During his recuperation, 9S discovers a glitch in YoRHa's servers when syncing himself and 2B, and learns humanity was extinct long before the alien invasion. This script took the most work of all his games to date, and while the story only experienced minor changes through development, it was delivered nearly five months late. The Switch version was named as one of the best third-party ports to the system, despite reviewers noting some expected performance issues and downgraded graphics. Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu gave Nier: Automata a near-perfect score, lauding most aspects of it including the themes and gameplay. The team worked on additional stage productions including an all-male spin-off, a musical version, and a revised version of the original.

The team also included the option for player to sacrifice their save data to aid other random players in the closing credit sequence, a mechanic similar to that of the original Nier.

Although Yoko was initially uneasy about the collaboration, he became confident in PlatinumGames due to their excitement to work on a Nier game, and their promise to remain faithful to the original game. According to Saito, a lot of time and effort went into creating the story and character interactions so they would match those of Nier. NieR公式PRアカウント - 1:06 AM - February 20, 2017 [NieR Official PR Account - 1:06 AM - February 20, 2017].

Negishi noted the lower concentration of enemies in the world compared to those of earlier PlatinumGame titles, a necessity due to the game's open nature. The game's visuals were generally praised [8] [89] [92] [98] despite comments regarding occasional poor environment quality or visual spectacle. Nier: Automata is set during a proxy war between alien-created Machines and human-crafted androids, focusing on the actions of combat android 2B, scanner android 9S, and rogue prototype A2.

Mollie Patterson, writing for Electronic Gaming Monthly, praised it as a highly enjoyable experience, both as a player and reviewer. A recurring element in Yoko's earlier work is his examination of reasons people kill and the impact of killing on others—this stems from his observation of people coming to enjoy killing enemies in games, which suggested to him something is wrong or missing inside them. Okabe created a score with a more-open world in mind, composing songs that segue into each other depending on situation and environment.