When comparing Final Fantasy X HD Remaster 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 Final Fantasy X HD Remaster is ranked 30th. 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 Strategic and proactive turn-based combat
Turn-based battles in Final Fantasy X give you great ways to plan out how to approach each fight instead of leaving you to mostly react in battle. On the right-hand side of the screen, you'll see a long column including the icons of each character in your main party and how many turns the boss or enemies will have. When you see that a boss is about to have three or more consecutive turns to attack, you can cast spells ahead of time to protect your party members. It's a neat mechanic that lets you see into the future to plan ahead proactively.
You can also use the right-hand column to plan out how your party members can handle enemy weaknesses. When you see that a strong armored enemy is up to attack next, bringing in one of your heavy hitters like Auron with his huge, armor-piercing sword is pretty efficient. Or if there's another monster that's resistant to physical attacks, you can bring in Lulu instead with her powerful black magic spells. Learning everyone's strengths and weaknesses in battle will help you breeze through normal battles and better prepare you for the game's more difficult boss encounters.
Pro Incredible music that fits the game's mood and tone
Final Fantasy X has an amazing soundtrack with a range of iconic tracks that are still beloved to this day, fitting well in each scene and situation they play in. "To Zanarkand" is a moving piano song that plays in the opening cutscene and again later on in the story, matching the game's overall thoughtfulness and retrospection. "Servants of the Mountain" is a really melodic and memorable song that plays in the game's snowy mountain level, with hard-hitting violins that mimic how tough and challenging it is to traverse the mountain itself. "Challenge" is a great boss theme that initially plays when you fight against one of the hardest bosses in the game, changing things up with some cool guitar riffs and fantastic-sounding drums that help pump you up for the fight's difficulty. There's a variety of sounds here that all come together as a cohesive whole, staying true to the game's atmosphere all the way through.
Pro Thoughtful and grounded story
Final Fantasy X tells the story of the main character Tidus who one day finds himself in a faraway place 1,000 years in the future in a world full of death and suffering. A cleric-like summoner named Yuna embarks on a pilgrimage with Tidus and their other companions to destroy Sin: a gigantic whale-like monster that terrorizes the populace and causes countless, senseless deaths. As Tidus grows to care about Yuna, he questions the sacrifices that she has to make on her pilgrimage in order to defeat Sin, compelling him to take a stand against the status quo. It's a wonderful story that shows how far someone can go to protect the person that they care about most.
Pro Addictive underwater sports mini-game called Blitzball
Blizball is an addictive mini-game in Final Fantasy X that's great to play as a respite from the main game. It's like a mix of soccer and rugby played underwater, where you pass a ball around the sphere-like field, trying to score goals while the opposing team tackles and kicks to try and stop you. Playing matches can be quite intense as you navigate your players across the field with the ball, surviving the onslaught of tackles and kicks from the other team long enough to get close to the goal and score. If you're inspired to go back to Blizball on your own after the mandatory games in the story, you can get addicted to it, since it's so well-developed and fleshed out with lots of strategies and different team members that you can recruit.
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 Extremely linear environments
The locations in Final Fantasy X are beautiful and detailed, and yet there are lots of invisible walls blocking you off from exploring those locations. More often than not there's only a single path in any given environment to follow. It's a lot like running down a single corridor from the start of the world to the end. The good news is that you'll rarely get lost, but you won't be able to run around outside of the incredibly limited boundaries in each level.
Con Airship travel is limited to picking points on the world map
It's really disheartening to unlock the airship in Final Fantasy X later in the game, only to discover that all you can do is pick a location and go to it automatically. You can't maneuver it through the skies like in older Final Fantasy games. It would have been nice to have the freedom to explore and see the world of Spira from high up.
Con Severe difficulty spike partway through the game
As you go through the game, you'll probably feel comfortable with the difficulty up until a certain point. There's one boss in particular that's notorious for how hard it is to beat compared to the previous ones. You'll more than likely have to spend hours grinding enemies in the area right before the boss to train. And even when you do defeat the boss, the ones after it are also quite challenging. It can be really confusing for newcomers if you aren't prepared.
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.