I am like you. I do not watch anime. I do not like JRPGs. I am always very skeptical of over-enthusiastic anime fans whose tastes simply do not align with mine. I never thought the game would actually be good. I took no interest in it at all. Whenever people talked about it like one of the best games of the generation I judged them silently and assumed they had bad taste.
I tried it in September because I was looking for something different, it was only $20, and people I trusted had urged me to play it for some time. I decided to just try it to see what happened. I fully expected to hate it and have my biases confirmed that it was a bad game for people with juvenile taste.
I was deeply, profoundly, overwhelmingly wrong. I came away from Nier: Automata not only believing it is one of the best and most important games of the generation, but a textbook example of teachable game design and one of the most groundbreaking texts of the last decade. It is a very rare, very special, very intelligent piece of art that far exceeds its own promises.
I hesitate to say all this because I do not want to risk overhyping the experience. You may still not like it. But I was a very hard sell and someone who actively wanted to dislike the game and look at how I turned out. I believe you should play it.
It is crucially, crucially important you play routes A through E in their entirety to understand the full effect of the text and the entire scope of the game. The structure of the experience is very nontypical but you must complete this much to actually beat the game.
I think, even if you hate it, it is better to play it and hate it than to never try. The game is not perfect. There are elements of it I still find distasteful (2B needs tights very badly). But flaws and all it is ambitious, intelligent, and complex work.
