become gods.
It’s no secret that Switch versions of multi-platform games are usually the worst performing versions today. Add to this fact the concern that the game behaves so badly that it barely works, or that it requires major compromises in art style to work. This state of affairs is what makes NieR Automata on Switch so impressive. Very few compromises have been made to make this game work on handhelds, so if you’ve never played it before, you might not even know what’s different. It creates a great opportunity for Switch players to experience what I believe is one of the greatest games ever made. .
In NieR Automata, you play as a member of YoRHa, a team of elite androids created to protect humanity from machine lifeforms created by alien invaders. Humanity has long retreated to its lunar fortresses, leaving the androids and machines as the only intelligent life forms on Earth to fight proxy wars on behalf of the Creators they have never met on either side. As you’d expect from a game written and directed by Taro, things aren’t as simple as they seem.
It’s hard to talk about details without spoilers, but in a way, it’s not the details that matter here. It remains focused on more emotional and philosophical themes. It’s not preachy or pretentious. The ideas on display, such as ‘What does it mean to be alive?’ and ‘Does it make sense to die?’ It means that you are not very interested in It’s about showing a character struggling with an answer. The journey gets so personal at times, and few games have hit me with such an emotional gut punch as NieR did five years after him.
While the game’s story is what makes it so beloved, NieR Automata doesn’t humiliate itself in the gameplay department either. Automata was developed by Platinum Games and should feel familiar to anyone who’s ever played a high-octane action game. Combat is built around big combos that alternate between light and heavy attacks to damage enemies. You can also tap a button in the middle of a combo to switch to your secondary weapon loadout, allowing you to completely change your moveset based on the weapon you have equipped. Light and heavy attacks each come with their own dedicated weapon, giving you plenty of versatility in how you approach fights and change your strategy.
Speaking of versatility, the NieR Automata’s equipment system also leaves plenty of room for creativity with the plug-in chip system. Plugin chips offer a wide range of buffs and abilities. Some directly upgrade stats such as damage and speed, while others grant entirely new effects such as auto-healing when preventing damage or enabling the ability to counter attacks. A chip consumes a certain amount of memory. This means that you should carefully consider which chips to include in your build to optimize both combat and memory usage. If you want a little more risk versus reward, you can even turn off the basics of the HUD to free up extra memory for more powerful chips.
So how well does it perform on the Switch? The biggest obvious change is that the game is now capped at 30 fps and the frame rate has been halved. The good news is that you can actually stay at 30 fps most of the time. Occasional drop in frame rate in some large open areas. In particular, the fields across the canyon from the abandoned mall looked like the worst offenders for some reason, but significant, notable drops are rare. The same is true for resolution. Automata targets a maximum resolution of 1080p for docks and 720p for handhelds, and is very good at hitting those resolutions often. Dynamic resolution kicks in from time to time to keep performance smooth, but no worse than this at the expense of visual clarity.
The closest thing to a true portability issue is that some animations take weirdly longer than others. The most prominent examples are the intentional slowdown effect when taking critical damage, the display of pause menu text, and the transition to hacking him minigames. I’m not quite sure what’s going on here, but I suspect these animations are related to framerate and slow down when going from 60fps to 30fps. The bright side is that these animations were very short to begin with. If you’ve never played the game on another platform, you probably won’t even notice anything is wrong.
NieR Automata is one of my favorite games ever made. I was worried about how it would hold up on the Switch, especially considering how cumbersome the PC port was at launch, but I’m very glad I was wrong to worry. It may be the best 3rd party switch port I’ve played, and this makes it very easy to recommend this game to anyone who’s never played it before. He doesn’t have two ways of doing it. NieR Automata is his 2017 design triumph, and his Switch port of the big game of 2022.
