Nier: Automata has all the making of a great game, but is held back by pretentious narrative framing and needlessly muddled storytelling. It grapples with interesting and layered themes of militarization, robotic castes, the influence of religion in a dystopia, and digital consciousness—unfortunately, these take a back seat to the game’s insistence on tackling the overly-done question of where humanness and roboticism meld and overlap. And it doesn’t resonate as deeply as the writer-director obviously thinks. There’s a great game somewhere in Nier: Automata; it’s beautiful in many ways, with stellar music and a melancholic tone, and overall creates a world that’s difficult to forget. If only it had a story more focused and emotionally resonant to tie it all together.