When comparing Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collectiom vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?” NieR: Automata is ranked 43rd while Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collectiom is ranked 141st. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Online and local versus modes are available
There are a handful of games in the collection that allow you to play against others both online and locally. You can join a friend for a match through a local connection or online, or you can go online for matchmaking against someone else. This is a really neat feature that's a lot like playing against someone else in an actual coin arcade.
Pro Old school 2D arcade fighting gameplay
The gameplay here is perfect for fans of the old school arcade Street Fighter games, or for new players who missed their chance to try them out before. You play in a 2D view, focused on getting in as many quick combos as you can, leading to cool-looking finishers that do tons of damage. While you can memorize combos and finishers by getting the muscle memory down, learning blocks and jumps is a matter of having great reflexes and predicting when your opponent's about to start landing combos on you. While the fighting looks simplistic because of the older graphics, there's a lot of nuance for you to master.
Pro Options to change the display mode in a few cool ways
There are a couple of display options that you can play around with. One lets you view the game as if you're playing on an old CRT television from the 1980s, and another has a certain frame around the perimeter of your screen to make it look like you're playing on an arcade machine. These are both nice options that aim right at nostalgia, especially for veteran players of the series.
Pro Great collection of twelve classic titles in one package
You get a lot for your money with the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. The bundle includes twelve ports of the arcade games, dating back to the original Street Fighter from 1987. For the Street Fighter II titles, you get The World Warrior, Champion Edition, Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Super, and Super Turbo. There are also the Street Fighter Alpha games, including Alpha, Alpha 2, and Alpha 3. And finally, there are the Street Fighter III games: New Generation, 2nd Impact, and 3rd Strike. If you love the arcade games in the series, you're sure to find your favorites.
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 Boring UI
The game's UI is not the most creative or pleasing to look at. It's just a standard dark background with the occasional character art, along with each game with its specific logo font on the selection screen. Even though the background art is a nice touch, there could have been some details or additions here and there to make things more unique.
Con Some online connection issues
There are a few issues when playing matches online. Depending on how poor your opponent's connection is, you may have to deal with lag. If their connection is decent, then you won't have to worry about it. It's pretty much hit-or-miss on whether your matches will be stable or not, since it's completely out of your control.
Con Phoned-in remasters of the soundtracks
A number of the songs here are pretty uninspired. They're supposedly updated versions of the original arcade soundtracks, but they honestly could have been left alone. They sound generic and dull, and not at all like the iconic tracks from the original games that would get players pumped up as they played. The overall package of the 30th Anniversary Collection would have been better served if they had kept the soundtrack as they were.
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.