NieR:Automata Ver1.1a (TV Series) Or not to (B)e (2023) User Reviews

Not looking good..

[jamiehudsongames · 6/10 · 8 January 2023]

Let's start of with the positives. The CG looks exactly like the game to the point where I think they may have actually been given the assets from the game itself, The cinematography was good and I am very glad that they combined endings A & B. I was really happy to hear the music from the game appear in the anime and the way they tackled the joke endings was great.. but that's about it?

Other than that, in typical A1 style, they skipped some really good moments (won't say for spoiler reasons), rushed the overall story, had things magically happen off-screen, and introduced a super important plotline about 3-6 episodes (if not more) early.

I really do hope this turns around as NieR: Automata is my favorite game of all time.

early shortcoming

[tinlittlenerd · 4/10 · 10 January 2023]

Based off of the trailer and A1's history, i was anticipating the animation for this series to be one of the strong suits, however it seems like that won't be the case. The 2D animation scenes are fairly good, however they are far out numbered by the embarrassing CGI for the machines and flight units. Cowboy Bebop came out 25 years prior and it gave us much better high-flying action scenes than this. If anyone wanted to watch something with video game graphics, there's no reason to produce this series when you can just play the actual game instead. I will say though, they have stuck to the source material extremely well thus far, so at the very least the first episode had that going for it. For the most part though, my thoughts are that this already feels like a waste of potential, which is a quite a shame.

Disappointing Effort from A1

[smallersoul · 4/10 · 12 January 2023]

As a huge fan of the game, this review pains me to write.

TLDR: This whole thing just feels uninspired, rushed and low budget

A1 is among the best in the business when it comes to stunning visuals, and the 2D visuals in Nier's anime can certainly impress. Additionally, the sound design is lovely and gives the fight sequences some much needed "oomph". The praise for Episode 1 ends there though, because hoo boy was everything surrounding those two things a disappointment.

The 3D. Ohhh, the 3D. Low-hanging fruit, I know, but for good reason. There's simply no other way to say it, the 3D animation looks ROUGH. To be clear, it doesn't look awful all the time. Many of the robot designs and aerial sequences feel great in CGI, but the moment a human (well, humanoid) appears on screen it feels like a first-time fan animation using MMD. They don't even try to match lighting to make it look as close to the hand-drawn characters as possible, it just looks bad.

Difficult to judge story from one episode only, but I found the tone of this episode to be rather emotionally distant. I never really felt invested in the characters, and sometimes lost track of who was talking over the radio. There are brief glimmers of good storytelling in here, but for the most part I just found myself uninterested and uninvested. Perhaps the biggest issue is the insistence on replicating the game's structure (and even select camera angles) 1:1. The game has a great story, but I'm unsure how good an idea it is to simply drag and drop it into a show without any reformatting to better suit the medium.

Then there's the use of music. Rather than compose new tracks unique to the show, the showrunners have instead opted to use the existing soundtrack from the game. I loved the game OST, but I feel this is perhaps the biggest red flag so far, since it truly indicates this was a rushed side project for A1 and wasn't given much money or time in the oven. Not only that, re-using the same track 3 times in the first episode does not bode well for future sound editing choices. The game's score is MASSIVE, and you're telling me you couldn't find more than one suitable track for the episode?

Here's hoping the rest of the season can at least faithfully deliver the story, because there's a lot of potential here. I'm unfortunately skeptical though, since Nier Automata Ver1.1a makes one of the weakest first impressions I've seen in a while. 4/10.