When comparing Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker's Memory vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best RPG games on Steam?” NieR: Automata is ranked 3rd while Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker's Memory is ranked 58th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Addictive monster collection aspect
The main side-goal of Hacker's Memory is collecting all of the 300+ Digimon found within the game, which quickly becomes addictive because of two reasons.
First, it's very simple – you either keep leveling/de-leveling your Digimon and transform them into other Digimon, create new Digimon, or buy some of them at a store. If you want to "catch" the Digimon found in random battles, you don't need to weaken them or actually catch them, but just encounter them enough times. This is because each encounter gives you a % of their data and once you get 100%, you can create that Digimon. To make it even better, you don't even have to level all your Digimon manually since you're given a farm where Digimon can level up automatically over time, reducing the tedium considerably.
Second, the Digimon designs look very interesting, cool and sometimes even funny. This includes fierce wolves, massive dinosaurs, robots, angels, devils, ghosts, sentient piles of poop, and many others. There's so much variety in the designs, it can be really exciting to see what new Digimon you'll get.
Because of these two reasons, the collection aspect can easily remain exciting right until you finish your collection.
Pro Crisp and colorful visuals
The game's visuals are really well done overall, having very detailed environments, intricate character models, vibrant particle effects, and even beautifully animated cutscenes. This is further improved by the use a wide variety of colors, ranging from shades of brown and gray to neon green and neon purple. Fortunately, the game also retains great amounts of visual clarity, so the colorful style almost never gets into the way of gameplay, allowing Hacker's Memory to be both enjoyable to play and to look at.
Pro Well-balanced story
Hacker's Memory strikes a nuanced balance between dark themes and over-the-top comedy. At its heaviest the story delves into identity theft and slavery, while at its lightest you have absurdist comedy with cartoonish characters in silly situations. The story's greatest strength, however, is that it constantly alternates between the light and heavy themes while throwing in some philosophical questions. As a result, you won't get drained from constant drama as easily and the jokes won't go stale as quickly, which makes the whole narrative more enjoyable as a whole.
Pro Enjoyable domination battles that freshen up turn-based combat
Aside from regular turn-based battles that make up most of the game, there are also team-based domination battles that focus on territory control. You and your opponent get placed into an arena and each of you is usually given 3 characters that you take turns to move. The arena is split into territories that have point values attached to them, requiring you to capture a certain amount of territories (points) to win. To contest a territory with an opponent character on it, you still have to fight a turn-based battle, but the loser respawns at their starting point, so the goal never is to just defeat your opponent. This creates a refreshing mini-game that still uses core concepts of the game, which is not seen in many other turn-based RPGs.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con No English dub
The voice-over is only available in Japanese albeit with English subtitles. This means unless you're fluent in Japanese, you'll need to read quite a bit of text to fully grasp the story, which can be a turn off for some players.
Con Combat can get repetitive easily
While there is some strategy to the combat, requiring you to target enemy weaknesses with corresponding abilities, the combat is still very simple at its core, allowing you to brute force through battles without much thought if your stats/level is high enough. As a result, the combat can quickly devolve into you just mashing a single button to get through battles quicker, which might not be that interesting and can get tiresome after a while.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.