Further thoughts on Nier Automata
I looked up some interesting extra canon material and watched a bunch of videos (thanks sulla!). These videos go through some of the interesting things the game does with philosophy, storytelling, and the structure of games, the first two have captions/a transcript and are designed to make sense if you haven't played the game. There was a bunch of stuff I hadn't noticed/seen/thought about but I also had some more thoughts of my own. So! Here they are!
I've tried to make this post at least vaguely readable to those who can't be bothered watching the videos or reading my previous post, but you'll be missing some context, and if you know NOTHING about the game should probably at least read the first few paragraphs of my previous post.
Every time I watch a new video I see scenes I never saw before, I think I'm going to have to just sit through all 60ish hours of a full playthrough at some point /o\ Sometimes I think about playing it but I just really hate bullet hell games, and 60 hours of one sounds unbearable, no matter how interesting the things it's doing with gameplay. At least a Let's Play can bang away in the background while I do other things.
So I am very aware that I have not had the real experience, and that some of the "gaps" that bug me might not be an issue in the actual game. This is just my reaction to the game as I have experienced it. This post serves less as a fair critique of the game, and more as a personal exploration of my own feelings and reactions as a writer and player of games.
Anyway.
When I started writing I'd only watched the first three videos because I wanted to get my thoughts down before continuing. I added my thoughts on the last one at the end.
I agree with the basic gist of the videos I've seen. Nier Automata is a really lovely, affecting story about finding meaning and connection in a meaningless, cruel world that traps us all in cycles of life and death. Those videos explain pretty much everything I liked really well.
As I said in the post I linked, one thing I liked that they didn't go into so much is that the machines/androids are explicitly controlled by their programming. Also noone seems to bring up that the Yorha androids turn out to be reprogrammed machines: they are literally the enemy they have been made to hate and kill. I really like how this is no way is meant to imply that the other androids are now The Bad Guy. It's just another bittersweet tragedy and blurring of false dichotomies.
But I hadn't thought about how the rather obvious fact that the theme of everyone being caught in a repeating cycle of life and death is (a) a buddhist thing (b) reflected in the looping narrative where you replay the same fights and scenes from a different POV, with more context and understanding. Also that it would be less boring to play than it sounds, since the characters have different fighting techniques.
You kill faceless and seemingly mindless machines, then find out that they have their own culture and feelings, and then have to keep killing them, and the game recognises that this is fucked up and disturbing. And as one of the video points out, you repeatedly re-fight the same machines, except now you know their feelings, but you still have to kill them again. It goes from triumph over an evil villain to mutual tragedy. And this escalates as 9S goes from sidekick to player-controlled protagonist to the tragic villain you must defeat. I'm sure some other narrative has done a similar arc of shifting POVs, but it worked really well. There's something similar going on with the pods, who often feel like background noise, or part of the game system, then come into focus as characters with their own (not always good) motivations, and we end the game from their POV.
I'm a little sad I'll never get to experience the ending unspoiled (and probably never at all) Fighting an impossible battle against the literal creators of the game, losing again and again and being asked if you want to give up as messages from real other players encourage you to keep going. And then finally being offered help from other players who have sacrificed their save data to help you. That's pretty sweet.
One thing I didn't fully come to terms with until the third video is that the game is intended to work on fairytale/mythic/tropey logic, designed to feel true emotionally not make literal sense. And it's going for a universal exploration of The Nature of Existence via tropes and symbols rather than anything rooted in the specific. It's also really only concerned with the arc of 2B and 9S, and everything is designed around their story. The further something gets from being about 2B and 9S's arcs, the more loosely it's sketched. This becomes more obvious in the post-canon materials, which are largely 9S/2B smarm.
And their story is very powerful.
In this context, I have mostly come to terms with the goth lolita outfits, since they do create some great moments visually and emotionally. I still think 2B's outfit should be more militaristic and practical since militaristic practicality is her whole backstory. And I think the sexiness of the female character's outfits should have been dialled down in general, especially for the Yorha androids who aren't 2B (the player is supposed to fall in love with her) or A2 (her being in shreds of clothing works thematically) I guess you could say it's ~symbolic of them being objectified and dehumanised but ehhh. They do contrast with the more sensible outfits of the Resistance characters, and the existence of drably dressed, no-nonsense female androids like Anenome and Jackass does make up for a lot.
But like...I don't think it's a coincidence that pretty much every person I've seen praise this game has been a guy and/or into women. A lot of women (and men and non binary people) are understandably put off by games with such blatantly fanservicey character designs, not just because they assume it means the game will be sexist, but because it makes the game less fun. Choosing to have the main character constantly reveal her underwear is a choice to exclude that audience, or at least significantly undermine their enjoyment.
And in general the game suffers from the same thing as a lot of "universal" scifi narratives: it's not as universal as it thinks it is, and doesn't challenge it's audience as much as it could.
This is partly a taste/genre thing. I personally prefer stories more rooted in the specific rather than those rooted as this is in idealised signifiers. The line between mythic trope and cliche is subjective.
But some of the choices felt boring and lazy, at least to my tastes, especially the environmental worldbuilding. An Abandoned Building, An Abandoned Factory, Forest Ruins, A City Turned To Desert. In general, if you take out the robots and android bodies they could be from almost any generic post-apocalyptic or even fantasy game. This is an Earth which has been colonised by an army of murderous alien robots for thousands of years, it should feel alienating, not just like our world but run-down. The buildings shouldn't just look bombed out and overgrown, they should have weird alien robot buildings/barricades/confusing experiments etc. There's a few robot constructions but they're all relatively new and related to specific characters, there's no sense of the layered history of this being the fourteenth robot war. And yeah, the machines have only recently started exploring some of this stuff, but...it just felt off.
Like, consider the forest castle royal chamber. This is where the king of a group of robots has been living for hundreds of years, and the robots have a whole army and uniforms etc, yet the chamber is ruins with no decorations and a single plain cradle for the baby king? Like at least have a few shitty metal panels where the robots tried to fix the holes in the walls.
And since the robots clearly didn't build the castle (we see a few robot buildings, and they're either shitty metal panels, wood, or CG-ish), it must have been connected to the nearby old human city. But afaict it might as well be straight from the 12th century, there's no like...gift shop or carpark etc like you have around castles near modern cities.
And I know I'm not supposed to overthink these things but it doesn't feel like fun tropey nonsense it just feels like laziness, like they might as well have used an existing "overgrown ruined castle in a forest" asset from the Unity store. It doesn't say anything or add to the story.
Horizon Zero Dawn did this way better, all these bittersweet contrasts between the ruins of the old human world, the effects of the robot war, and the new life being built by nature and the survivors.
That's a pretty realistic and literal minded game, but like...the worldbuilding of Final Fantasy games is always nonsense and their environments still do a great job of telling stories and feeling somehow coherent. Maybe I'd connect with Nier: Automata's world more if I'd actually played the game though, idk.
I fell asleep not long after writing this section and had an intense dream about visiting my childhood home, which was overgrown and covered in dust but full of all these objects we used to care about but chose to leave behind.
Yorha doesn't make any sense as an established society, but that's fine because it turns out to have been made 4 years ago by Resistance androids (who were being manipulated by the machine network) who see the Yorha androids as soulless and expendable, and intend on killing them after a few years. But again I ask: if this is where the goth lolita androids live, where is my goth lolita space station.
The character designs have a lot more, well, character. They don't all make much literal sense if you think about too hard, but they generally connect to whatever emotional effect the character is supposed to have.
But it feels like...one of the things I think this game is trying to do is have these robots play out tropey/cliched human rituals in ways that are both very human, and disconcertingly off-center, so that the player both connects with the story the robots are living out, and is thrown out of it. A robot mourns it's 'brother', but they were both made in a factory, or from one another via a network, and the way they play out "brotherhood" is off. The mourning is real, and connects to our existing associations with sibling bonds, but is also surreal and disturbing, and also makes us think about whether there is some version of siblinghood that can exist in a meaningful way even in a context without biological connection/childhood etc.
I used to be annoyed that the machines are so obsessed with humans, but it's apparently coded into them so they can mimic and evolve past their enemy which is kinda cool.
Also the nature of self is undermined. You are explicitly playing a re-uploaded version of your previous memories in a new body, and can loot your old body as it lays dead on the ground.
And I like all that! But I feel like by largely using very cliched tropes and stories to explore this, it wasn't as interesting an experience as it could have been.
This especially applies to gender. Like as the third video says, there's a machine referencing Simone de Bouviour who basically turns herself into what she thinks a woman is, which to some extent does play with de Bouviour's ideas of womanhood as construction.
But then from what I've seen the game generally does assume all the characters are straightforwardly cisgendered, in the sense that they just know what binary gender they are from the day they're made, and are Male/Female characters in a straightforward way. Most of them don't seem super invested in gender roles, and there's a moderate variety of personalities amongst the male and female characters, and some same sex relationships. But...why do they all so consistently have such straightforward genders in the first place? Why isn't gender another Human Thing they play with in strange, inconsistent ways? Especially the Yorha androids, who weren't designed by or for humans or human society, and aren't really supposed to care about sex or relationships. I do really like that they canonically don't have genitals unless they decide to get them installed as an accessory but that could all have been pushed way further.
Also...given all the machines named after male philosophers, maybe don't only have one named after a female philosopher and then make her a stereotypical Hysterical Female Villain. Yes, yes, I know, it's an ironic twist on her feminist writings, that doesn't make it not also a sexist cliche. (Being a villain is fine in and of itself)
The B-grade anime silliness I find easier to roll with and understand the point of. As a fan of Homestuck etc I am well aware of the way tonal dissonance and silliness can not only co-exist with good storytelling and deeper ideas, but accentuate them. It's also going to alienate some of the audience but removing it would hurt the game.
My somewhat tsundere "this is silly...oh no I am unironically into it" arc reminded me of playing Hakuoki. And I had a bit of a defensive "If people want a game about the ability of love to transcend violent tragedy why not look to dating sims, instead of making yet another fighting game about how fighting games are bad" reaction while watching the videos. But one of the themes of Nier:Automata is that violence is inescapable and we have to find meaning within a violent world, so I guess it works.
I'm having trouble articulating what my problem is with the "universal" nature of the narrative. It's not like there's anything inherently wrong with telling a metaphorical story using simple tropes.
It feels like they deliberately made the setting not Japan, and included some things that felt American (a yellow school bus) and European (a gothic stone castle). The 'human culture' the androids and machines explore is a vague mish-mash of the mainstream cultures of all of those places.
But I guess...the metaphor the game is exploring is why people hate each other. And the reasons these characters hate each other are the sorts of reasons that make sense to the kind of privileged guy who tends to write 'universal' stories about war and hatred.
It deliberately invokes a lot of references to world war two (Oh hey, like 'The Resistance'!) but as a clash between would-be colonisers versus theocratic nationalists. It has little time for the people in charge, and sympathises with the civilians and soldiers, which is all great. But afaict there's nothing remotely equivalent to the Holocaust. No systemic in-culture prejudice at all, just xenophobic intolerance directed to the other side of the war. And while it clearly thinks colonising, theocracy and nationalism are bad, the ways it explores their flaws aren't especially deep or challenging. No sense that a player would go "Oh, MY society is also bad in these ways...", so it just feels like window dressing. I mean idk if I'd want to see a Japanese guy straight-up explore the Holocaust, but to tell story exploring the dynamics of WWII and not have anything like it at all...ehh...
And I mean...there's nothing inherently bad about just telling a story about how war hurts civilians and soldiers and not also telling a story about social prejudice, especially when the society of the story is entirely made up. But the game explores so many facets of Human Nature via lots of little side stories, yet ignores the universal tendency towards hierarchical prejudice to an extent that feels like the writers just didn't think about it. It plausibly DOES come up at least once in some story I didn't see, but it's clearly not a significant theme. There's the sexist dynamic with John-Paul and Simone, but that's one guy being sexist in an otherwise gender-neutral society, and afaict it's just him finding feminine women hot and being a jerk about it, and not advocating for sexism as a social structure.
The Forest King feels like a largely positive character, even if his Kingdom didn't pan out, and while I'm not sure if Pascal has total control over his village he's still a Great Man Inspiring And Ruling Others type figure played pretty straight. I mean, his people all die, but everyone in this game dies. Even the machine network has a hierarchy of rulers.
And I'm not saying a story has to advocate for egalitarianism to be good. But when you're talking about the Tragedies of Human Nature and Society, then when you ask "Are we doomed to violence/war/misunderstanding/being mistreated by our rulers etc and how do we work around these tendencies?" you also should ask "Are we doomed to having hierarchy and bigotry, and how do we work around these tendencies?"
I wouldn't mind so much if they asked these questions and came up with answers I didn't agree with, or refused to give any answer at all. What annoys me is that the questions didn't seem to occur to the writers at all, or did, but they don't find them interesting. And I do! So it bugs me.
I feel like there's something going on with the Resistance androids having some variety in their colouring but the Yorha ones being pale with white hair and blue eyes, but can't say what. Afaict the Yorha robots in the stage plays all had dark hair but that might just have been because the cast are Japanese and white wigs look silly haha.
Ok I finally got around to watching the fourth video.
I hadn't thought about how Japanese narratives where robots or other 'things" become sentient/human-like connect to shintoism. Although such narratives are pretty popular in culturally Christian countries too.
The video's in-depth praise for the B route actually makes me more annoyed at the game's sexism: In the A route, the female 2B is the player controlled protagonist, and male 9S her plucky sidekick. As described, in the B route 9S gets to become a full character, and the most human-seeming character in the game. From his POV we see what dicks his (all female) bosses/supervisors are, when they seemed fine before, and we realise that while he didn't seem super helpful in battle and is indeed not very strong physically, his hacking ability is actually pretty badass. You see some of the cooler stories and sidequests, filling out the plot and themes. 2B goes from cool protagonist to 9S's sidekick.
And then as the C route starts 2B dies, and 9S becomes the villain, but the game never really digs as deep into the new female protag A2, and then we flip back to 9S as protagonist and A2 as tragic antagonist.
That's, like...classic Nebbishy Dude Looks Up To Hot Badass Woman But Ultimately Becomes the Cool Protagonist, but with more tragedy than usual. "Side characters are people too" is all well and good, but illustrating this via the closest thing the game has to a human dude player self insert is hardly the most interesting or challenging way to do it.
EDIT: I'm not sure how much of this is the actual game and how much that youtuber projecting his own sexist attitudes onto it.
Still figuring out how my earlier criticism works when the game apparently draws deeply on the communist manifesto. Robots as the underclass who gain an awareness through conflict is certainly a Thing, and the inevitable cycles of violence do match Marxist ideas of history as inevitable large scale shifts. Plus finding meaning in life through work. I guess Yoko Taro is ALLOWED to read communist and feminist classics and use them as inspiration for an enjoyable but not especially socialist or feminist story. Maybe I just feel defensive because I've never read them myself >.>
I suppose ultimately my issue is that the game explores human nature based on some common assumptions about how human nature works that I don't like.
As the video maker points out, the conflict between individual happiness versus social good has a specific meaning in a modern Japanese context. Robots obsessively working at their goal, failing, and then self destructing as a repeated theme is...something. And the game has a repeated theme that it's ok to fail, and change direction, and need help. The message is: Just keep going, even though life is awful, and you'll find some meaning, even if it's just playing video games. Even if, as with Undertale, I have mixed feelings about this as someone who physically can't play the game. I'm also pondering how it fits within a game relying on experience grinding.
But it seems like as good a message to end this post on as any :)
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/793630.html. There are
comments.
I've tried to make this post at least vaguely readable to those who can't be bothered watching the videos or reading my previous post, but you'll be missing some context, and if you know NOTHING about the game should probably at least read the first few paragraphs of my previous post.
Every time I watch a new video I see scenes I never saw before, I think I'm going to have to just sit through all 60ish hours of a full playthrough at some point /o\ Sometimes I think about playing it but I just really hate bullet hell games, and 60 hours of one sounds unbearable, no matter how interesting the things it's doing with gameplay. At least a Let's Play can bang away in the background while I do other things.
So I am very aware that I have not had the real experience, and that some of the "gaps" that bug me might not be an issue in the actual game. This is just my reaction to the game as I have experienced it. This post serves less as a fair critique of the game, and more as a personal exploration of my own feelings and reactions as a writer and player of games.
Anyway.
When I started writing I'd only watched the first three videos because I wanted to get my thoughts down before continuing. I added my thoughts on the last one at the end.
I agree with the basic gist of the videos I've seen. Nier Automata is a really lovely, affecting story about finding meaning and connection in a meaningless, cruel world that traps us all in cycles of life and death. Those videos explain pretty much everything I liked really well.
As I said in the post I linked, one thing I liked that they didn't go into so much is that the machines/androids are explicitly controlled by their programming. Also noone seems to bring up that the Yorha androids turn out to be reprogrammed machines: they are literally the enemy they have been made to hate and kill. I really like how this is no way is meant to imply that the other androids are now The Bad Guy. It's just another bittersweet tragedy and blurring of false dichotomies.
But I hadn't thought about how the rather obvious fact that the theme of everyone being caught in a repeating cycle of life and death is (a) a buddhist thing (b) reflected in the looping narrative where you replay the same fights and scenes from a different POV, with more context and understanding. Also that it would be less boring to play than it sounds, since the characters have different fighting techniques.
You kill faceless and seemingly mindless machines, then find out that they have their own culture and feelings, and then have to keep killing them, and the game recognises that this is fucked up and disturbing. And as one of the video points out, you repeatedly re-fight the same machines, except now you know their feelings, but you still have to kill them again. It goes from triumph over an evil villain to mutual tragedy. And this escalates as 9S goes from sidekick to player-controlled protagonist to the tragic villain you must defeat. I'm sure some other narrative has done a similar arc of shifting POVs, but it worked really well. There's something similar going on with the pods, who often feel like background noise, or part of the game system, then come into focus as characters with their own (not always good) motivations, and we end the game from their POV.
I'm a little sad I'll never get to experience the ending unspoiled (and probably never at all) Fighting an impossible battle against the literal creators of the game, losing again and again and being asked if you want to give up as messages from real other players encourage you to keep going. And then finally being offered help from other players who have sacrificed their save data to help you. That's pretty sweet.
One thing I didn't fully come to terms with until the third video is that the game is intended to work on fairytale/mythic/tropey logic, designed to feel true emotionally not make literal sense. And it's going for a universal exploration of The Nature of Existence via tropes and symbols rather than anything rooted in the specific. It's also really only concerned with the arc of 2B and 9S, and everything is designed around their story. The further something gets from being about 2B and 9S's arcs, the more loosely it's sketched. This becomes more obvious in the post-canon materials, which are largely 9S/2B smarm.
And their story is very powerful.
In this context, I have mostly come to terms with the goth lolita outfits, since they do create some great moments visually and emotionally. I still think 2B's outfit should be more militaristic and practical since militaristic practicality is her whole backstory. And I think the sexiness of the female character's outfits should have been dialled down in general, especially for the Yorha androids who aren't 2B (the player is supposed to fall in love with her) or A2 (her being in shreds of clothing works thematically) I guess you could say it's ~symbolic of them being objectified and dehumanised but ehhh. They do contrast with the more sensible outfits of the Resistance characters, and the existence of drably dressed, no-nonsense female androids like Anenome and Jackass does make up for a lot.
But like...I don't think it's a coincidence that pretty much every person I've seen praise this game has been a guy and/or into women. A lot of women (and men and non binary people) are understandably put off by games with such blatantly fanservicey character designs, not just because they assume it means the game will be sexist, but because it makes the game less fun. Choosing to have the main character constantly reveal her underwear is a choice to exclude that audience, or at least significantly undermine their enjoyment.
And in general the game suffers from the same thing as a lot of "universal" scifi narratives: it's not as universal as it thinks it is, and doesn't challenge it's audience as much as it could.
This is partly a taste/genre thing. I personally prefer stories more rooted in the specific rather than those rooted as this is in idealised signifiers. The line between mythic trope and cliche is subjective.
But some of the choices felt boring and lazy, at least to my tastes, especially the environmental worldbuilding. An Abandoned Building, An Abandoned Factory, Forest Ruins, A City Turned To Desert. In general, if you take out the robots and android bodies they could be from almost any generic post-apocalyptic or even fantasy game. This is an Earth which has been colonised by an army of murderous alien robots for thousands of years, it should feel alienating, not just like our world but run-down. The buildings shouldn't just look bombed out and overgrown, they should have weird alien robot buildings/barricades/confusing experiments etc. There's a few robot constructions but they're all relatively new and related to specific characters, there's no sense of the layered history of this being the fourteenth robot war. And yeah, the machines have only recently started exploring some of this stuff, but...it just felt off.
Like, consider the forest castle royal chamber. This is where the king of a group of robots has been living for hundreds of years, and the robots have a whole army and uniforms etc, yet the chamber is ruins with no decorations and a single plain cradle for the baby king? Like at least have a few shitty metal panels where the robots tried to fix the holes in the walls.
And since the robots clearly didn't build the castle (we see a few robot buildings, and they're either shitty metal panels, wood, or CG-ish), it must have been connected to the nearby old human city. But afaict it might as well be straight from the 12th century, there's no like...gift shop or carpark etc like you have around castles near modern cities.
And I know I'm not supposed to overthink these things but it doesn't feel like fun tropey nonsense it just feels like laziness, like they might as well have used an existing "overgrown ruined castle in a forest" asset from the Unity store. It doesn't say anything or add to the story.
Horizon Zero Dawn did this way better, all these bittersweet contrasts between the ruins of the old human world, the effects of the robot war, and the new life being built by nature and the survivors.
That's a pretty realistic and literal minded game, but like...the worldbuilding of Final Fantasy games is always nonsense and their environments still do a great job of telling stories and feeling somehow coherent. Maybe I'd connect with Nier: Automata's world more if I'd actually played the game though, idk.
I fell asleep not long after writing this section and had an intense dream about visiting my childhood home, which was overgrown and covered in dust but full of all these objects we used to care about but chose to leave behind.
Yorha doesn't make any sense as an established society, but that's fine because it turns out to have been made 4 years ago by Resistance androids (who were being manipulated by the machine network) who see the Yorha androids as soulless and expendable, and intend on killing them after a few years. But again I ask: if this is where the goth lolita androids live, where is my goth lolita space station.
The character designs have a lot more, well, character. They don't all make much literal sense if you think about too hard, but they generally connect to whatever emotional effect the character is supposed to have.
But it feels like...one of the things I think this game is trying to do is have these robots play out tropey/cliched human rituals in ways that are both very human, and disconcertingly off-center, so that the player both connects with the story the robots are living out, and is thrown out of it. A robot mourns it's 'brother', but they were both made in a factory, or from one another via a network, and the way they play out "brotherhood" is off. The mourning is real, and connects to our existing associations with sibling bonds, but is also surreal and disturbing, and also makes us think about whether there is some version of siblinghood that can exist in a meaningful way even in a context without biological connection/childhood etc.
I used to be annoyed that the machines are so obsessed with humans, but it's apparently coded into them so they can mimic and evolve past their enemy which is kinda cool.
Also the nature of self is undermined. You are explicitly playing a re-uploaded version of your previous memories in a new body, and can loot your old body as it lays dead on the ground.
And I like all that! But I feel like by largely using very cliched tropes and stories to explore this, it wasn't as interesting an experience as it could have been.
This especially applies to gender. Like as the third video says, there's a machine referencing Simone de Bouviour who basically turns herself into what she thinks a woman is, which to some extent does play with de Bouviour's ideas of womanhood as construction.
But then from what I've seen the game generally does assume all the characters are straightforwardly cisgendered, in the sense that they just know what binary gender they are from the day they're made, and are Male/Female characters in a straightforward way. Most of them don't seem super invested in gender roles, and there's a moderate variety of personalities amongst the male and female characters, and some same sex relationships. But...why do they all so consistently have such straightforward genders in the first place? Why isn't gender another Human Thing they play with in strange, inconsistent ways? Especially the Yorha androids, who weren't designed by or for humans or human society, and aren't really supposed to care about sex or relationships. I do really like that they canonically don't have genitals unless they decide to get them installed as an accessory but that could all have been pushed way further.
Also...given all the machines named after male philosophers, maybe don't only have one named after a female philosopher and then make her a stereotypical Hysterical Female Villain. Yes, yes, I know, it's an ironic twist on her feminist writings, that doesn't make it not also a sexist cliche. (Being a villain is fine in and of itself)
The B-grade anime silliness I find easier to roll with and understand the point of. As a fan of Homestuck etc I am well aware of the way tonal dissonance and silliness can not only co-exist with good storytelling and deeper ideas, but accentuate them. It's also going to alienate some of the audience but removing it would hurt the game.
My somewhat tsundere "this is silly...oh no I am unironically into it" arc reminded me of playing Hakuoki. And I had a bit of a defensive "If people want a game about the ability of love to transcend violent tragedy why not look to dating sims, instead of making yet another fighting game about how fighting games are bad" reaction while watching the videos. But one of the themes of Nier:Automata is that violence is inescapable and we have to find meaning within a violent world, so I guess it works.
I'm having trouble articulating what my problem is with the "universal" nature of the narrative. It's not like there's anything inherently wrong with telling a metaphorical story using simple tropes.
It feels like they deliberately made the setting not Japan, and included some things that felt American (a yellow school bus) and European (a gothic stone castle). The 'human culture' the androids and machines explore is a vague mish-mash of the mainstream cultures of all of those places.
But I guess...the metaphor the game is exploring is why people hate each other. And the reasons these characters hate each other are the sorts of reasons that make sense to the kind of privileged guy who tends to write 'universal' stories about war and hatred.
It deliberately invokes a lot of references to world war two (Oh hey, like 'The Resistance'!) but as a clash between would-be colonisers versus theocratic nationalists. It has little time for the people in charge, and sympathises with the civilians and soldiers, which is all great. But afaict there's nothing remotely equivalent to the Holocaust. No systemic in-culture prejudice at all, just xenophobic intolerance directed to the other side of the war. And while it clearly thinks colonising, theocracy and nationalism are bad, the ways it explores their flaws aren't especially deep or challenging. No sense that a player would go "Oh, MY society is also bad in these ways...", so it just feels like window dressing. I mean idk if I'd want to see a Japanese guy straight-up explore the Holocaust, but to tell story exploring the dynamics of WWII and not have anything like it at all...ehh...
And I mean...there's nothing inherently bad about just telling a story about how war hurts civilians and soldiers and not also telling a story about social prejudice, especially when the society of the story is entirely made up. But the game explores so many facets of Human Nature via lots of little side stories, yet ignores the universal tendency towards hierarchical prejudice to an extent that feels like the writers just didn't think about it. It plausibly DOES come up at least once in some story I didn't see, but it's clearly not a significant theme. There's the sexist dynamic with John-Paul and Simone, but that's one guy being sexist in an otherwise gender-neutral society, and afaict it's just him finding feminine women hot and being a jerk about it, and not advocating for sexism as a social structure.
The Forest King feels like a largely positive character, even if his Kingdom didn't pan out, and while I'm not sure if Pascal has total control over his village he's still a Great Man Inspiring And Ruling Others type figure played pretty straight. I mean, his people all die, but everyone in this game dies. Even the machine network has a hierarchy of rulers.
And I'm not saying a story has to advocate for egalitarianism to be good. But when you're talking about the Tragedies of Human Nature and Society, then when you ask "Are we doomed to violence/war/misunderstanding/being mistreated by our rulers etc and how do we work around these tendencies?" you also should ask "Are we doomed to having hierarchy and bigotry, and how do we work around these tendencies?"
I wouldn't mind so much if they asked these questions and came up with answers I didn't agree with, or refused to give any answer at all. What annoys me is that the questions didn't seem to occur to the writers at all, or did, but they don't find them interesting. And I do! So it bugs me.
I feel like there's something going on with the Resistance androids having some variety in their colouring but the Yorha ones being pale with white hair and blue eyes, but can't say what. Afaict the Yorha robots in the stage plays all had dark hair but that might just have been because the cast are Japanese and white wigs look silly haha.
Ok I finally got around to watching the fourth video.
I hadn't thought about how Japanese narratives where robots or other 'things" become sentient/human-like connect to shintoism. Although such narratives are pretty popular in culturally Christian countries too.
The video's in-depth praise for the B route actually makes me more annoyed at the game's sexism: In the A route, the female 2B is the player controlled protagonist, and male 9S her plucky sidekick. As described, in the B route 9S gets to become a full character, and the most human-seeming character in the game. From his POV we see what dicks his (all female) bosses/supervisors are, when they seemed fine before, and we realise that while he didn't seem super helpful in battle and is indeed not very strong physically, his hacking ability is actually pretty badass. You see some of the cooler stories and sidequests, filling out the plot and themes. 2B goes from cool protagonist to 9S's sidekick.
And then as the C route starts 2B dies, and 9S becomes the villain, but the game never really digs as deep into the new female protag A2, and then we flip back to 9S as protagonist and A2 as tragic antagonist.
That's, like...classic Nebbishy Dude Looks Up To Hot Badass Woman But Ultimately Becomes the Cool Protagonist, but with more tragedy than usual. "Side characters are people too" is all well and good, but illustrating this via the closest thing the game has to a human dude player self insert is hardly the most interesting or challenging way to do it.
EDIT: I'm not sure how much of this is the actual game and how much that youtuber projecting his own sexist attitudes onto it.
Still figuring out how my earlier criticism works when the game apparently draws deeply on the communist manifesto. Robots as the underclass who gain an awareness through conflict is certainly a Thing, and the inevitable cycles of violence do match Marxist ideas of history as inevitable large scale shifts. Plus finding meaning in life through work. I guess Yoko Taro is ALLOWED to read communist and feminist classics and use them as inspiration for an enjoyable but not especially socialist or feminist story. Maybe I just feel defensive because I've never read them myself >.>
I suppose ultimately my issue is that the game explores human nature based on some common assumptions about how human nature works that I don't like.
As the video maker points out, the conflict between individual happiness versus social good has a specific meaning in a modern Japanese context. Robots obsessively working at their goal, failing, and then self destructing as a repeated theme is...something. And the game has a repeated theme that it's ok to fail, and change direction, and need help. The message is: Just keep going, even though life is awful, and you'll find some meaning, even if it's just playing video games. Even if, as with Undertale, I have mixed feelings about this as someone who physically can't play the game. I'm also pondering how it fits within a game relying on experience grinding.
But it seems like as good a message to end this post on as any :)
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