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REVIEW: Nier: Automata: Long Story Short

....Long Story Short is not an "official localization of the novel". It's a companion piece. It's intentionally written entirely from the perspective of 2B, who has never been a particularly reliable narrator, and its content is largely intended to reflect her state of mind. It's not supposed to recapture the original game's plot or emotional content, its only purpose is to provide 2B's very limited perspective of events.

This review is thus made very bizarre because it reviews the book for something it's not and was never supposed to be, and is therefore as unreliable as the book's narration itself.

Thanks for this; I was gonna' buy this anyway (because the NieR series is my jam), but good to know this is meant more as supplementary material and not-so-much a replacement for Automata's story (though I do readily agree with the reveiwer that the translation choices strike me as odd, especially for "This Cannot Continue").

....Long Story Short is not an "official localization of the novel". It's a companion piece. It's intentionally written entirely from the perspective of 2B, who has never been a particularly reliable narrator, and its content is largely intended to reflect her state of mind. It's not supposed to recapture the original game's plot or emotional content, its only purpose is to provide 2B's very limited perspective of events.

This review is thus made very bizarre because it reviews the book for something it's not and was never supposed to be, and is therefore as unreliable as the book's narration itself.

Except this isn't true at all, though. There are several asides that are written from the perspectives of the Pods, Adam/Eve, and A2, and the entire back half of the book covers 9S' perspective, plus the content of endings B-E, most of which spoiler[ 2B isn't even around for, on account of being dead]. In fact, the book is less ambiguous concerning perspective and plot than the game is - because of some of the character-specific narration that we do get, a couple of late game twists are made explicit and obvious very early on in the novel.

Unless there are key passages or entire chapters that I somehow missed out on, this really is just a run through of the events of the main plot of the game, with occasional scenes tossed in that technically offer different perspectives, though they don't tell the reader anything they couldn't have already inferred from playing the game.

Still, this is the first time I have ever seen it described as an official localization. Everywhere I know describes it as a companion piece that shouldn't be bothered with unless you've already played the game, not an attempt to recreate the game experience in novel form.

I particularly enjoyed the parts that focused on Adam, Eve, and A2, which are presented in separate segments at the ends of the "main" chapters and are generally better written to boot. These "companion piece" elements are really the only reason to read this book.

Oh well guess I'm gonna have to finally finish it.
Also on a partially related note, to anyone who got all the game endings:
spoiler[is it ever explained why devola and popola would sometimes randomly appear in cutscenes as some sort of ghost? The first time it happened I thought I was crazy, thank sony for always recording your gameplay. Cause of that I was able to replay the scene and prove to myself that I wasn't playing Neir for so long that I was hallucinating things. I don't wanna know the answer if its eventually explained but I know this is Yoko game and not everthing might be explained]

spoiler[is it ever explained why devola and popola would sometimes randomly appear in cutscenes as some sort of ghost? The first time it happened I thought I was crazy, thank sony for always recording your gameplay. Cause of that I was able to replay the scene and prove to myself that I wasn't playing Neir for so long that I was hallucinating things. I don't wanna know the answer if its eventually explained but I know this is Yoko game and not everthing might be explained]

Yoko Taro uses video games as medium to tells his story. Its not something you can just put it in books, anime or movie to get same effect as playing the games. His games are not like most AAA western games that trying to be Hollywood movies.