NieR:Automata

One of the few rare games still left on my backlog that I've previously talked about, while I still listed every new game I added. Perhaps the last one; I'm not keeping count. I finally got around to playing the highly anticipated NieR:Automata.
And as much as I was looking forward to it, and as much as I hate to say it... It's one of the worst things I've ever played.

That may seem like a bit of an exaggeration, but the main reason is that the game is unplayable, quite literally. I hold a firm belief that on PC, your game should have keyboard and mouse support. Steam has the option of marking a game as "controller only" or "controller heavily recommended" for this reason too. Nier here only has "partial controller support", which is a complete lie. You can not play this game with a keyboard and mouse. I even went through the trouble of installing a mod, which made the game playable, but sadly, it was still not enough. I could delve into the long list of actual problems when using KB&M, but just believe me that I'm not exaggerating. It's effectively not supported. For this reason alone, I could confidently recommend not playing this game.

Regardless, I pushed through a few hours of the gameplay (2 of those were spent dying in the tutorial, which, unlike the entire rest of the game, doesn't let you save for some unknown reason, having you do the whole thing again, cutscenes and all.) I feel like a lot of my criticisms from Nier Replicant carried over, which, surprisingly, despite being older, was more enjoyable. Perhaps because it was released on PC later, and they had a marginally better control scheme? The story was of course different, graphics were slightly updated, and the specifics of combat weren't the same, but at the heart of it, I felt like I was playing the same game with a different character, in different levels.
The bullet hell portions were back as a core part of the game. The various ranged magic spells were replaced by the most useful "gatling gun" one, which luckily didn't have to be tapped, but still had to be held for some reason. Not in easy mode, so they clearly though of this, but thought it was "challenging" to dedicate a finger to holding down the shoot button? Insanity. Going into melee still didn't feel worth the risk, but at least I got a ranged addon for my swords real fast. Kind of a waste of the beautiful and varied attack combos, as the game turned into a sort of third-person shooter. Character progression was also still too meaningless. It almost didn't feel like an RPG, but an action-adventure game.
In terms of new complaints I have, outside of boss fights, the world felt even less interesting to explore somehow. The enemies were too easy, while, at the same difficulty, the boss fights were too hard, so there was a clear difficulty mismatch here. And you'd think that maybe the positive reviews were from the main character now being a good-looking female, but then they very deliberately made sure we can't even catch an upskirt peek. Terrible.

Back to a serious tone, I've been kind of looking forward to playing this for 7 years, and I could not have been more disappointed. This manages to be worse than its predecessors in most every way, and even its predecessor was really bad for a JRPG. Even if the PC support was there, I do not understand the high praise this game received. Neither the combat nor the progression is fun in the least. I can't recommend this.