I’m in no hurry to get through the games in my backlog as usually production values are so high now that they’re just as good whenever I get around to them. But this is one case where I might have left it in the oven for too long. Playing a 2017 game in 2024 is kind of pushing it but I think this never looked very good even back then. I added this to my list a while back because it has a lot of many passionate fans and it adds old school shoot ’em up elements to the action genre. But I ultimately found it to be an underwhelming and overrated game.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which aliens have unleashed hordes of machines to conquer the planet. The surviving humans have retreated to the Moon and has assembled a force of androids known as YoRHa, to fight on their behalf. The player initially controls the YoRHa unit designated 2B on a mission to strike against the machines. She is partnered with 9S, a male android who specializes in hacking and intelligence gathering. Over the course of their battles, they discover that the machines have emotions and personalities contrary to what they were taught. They later come across a community of pacifist machines led by one called Pascal who have organized into a village and want an end to the war between androids and machines. They encounter rogue androids who have deserted and accost a powerful YoRHA unit who claims that command has betrayed them all. Eventually they make their way into a base deep underneath the surface and learn that the original aliens are long dead and the machines have only been blindly following their directives. Naturally there are more dramatic twists in the story as the secrets of humanity are revealed and the relationship between 2B and 9S deepens.

To experience the whole story however the player needs to complete the game not once but at least three times. You start as 2B and play through until you confront the big bad. After that, you replay through the same series of events, but retold from the perspective of 9S. After that, the story continues on from various perspectives. It’s rather tiresome and made especially so as it all takes place on the same map. The world looks deceptively large at the beginning of the game but there are not actually that many zones and most of it is just empty space. Between the optional side missions and the main quests forcing you to traverse the same areas again and again, you’ll soon get sick and tired of the map. As this is meant to portray a post-apocalyptic world, it looks drab and unappealing, empty deserts, desolate ruins and abandoned factories in dull browns and grays. The game’s age works against it here as the graphics are plain and rather crude by modern standards. I don’t think it was ever a particularly beautiful game even when it was first released and it’s even less so now.

Its case isn’t helped by the fact that the combat system is primitive. Attack combos are simply a string of button presses, and how long you can keep a combo going depends on the equipped weapon. There’s no fatigue or energy system, you can attack and dodge as much as you want. For the most part, the game is not actually very difficult at normal settings as enemy attacks are telegraphed. It’s just that they like to throw many enemies at a time at you and fill the screen with projectiles. Some also have extreme levels of health and defense so it’s simply a long slog to take them down. At higher difficulty settings, the enemies do enough damage to kill you in a couple of hits but don’t behave any differently. Provided you get a chance to pause, you can always pop healing items if you’re ever at risk of dying. Since there’s no use for money beyond a certain point, you might as well stock up on them. If all else fails, you can always keep your distance and rely on the ranged weapon on the pod that accompanies you, though it means battles will go on forever.

Another consideration is the very strict save system and forces you to manually save only at designated locations. There are absolutely no automated checkpoints even after long set-piece battles so you might lose a lot of progress if you don’t make a habit of manually saving. It’s supposed to simulate the fact that the android bodies are disposable and it is their memories that are saved. The game does do some interesting things with it as part of the story but it does mean that there is no opportunity to save at some key moments. I genuinely believe that for many players the hardest part of the game is the prologue. There’s no saving until it’s complete, which can take nearly an hour. As this is when the player is still new and unused to the controls and you start with only have a basic loadout of chips, the chance of dying to the boss at the end of the prologue is very real.

I do like how the chip upgrades work and it’s cute how even basic functions like your HUD elements are determined by the chips. Incredibly, the game allows you to stack similar effects from different chips. It’s just that you’re limited by the total memory capacity you have available. There are quite a few different builds you can specialize in, provided you’re willing to farm for the just the right chips. You can stack enough healing effects to outpace enemy damage or specialize in ranged attacks by imbuing your melee weapon swings with shock waves. The shoot ’em up elements are also nostalgic as are the sections when the game forces a side-scroller or top-down perspective. Even so the mechanics are so basic that it’s not engaging for very long.

Many players praise the touching and profound story but to me, it’s just the usual anime emo bullshit. 2B and 9S are meant to develop some sort of deep affection for each other over the course of the game but the main story is so short that it feels rushed and fake. The brotherly love between the two antagonists who are oddly enough named Adam and Eve fuels precisely the kind of overdramatic emo angst that is so common in anime. The truth behind the history of the war between humans and aliens is meant to be soul crushing but most of the revelations are telegraphed from far away. Who out there is really surprised that there are machines who are friendly or that YoRHa hides nasty secrets? This is very juvenile storytelling with characters who all look like they’re in their teens, even if they are supposedly far older than that, and have the emotional intelligence to match. I will say one thing in its favor: its music is pretty awesome and the game knows it. It likes to boost the volume to highlight key moments in the story. But that isn’t enough to make up what is a weak story in the first place.

In the end, I suspect that a large part of the appeal of this game lies in waifu potential of 2B. The character does seem deliberately designed to be enticing and attractive. The game was after all made by the same developer who made Bayonetta. This is the first time I’ve played one of their games so it’s good to at least have firsthand experience with their style of game. Honestly, it’s a perfectly cromulent action game so it’s not all bad. But it’s not at all my cup of tea and I think its reputation is wildly overrated.