8 Fatal Flaws That Stop Nier Automata Being A Masterpiece

8. The Structure Of Side Missions Is Garbage

The quality of RPG side missions has dropped off a cliff in recent years. While they used to provide players with expansive and creative additional stories, recently this secondary content has become more and more limited in its scope, ditching intricate game design in favour of a series of mundane checklist tasks - an uninspired approach that Automata unfortunately takes to another level.

Often boiling down to fetch quests or escort missions (didn't we kill those off back in 2008?), there's little variety to any of the additional content the game has to offer.

And the worst part is that there's loads of it.

When it comes to crafting side quests, Nier definitely takes a quantity over quality approach, and many of the missions themselves are just copied and pasted to the point of exhausting the player.

Sure, you'll get the occasional stand out moment like when you meet a budding robotic martial artist - but even quests like this lose their lustre when you're forced to repeat them over and over again.

The stories that complement these side missions themselves are usually excellent vignettes that provide valuable insight into a fascinating world, but more often than not their repetitive and mundane nature quickly turns each one into just yet another box-ticking exercise.