YELLOW MAGIC'S PROFILE

-> The whole "feeling sympathy for the beings you're killing" thing...first NieR did that, arguably better.

-> The deleting of your save data bit...I admit I thought it was a pretty novel idea in the first NieR, so I wasn't expecting it to show up in Automata. I guess you could argue it, in a way, made more sense to the player on this occasion (saving an actual human being versus saving a fictional character), but on a philosophical level one can question the point of a sacrifice: If the recipient of a sacrifice themselves becomes a sacrifice, and so on, is there any net gain?

But honestly, my main problem with the whole thing is that it's been done before. By the prequel. So I myself can't find it in me to praise it as a groundbreaking idea.

-> More of a subjective thing maybe, but I felt this time round the emotion was kinda shoehorned in: Esp. with 9S who had this really weird character turn almost BSOD'd after 2B's death (although I liked the twist with the whole 2E thing). I'm still not sure what to make of A2, that character was just weird. Maybe I didn't do enough side-quests.

-> The gameplay was a lot LESS repetitive than the previous NieR...is what I thought until I hit the 20 hour mark (about an hour into the C-D arc). At that point, the action felt very one-note, the enemies weren't interesting and I was basically playing for the story from that point. Oh, and don't get me started on 9S' hacking stuff. That was cool the first couple times, but after that every time I was forced to hack into something, I was like "Come on, really?"