Rambling about Nier: Automata
So I kept hearing about the game Nier:Automata being full of robot tropes I'm really into, but it also looked kind of ridiculous and sounded like not my sort of combat, so I finally decided to just watch it on Youtube.
As I watched I went back and forth between "THIS IS RIDICULOUS" and "AAAHH ROBOT FEELS", ending up mostly consumed by the latter and sniffling. It really is ridiculous in parts, but also good for what it is. Namely: philosophical meditations on the nature of the self, explored via hot robots shooting things.
I'll avoid spoilers to start with and give some general information and links, then mark when my spoilery thoughts begin.
Here's the trailer.
Note that the backstory plot involves a (ridiculous magical) pandemic, for anyone not up for that right now.
So! Nier: Automata is a Japanese scifi RPG. It's designed to make sense as a stand alone game, but continues the story told in the Drakengard games and then Nier:Gestalt. All of these games were directed by Yoko Taro.
The starting premise of Nier: Automata is that in around 5000CE, aliens invaded the Earth with robots called 'machine lifeforms'. The humans escaped to the Moon, and have been trying to take back the Earth with an army of androids for thousands of years since. The story of the game follows some of these androids as they fight the machines and have a bunch of Feelings about war, the nature of self, etc. It runs very much on rule of cool over realism, which sometimes worked for me and sometimes had me thinking "THIS IS SOME ANIME BULLSHIT". But in the end, it won me over.
It has multiple endings, telling an increasingly emotionally intense story.
The protagonists are 2B and 9S. 2B is a coldly practical but secretly sweet female combat android who dresses like a sexy goth lolita dominatrix and gets a lot of upskirt shots. 9S is a cheerfully curious male support android who mostly just wants to follow 2B's orders, dresses like a goth schoolboy, and gets a lot of scenes where he is very prettily in pain. They both wear heads-up-display goggles that happen to look exactly like black blindfolds. If you think this sounds like an excuse for femdom het smarm with robots you'd be right! Consider the game cover, which has 2B holding an unconscious 9S in a pieta pose.
There's also some background overtly shippy m/f and f/f robots, and some very homoerotic male robots. And a LOT of fanservice.
It's quite pretty aesthetically, with overgrown ruined cities and cool robot explosions etc, though some of the environmental worldbuilding didn't work for me.
From what I've heard the combat is really well done if you like fast paced dodging-and-shooting bullet hell, and the easy mode is pretty easy once you get past the prologue (which is very long and has no save points) It looked EXCRUCIATING to me, but I hate dodging.
If you're interested in playing the game totally unspoiled, go do so and stop reading now!
Go! Go!
*** mild spoilers for game structure ***
Ok, so! If you want to watch the plot without playing, you'll need to understand the ending structure.
Route 'A' route is the first playthrough. You play as 2B.
Route 'B' is the second playthrough, and is basically the same game, plus a few extra scenes, but playing as 9S.
Route 'C' follows on from ending B and is basically a whole second sequel game.
Routes 'D' and 'E' are repeats of route 'C' except for some choices at the end, but the game lets you just jump to the decision part instead of replaying.
The best summary video I found after a brief search is All Cutscenes / Full Movie (All Characters) ALL ENDINGS. This video definitely cuts some stuff I've seen elsewhere, but captures the main arc of the game. The first part is mostly Route 'A', with the extra scenes from Route 'B' interleaved, and using the B ending. Then the video goes through route C, and then jumps to Route E. I looked up the very short scene that happens in Ending D and mention it below.
So yeah, if you want to get the gist of the plot, just watch the video. But I took a more circuitous path...
I started with this Let's Play, which has someone playing for the first time giving commentary as she goes through the whole game, including all the running around and combat. Since she's played Nier: Gestalt, she also discusses how the two fit together. It's good, and gave a strong sense of what it's like to actually play the game, but very long.
When I got bored of how long this was taking, and also curious about the Nier: Gestalt stuff, I looked up plot summaries for Nier: Gestalt and Nier: Automata and watched Lore summary - From Drakengard to Nier: Automata. Then I watched this collection of the cutscenes from Route A. Which was enjoyable at the time but kind of a mistake in retrospect, because I cannot find any videos that go on from there with JUST the new scenes from Route B.
So I found the ALL ENDINGS video I linked above and started watching from the start of Route C, then when I got paranoid I was missing important things by not having seen any of Route B went back and watched from the start, skipping through any extended sequences where I was pretty sure there'd be nothing new. I'm sure I missed some stuff but did gain a lot from the rewatch, even though it's mostly the same: both new scenes, and just seeing things again with more context. And I guess that's closer to the intended experience.
As I start this post, I'm partway through watching route C.
Ok! And now for my spoilery thoughts. I'm not going to fully summarise the game but will try and get across the basic gist for anyone who doesn't feel like reading the wikipedia summary (but does feel like reading all of this haha)
Also I had to edit this like a billion times for stuff I'd misunderstood, and am sure I still got some stuff wrong. It gets confusing!
**** MAJOR SPOILERS *****
So! Just a reminder to remember the difference between androids (look human, made by humans, fight machines) and machines (look like simple metal robots, made by aliens, fight androids)
Nier Automata starts with 2B talking about wanting to kill God, shortly before everyone else in her squadron is killed and she is assigned 9S as support. The YorHa organisation sending these androids to fight had some pretty blatant Toxic War Machine vibes: androids being told not to have emotions, hate machines, and shout 'glory to humanity' etc. So I was expecting "Maybe us machines and androids aren't so different after all" and "the humans we worship as distant gods are a lie/evil" from the start, especially when we saw machines acting peaceful or afraid.
And then a bunch of weird little machines had an orgy (the Let's Player's "WAIT ARE THOSE ROBOTS OVER THERE HAVING SEX???" echoed mine) shouting THIS CANNOT CONTINUE and created a womb from which fell an androgynous white haired man who just stood there at level one until 2B hit him, at which point he started gaining levels and fighting back. And then when 2B killed him another identical man grew from his...chest....ah! That's why they're called Adam and Eve!! I just got it!
Anyway. At first I thought they were humans, created with no memories, and was wondering if perhaps the machines were actually the ones working for/descended from humanity. Or if both machines and androids were created by humans, but went to war for some reason, and then YorHa made up the aliens as an excuse for the war.
But then the Let's Player said "I wonder if it will turn out that the machines are actually the humans, like in Nier: Gestalt" and I went "wait what" and fell down the "learning about Drakengard and Nier: Gestalt" wormhole for a while.
The Drakengard and Nier: Gestalt plots are some heavy anime bullshit, all hot girls in anachronistic goth lolita dresses killing medieval soldiers and making blood pacts with dragons that then land in modern Tokyo and cause a plague with magic particles spread by a nuclear bomb. But the bittersweet violent tragedy sounds very effective, and there's some cool ideas. Like a 'plague' whose victims tend to either die quickly or become mindlessly violent, where it turns out what's actually happening is that when you catch it, you're faced with a god who gives you the choice to either die, or become a mindless tool for the destruction of humanity.
And I...still don't entirely get what happened in Nier: Gestalt. But from what I can tell: it's set in a post apocalyptic village, about a man fighting monstrous 'shades'. And then it turns out he's not really human: there was a plague, and most humans died, and the survivors uploaded their souls to 'replicant' robot hosts. Except the souls didn't stick, and the replicants developed their own personalities and culture. The shades are all that remains of biological humans. The game ends with the replicants knowing they only have a limited time left, and then humanity will be gone. The androids in Nier: Automata are the descendants of the ones created to oversee the replicants and protect humanity, except humanity is dead.
So yeah. The "the bad guys are the real humans" twist has already been done! The machines really WERE created by aliens to take over the Earth. But like the replicants, they developed their own personalities and culture divergent from their intended purpose.
The big twists of Routes A and B are (a) the machines killed the aliens some time after the invasion started, but are still following their 'take over the earth and become more efficient' programming (b) humans had already died out before the alien invasion, but the androids in charge decided it would be better to pretend they still existed to give the other androids something to fight for.
We later find out that the machines are mostly part of a Machine Network. We meet Adam and Eve again, and they're definitely machines and definitely not friendly, but they find humans fascinating in a "I want to dissect them" way. I think Adam and Eve were control programs that were either created by the aliens, or grew organically in the network shortly after it's creation, but since they use 'us' to refer to both themselves as individuals and the machines as a whole, it's not clear. (Also they call each other Brother and are super homoerotic with each other and 9S) EDIT: Or maybe they were actually created in that moment with the robot womb??
Afaict machines in the network have individual consciousness, but can be overridden by higher processes like Adam and Eve, and it's not clear to me how much of the weird machine behaviour we see mimicking humans is what the individual robots want to do, what higher process like Adam and Eve want them to explore, and what a more diffuse group machine consciousness wants. They've supposedly been getting smarter over time, but there's some weird inconsistencies: 2B is surprised to encounter robots that show much sign of intelligence or any interest beyond killing androids. Yet we see many examples of machines who've been behaving in similar ways going back hundreds of years. I guess YorHa propaganda does encourages ignoring these signs as 'meaningless behaviour'.
Machines can also choose to disconnect from the network, this means they can no longer back themselves up but gives more scope for individuality or totally different priorities. My fave is the pacifist robot Pascal, who formed a peaceful village for robots who don't want to fight the androids. The village has a cute mutually respectful relationship with The Resistance, a group of androids separate to YorHa who live permanently on Earth and afaict are androids who were on Earth during the initial invasion, or their descendants.
One of the cool things in the game is the way it uses the main characters being androids: 'saving' means backing up their memories to the space station Bunker that YorHa is based in, and 'loading' means being re-uploaded into a new body. The prologue/demo ends with 2B and 9S self destructing to defeat an impossible foe, and 2B meeting 9S again only to discover he doesn't remember anything past their initial meeting. And the game litters the landscape with the burned out bodies from players who died in those places, letting the current player either loot the body or restore it as a temporary, mindless ally.
There's also these cute little support drones called "pod"s, which follow along doing stuff like shooting enemies, displaying messages, and offering 'logical' advice. Despite YorHa being fucked up, the individual people you meet from it clearly mean well and care about each other, including the pods.
Ending A and B involve 2B and 9S defeating Adam and Eve after a lot of hurt/comfort and tragic quasi-death and growing mutual affection and devotion. It's sweet.
The video I linked shows 9S's Ending B monologue. The ending A monologue by 2B is "What is it that separates machines from androids like us? The machine has gained emotion...Consciousness. The final screams they summon on the edge of death...They still echo within me."
AND THEN.
AT THE START OF ROUTE C.
THEY KILL 2B.
I knew this was coming and it is effectively tragic but ahhhhhhh :(
She and everyone else in YorHa but 9S is infected with a 'logic virus' which makes them controlled by the cheerfully murderous machine network. 2B encounters an uninfected rogue ex-Yorha android, A2, and asks A2 to kill her before the virus takes hold. 9S sees the killing from a distance and becomes consumed with rage towards A2.
And then A2 becomes the protagonist. 2B's last order to her pod was to support A2, but being an ex-YorHa loner who's spent years brooding and murdering machines after some currently unspecified Trauma, A2 is Not A Fan of this YorHa-rulebook-spouting little robot and keeps telling him to shut up and go away. He cheerfully takes this in stride. I miss 2B but A2's bitter violent loner shtick is enjoyable too.
I'd say "I hope 9S will be ok" but I know he won't :(
And now to poke at why parts of this game don't work for me!
I think my problem is the robots feel too human, the 'weirdly and imperfectly copying humans as they try to figure out how to be people' thing is great but not surreal/alien enough. They should be using parts of human cultures but to work towards their own new thing, like bowerbirds, not just straightforwardly copying us with varying levels of success. Especially the machines, who were created with literal alien motivations. Like, we see alien bodies, and they look like round heads with dots for eyes and weird muppet mouths on tentacle bodies(*), but while the machines mostly have weird dot eyed round heads none of them have tentacles so far. GIVE ME ROBOT TENTACLES, YOKO TARO.
(*)Spherical heads with circular eyes and either no mouth or a huge unsettling grin seems to be a Yoko Taro trademark, and is how he hides his appearance in interviews.
And the homogenous 'human culture' they're riffing on is very bland. Them SEEING human culture as uniform makes sense, but I'd like some reminders that they're wrong beyond the odd samurai sword.
I believed Horizon Zero Dawn's combination of tropey ridiculous robots and cultures created in the ruins of human society way more. And it was still ridiculous! Just a level of ridiculous I could roll with.
And I just cannot reconcile 2B's outfit. Like YorHa are this no-nonsense robot military. They give everyone numbers instead of names, their architectural aesthetic is stark modernist practicality, and 2B in particular is especially unsentimental. SO WHY DOES SHE DRESS LIKE A SEXY GOTH LOLITA DOMINATRIX?? It's a glorious outfit, but it constantly erodes my suspension of disbelief.
Yoko Taro apparently explained it with "it's what I think is sexy", which...is honest, I guess. And I would be fine with the whole jacket + no pants + knee high boots combo, since it fits the whole 'copying human behaviours but missing something' thing. But gartered stockings, high heels, and FEATHERED CUFFS is TOO MUCH.
9S's outfit almost works for me, it has more of a practical-if-fancy military uniform vibe, but for it to be plausible I'd need the Bunker's environmental design to have a similar vibe. If the robots are all into goth lolita that should show up consistently! Give me a goth lolita space station! Goth lolita mecha!
Compare, say, the women's uniform from the original Star Trek. It's both influenced by 19th century naval uniforms and sexily feminine, while still believably scifi and practical, and fits the overall aesthetic of Starfleet.
On the other hand, 9S and 2B's personalities and interpersonal dynamic are A+.
I don't understand the logic for YorHa's 'no emotions' rule: they are literally creating the personalities of these androids (or at least tweaking them, if it's more of an art than a science) and while they pretend to be working for humans are actually just creating these rules to keep the androids happy. So why make androids with feelings, then tell them those feelings are bad? I guess it does turn out YorHa is actually designed as a training dummy for the machines to fight, but I don't see how them being emotionally repressed helps that especially. On the other hand, 'eternal war in worship of creators who don't exist any more' makes perfect sense to me as something human created androids would think was a good idea.
I wonder if this would all feel more or less plausible if I'd played Nier: Gestalt.
OK BACK TO THE GAME AHHHHHHHH OH GOD IT FEELS PRETTY REAL RIGHT NOW
I knew Pascal and his village of pacifist machines would all die but ahhhhh
Some of the villagers start just...eating the others D: Similar machines showed up to try to kill the Resistance, is this the Machine Network trying to destroy all sites of android/machine friendship? And now Pascal is defending the child machines from a huge army of machines by controlling one of the huge Goliath death machines shouting "I'll kill you!" and after a game of him being gentle voiced and sweet it's very unsettling.
...and now he's fighting another Goliath called Engels, which is a bit on the nose.
I was expecting Pascal to die easily, but him being so good at killing is worse. And he said before that the reason he became a pacifist was he realised he was starting to not care about all his friends dying.
On the plus side it's cute how A2 tells her pod she hates all machines, and is initially super mistrustful of Pascal, but eventually feels for him and helps him defend the children.
THE CHILDREN COMMITTED SUICIDE WHILE A2 AND PASCAL WERE BUSY FIGHTING THE OTHER MACHINES
Pascal: This is my fault. I taught them everything I knew...I taught them what fear is. I just wanted to keep them safe.
He asks A2 to erase his memories or kill him. The player can walk away, in which case Pascal starts to beg D:
And then you shoot his memories of the children in a minigame and hear them be destroyed one by one???
We see text conversations between A2 and 9S's pods, where they share data on how their charges are doing and agree 9S's mental state needs to be watched carefully.
9S POV nnng. He is polite but distant with the Resistance who repaired him.
9S: Where is A2?
Pod: The unit known as A2's position and status is currently unknown. Would the unit known as 9S please state his intentions?
9S: I'm going to kill every last machine, and then kill A2.
Pascal: Hello :)
Me: TIME TO PLAY SOME FINAL FANTASY.
Pascal, standing in an empty village: Isn't this a nice quiet place? Full of junk, though. Would you like some?
9S: Pascal... :(
And then a shop screen comes up and Pascal CHEERFULLY SELLS 9S THE BODY PARTS AND CORES OF HIS FRIENDS AND THE CHILDREN, WHICH HE SEES AS JUNK.
I AM BEING PERSONALLY ATTACKED BY THIS GAME
And then 9S just sighs and leaves.
The machines have made a strange structure in the forest, one of many sending supplies to a huge tower growing in the distance. There is writing over the door in an ancient tongue, saying "Meatbox". A strange glowing ball cries "help me" in a metallic tone, and 9S melts it to slag.
...I have read the summary of this game like twice and still...have no idea what that was about...
The only people 9S really spoke to during missions were 2B, his pod, and his operator, the person back on the space station who gave information and orders etc.
9S is still polite and soft voiced when talking to his pod, but his voice lacks any joy, and whenever she tries to get him to take care of himself he just asks for the next target.
2B is dead.
And then his operator shows up, infected by the machine virus and trying to kill him. He's rescued...by A2 showing up and messily stabbing the operator to death. He does not cope with this well :(
AaaaaAAAaaaaaaaah I don't think I can get across the specific kind of robot feelings I am having right now
but they are very bittersweet and intense!
A2 and 9S make their way separately up the giant tower the machines have been building, the POV switching back and forth between them as they fight separate ongoing battles.
The tower was built by intelligences in the Machine Network who take the form of girls in red. They taunt A2 with how they killed all others of her kind. A2 was one of the first prototype YorHa models, and watched all the others of her model killed by the machines during a test run.
As 9S and 2A reach the top, the two machines they're fighting fuse into one, and they have to work as a team to bring it down.
And then 9S draws his sword, and points it at A2.
She tells him they have to bring down the tower, that it's a canon to destroy the remaining human data on the moon.
9S: So what? None of it matters. Humanity is extinct. YorHa was created to perpetuate the lie, and we were DESIGNED to be killed. You killed 2B. That's all we need to kill each other.
9S knew (I guess since hacking into the Bunker at the end of Ending B?) that 2B's role was to kill him if he ever learned too much during his work as a scanner/analyst. According to A2, 2B had done this before, and it broke her heart every time :( I guess that's why she was always telling him not to be incautiously curious, but accepted with resigned affection that he wouldn't change.
And then the player chooses whether to fight as A2, or 9S :(
Ending C (as A2):
She basically knocks him out and hacks into his brain to remove the virus that's corrupting him, then sacrifices herself to bring down the tower. Her final thought is that the world is beautiful.
Ending D/E (as 9S):
While they fight:
9S: If it doesn't matter, why do I long for humans like this? Why do I desire the touch of something that no longer exists?
2A: Androids were designed to-
9S: SHUT UP!!
And then they stab each other and die beside each other in a pool of blood.
9S wakes in a warm light. He thinks back on his life, born as a soldier, alone. 2B tried to keep her distance, not wanting to get attached to someone she had to kill again and again. But to him, she was like finally having a family.
The red girls that control the machine network, having watched all this, have changed their mind. They're not going to destroy the human data. They're going to send the data of the machine intelligences, including Adam and Eve, into space, in the hopes of one day landing somewhere and finding a home.
Adam invites 9S to join them and he realises he doesn't hate the machines any more. He has no reason to. Maybe he never did. His words become fainter and fainter on the screen, and the player offered two choices:
Ending D:
He chooses "I'll stay". In his final moment 9S looks up to the sky and says: "So that's where you were...2B" before shutting down.
Ending E:
He chooses "I'll go with you". His words fade to nothing.
We see 9S and 2A's lifeless bloody bodies become hidden by the steam of a rising rocket. We see Pascal, the Resistance etc watch it go up into the sky.
The credits play. I sniffle.
Pod: All YorHa unit black boxes now confirmed offline. Our mission to oversee Project YorHa is complete. Commencing final stage of project. Commencing deletion of all data.
Uh?
The credits start glitching.
9S's Pod: Data noise present in stream. Requesting temporary halt to perform data check.
And then the player gets to choose whether or not to allow the data check. Not sure what happens if you say No, but if you say Yes...
2B/A2's pod: Unit A2, 2B, and 9S's data appears to be leaking out.
9S's Pod: Follow project rules and delete all personal data.
2B/A2's pod: Request denied.
9S's Pod: Failure to parse statement.
2B/A2's pod: I find I cannot accept this conclusion.
9S's Pod: The destruction of all YorHa units is an essential component of the project plan.
2B/A2's pod: Request denied. Commencing data salvage.
2B/A2's pod: You hoped they would survive as well, didn't you?
9S's Pod: ...
The video doesn't show this, but as I understand it, there's then an impossibly difficult hacking game inside the credits. Players can only complete it by accepting an offer of help, which is given by another player's saved character. The creation of such a helpful saved character deletes the save data of the original player.
We see the pods carrying android body parts and discussing philosophy. We see the unfinished bodies of 9S and 2B, lying next to each other on a ruined skyscraper. In a nearby ivy covered window lies A2, alone except for a dove.
9S's Pod: Did you recover all of their memories?
2B/A2's pod: Yes.
9S's Pod: Then won't things end the same way as before?
2B/A2's pod: The future isn't given to you. It's something you have to take for yourself.
THE END
YES, FINE, YOU GOT ME GAME. I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS.
There's a bunch of joke endings but I think I'll stop there.
I'm poking the wiki for things I missed and...9S is three and a half years old. He's also 160cm tall, which is shorter than me. Baby :(
2B is around the same age but a bit taller (and they're both significantly skinnier than me but still heavier haha). Also: "The win pose in which her pod tells her that she's being watched from below is a reference to the What Are You Doing? achievement in Nier: Automata where the player has to look up her skirt ten times to obtain said achievement." SIGH.
There's a few interesting details in the Red Girl entry I didn't mention/notice, but it's not a long entry, so. Read it yourself if you're interested! Turns out they were behind a LOT of things that happened, and influenced both the machines and androids, which does make "The Red Girls Just Decided To Make It That Way" a convenient if lazy explanation for various plot holes.
I didn't mention the twins Devola and Popola, they had an affectingly tragic story. Back when humanity was trying to overcome the virus that eventually wiped them out, the Devola and Popola models were made en masse to work as pairs looking after the human-soul-in-robot-body replicants. A specific pair of them made choices that led to the replicants failing, and show up in Nier: Gestalt.
And then in Nier: Automata we meet a different Devola and Popola who did their job fine. But because models like them helped wipe out humanity, all the other androids resented every Devola and Popola. We see their frustration at being blamed when they see themselves as separate individuals. And then, I guess as part of project YorHa, all android memories of the death of humanity are wiped, so noone hates them any more. But android command decides to give them a permanent sense of guilt over having done something wrong, even though they can't remember it, and in the end they sacrifice themselves to help 9S in penance.
HUH OK. So YorHa is only a few years old?? There's a note players can encounter about the 'Pearl Harbor Descent' where 2A and her fellow prototypes were sent into battle as a test, and not expected to survive. When 2A did survive, command decided it expedient to have her killed, so declared her a traitor and ordered everyone else to kill her :(
Starting things with an attack on Pearl Harbour is sure a Choice for a Japanese game, especially one that seems to be set in the US and is about two sides of a war learning to understand each other...
One thing I really like about the game is it avoids a problem in many other video games which humanise the bad guys: it doesn't ever forget that some of the people you befriend look exactly like some of the people you kill, and makes this deliberately unsettling instead of expecting the player to be able to switch on and off their empathy. It plays with the line between friend and enemy without pretending the division can ever be clean.
There's a disturbing sequence where 9S kills a room of 2B models controlled by the machine network, and after he kills the last one he touches her face, and moves her dead hand to touch his face, before ripping her arm off to replace his own lost arm. He has her arm attached for the rest of the game.
The fanservice and (as above) sexy violence against women didn't bother me as much as you might expect, asides from the THIS COSTUME MAKES NO SENSE. But while I did like the mild playing with gender roles, complex female characters, and background queerness, it's overall a moderately heteronormative and male-gazey game, just made by a competent male writer who likes women well enough and thinks it's hot when they're angsty and scary. As someone who also thinks it's hot when female characters are angsty and scary, I enjoy this kind of thing, but as a former fan of Joss Whedon and Stephen Moffat have learned to be cynical.
I'm skimming this timeline and still don't understand the plot of Nier: Gestalt. Maybe I'll watch it on Youtube at some point, I've heard some people think it has worse combat than Automata but a better plot and characters.
Anyway, more stuff I have figured out: About 15 years before the game, machines and androids both begin to stagnate, the former due to lack of goals and constant victory, the latter due to lack of goals and constant loss.
The androids created YorHa, creating stronger androids and also wiping everyone's memory about humans being dead. This way they could follow their core programming to Protect Humans, and might not lose so often.
The machines secretly took over YorHa, and became less violent. This kept the androids around and helped them become a more powerful enemy, thus fulfilling the machines' core programming to Kill The Enemy and giving them a challenge to encourage them to keep evolving, but made sure the enemy would never actually win.
Here's some key dates!
3361: The events of Nier: Gestalt. Humanity is doomed to die out.
4198: The last human dies. Androids, created to serve humans, have now lost their purpose.
4519: A group of androids who have no loyalty to humans form an independent colony in Australia. Aw. Maybe they're still there!
5012: Aliens attack via the machines.
7645: The machines have conquered 80% of the Earth, but just...stop. Attempts to drive them back fail.
11,300: The aliens are killed by the machines.
11,930ish: The beginnings of YorHa, as I described above.
11,940ish: YorHa begins in earnest. A2 is created.
11,942: 9S is created.
11,945: The events of Nier Automata.
11,946: "The machine lifeform peace faction, led by Pascal, formally sign an armistice with the Army of Humanity." AWWW.
These are some RIDICULOUS dates but I've rolled with sillier things. Knowing YorHa as a whole was designed by the machines as a temporary training exercise with a life span of 4 years before they killed everyone... D: And I guess the pods were always in on it???
I really like the way that like...both machines and androids spend so much of themselves on this pointless war, and are unable to escape the rules coded into them by their dead creators. But even while they remain killing machines, complicit in atrocity and unable to escape or break the system, they still find beauty, connection, and meaning, even if only for moments here and there.
Because that's what humans are: doomed to fight and die, unable to escape the rules coded into us by the arbitrary evolutionary history that led to our creation. But we still find beauty in the spaces between.
EDIT: Currently reading through I just got Ending E which has links to a bunch of official extra content including what happens next.
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/791325.html. There are
comments.
As I watched I went back and forth between "THIS IS RIDICULOUS" and "AAAHH ROBOT FEELS", ending up mostly consumed by the latter and sniffling. It really is ridiculous in parts, but also good for what it is. Namely: philosophical meditations on the nature of the self, explored via hot robots shooting things.
I'll avoid spoilers to start with and give some general information and links, then mark when my spoilery thoughts begin.
Here's the trailer.
Note that the backstory plot involves a (ridiculous magical) pandemic, for anyone not up for that right now.
So! Nier: Automata is a Japanese scifi RPG. It's designed to make sense as a stand alone game, but continues the story told in the Drakengard games and then Nier:Gestalt. All of these games were directed by Yoko Taro.
The starting premise of Nier: Automata is that in around 5000CE, aliens invaded the Earth with robots called 'machine lifeforms'. The humans escaped to the Moon, and have been trying to take back the Earth with an army of androids for thousands of years since. The story of the game follows some of these androids as they fight the machines and have a bunch of Feelings about war, the nature of self, etc. It runs very much on rule of cool over realism, which sometimes worked for me and sometimes had me thinking "THIS IS SOME ANIME BULLSHIT". But in the end, it won me over.
It has multiple endings, telling an increasingly emotionally intense story.
The protagonists are 2B and 9S. 2B is a coldly practical but secretly sweet female combat android who dresses like a sexy goth lolita dominatrix and gets a lot of upskirt shots. 9S is a cheerfully curious male support android who mostly just wants to follow 2B's orders, dresses like a goth schoolboy, and gets a lot of scenes where he is very prettily in pain. They both wear heads-up-display goggles that happen to look exactly like black blindfolds. If you think this sounds like an excuse for femdom het smarm with robots you'd be right! Consider the game cover, which has 2B holding an unconscious 9S in a pieta pose.
There's also some background overtly shippy m/f and f/f robots, and some very homoerotic male robots. And a LOT of fanservice.
It's quite pretty aesthetically, with overgrown ruined cities and cool robot explosions etc, though some of the environmental worldbuilding didn't work for me.
From what I've heard the combat is really well done if you like fast paced dodging-and-shooting bullet hell, and the easy mode is pretty easy once you get past the prologue (which is very long and has no save points) It looked EXCRUCIATING to me, but I hate dodging.
If you're interested in playing the game totally unspoiled, go do so and stop reading now!
Go! Go!
*** mild spoilers for game structure ***
Ok, so! If you want to watch the plot without playing, you'll need to understand the ending structure.
Route 'A' route is the first playthrough. You play as 2B.
Route 'B' is the second playthrough, and is basically the same game, plus a few extra scenes, but playing as 9S.
Route 'C' follows on from ending B and is basically a whole second sequel game.
Routes 'D' and 'E' are repeats of route 'C' except for some choices at the end, but the game lets you just jump to the decision part instead of replaying.
The best summary video I found after a brief search is All Cutscenes / Full Movie (All Characters) ALL ENDINGS. This video definitely cuts some stuff I've seen elsewhere, but captures the main arc of the game. The first part is mostly Route 'A', with the extra scenes from Route 'B' interleaved, and using the B ending. Then the video goes through route C, and then jumps to Route E. I looked up the very short scene that happens in Ending D and mention it below.
So yeah, if you want to get the gist of the plot, just watch the video. But I took a more circuitous path...
I started with this Let's Play, which has someone playing for the first time giving commentary as she goes through the whole game, including all the running around and combat. Since she's played Nier: Gestalt, she also discusses how the two fit together. It's good, and gave a strong sense of what it's like to actually play the game, but very long.
When I got bored of how long this was taking, and also curious about the Nier: Gestalt stuff, I looked up plot summaries for Nier: Gestalt and Nier: Automata and watched Lore summary - From Drakengard to Nier: Automata. Then I watched this collection of the cutscenes from Route A. Which was enjoyable at the time but kind of a mistake in retrospect, because I cannot find any videos that go on from there with JUST the new scenes from Route B.
So I found the ALL ENDINGS video I linked above and started watching from the start of Route C, then when I got paranoid I was missing important things by not having seen any of Route B went back and watched from the start, skipping through any extended sequences where I was pretty sure there'd be nothing new. I'm sure I missed some stuff but did gain a lot from the rewatch, even though it's mostly the same: both new scenes, and just seeing things again with more context. And I guess that's closer to the intended experience.
As I start this post, I'm partway through watching route C.
Ok! And now for my spoilery thoughts. I'm not going to fully summarise the game but will try and get across the basic gist for anyone who doesn't feel like reading the wikipedia summary (but does feel like reading all of this haha)
Also I had to edit this like a billion times for stuff I'd misunderstood, and am sure I still got some stuff wrong. It gets confusing!
**** MAJOR SPOILERS *****
So! Just a reminder to remember the difference between androids (look human, made by humans, fight machines) and machines (look like simple metal robots, made by aliens, fight androids)
Nier Automata starts with 2B talking about wanting to kill God, shortly before everyone else in her squadron is killed and she is assigned 9S as support. The YorHa organisation sending these androids to fight had some pretty blatant Toxic War Machine vibes: androids being told not to have emotions, hate machines, and shout 'glory to humanity' etc. So I was expecting "Maybe us machines and androids aren't so different after all" and "the humans we worship as distant gods are a lie/evil" from the start, especially when we saw machines acting peaceful or afraid.
And then a bunch of weird little machines had an orgy (the Let's Player's "WAIT ARE THOSE ROBOTS OVER THERE HAVING SEX???" echoed mine) shouting THIS CANNOT CONTINUE and created a womb from which fell an androgynous white haired man who just stood there at level one until 2B hit him, at which point he started gaining levels and fighting back. And then when 2B killed him another identical man grew from his...chest....ah! That's why they're called Adam and Eve!! I just got it!
Anyway. At first I thought they were humans, created with no memories, and was wondering if perhaps the machines were actually the ones working for/descended from humanity. Or if both machines and androids were created by humans, but went to war for some reason, and then YorHa made up the aliens as an excuse for the war.
But then the Let's Player said "I wonder if it will turn out that the machines are actually the humans, like in Nier: Gestalt" and I went "wait what" and fell down the "learning about Drakengard and Nier: Gestalt" wormhole for a while.
The Drakengard and Nier: Gestalt plots are some heavy anime bullshit, all hot girls in anachronistic goth lolita dresses killing medieval soldiers and making blood pacts with dragons that then land in modern Tokyo and cause a plague with magic particles spread by a nuclear bomb. But the bittersweet violent tragedy sounds very effective, and there's some cool ideas. Like a 'plague' whose victims tend to either die quickly or become mindlessly violent, where it turns out what's actually happening is that when you catch it, you're faced with a god who gives you the choice to either die, or become a mindless tool for the destruction of humanity.
And I...still don't entirely get what happened in Nier: Gestalt. But from what I can tell: it's set in a post apocalyptic village, about a man fighting monstrous 'shades'. And then it turns out he's not really human: there was a plague, and most humans died, and the survivors uploaded their souls to 'replicant' robot hosts. Except the souls didn't stick, and the replicants developed their own personalities and culture. The shades are all that remains of biological humans. The game ends with the replicants knowing they only have a limited time left, and then humanity will be gone. The androids in Nier: Automata are the descendants of the ones created to oversee the replicants and protect humanity, except humanity is dead.
So yeah. The "the bad guys are the real humans" twist has already been done! The machines really WERE created by aliens to take over the Earth. But like the replicants, they developed their own personalities and culture divergent from their intended purpose.
The big twists of Routes A and B are (a) the machines killed the aliens some time after the invasion started, but are still following their 'take over the earth and become more efficient' programming (b) humans had already died out before the alien invasion, but the androids in charge decided it would be better to pretend they still existed to give the other androids something to fight for.
We later find out that the machines are mostly part of a Machine Network. We meet Adam and Eve again, and they're definitely machines and definitely not friendly, but they find humans fascinating in a "I want to dissect them" way. I think Adam and Eve were control programs that were either created by the aliens, or grew organically in the network shortly after it's creation, but since they use 'us' to refer to both themselves as individuals and the machines as a whole, it's not clear. (Also they call each other Brother and are super homoerotic with each other and 9S) EDIT: Or maybe they were actually created in that moment with the robot womb??
Afaict machines in the network have individual consciousness, but can be overridden by higher processes like Adam and Eve, and it's not clear to me how much of the weird machine behaviour we see mimicking humans is what the individual robots want to do, what higher process like Adam and Eve want them to explore, and what a more diffuse group machine consciousness wants. They've supposedly been getting smarter over time, but there's some weird inconsistencies: 2B is surprised to encounter robots that show much sign of intelligence or any interest beyond killing androids. Yet we see many examples of machines who've been behaving in similar ways going back hundreds of years. I guess YorHa propaganda does encourages ignoring these signs as 'meaningless behaviour'.
Machines can also choose to disconnect from the network, this means they can no longer back themselves up but gives more scope for individuality or totally different priorities. My fave is the pacifist robot Pascal, who formed a peaceful village for robots who don't want to fight the androids. The village has a cute mutually respectful relationship with The Resistance, a group of androids separate to YorHa who live permanently on Earth and afaict are androids who were on Earth during the initial invasion, or their descendants.
One of the cool things in the game is the way it uses the main characters being androids: 'saving' means backing up their memories to the space station Bunker that YorHa is based in, and 'loading' means being re-uploaded into a new body. The prologue/demo ends with 2B and 9S self destructing to defeat an impossible foe, and 2B meeting 9S again only to discover he doesn't remember anything past their initial meeting. And the game litters the landscape with the burned out bodies from players who died in those places, letting the current player either loot the body or restore it as a temporary, mindless ally.
There's also these cute little support drones called "pod"s, which follow along doing stuff like shooting enemies, displaying messages, and offering 'logical' advice. Despite YorHa being fucked up, the individual people you meet from it clearly mean well and care about each other, including the pods.
Ending A and B involve 2B and 9S defeating Adam and Eve after a lot of hurt/comfort and tragic quasi-death and growing mutual affection and devotion. It's sweet.
The video I linked shows 9S's Ending B monologue. The ending A monologue by 2B is "What is it that separates machines from androids like us? The machine has gained emotion...Consciousness. The final screams they summon on the edge of death...They still echo within me."
AND THEN.
AT THE START OF ROUTE C.
THEY KILL 2B.
I knew this was coming and it is effectively tragic but ahhhhhhh :(
She and everyone else in YorHa but 9S is infected with a 'logic virus' which makes them controlled by the cheerfully murderous machine network. 2B encounters an uninfected rogue ex-Yorha android, A2, and asks A2 to kill her before the virus takes hold. 9S sees the killing from a distance and becomes consumed with rage towards A2.
And then A2 becomes the protagonist. 2B's last order to her pod was to support A2, but being an ex-YorHa loner who's spent years brooding and murdering machines after some currently unspecified Trauma, A2 is Not A Fan of this YorHa-rulebook-spouting little robot and keeps telling him to shut up and go away. He cheerfully takes this in stride. I miss 2B but A2's bitter violent loner shtick is enjoyable too.
I'd say "I hope 9S will be ok" but I know he won't :(
And now to poke at why parts of this game don't work for me!
I think my problem is the robots feel too human, the 'weirdly and imperfectly copying humans as they try to figure out how to be people' thing is great but not surreal/alien enough. They should be using parts of human cultures but to work towards their own new thing, like bowerbirds, not just straightforwardly copying us with varying levels of success. Especially the machines, who were created with literal alien motivations. Like, we see alien bodies, and they look like round heads with dots for eyes and weird muppet mouths on tentacle bodies(*), but while the machines mostly have weird dot eyed round heads none of them have tentacles so far. GIVE ME ROBOT TENTACLES, YOKO TARO.
(*)Spherical heads with circular eyes and either no mouth or a huge unsettling grin seems to be a Yoko Taro trademark, and is how he hides his appearance in interviews.
And the homogenous 'human culture' they're riffing on is very bland. Them SEEING human culture as uniform makes sense, but I'd like some reminders that they're wrong beyond the odd samurai sword.
I believed Horizon Zero Dawn's combination of tropey ridiculous robots and cultures created in the ruins of human society way more. And it was still ridiculous! Just a level of ridiculous I could roll with.
And I just cannot reconcile 2B's outfit. Like YorHa are this no-nonsense robot military. They give everyone numbers instead of names, their architectural aesthetic is stark modernist practicality, and 2B in particular is especially unsentimental. SO WHY DOES SHE DRESS LIKE A SEXY GOTH LOLITA DOMINATRIX?? It's a glorious outfit, but it constantly erodes my suspension of disbelief.
Yoko Taro apparently explained it with "it's what I think is sexy", which...is honest, I guess. And I would be fine with the whole jacket + no pants + knee high boots combo, since it fits the whole 'copying human behaviours but missing something' thing. But gartered stockings, high heels, and FEATHERED CUFFS is TOO MUCH.
9S's outfit almost works for me, it has more of a practical-if-fancy military uniform vibe, but for it to be plausible I'd need the Bunker's environmental design to have a similar vibe. If the robots are all into goth lolita that should show up consistently! Give me a goth lolita space station! Goth lolita mecha!
Compare, say, the women's uniform from the original Star Trek. It's both influenced by 19th century naval uniforms and sexily feminine, while still believably scifi and practical, and fits the overall aesthetic of Starfleet.
On the other hand, 9S and 2B's personalities and interpersonal dynamic are A+.
I don't understand the logic for YorHa's 'no emotions' rule: they are literally creating the personalities of these androids (or at least tweaking them, if it's more of an art than a science) and while they pretend to be working for humans are actually just creating these rules to keep the androids happy. So why make androids with feelings, then tell them those feelings are bad? I guess it does turn out YorHa is actually designed as a training dummy for the machines to fight, but I don't see how them being emotionally repressed helps that especially. On the other hand, 'eternal war in worship of creators who don't exist any more' makes perfect sense to me as something human created androids would think was a good idea.
I wonder if this would all feel more or less plausible if I'd played Nier: Gestalt.
OK BACK TO THE GAME AHHHHHHHH OH GOD IT FEELS PRETTY REAL RIGHT NOW
I knew Pascal and his village of pacifist machines would all die but ahhhhh
Some of the villagers start just...eating the others D: Similar machines showed up to try to kill the Resistance, is this the Machine Network trying to destroy all sites of android/machine friendship? And now Pascal is defending the child machines from a huge army of machines by controlling one of the huge Goliath death machines shouting "I'll kill you!" and after a game of him being gentle voiced and sweet it's very unsettling.
...and now he's fighting another Goliath called Engels, which is a bit on the nose.
I was expecting Pascal to die easily, but him being so good at killing is worse. And he said before that the reason he became a pacifist was he realised he was starting to not care about all his friends dying.
On the plus side it's cute how A2 tells her pod she hates all machines, and is initially super mistrustful of Pascal, but eventually feels for him and helps him defend the children.
THE CHILDREN COMMITTED SUICIDE WHILE A2 AND PASCAL WERE BUSY FIGHTING THE OTHER MACHINES
Pascal: This is my fault. I taught them everything I knew...I taught them what fear is. I just wanted to keep them safe.
He asks A2 to erase his memories or kill him. The player can walk away, in which case Pascal starts to beg D:
And then you shoot his memories of the children in a minigame and hear them be destroyed one by one???
We see text conversations between A2 and 9S's pods, where they share data on how their charges are doing and agree 9S's mental state needs to be watched carefully.
9S POV nnng. He is polite but distant with the Resistance who repaired him.
9S: Where is A2?
Pod: The unit known as A2's position and status is currently unknown. Would the unit known as 9S please state his intentions?
9S: I'm going to kill every last machine, and then kill A2.
Pascal: Hello :)
Me: TIME TO PLAY SOME FINAL FANTASY.
Pascal, standing in an empty village: Isn't this a nice quiet place? Full of junk, though. Would you like some?
9S: Pascal... :(
And then a shop screen comes up and Pascal CHEERFULLY SELLS 9S THE BODY PARTS AND CORES OF HIS FRIENDS AND THE CHILDREN, WHICH HE SEES AS JUNK.
I AM BEING PERSONALLY ATTACKED BY THIS GAME
And then 9S just sighs and leaves.
The machines have made a strange structure in the forest, one of many sending supplies to a huge tower growing in the distance. There is writing over the door in an ancient tongue, saying "Meatbox". A strange glowing ball cries "help me" in a metallic tone, and 9S melts it to slag.
...I have read the summary of this game like twice and still...have no idea what that was about...
The only people 9S really spoke to during missions were 2B, his pod, and his operator, the person back on the space station who gave information and orders etc.
9S is still polite and soft voiced when talking to his pod, but his voice lacks any joy, and whenever she tries to get him to take care of himself he just asks for the next target.
2B is dead.
And then his operator shows up, infected by the machine virus and trying to kill him. He's rescued...by A2 showing up and messily stabbing the operator to death. He does not cope with this well :(
AaaaaAAAaaaaaaaah I don't think I can get across the specific kind of robot feelings I am having right now
but they are very bittersweet and intense!
A2 and 9S make their way separately up the giant tower the machines have been building, the POV switching back and forth between them as they fight separate ongoing battles.
The tower was built by intelligences in the Machine Network who take the form of girls in red. They taunt A2 with how they killed all others of her kind. A2 was one of the first prototype YorHa models, and watched all the others of her model killed by the machines during a test run.
As 9S and 2A reach the top, the two machines they're fighting fuse into one, and they have to work as a team to bring it down.
And then 9S draws his sword, and points it at A2.
She tells him they have to bring down the tower, that it's a canon to destroy the remaining human data on the moon.
9S: So what? None of it matters. Humanity is extinct. YorHa was created to perpetuate the lie, and we were DESIGNED to be killed. You killed 2B. That's all we need to kill each other.
9S knew (I guess since hacking into the Bunker at the end of Ending B?) that 2B's role was to kill him if he ever learned too much during his work as a scanner/analyst. According to A2, 2B had done this before, and it broke her heart every time :( I guess that's why she was always telling him not to be incautiously curious, but accepted with resigned affection that he wouldn't change.
And then the player chooses whether to fight as A2, or 9S :(
Ending C (as A2):
She basically knocks him out and hacks into his brain to remove the virus that's corrupting him, then sacrifices herself to bring down the tower. Her final thought is that the world is beautiful.
Ending D/E (as 9S):
While they fight:
9S: If it doesn't matter, why do I long for humans like this? Why do I desire the touch of something that no longer exists?
2A: Androids were designed to-
9S: SHUT UP!!
And then they stab each other and die beside each other in a pool of blood.
9S wakes in a warm light. He thinks back on his life, born as a soldier, alone. 2B tried to keep her distance, not wanting to get attached to someone she had to kill again and again. But to him, she was like finally having a family.
The red girls that control the machine network, having watched all this, have changed their mind. They're not going to destroy the human data. They're going to send the data of the machine intelligences, including Adam and Eve, into space, in the hopes of one day landing somewhere and finding a home.
Adam invites 9S to join them and he realises he doesn't hate the machines any more. He has no reason to. Maybe he never did. His words become fainter and fainter on the screen, and the player offered two choices:
Ending D:
He chooses "I'll stay". In his final moment 9S looks up to the sky and says: "So that's where you were...2B" before shutting down.
Ending E:
He chooses "I'll go with you". His words fade to nothing.
We see 9S and 2A's lifeless bloody bodies become hidden by the steam of a rising rocket. We see Pascal, the Resistance etc watch it go up into the sky.
The credits play. I sniffle.
Pod: All YorHa unit black boxes now confirmed offline. Our mission to oversee Project YorHa is complete. Commencing final stage of project. Commencing deletion of all data.
Uh?
The credits start glitching.
9S's Pod: Data noise present in stream. Requesting temporary halt to perform data check.
And then the player gets to choose whether or not to allow the data check. Not sure what happens if you say No, but if you say Yes...
2B/A2's pod: Unit A2, 2B, and 9S's data appears to be leaking out.
9S's Pod: Follow project rules and delete all personal data.
2B/A2's pod: Request denied.
9S's Pod: Failure to parse statement.
2B/A2's pod: I find I cannot accept this conclusion.
9S's Pod: The destruction of all YorHa units is an essential component of the project plan.
2B/A2's pod: Request denied. Commencing data salvage.
2B/A2's pod: You hoped they would survive as well, didn't you?
9S's Pod: ...
The video doesn't show this, but as I understand it, there's then an impossibly difficult hacking game inside the credits. Players can only complete it by accepting an offer of help, which is given by another player's saved character. The creation of such a helpful saved character deletes the save data of the original player.
We see the pods carrying android body parts and discussing philosophy. We see the unfinished bodies of 9S and 2B, lying next to each other on a ruined skyscraper. In a nearby ivy covered window lies A2, alone except for a dove.
9S's Pod: Did you recover all of their memories?
2B/A2's pod: Yes.
9S's Pod: Then won't things end the same way as before?
2B/A2's pod: The future isn't given to you. It's something you have to take for yourself.
THE END
YES, FINE, YOU GOT ME GAME. I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS.
There's a bunch of joke endings but I think I'll stop there.
I'm poking the wiki for things I missed and...9S is three and a half years old. He's also 160cm tall, which is shorter than me. Baby :(
2B is around the same age but a bit taller (and they're both significantly skinnier than me but still heavier haha). Also: "The win pose in which her pod tells her that she's being watched from below is a reference to the What Are You Doing? achievement in Nier: Automata where the player has to look up her skirt ten times to obtain said achievement." SIGH.
There's a few interesting details in the Red Girl entry I didn't mention/notice, but it's not a long entry, so. Read it yourself if you're interested! Turns out they were behind a LOT of things that happened, and influenced both the machines and androids, which does make "The Red Girls Just Decided To Make It That Way" a convenient if lazy explanation for various plot holes.
I didn't mention the twins Devola and Popola, they had an affectingly tragic story. Back when humanity was trying to overcome the virus that eventually wiped them out, the Devola and Popola models were made en masse to work as pairs looking after the human-soul-in-robot-body replicants. A specific pair of them made choices that led to the replicants failing, and show up in Nier: Gestalt.
And then in Nier: Automata we meet a different Devola and Popola who did their job fine. But because models like them helped wipe out humanity, all the other androids resented every Devola and Popola. We see their frustration at being blamed when they see themselves as separate individuals. And then, I guess as part of project YorHa, all android memories of the death of humanity are wiped, so noone hates them any more. But android command decides to give them a permanent sense of guilt over having done something wrong, even though they can't remember it, and in the end they sacrifice themselves to help 9S in penance.
HUH OK. So YorHa is only a few years old?? There's a note players can encounter about the 'Pearl Harbor Descent' where 2A and her fellow prototypes were sent into battle as a test, and not expected to survive. When 2A did survive, command decided it expedient to have her killed, so declared her a traitor and ordered everyone else to kill her :(
Starting things with an attack on Pearl Harbour is sure a Choice for a Japanese game, especially one that seems to be set in the US and is about two sides of a war learning to understand each other...
One thing I really like about the game is it avoids a problem in many other video games which humanise the bad guys: it doesn't ever forget that some of the people you befriend look exactly like some of the people you kill, and makes this deliberately unsettling instead of expecting the player to be able to switch on and off their empathy. It plays with the line between friend and enemy without pretending the division can ever be clean.
There's a disturbing sequence where 9S kills a room of 2B models controlled by the machine network, and after he kills the last one he touches her face, and moves her dead hand to touch his face, before ripping her arm off to replace his own lost arm. He has her arm attached for the rest of the game.
The fanservice and (as above) sexy violence against women didn't bother me as much as you might expect, asides from the THIS COSTUME MAKES NO SENSE. But while I did like the mild playing with gender roles, complex female characters, and background queerness, it's overall a moderately heteronormative and male-gazey game, just made by a competent male writer who likes women well enough and thinks it's hot when they're angsty and scary. As someone who also thinks it's hot when female characters are angsty and scary, I enjoy this kind of thing, but as a former fan of Joss Whedon and Stephen Moffat have learned to be cynical.
I'm skimming this timeline and still don't understand the plot of Nier: Gestalt. Maybe I'll watch it on Youtube at some point, I've heard some people think it has worse combat than Automata but a better plot and characters.
Anyway, more stuff I have figured out: About 15 years before the game, machines and androids both begin to stagnate, the former due to lack of goals and constant victory, the latter due to lack of goals and constant loss.
The androids created YorHa, creating stronger androids and also wiping everyone's memory about humans being dead. This way they could follow their core programming to Protect Humans, and might not lose so often.
The machines secretly took over YorHa, and became less violent. This kept the androids around and helped them become a more powerful enemy, thus fulfilling the machines' core programming to Kill The Enemy and giving them a challenge to encourage them to keep evolving, but made sure the enemy would never actually win.
Here's some key dates!
3361: The events of Nier: Gestalt. Humanity is doomed to die out.
4198: The last human dies. Androids, created to serve humans, have now lost their purpose.
4519: A group of androids who have no loyalty to humans form an independent colony in Australia. Aw. Maybe they're still there!
5012: Aliens attack via the machines.
7645: The machines have conquered 80% of the Earth, but just...stop. Attempts to drive them back fail.
11,300: The aliens are killed by the machines.
11,930ish: The beginnings of YorHa, as I described above.
11,940ish: YorHa begins in earnest. A2 is created.
11,942: 9S is created.
11,945: The events of Nier Automata.
11,946: "The machine lifeform peace faction, led by Pascal, formally sign an armistice with the Army of Humanity." AWWW.
These are some RIDICULOUS dates but I've rolled with sillier things. Knowing YorHa as a whole was designed by the machines as a temporary training exercise with a life span of 4 years before they killed everyone... D: And I guess the pods were always in on it???
I really like the way that like...both machines and androids spend so much of themselves on this pointless war, and are unable to escape the rules coded into them by their dead creators. But even while they remain killing machines, complicit in atrocity and unable to escape or break the system, they still find beauty, connection, and meaning, even if only for moments here and there.
Because that's what humans are: doomed to fight and die, unable to escape the rules coded into us by the arbitrary evolutionary history that led to our creation. But we still find beauty in the spaces between.
EDIT: Currently reading through I just got Ending E which has links to a bunch of official extra content including what happens next.
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/791325.html. There are
comments.