Nier: Automata

The pairing of visionary writer Yoko Taro and the action specialists at PlatinumGames delivered, in Nier: Automata, a story about combat androids 2B, 9S, and A2, who fight in humanity's proxy war against alien machines on a devastated Earth, unaware of just how deeply distorted the truth about their mission really is.

Combat combines hack-and-slash sword fighting with bullet-hell shootouts using flying Pod units, letting PlatinumGames bring its signature fluid action into an RPG framework. The game constantly toys with the camera: the perspective shifts without warning from third person to a side-scrolling platformer or a classic top-down shoot-em-up, so the player moves through several genres within a single mission. Characters aren't upgraded through levels alone but through plug-in chips that take up space in shared memory - players can sacrifice part of the interface, such as the health bar or minimap, in exchange for greater combat power, a typically audacious idea from Yoko Taro.

The game is famous for its structure of several successive playthroughs - the second and third runs reveal the same events from another character's perspective or entirely new chapters, while questions of consciousness, mortality, and the meaning of existence form the philosophical core of the narrative; the game also contains a number of hidden, unconventional endings, including sequences with no gameplay at all. The emotive soundtrack, sung in an invented language, ranks among the most acclaimed in the gaming industry and amplifies the melancholic tone of a dying planet, while the design of 2B, inspired by a gothic military uniform and a blindfold symbolizing suppressed emotion, became one of the most recognizable visual concepts of the decade. Empty, nature-overgrown ruins of human cities, abandoned amusement parks, and rusting factories don't merely serve as scenery but as a quiet commentary on what remains after civilization. Critics praised the unusual combination of deep philosophical reflection with satisfying action, the game became an unexpected commercial and critical hit, and it firmly established Yoko Taro as one of the most distinctive creators in the Japanese gaming industry.