A summary of my thoughts on Nier: Automata
I decided to try writing a summary of my thoughts for people who DON'T feel like reading 2 super long posts and watching several hours of youtube videos. I ended up with...a pretty long post, but I tried.
So! Nier Automata is video game about sexy robots shooting things. It's also a really affecting story about finding meaning and connection in a meaningless, cruel world that traps us all in cycles of life and death.
This is reflected in the looping narrative where you replay the same fights and scenes from a different POV, with more context and understanding each time.
This post summarises the whole game and thus spoils it. I go into more detail about the game, including how to watch it on Youtube, as I did, in my initial post. I link to and discuss some extra materials/analysis in my second post. A lot of my thoughts here draw on other people's, and since I haven't actually played the game there's stuff I've missed.
Here's the trailer.
I'm not going to go into my criticisms of the game, or this'll be even longer. But in short, I think the approach to human nature is overly conventional, and the environmental storytelling is lazy. But overall, I got a lot out of what I've seen of it.
The starting premise 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 called YorHa for thousands of years since. The story of the game follows some of these YorHa androids as they fight the machines and have a bunch of Feelings about war, the nature of self, etc.
The overall tone is very tropey, with ridiculous fanservicey outfits and silly humour mixed with melodramatic tragedy, as well as meta-heavy references to various philosophers.
You start out playing as the coldly practical but secretly sweet female combat android 2B, who dresses like a sexy goth lolita dominatrix. Her sidekick 9S is a cheerfully curious male support android who mostly just wants to follow 2B's orders and dresses like a goth schoolboy. They both wear heads-up-display goggles that happen to look exactly like black blindfolds and there's a lot of shots of 2B's underwear and 9S in pain.
They're very shippy, and share a lot of hurt/comfort and tragic quasi-death and growing mutual affection and devotion.
The third protagonist is the bitter, beat-up prototype female battle android A2. She's been on the run from YorHa for years and wears ripped up black underwear and thigh-high stiletto boots.
Route 'A' route is the first playthrough. You play as 2B. She has to mercy-kill 9S at the end, but he manages to upload himself to safety first.
Route 'B' is the second playthrough, and is basically the same game, plus a few extra scenes and quests, but playing as 9S.
Route 'C' follows on from ending B. You play as A2. She mercy-kills a virus-corrupted 2B at the start, and so 9S wants to kill her and becomes the antagonist. In the end, they fight, and she defeats him, only to sacrifice herself so he can live.
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.
In Route 'D', you switch back to 9S, and he and A2 kill each other. The machines decide to stop fighting the androids and send copies of themselves to find a new peaceful life on another planet.
Route 'E' follows from this ending, and the closing credits become an impossible battle against the names of the literal creators of the game. The player loses again and again and is repeatedly asked if they want to give up, as real messages from other players encourage them to keep going. And then finally they're offered help from other players who have sacrificed their save data to help.
We then see 2B, 9S and A2 being rebuilt, and their memories re-uploaded, with the hopes of finding a happier ending the next time around.
The end!
Some more details, including a bunch of twists:
The original pre-alien-invasion androids live on Earth as The Resistance and have a variety of appearances, and relatively practical clothes. The Yorha android army all have white hair, pale skin and blue eyes, and other than 9S are all sexily dressed women. The machines are mostly clunky, rusted metal robots, their heads are usually just a sphere with two round eyes and they have tinny metallic voices. But near the start of the game they make human-like machines called Adam and Eve who act as the main antagonists of the A and B route.
It turns out 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. This takes the form of trying to understand and evolve to surpass humanity, but also seeking out difficult challenges. They're mostly networked as a linked consciousness, but some have broken off to follow their own priorities. It's not clear if they CHOSE to break off, or if the network is using them as experiments into different ways of being.
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.
The YorHa battle androids are actually built from dead machines, since the regular androids (a) aren't as good at killing and (b) Are more comfortable sending 'machines' off to die.
YorHa constantly lectures it's androids about 'The Glory of Mankind' and machines being mindless and evil, even though mankind is dead and these androids are actually machines themselves.
It turns out the machines encouraged the YorHa army to be built, because it gave them a new challenge to test themselves against. They could defeat the remaining androids easily, but then would have no more enemy to fight. Both the android command and machine network intended Yorha to be short-lived, and all the Yorha androids except 9S and A2 die at the start of route C.
Also, 2B is not actually designed for battle. Her job is killing YorHa androids who command has decided are a liability. Specifically, she's 9S's babysitter, since as a spy/analyst he's designed to be curious and observant, and so is doomed to eventually figure out YorHa's secrets. She has 'met', worked with, and then killed him multiple times, always causing him to be return to factory settings. She finds this very upsetting, but follows orders.
9S finding all this out is the cause of the existential despair that turns him into an antagonist in route C.
As the cycles repeat 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. 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.
Despite YorHa being fucked up, the individual people you meet from it clearly mean well and care about each other. There's these cute little support drones called "pod"s, which follow along doing stuff like shooting enemies, displaying messages, and offering 'logical' advice. The pods often feel like background noise, or part of the game system, then come into focus as characters with their own feelings.
But then it turns out they were in on YorHa being temporary, and are programmed to delete all the personal data from the dead YorHa androids, including the protagonists. We end the game from their point of view, as they decide to resurrect the protagonists instead, even while the agree it may just end in more death.
Now, some themes and thoughts!
There's a lot about Killing God/God Being Dead etc.
One of the themes is that violence is inescapable and we have to find meaning within a violent world, so it's less hypocritical than most fighting games about how fighting games are bad.
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 most of the rest of the game. It's implied that YorHa androids are programmed to get joy from killing, so there's some psychosexual stuff going on there.
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 predating YorHa who live permanently on Earth. And then Pascal's village comes under threat and the children commit suicide, because Pascal taught them fear. You shoot his memories of the children in a minigame and hear them be destroyed one by one D: D:
The nature of self is undermined. 'Saving' means backing up memories to the space station Bunker that YorHa is based in, and 'loading' means being re-uploaded into a new body. You can loot your old body as it lays dead on the ground where you saved/loaded. 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.
The machines/androids are explicitly controlled by their programming. 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.
Even in the depths of his despair, knowing the truth about himself and wanting to destroy everything, 9S cries out "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?"
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.
Robots and androids obsessively work at their goal (either the one they were coded with, or something new they've fixated on) and there's a repeated theme of them failing, and then self destructing.
But the message of the game is: Just keep going, even though life is awful, and you'll find some meaning, even if it's just playing video games. Get help if you need it, none of us can survive alone.
As with Undertale, I have mixed feelings about this as someone who physically can't play the game. I'm also pondering how the mechanic of experience grinding supports/undermines the message.
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 entirely escape or break the system, they still find beauty, connection, and meaning, even if only for moments here and there.
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/793886.html. There are
comments.
So! Nier Automata is video game about sexy robots shooting things. It's also a really affecting story about finding meaning and connection in a meaningless, cruel world that traps us all in cycles of life and death.
This is reflected in the looping narrative where you replay the same fights and scenes from a different POV, with more context and understanding each time.
This post summarises the whole game and thus spoils it. I go into more detail about the game, including how to watch it on Youtube, as I did, in my initial post. I link to and discuss some extra materials/analysis in my second post. A lot of my thoughts here draw on other people's, and since I haven't actually played the game there's stuff I've missed.
Here's the trailer.
I'm not going to go into my criticisms of the game, or this'll be even longer. But in short, I think the approach to human nature is overly conventional, and the environmental storytelling is lazy. But overall, I got a lot out of what I've seen of it.
The starting premise 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 called YorHa for thousands of years since. The story of the game follows some of these YorHa androids as they fight the machines and have a bunch of Feelings about war, the nature of self, etc.
The overall tone is very tropey, with ridiculous fanservicey outfits and silly humour mixed with melodramatic tragedy, as well as meta-heavy references to various philosophers.
You start out playing as the coldly practical but secretly sweet female combat android 2B, who dresses like a sexy goth lolita dominatrix. Her sidekick 9S is a cheerfully curious male support android who mostly just wants to follow 2B's orders and dresses like a goth schoolboy. They both wear heads-up-display goggles that happen to look exactly like black blindfolds and there's a lot of shots of 2B's underwear and 9S in pain.
They're very shippy, and share a lot of hurt/comfort and tragic quasi-death and growing mutual affection and devotion.
The third protagonist is the bitter, beat-up prototype female battle android A2. She's been on the run from YorHa for years and wears ripped up black underwear and thigh-high stiletto boots.
Route 'A' route is the first playthrough. You play as 2B. She has to mercy-kill 9S at the end, but he manages to upload himself to safety first.
Route 'B' is the second playthrough, and is basically the same game, plus a few extra scenes and quests, but playing as 9S.
Route 'C' follows on from ending B. You play as A2. She mercy-kills a virus-corrupted 2B at the start, and so 9S wants to kill her and becomes the antagonist. In the end, they fight, and she defeats him, only to sacrifice herself so he can live.
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.
In Route 'D', you switch back to 9S, and he and A2 kill each other. The machines decide to stop fighting the androids and send copies of themselves to find a new peaceful life on another planet.
Route 'E' follows from this ending, and the closing credits become an impossible battle against the names of the literal creators of the game. The player loses again and again and is repeatedly asked if they want to give up, as real messages from other players encourage them to keep going. And then finally they're offered help from other players who have sacrificed their save data to help.
We then see 2B, 9S and A2 being rebuilt, and their memories re-uploaded, with the hopes of finding a happier ending the next time around.
The end!
Some more details, including a bunch of twists:
The original pre-alien-invasion androids live on Earth as The Resistance and have a variety of appearances, and relatively practical clothes. The Yorha android army all have white hair, pale skin and blue eyes, and other than 9S are all sexily dressed women. The machines are mostly clunky, rusted metal robots, their heads are usually just a sphere with two round eyes and they have tinny metallic voices. But near the start of the game they make human-like machines called Adam and Eve who act as the main antagonists of the A and B route.
It turns out 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. This takes the form of trying to understand and evolve to surpass humanity, but also seeking out difficult challenges. They're mostly networked as a linked consciousness, but some have broken off to follow their own priorities. It's not clear if they CHOSE to break off, or if the network is using them as experiments into different ways of being.
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.
The YorHa battle androids are actually built from dead machines, since the regular androids (a) aren't as good at killing and (b) Are more comfortable sending 'machines' off to die.
YorHa constantly lectures it's androids about 'The Glory of Mankind' and machines being mindless and evil, even though mankind is dead and these androids are actually machines themselves.
It turns out the machines encouraged the YorHa army to be built, because it gave them a new challenge to test themselves against. They could defeat the remaining androids easily, but then would have no more enemy to fight. Both the android command and machine network intended Yorha to be short-lived, and all the Yorha androids except 9S and A2 die at the start of route C.
Also, 2B is not actually designed for battle. Her job is killing YorHa androids who command has decided are a liability. Specifically, she's 9S's babysitter, since as a spy/analyst he's designed to be curious and observant, and so is doomed to eventually figure out YorHa's secrets. She has 'met', worked with, and then killed him multiple times, always causing him to be return to factory settings. She finds this very upsetting, but follows orders.
9S finding all this out is the cause of the existential despair that turns him into an antagonist in route C.
As the cycles repeat 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. 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.
Despite YorHa being fucked up, the individual people you meet from it clearly mean well and care about each other. There's these cute little support drones called "pod"s, which follow along doing stuff like shooting enemies, displaying messages, and offering 'logical' advice. The pods often feel like background noise, or part of the game system, then come into focus as characters with their own feelings.
But then it turns out they were in on YorHa being temporary, and are programmed to delete all the personal data from the dead YorHa androids, including the protagonists. We end the game from their point of view, as they decide to resurrect the protagonists instead, even while the agree it may just end in more death.
Now, some themes and thoughts!
There's a lot about Killing God/God Being Dead etc.
One of the themes is that violence is inescapable and we have to find meaning within a violent world, so it's less hypocritical than most fighting games about how fighting games are bad.
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 most of the rest of the game. It's implied that YorHa androids are programmed to get joy from killing, so there's some psychosexual stuff going on there.
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 predating YorHa who live permanently on Earth. And then Pascal's village comes under threat and the children commit suicide, because Pascal taught them fear. You shoot his memories of the children in a minigame and hear them be destroyed one by one D: D:
The nature of self is undermined. 'Saving' means backing up memories to the space station Bunker that YorHa is based in, and 'loading' means being re-uploaded into a new body. You can loot your old body as it lays dead on the ground where you saved/loaded. 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.
The machines/androids are explicitly controlled by their programming. 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.
Even in the depths of his despair, knowing the truth about himself and wanting to destroy everything, 9S cries out "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?"
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.
Robots and androids obsessively work at their goal (either the one they were coded with, or something new they've fixated on) and there's a repeated theme of them failing, and then self destructing.
But the message of the game is: Just keep going, even though life is awful, and you'll find some meaning, even if it's just playing video games. Get help if you need it, none of us can survive alone.
As with Undertale, I have mixed feelings about this as someone who physically can't play the game. I'm also pondering how the mechanic of experience grinding supports/undermines the message.
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 entirely escape or break the system, they still find beauty, connection, and meaning, even if only for moments here and there.
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/793886.html. There are
comments.