good things... I managed to get to... the forest king? I think that was the last thing I did? And put the game down. I'd heard that the game goes into some very heavy stuff, no worries, I can handle heavy, and, yet, here, by the time I'd gotten to this point, the deepest thing I had come on was either the reframing of the Ship of Theseus, or the idea that a lo-o-ot of robots can suddenly create life? "Meh" said I... And, then, I played FF14 through Endwalker, and the Nier raids were in there somewhere, and I heard Yoko Tarro was directly making the decisions for how the mobs and bosses would react and attack and such, and, seeing as everything was a goddamn bullet sponge in those raids, I think I figured out why I hated Nier... well, that and the not fully connected to the storytelling the bosses presented...
Nier is kind of like elden ring, storywise. You really gotta pay attention to every single thing, from every item description to every word said in the games with a minimum iq of 125 to completely understand it. Unfortunately, i’m too lazy and i never came to fully understand or appreciate nier until i played the prequel to nier automata, aka nier: replicant. That game got me hooked, and it’s the game that made me read hours onto the lore of nier. It wasn’t until then that i started calling this franchise a masterpiece.
I used to play NieR automata in my university days in-between project crunches and studies. In hindsight, It felt to me like relationships - you gotta work on it for it to come back and shower you with love. And the good thing about hindsight enjoyment? A good chunk of nier’s life lessons lives in you forever ❤
as someone who loves the gnosia story, I completely agree with all of this. I also loved that you pointed out the nonbinary characters, the biggest gnosia lore explanation video uses she/her on setsu (they/them) the whole way through and as a feminine nb person it made the video unbearable. nice little recommendation video, though i would say the game doesnt fully stray away from not pg elements (one of the notes has you discover the other nonbinary crewmember, raqio, is amab by... walking in on them in the shower. yeah its not hard to guess what your player sees)
Great content! The algorithm brought me here! You deserve more views! I will send your stuff to all my gamer buddies that have exactly that question: is this game fun with casual time investment?
I beat nier automata’s true ending a few weeks ago and it was genuinely one of the biggest wastes of times I’ve ever experienced in a big budget game. The combat was absolutely brain dead on 2b and 9s (which made doing side quests, fusing chips, or finding stronger weapons completely pointless), the multiple route system did not provide nearly enough quality ideas to make the time sync worth it, the characters to me are largely uninteresting or downright poorly written, the philosophy aspect has nothing of its own to say and feels more like the devs copy and pasted from an “intro to philosophy” book (every single idea the game presents is done infinitely better is other media), etc. I’ve been watching a lot of videos on the game because I’m honest to god trying to figure out why it’s so critically acclaimed. (Other than people thirsting over 2b’s ass)
Nier: replicant as a lot more better in writing, try giving that a shot. Though i will say that it’s a remaster of a 2010 game, and the combat didn’t really improve that much in the remaster, so gameplay wise, it’s pretty bad, a lot worse than nier automata. But the storywriting is worth it.
Some of the best Sci-Fi stories such as 2001, Primer, Predestination, etc are never blockbuster that everyone watched and this title is the same. They all cover some deep and existential topics and cut deeply for those who ask the deep meaningful questions that the title guides you to ponder. But even the act to philosophize is something reserved for minority of us as audience. If it's a perfect game for everyone then it's not a deep and philosophical game comparatively speaking.
This game is avalible on game pass and avalible to stream so if you have access to game pass,you have access to citizen sleeper. Please play this game. It’s amazing.
I appreciate you talking about that as adults we have extremely limited gaming time and that should be respected. You can’t compete with a 15 year olds for time invested in grinding.
After 3 hours of the game I has a feeling that I'm wasting my time. Thank you for the video, I was trying to understand why everybody find it so great. I think you have to play it when you still have lot of free time
If you ignore the themes and philosophies being explored, the story falls apart if you rub two brain cells together as does the backstory. This is true for all NieR games. I don't think that makes it a bad game, though. As far as gameplay goes, though, NieR: Automata is rightly praised as one of the best.
And now there's an element of the gaming "community" that's down on longer games, for some reason - usually just morons following a certain trend. I definitely feel the anti ubisoft/open world faction are so self-entitled and misguided. But I'm sure the gaming companies will be happy to oblige thier request for shorter and smaller games with less content....
Had the exact same issue with the teleporter on the same level. Except I spent 20 minutes and didn’t find it. Read they sometimes get stuck in walls. Has happened twice in the 4 hours I’ve played, so this issue still exists
definitely randomly clicked here cause of the thumbnail. respect it, but I definitely can't live my life worrying about how much time anything took me to complete.
Not going to lie: I missed like 3 min. Of the video cause my mind couldn't comprehend that the Miduarsormr theme from FF14 was playing over a NeiR video 🤣
