Board 8 > Let's talk Nier Automata *spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

I had unrealistic sky-high expectations for this game due to my fanboy love for Nier and it somehow met them. While I think the story and characters were slightly worse, the gameplay was bounds better and the music is almost as good which is nuts as Nier has my all-time favorite OST.

The way Automata tells its story is very different from Nier 1. Nier 1 is all about those emotional highs. There's not much subtlty in what happens - it just hits you over the head with emotion and pulls it off with gusto. It's also got a bunch of charming, memorable characters with great characterization and arcs. I think if there's one thing Nier 1 does better than Automata, it's characters. I really like some of the characters in Automata but no one matches up to Nier/Kaine/Emil.

Automata has a big lack of emotional high points with a few exceptions. That's by design though. The characters in Automata struggle with emotion due to their nature as androids and barely know how to express themselves most of the time. There's a ton of subtle writing about the nature of self, finding meaning in life, the pain of existence, the pointlessness of war and its endless cycle of death and revenge, all mixed in with androids and machines trying to come to terms with their budding humanity that is restricted and stifled by programming they can't defy. So much of their lives and what they do is pretedermined to be utterly meaningless. It's gooood shit. There's a ton of small moments in Automata that I adore. Probably the best one is the Wise Machine 'quest' which is totally optional and contains one of the most powerful moments in the game. You hack several random machines in a row, hearing them question why they were born and why life has to hurt so much, culminating in a furious rage against the heavens mini-speech followed by an immediate jump off a tall ledge. That one messed me up good.

I love how all the androids/machines in the game try to emulate humans. They've just now achieved some sort of consciousness, and in their complete confusion they turn to the only sentient life form they know of - humans. Someone should have told them how messed up we are! There's an incredible sadness in a lot of the things they do as they try to become more human. What little happiness they manage to build up is always cut short by their programming they can't escape from. If there's an actual villain in Automata, it's their programming which prevents the androids and machines from ever being able to escape their situation. There's a lot of goddamn robot suicide in this game - they simply can't reconcile their nature as weapons of war with their newfound sentience. Everyone in Automata is searching for their purpose in life...and for machines, if that purpose as a weapon is outdated, then what meaning is there to anything they do? Much of life is pain, and no one ever taught them how to deal with that pain.
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The androids don't have it much better; their lives are somehow even more worthless. Everything they do is predestined to either succeed or fail, but never to end. The war is kept eternal by design due to messed up programming in the machine network that requires an enemy, and by the androids needing a meaning in life to keep themselves going. It's only after finishing the game that I appreciated how morose 2B is through the entire game. She's a broken soul that can't see the point in anything anymore but literally doesn't have the option to stop. No one's happy about this whatsoever but the war still goes on. You see so many cycles of revenge happening throughout the course of the game. Violence leads to violence leads to...yeah. The androids and machines have a tendency to default to the baser parts of humanity when their attempts to embrace the happier parts fail. It's just plain depressing.

As far as characters go, A2 is too underdeveloped and doesn't have much time to shine. I really like what was there but more screentime was definitely needed. 2B is an odd case because a lot of her characterization is retroactive. She's a static character, and you can glean some interesting character traits from her if you pay attention (like how she's more okay killing fellow androids than some machines, and how she reacts whenever 9S dies) but it's a little too subtle. It's really only after you learn her status as an Execution robot that things start to fall into place. I thought the reveal was silly at first but when I started to think about how it changed the context of 2B's cutscenes and lines with 9S I liked it way more. Her death scene hit me hard too; I basically couldn't believe it had happened until hours later when I realized 2B probably wasn't coming back anytime soon.

But more than anyone else, the real star of the show is 9S. He drives most of the emotional weight in the game. 9S represents all the worst aspects of the hellish purgatory the androids & robots are in. He's full of anger that only escalates as everything he knows and loved is taken away from him. He knows on a certain level that the machines are sentient and have emotions but he constantly reinforces the opposite to himself because it's easier to hate than to forgive. His whole life has been a lie, a pointless existence with no meaning, and he finds that the only way to fill that void is with violence. The voice actor also nails all of 9S' important lines and puts on one of the best vocal performances I've heard in a long time. Definitely the biggest pleasent surprise of the game.

There's so much I haven't covered. I could talk about this game for hours. I'll be thinking about it for months to come and I kinda want to replay it again even though I have a growing backlog. But god damn, is it fascinating. I love the world and the gameplay and the characters and the music and maaan.
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k
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Good talk!
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Indeed.
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Best joke ending?

Self destruct in the Bunker is probably my favorite.
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Murphiroth posted...

Best joke ending?

Self destruct in the Bunker is probably my favorite.

It's a tie between that and the Mackeral. That thing lost so many people progress despite the game warning them a million times it was a bad idea.
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G.

"Fuck this shit, Imma go study machines"

Also L. Arbitrarily deciding to go off fishing for no reason whatsoever.
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SupremeZero posted...

G.

"Fuck this shit, Imma go study machines"

Also L. Arbitrarily deciding to go off fishing for no reason whatsoever.

I'm also fond of A2 deciding to take a peaceful stroll while Pascal's village is getting wrecked
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Goddd 2B's death sequence was insane... those glitch effects are too good. I never ran into those effects again though, despite all the items that heal glitch effects. Not sure what that was all about. It made 2B's whole sequence feel super crazy and unique though.

I agree about 9S. All the androids show different reactions to the pointlessness of life, but his is probably the most on-point. He explicitly rejects empathy for those that are obviously living just like him, just so he can maintain the belief that life means something. That's a pretty common worldview nowadays. But what's interesting is that this game makes up empathize with him, even though there is no empathy returned, and it leads to evil and violence.
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foolm0r0n posted...

Goddd 2B's death sequence was insane... those glitch effects are too good. I never ran into those effects again though, despite all the items that heal glitch effects. Not sure what that was all about. It made 2B's whole sequence feel super crazy and unique though.

I went ahead and took an E-drug during that sequence. It uh...it was quite an experience.

I agree about 9S. All the androids show different reactions to the pointlessness of life, but his is probably the most on-point. He explicitly rejects empathy for those that are obviously living just like him, just so he can maintain the belief that life means something. That's a pretty common worldview nowadays. But what's interesting is that this game makes up empathize with him, even though there is no empathy returned, and it leads to evil and violence.

One of my favorite moments in the game is when 9S is finishing off one of the control towers. The core of the tower is freaking out and begging for mercy and 9S just coldly tells his Pod to fire at maximum power. And the Pod actually goes "Uh, dude, are you sure about that-" before getting commanded once again. Not only is it the first big hint that the Pods are developing sentience, it really sells how gone 9S is becoming when his Pod is telling him to chill out.


Also side note: ending E was amazing.
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KamikazePotato posted...

SupremeZero posted...

G.

"Fuck this shit, Imma go study machines"

Also L. Arbitrarily deciding to go off fishing for no reason whatsoever.

I'm also fond of A2 deciding to take a peaceful stroll while Pascal's village is getting wrecked

Hell yes
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Oh god I didn't realize that A2 could just walk away from the machines begging for their big brother

I feel so bad right now
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I love how like half the joke endings are basically just walk the wrong way when you're directed to go somewhere.
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