So why I did I watch the anime at all if I never liked the game? I find the belief that you need to be a "fan" of the source material in order to check out and enjoy the adaptation to be a pretty misguided belief. There's a good number of people out there who never read a superhero comic and there are many who are apprehensive about the industry in general but is that going to stop those same people from raving about how much they enjoyed the Sam Raimi Spider-Man and Christopher Nolan Batman movies? No it won't.
To use an anime example, the Gungrave adaptation from the 00s is one my favorite anime of all time and that was based on third person shooters that were just "decent" at best so I'd say it's possible for me to enjoy this adaptation of Nier Automata despite me not liking the game.
Long introductions out of the way, what did I think of this show? I'd say as an adaptation of the Nier Automata game it's really misguided. The best of way of describing the show is that it feels like it was made for people who can't get into video games at all so what the anime creators did was create a 90% faithful adaptation while adding in new scenes that don't develop the two main characters, made changes that don't contribute much, and removed aspects of the game that showed the game's narrative was never that great to begin with.
I'll start with what was already similar, the basic plot of the game is still here and if this was a story and writing I was a fan of I would find this to be okay but watching the anime just reminded me of how much I never liked the game's story to begin with.
2B and 9S are just painfully dull lead characters and it's not because they are androids, it's because their character interactions are just the bare minimum for a character dynamic and most of their interactions revolve around the same thing, 9S gets overly excited and tries to have a fun conversation with 2B and the latter just stoicly dismisses everything 9S throws at her. There are some exceptions like when 2B and 9S discuss what they are going to do together after the war but these are few and far between.
2B doesn't have much going on with her outside of just being stoic and 9S only had two modes, acting casual around the people he works with and getting antagonistic towards "machine life forms".
Maybe if this would be forgiven if there were any backstory reveals or any hints as to why the charactes act the way they do and the anime never shows it much like the game. The characterization of 2B and 9S are in the lore of the Nier Automara game and I thought the anime would incorporate that and it didn't.
For example the reason why 2B acts so stoic in the game and anime is because she is forced to kill 9S and can't bring herself to kill do it which is why she acts dimissive towards 9S. I thought anime being a passive medium might be easier to portray this but they didn't which is such a shame.
Now there are the villains for the season which are Adam and Eve which who are just painfully dull. Most of their interactions consist of Eve wanting to "play" with Adam and the latter being primarily interested in reading books, that what is all consists of. You'd think Adam in the anime and by extension Eve in the game would do some villain things like actively get in the way of the lead characters, do some collateral damage or just do something to make me dislike them or be interesting foils to the leads in some way but they aren't. Eve dies in the anime instead of Adam but the latter goes through the same "character arc" where they both experience loss and then just turn into over the top nilhilists, what was the point of changing who dies if the writing is going to remain the same anyway? Some of the bosses with them are removed and Adam gets beaten with the Hammer of Dawn instead of fighting 2B which makes me question if you can remove key boss fights from the game and mostly have the same story then were the bosses really that important to the story to begin with? This is yet another reason why I am not big on the game.
Then there is the plot which is just super padded. It starts off with 2B and 9S joining up with the resistance, they randomly meet up with Adam and Eve and then a bunch of stuff happens in between that has nothing to with furthering the main characters' goals start happening, they go to an amusement park, they meet up with Pascal do some favors for him and then Adam randomly pops back into the story, the robots go crazy and then Adam does too and barely anything relating to the characters getting closer to their goal was achieved.
Some good things about the anime being faithful to the game is the audio since the english dub actors and the soundtrack both return for the anime and they were the best things about the game and I am glad I get to experience them both without needing to deal with tedious gameplay and beating the game 5 times within the context of the story.
The puppet shows that take place after the end credits are also really fun and enjoyable since they have more personality than the game and anime does, the characters get to more expressive in them.
The main difference is and this is where I get a bit more positive is that there is now a character named Lily and the scenes with her were not in the game and I found thse scenes with her far more interesting than 2B and 9S. Her introduction established both that she spent her whole life being an expendable pawn and that Yorha doesn't treat the earth resistance with much care or respect so in just one scene of the first 10 minutes of the 2nd episode I care about her more than 2B and 9S, and she gets fleshed out more than 2B and 9S ever do throught the game and this part of the anime. She is also a connected to a backstory reveal with A2 that the game never fully shown which already puts the anime slightly above the game, only slightly.
Which starts to make me wonder why not make the whole anime be told from Lily's perspective instead and the audience views 2B and 9S' actions through her. Halo Legends did this with the "Babysitter" short and it could've worked just as well here. Either do this or incorporate the characterization in the lore of the game into the anime.
Overall, I wanted to like this show over the game and in a backhanded way, the fact that the anime is mostly faithful to the game makes it much easier to revisit the story again instead of me beating the game 5 times and doing 30 hours of dull combat and awkward minigames. At the same time, I wanted this series to be more than a mostly faithful adaptation, I wanted it to make me geniunely like a story I never liked that much but it ultimately failed in that regard.
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