Ok, it took about four or five hours of gameplay, but I eventually ran into a moment of absolutely terrible game design in NieR Automata.

Throughout the game there are a ton of items to collect.  Like, an actual ton.  A ton of mostly garbage.  Dented metal, rusty screws, broken springs… that’s not a joke, you literally walk around the place picking up junk like an android janitor.

There is nothing that 2B doesn’t feel like not picking up and keeping.

So when we were traversing a castle in the woods and opened a chest, that whole dialogue of “machine lifeform yada yada” started, and 2B was like, “nah bro, I don’t want this, let’s leave it here.”

I was playing it on twitch and instantly said that there was going to be a quest later that would allow us to pick up the items.  This annoyed me to no end however, because this was a not so subtle way for the developers to increase the length of the game.

Sure enough, after we cleared the castle and some new quests opened up – BOOM – quest to collect those machine parts.

Even if we didn’t know what they were for, based off the fact that we were picking up anything and everything no matter what up until that point, it was stupendously out of character for us to decide to leave an item behind.

Booooooooooooo.