When comparing Beyond: Two Souls vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best story rich games on PC?” NieR: Automata is ranked 38th while Beyond: Two Souls is ranked 63rd. 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 Plenty of tense and exciting action moments
Even though the game is like an interactive movie, there are still some action scenes with more involved gameplay. There are moments where Jodie is in danger and you have to navigate Aiden to help her, or Jodie and Aiden are on the run from several enemies and you have to find a way to escape. You then have to press buttons in time or navigate your analog sticks in certain ways to stay in control of the scene. The game does rely a lot on button presses with QTEs to keep you involved in the gameplay, but as long as you feel engrossed in the game and the overall plot, you probably won't mind too much.
Pro Excellent performance from actress Ellen Page as the protagonist
The protagonist Jodie Holmes is played incredibly well by actress Ellen Page through motion capture technology and voice acting. Portraying Jodie during her teenage and young adult years, Ellen Page shows a huge range of believable emotions, from Jodie's frustrations of growing up with her supernatural powers and her determination to survive all the problems she faces. You get to see every genuine expression she makes and hear each inflection of her voice when she speaks. Controlling Jodie especially feels like you're controlling a real person, Ellen Page herself, just from how realistic everything looks. The actress does a great job performing such a fully-realized character.
Pro Your choices have consequences
Each choice you make, no matter how small, affects how the story plays out in some way. There are the bigger decisions, like pressing a QTE in time to keep Jodie from getting hurt, or making the right dialog choices during encounters with the game's antagonists to outsmart them. But there are also smaller decisions, like choosing to give someone a gift or not stealing money when given the opportunity, and the unexpected ways these choices get taken into account down the line. The best part is that everything leads up to multiple endings depending on which path your choices take you.
Pro Thoughtful story about morality and the supernatural
Beyond: Two Souls tells a thought-provoking story about how supernatural powers affect a person's morality. You play as Jodie Holmes, a young woman who controls a strange spirit-like entity known as Aiden, giving Jodie certain supernatural powers that only seem to cause her trouble at first.
Throughout the story, Jodie tries to find meaning in her powers by deciding whether or not she should use Aiden to help others, even as many in the world persecute her for how dangerous her abilities are. Most of the tension in the plot surrounds whether or not Jodie should get revenge against those who discriminate against her, or if she should choose kindness instead. Whichever path you take is fair game, since the story leaves you to decide what is best.
Pro Great music that compliments the story well
Beyond: Two Souls' soundtrack fits well with the game's dramatic and emotional plot. The innocent songs with wind instruments and undertones of sorrow reflect the quiet moments you spend as Jodie during her lonely childhood years. Other, more powerful tracks with blaring cellos and ethereal screaming sounds compliment the action-heavy moments. Sometimes even the silent scenes with only a few notes of music convey the seriousness of what's happening on-screen. The composer Lorne Balfe hit the right tone for any given scene, making the story even more memorable.
Pro Unique two-player couch co-op
The co-op in Beyond: Two Souls is pretty different from the norm. One person plays as Jodie, controlling her for regular story segments, while the second person plays as Aiden for his poltergeist-like powers. You can either work together to get the outcome you both agree on, or the person playing Aiden can cause as much havoc as they want. It can be really funny to have Aiden mess things up by destroying a room or making another character angry by annoying them. Depending on how you and your co-op partner work together -- or don't work together -- you can come up with some interesting scenarios.
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 Some parts of the story drag for too long
The pacing in Beyond: Two Souls is off sometimes, with certain sections taking too long to get going. One part in particular is pretty boring, with time passing way too slowly and not a lot going on. Things pick up after a while, but it's easy to put the game down entirely before you get that far. This happens a little too often in a playthrough, bogging the plot down in an otherwise good story.
Con The romance subplots feel tacked-on
The romance options in the game feel like they don't belong. They also don't feel at all natural, mainly because Jodie doesn't have much chemistry with either of the guys. The romances don't contribute much to the plot, either, since the story progresses more or less the same with only minor differences depending on if you romanced someone or not. At the end of the day, the subplots are awkward and unfulfilling, and could have been left out of the game altogether.
Con The story feels on-rails most of the time
Despite how many decisions you make throughout the game, the story still follows a set formula. Your choices don't really affect the bigger picture, just the finer details of how each chapter plays out. The choices you make at the very end of the game do depend on which options you went with across the game, but it's still not enough. It would have been nice if this were a game where your choices drastically affect the outcome of the plot instead.
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.