Nier: Automata.
I think it will be difficult for me to talk coherently about the game. There's so much to say! But I'll give it a shot. Spoilers follow. This isn't a game to spoil yourself on, so if you haven't played it, I'd recommend not reading about it.
First of all, the trailer that plays from the title screen. It is comical how spoilery it is. There's one clip from the A/B route aaaaand it's the early part of the Eve fight. Other than that, 100% aftergame territory, including clips from both the C and I believe D endings AND a voice clip of Emil from his superboss fight. Like. Those sure are some spoilers.
The sound design is about as good as I have ever encountered in a video game, the overlaid audio tracks fading in and out worked very well all game long, and never better than in the E ending when the chorus comes in. It was such a beautiful moment.
The game feels like a multimedia project condensed into videogame form. The various sorts of interludes and ways information are presented, the frequent changes of perspective - the storybook style backstories for the robots, and the stilted back-and-forth of the pods and allowing the player to control characters like Pascal and the oil-carrying robot kid. All great, weaving the threads of plot and changing perspectives to explore different aspects of the themes of the game. The ending fakeouts and the presence of multiple endings and a chapter select feature also help in that regard. Like, you did the plot, now let's finish exploring these ideas more selectively. Integrating the screen and volume setup into the plot at the beginning, then going straight to the self-destruct feature, sure was a thing. I loved that the game remembered what I did there during 9S's route.
On that note I also really liked a lot of the sidequests, which were a great mechanism for exploring different perspectives. One robot feels guilty about all the androids it killed, so commits suicide by jumping off a tower, leaving the question hanging of whether you, 9S, feel guilt for all the robots you killed, and what you are going to do about it. (Though it must be said, 9S, that if you jumped off the tower, you would survive the fall.) Another robot presents a "treasure hunting" quest as a pretext to get you to murder robots it didn't like. It has no remorse. Do you?
The game does a lot to integrate its themes into the mechanics. Even hostile robots typically have very short aggro ranges. Harmless unless you get too close, and maybe you don't know that at first but you quickly learn. You can spare them easily, if you so choose. 2B's ability to self-destruct on command, the ability to commit suicide by removing your OS chip, make continuing to live a choice rather than an assumption. "To be" indeed.
One thing I was thinking as I was playing the B route was that I was really disappointed that the game does not explore the idea of 2B and 9S's different perspectives and memories at that point. I thought it was a missed opportunity, because I assumed that 9S knew more than 2B did - that's what the narrative flow would suggest, and that's how Nier worked, with Kaine's story. The later reveal that the opposite was true - that 2B was the one with the secret perspective which 9S was ignorant of - was a beautiful subversion. The latter half of the game, which was about a lot of things but to me mostly about whether 9S could be saved, reminded me a lot of Tsukihime, where in the final route you, the player, know everything there is to know, and the game shifts from being about uncovering the truth to finding (as the back cover of the final volume of Gunslinger Girl puts it) a faint ray of light.
The E ending is a beautiful answer to that question, and is something that could only be accomplished in a video game format. I thought it worked much better than the (very good!) ending to Nier, because Nier:A creates some separation between the player and the characters, especially in the C route. In Nier, you sometimes are made aware that Nier has a different perspective than you do (during one sidequest he says that any villager he suspected of being a shade he would kill without hesitation, to keep the village safe for Yonah) he's still something of a stand-in. And that limits, I think, how much you can care about him as a character. Not so in Nier:A. And just when you think you're struggling to save the characters, the curtain is pulled back, you get help from other players. You have the opportunity to help a complete stranger. To affirm that just as you mattered to someone else, they matter to you. To affirm that the characters of the story deserve their happy ending. That it matters. It's so beautiful. I cried, a lot.
