In Nier Automata, the desert proves quite perilous indeed with talking machines that are clearly afraid of us. 9S repeatedly insists they're just saying words that they've picked up that they don't actually mean, but that's pretty clearly not the case. All the machines gather in an area where they're rocking baby carriages and talking about loving forever, which is weird. Then we fight a naked Sephiroth after all the machines combined to form Jenova and gave birth to him. Then even after we kill naked Sephiroth, another naked Sephiroth emerges from his corpse, so we just decide to run away.
I'm trying to figure out what's going on here based on what I remember from Nier. I know something crazy is going to happen because come on, it's expected. We haven't actually seen any of our "human" commanders, so maybe it's possible we're not actually fighting for mankind. We're fighting for impostors of mankind trying to kill the real thing. Plus, didn't the first Nier essentially end with mankind doomed to extinction after the death of the Shadowlord? Shouldn't whatever is left of mankind be Replicants? Beats me. Apparently, this war against alien invaders who use machines that seem like something mankind would build has been going on for thousands of years now. Maybe this is a 1984 situation where we're just continually at war with ourselves. It's still pretty early, so who knows!
I've been thinking some more about this, trying to come up wild theories to explain what's going on here. Maybe the machines are the new vessels for the Gestalts, so maybe they're at war with the Replicants, and we're fighting for the Replicants.
I've got plenty of time to think about it since I can't play for a week, but I'm sure anything I come up with will be completely wrong. Like the Judge in Ace Attorney, my theories are almost certainly never correct. ---
