When comparing Catherine vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best story driven games on Xbox One?” NieR: Automata is ranked 10th while Catherine is ranked 39th. 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 Challenging puzzles that constantly make you think on the spot
Catherine is uniquely challenging in the way it blends puzzle-platforming with horror elements. Each stage you encounter is a visualization of the main protagonist Vincent's "nightmare": they're a series of connecting blocks that you push and pull in order to reach the very top and escape from the madness. There are all sorts of different blocks, like ice blocks that cause you to slip and fall, bomb blocks that explore after a short time, spike blocks that shoot out traps to kill you if you stand on top of them for too long, and many more.
And the kicker is that you have limited time, since the blocks gradually fall away to an abyss, keeping you scrambling to stay ahead of the puzzles. You have to be quick on your toes in order to figure out a way forward without letting the ground fall from underneath you. This chasing dynamic adds to the nightmarish quality of the stages, giving you an extra push to think strategically in the shortest amount of time possible.
Pro Your choices lead to multiple different endings
Playing as Vincent Brooks, a hopeless thirty-something man who's unhappy with his life, your decisions throughout the game determine how he turns out in the end. The main drama centers around his indecision to marry his steady, by-the-books girlfriend, Katherine, and his affair with the spontaneous and sexy young woman named Catherine. You can choose if Vincent stays with Katherine or Catherine, or if he goes off on his own way and leaves them both behind. The ways each of these endings play out are all unique and vastly different from each other, so it can be pretty fun to do multiple playthroughs in order to see them all.
Pro Horrifying boss designs with symbolism relevant to the story
The boss designs are clever in how accurate they are. Since they're part of Vincent's nightmares that plague him about his guilt over Katherine and Catherine, the symbolism fits right in with this theme. The boss "fights" themselves involve the boss at the very bottom of the stage chasing you and manipulating certain blocks to slow you down.
One of the bosses is a mutated version of Katherine in a wedding dress, another is a disfigured toddler representing Katherine's desire to have kids with Vincent, and others are certain NSFW depictions of body parts. They're over-the-top on purpose, instilling a shocking fear that makes you want to get away from the boss chasing you and reach the end as soon as possible.
Pro Stylized, artful cutscenes, menus, and imagery
The art style in Catherine is really cool in all the ways it pops out at you. The black and pink motifs are a clear running theme, showing up everywhere from the game's logo, to the menus, and the UI. Cutscenes have a neat anime aesthetic that help them stand out more. You can also find the game's ample imagery and symbolism everywhere, both obvious and subtle, such as the male and female signs, and the puns on "counting sheep in your sleep" with the characters who become sheep in Vincent's dreams as well as the bar named the Stray Sheep. The visuals are all creative with a lot of love and care that went into them.
Pro Great cast of characters that deal with real-life struggles
You can get to know a colorful cast of characters aside from Katherine and Catherine. Every day, Vincent hangs out at a bar called the Stray Sheep where he and his friends drink together and commiserate about their uneventful lives. He can also go talk to other patrons of the bar who have their own problems, and possibly motivate them to change, like two different womanizers who had abusive pasts, a journalist who helped drive a celebrity to commit suicide, and a rich man whose parents won't let him marry his lower class lover. They all deal with some pretty mature and serious issues, but if you choose to help them out, there's usually a light at the end of the tunnel.
Pro Entertaining two-player couch co-op
Playing with one other person through Catherine's challenging levels can be pretty funny and entertaining. You naturally have to help each other, since one small mistake can lead to one or both players falling to their deaths. Working together to push certain blocks to make a path upward may or may not always work out, since certain blocks can crumble if you step on them too many times, for example. If someone falls behind, and they're not sure how to get back up, helping them out can get the both of you laughing as you desperately try to figure out a solution together. If you're willing to embrace the tough difficulty and not let it frustrate you, then local co-op can be a blast.
Pro Unique soundtrack with rock songs and remixes of classical music
The game's music is a special blend of sounds that all work well together. Fast-paced, frantic stages have rock music with catchy electronica influences. The more serious stages and story moments have cool modern-day remixes of old classics, like the familiar third movement of "Funeral March", and William Tell's Overtures, "The Storm" and "The Ranz des Vaches". Even if you can't remember the songs by name, hearing their renditions in Catherine will probably jog your memory. These tracks really heighten the energy and the drama as you play.
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 A lot of your choices boil down to binary decisions
In the end, the decisions you make aren't all that robust. Most of the choices you make happen in between stages where a narrator asks you certain questions, like whether you personally think it's okay to cheat in relationships. Your responses are usually just yes or no options, which is pretty black-and-white. These choices affect a morality meter that determines which ending you get, but because of how binary your decisions are, you never really get a sense that the system is accurate or insightful. The meter and the questions themselves are just okay, though your mileage will vary on how you feel about them.
Con Might be too hard for players who don't normally play puzzle games
If you're thinking of getting Catherine as your first puzzle game, then you may want to reconsider. Even on the easiest difficulty setting, the game is really tough and tricky to figure out. The hardest part is that you don't have the luxury of time to observe things and find a way forward: you have to keep making snap decisions, one after the other, for several minutes at a time, otherwise you'll fall to your death. The most difficult optional content is also pretty grueling even for the most seasoned veterans. This is definitely one of those games that you play when you want to push yourself with new challenges.
Con Repetitive sound effects can get annoying
There's one small nitpick that can grow to be incredibly irritating as you play. Every time you move a block and connect it to another one by one of its edges, a female announcer says the word "EDGE" in a robotic way. This would be fine every once in a while, except this happens constantly as you situate blocks so that their edges connect for you to climb on top of them. Playing every single stage forces you to hear the same "EDGE" spam from the announcer over and over again. It's prolific enough to have turned into a running joke within the Catherine community online, but it's still really annoying.
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.