Nier Automata is that kind of game which I´ve played in many other gaming platforms without even realizing it, I mean, I´ve played it on PC, my PC wasn´t that good but still the game was badly optimized at that time, I played it on a PS4, even on a Xbox One Fat, as you see, I´ve played this game several times in my life, in many gaming consoles, but I´ve never enjoyed it as much as I wanted: The PC port was horrible, the PS4 port was fine but I just could play it from time to time since the console wasn´t mine, and in the Xbox One, my controller had drift and I was in kind of a hurry to complete it, you could say I was speedrunning it lol.
When the Switch port was oficially announced I have to say I was pretty excited, finally I could play the game with no pressure at all, taking my time and with no drift issues. My only concern was the performance, I don´t consider Nier Automata to be a miracle running on the system as crazy you would call me, it´s a beatufiul looking game but not a portent, still, can´t deny this game had a lot of performance issues in PC and even didn´t run as good as it could on a PS4 or Xbox One, I was crossing my fingers and actually worked, because the Switch port ended being great. Everything said here will be based on my personal experience some playing all of these ports + some investigation so take that into consideration.
The Nier Automata port on Switch runs at 1080p in dock mode and 720p when playing in handheld mode, lowering a little bit the resolution. Now, this fact seemed pretty weird to me, because I played the PS4 version and I noted that the game doesn´t reach 1080p, you can investigate what I´m saying, I think it runs at 900p as much, unless you play the PS4 Pro version which actually runs at 1080p. I think everyone knows that the Xbox One is a great console but not as powerful as the PS4, most of the games runs with a lower resolution comparing it to the PS4, I mean, it´s not as bad as it sounds because the comparissions are slim but those are the facts, the Xbox One runs the game at 800p I think, unless you play it on Xbox One S or Xbox One X of course.
At the end of the day, what is the use of running at 1080o if you don´t have good fps? Well, this Switch port runs at stable 30 fps for most of the times, I had some frame drops but they were punctual, I mean, not something that happened often. For example, I never had issues with the frame until you get to a certain part of the game and you have to fight machines in the open field, I didn´t understand why because in some other parts of the game I had fight with machines in areas with a lot of vegetation, water and stuff and the Switch was like OK, not a single frame drop. Cool thing is, this only happened to me in the begining of the fights, once you have a time fighting, seems like the Switch gets used to it and the frame is stable again.
I mean, I really don´t understand why, there are a lot of fights in the game which include a lot of machines and didn´t give me issues, maybe because it was a more closed area, but don´t get me wrong, these framedrops, as I said, they are punctual, I only counted like two or three times this happened to me, all of the time besides this I mentioned, the game had its stable 30 fps. Now, this is really interesting, the PS4 version runs at 40-50fps, it´s weird, it´s not as stable as someone would think, I mean, the game looks smoothly but the game is always between 40-50fps, more if you are fighting tons of enemies, it reaches 60fps sometimes but it always falls to 50 or 40. In the Switch port it´s different, when fighting, the fps are stable at 30fps.
Not everything is perfect, in order to make this port possible, a lot of things were sacrificed along the way, when investigating a little bit, I noticed even the grass was nerfed compared to other versions, lighting effects were nerfed too obviously, but it´s not that evident. The textures were the thing that got sacrificed the most, the quality of said textures is considerably low, even to someone like me who is not too obsessed with these things, the nerfed textures are pretty noticeable, as I said, there are many sacrifices, but I think the textures is the one who got nerfed the most.
A section of the port which seemed to me like really nerfed as well were the shadows, I mean, the quality of shadows in the game in general look blurry, I´m gonna be honest, when playing a videogame, I think quality shadows are the thing that I less pay attention, still can´t deny there´s a obvious nerf there. When playing the port, these things were the things I noticed with the worst quality, as I said before, there are things like grass or lighting who were nerfed as well, but the worst ones are textures and shadows to me.
What about the air particles? They look actually good, man I though they were going to be nerfed too as the lighting did but it looks actually great, there is no framedrop when there are air particles, which is pretty awesome.
At the end of the day, Nier Automata is a videogame where tons of things are happening at the same time in the screen, I thought the Switch would have a hard time with these areas and no, actually no, the game keeps its stable 30fps, trust me, there a lot of areas where there is an insame amount of enemies and bunch of things happenings at the same time, plus the projectiles which can be a lot, even so the port keeps its stable frames.
When playing this game, I was sure to check how was the Switch doing, I managed to even play 8 hours straight and the console didn´t sweat a little bit, didn´t feel like the fans were doing noise or something, even that, the Switch managed to keep a stable temperature, it doesn´t feel like hot or burning when you touch the console.
Nier Automata on Switch has another way to play the game, intead of playing with a classic or pro controller, you just can play it with the joycons as they were motion controllers, with the right joycon the character uses their sword, spears or hands to hit their enemy by moving the right joycon, using the left joycon is to evade only, but moving the joycon on left or right can determine whenever you want to evade to left or right. It´s actually fun to play this way, there is no delay but I´m not too much of a motion controllers person, I just desactivated the option, but you can do it and feels comfortable enough.
This might sound crazy or that I´m nuts but between all of these ports that I managed to play through my life, I´ve got to admit I enjoyed the Switch port the most, even at the cost of the quality sacrifices. I didn´t care too much about the low quality of the textures or the shadows, didn´t care too much either on the nerfed lighting and so on, let´s take into account that I played the PS4 and Xbox One ports before playing the Switch version. I think this is due to the fact that I enjoyed the game with no pressure at all and actually took my time without a hurry, plus the drift issue in Xbox One was annoying as hell, didn´t suffer from this in the game.
That´s about everything on my experience playing this port, I wanted to make a shorter post but seems like I wrote too much again, hope this post helps you to see the differences in the most accurate way. At the end of the day, being objective, this Switch port is the worst version you can play graphically speaking, it looks and run better on the other platforms, if its about playing on handheld mode you can just buy a Steam Deck, or well, that´s what I´d like to say but not everyone can afford a Steam Deck or a good PC to play this game in the best way possible, The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are way too expensive in Latin America too, my point is, if you only own a Nintendo Switch and that´s the only way to play it, do it then, it´s still a great port, if you really have the chance, play it on other gaming platforms.
All of the screenshots were taken by me while playing the game