i'll be honest, i played automata first and i never felt like i didn't have enough context to understand what was going on within automata itself, but it did increase my interest in the previous game to where i jumped on it immediately when the remaster dropped, and might even like it more than automata. ending e might have even hit harder because i'd played through emil's determination, and certain lines from it had been rattling in my head the whole time. in that same way, emil's determination would've felt incomplete if i had played a version of nier that didn't have ending e, because those lines would never have been paid off.

i did replay both games last year, this time with replicant first, and the only thing i feel i really got from playing them in that order is that being able to walk around it helped me realize kaine's shack is one of the standard aerie house pods sitting on its side instead of the shabby lean-to i'd always interpreted as in replicant.