This concerns the first playthrough and ending of NieR: Automata. I haven’t played anything beyond that ending, and I’ll be writing something after getting to each ending.
Spoilers for ending A of Automata, of course. Also some light spoilers for the original NieR, though if you’ve played Automata I’m pretty sure you know those parts already.
The biggest surprise for me in this first playthrough of NieR: Automata was how complete it felt. You can get to this first ending, ignore Square Enix’s plea to continue through multiple playthroughs, and leave feeling like you’ve played a pretty good game. Not a great game, but at least one that felt like it gave you a whole experience. Obviously there are plenty of loose ends, but even the mysteries surrounding A2 or Adam and Eve could be excused as general anime bullshit if you wanted to take them that way, because at the very least this playthrough is thematically coherent.
That’s the big thing: the first playthrough of the original NieR felt, by contrast, very incomplete because it didn’t fully reveal its themes and ideas until the second playthrough. (While the third and fourth endings felt mostly unnecessary.) It similarly had a lot of unexplained nonsense — most of which never gets resolved in any playthrough — but I found those things far more difficult to write off, because they were missing pieces of a thematic puzzle. But Automata, whew, well, they sidestep that issue by throwing any idea of ‘subtext’ out the window. Yoko Taro’s out here fully naming characters after his favourite philosophers (Jean-Paul [Sartre], [Blaise] Pascal, [Friedrich] Engels) and making his characters say blatant shit like ‘you‘ll lose you, the you that exists at this very moment’ when a character’s about to lose their memories. Whereas the first NieR seemed to start with its setting — or, I suppose, Drakengard’s final setting — and build its themes from there, Automata starts with the existentialism the first game was developing, and creates every piece of its game around that.
What I also appreciate is how it fast-forwards to get to the point. The first NieR’s themes didn’t really coalesce until the second playthrough because Nier, the protagonist, is too much of a stubborn asshole to ask even the most obvious questions at any point through the story, insisting on killing every stray Shade in his path in a quest to save his sister. It’s only at the very end, when he’s already killed everyone and it’s too late to do much with this knowledge, that he learns that all the Shades he’s been killing are actually the residual souls of humans, removed in some grave science experiment before disease wiped out humans’ physical forms, leaving only androids like Nier. It’s in the second playthrough that you get to actually see this in action, as you get extra scenes of the Shades conversing with each other, terrified by the impending slaughter from Nier and his crew.
Automata has similar plot beats, but it speeds things up and essentially conflates NieR’s first two playthroughs. Robots are fleeing for their lives and displaying autonomy only a few hours into the game, in the desert; not longer after that you find the brilliant celebration of the machines in the amusement park, and after that, you find an entire village full of machines. If 9S the android screaming to kill everything in sight didn’t set you on edge before that, well, now you know that the machines are every bit as sentient as you and your androids. And so even though Automata actually holds back on revealing NieR’s twist — an interesting move that capitalizes on a large audience who hadn’t played the preceding game — it doesn’t take long to get people up to speed. There’s enough red flags right from the beginning, right down to the central premise of ‘androids killing machines’ essentially being ‘robots killing robots,’ that players become distrustful of all events going on. No need to know that humans died out roughly 9000 years before the setting of Automata; so long as you know enough to start questioning things, that opens up the door for players to be directed to the right questions. Not just about why things seem off, but why we notice that things are off.
Is 2B’s supposed emotionlessness (which is entirely proven false as she bemoans 9S’s impending death at both the beginning and the end of the playthrough, literally weeping android tears at the end) actually a consequence of her programming, or is she just kinda like that, much like some humans are? Is it the memories or the bodies of 2B and 9S that define who they are? What does it mean for a robot to be ‘born’ if they have their consciousnesses programmed, and how does the concept of a robot ‘family’ work in that context? Why does a younger robot have the behaviours of a child, when you could just program in a new ‘adult’ personality? If the forest king supposedly ‘gained’ awareness, is there a point where we can truly consider someone ‘alive’? Why do the robots have a concept of gender? Why are the female robots horny for Jean-Paul when there’s no biological reason for them to experience that kind of attraction? Does human anatomy like an android’s, or Adam and Eve’s, make someone more ‘real’? Is that why 6O had a girlfriend, and why 2B has a blatant shipping sidequest to gather flowers for her? Does the thematically relevant body retrieval mechanic mean that Dark Souls is similarly existential? If the Emil we find regains his memories, is he fundamentally the same as the original Emil?
These are all good questions, but at the same time, they’re easy questions, arguably leading questions. The game unambiguously points you in the direction of seeing all its characters as fully human, with their own social orders and habits no different from our own, for better and for worse; just with the added complexities given the nature of their birth, or creation. I see a lot of people who act dismissively about Automata say that the game is like science fiction for babies, and I mean, yeah, existential questions about artificial intelligence are hardly new ground. The game doesn’t render those questions in a profound enough way to really transcend that, not yet. And for this first playthrough, those questions are practically all the game really is. 2B and 9S hardly feel developed beyond a few basic characteristics; 2B is quiet and focused on the mission while 9S is more emotional and idealistic, even if they’re not always for the right ideals. Beyond that it feels hard to say much more about them. It feels as though 2B is designed to be a quiet, blank slate to let the player experience things how they want to experience them, to choose when to attack and when to simply observe. (Though this is slightly undercut in the first Adam battle in the desert, where you’re forced to make the first strike even if you’d rather ask a few questions first.) Everything about the central characters is in service to Automata’s existentialism, which is also plastered blatantly everywhere else in the game. For the first playthrough, it’s all the game gives you, and if you’ve seen these themes before, it might not seem like much. And because said playthrough feels fairly contained, I can easily see why someone would think that the game wasn’t going to offer much beyond that. Even I’m not completely convinced, given how I felt a little burned by the first game’s subsequent endings (at least until Replicant ver.1.22’s very good fifth ending).
The big question that I didn’t ask up top there is: why should anyone care about any of these themes? That’s the big challenge that faces art that’s asking questions like these, of making ideas that might seem obvious come to life in new and unexpected ways, which can then illuminate those ideas in ways that aren’t obvious. That’s why art needs to be engaging on a level beyond rote didacticism; for a video game, that’s often where characters or mechanics allow for direct engagement with the material. There’s elements of that in the mechanics — the Dark Souls chip retrieval mechanic, the fast travel being software uploads between different bodies —but by and large this story seems to be staking its themes on its characters, and by its first ending, Automata isn’t quite there yet.
Actually, the material I found the most engaging in the first paythrough is in the sidequests. They’re not great sidequests, and even Platinum’s Takahisa Taura admitted they felt a little inferior next to those from The Witcher 3. Moral choices don’t often make a big difference — the rewards are the same, and often the character is gonna do what they’re gonna do regardless of what you say — and a lot of them are generic fetch quests. But they provide more of a chance to meaningfully interact with the game’s world than anywhere else.
The quest I found most interesting was “Retrieve the Confidential Intel”, where you recover some YoRHa combat chips for an android. As you find them, a bulletin comes from HQ insinuating that not everything is above board with this guy, but you can hand over the chips anyway. Later, you find him in the desert with a YoRHa unit that he secretly repaired from the brink of death. He says he always wanted to start a family, which for a robot could be treated as a tender ending to show the consciousness they had developed. But instead, an unsettling, dissonant piece of music called “The Color of Depression” plays, shuttering the air with a glitchy feedback. As this android and his YoRHa plead for you not to tell, it made me realize that he was essentially treating this YoRHa as a pet, converging consciousness and property in unsettling ways. With programmed consciousness, hierarchy can be routinely and easily controlled in arbitrary ways, and you could argue that what this android was doing is a gross abuse of power. That same piece of music also shows up at the end of a quest to find treasure in the Forest Kingdom, where you actually find the remains of the Forest King. When you return to the machine who tipped you off to this ‘treasure’, they respond with an eerie glee as that music plays.
As much as I like those quests, I hope they’re not the totality of what to expect from this game, thematically. I’m not expecting much from the second playthrough as 9S, which I gather will largely play out the same with some relatively predictable differences at the beginning and end. (Though since he’s less of a blank slate than 2B, and he’s nominally a secondary support character, I imagine things will feel different through out.) But I imagine things will get much more interesting in the third playthrough, as we continue the story with more context and a focus on A1, who we know very little about in the first playthrough.
For now, though, I’m still as entranced as anyone with the atmosphere the game lays out for you. This is a game where I don’t mind doing sidequests that run you around the same places over and over again, partially because they provide more worldbuilding than the main story does, but also because you get to spend more time soaking in the visuals and the goddamned music. Every time I wander into the amusement park and see all the machines dancing with their confetti and fireworks, I’m as awestruck as I was the first time. Keigo Hoashi’s dramatic melody in the area’s music lends a sense of fear to the awe, and as always, Emi Evans’ vocals stabilize it with grace and beauty. But it’s the percussion that makes it so great; I’m not always a fan when orchestral soundtracks lean too hard on the drums, but here it adds weight and pomp to match the fireworks and the dancing, like you’re actively particpating in the celebration, even if you don’t understand it. The celebration never stops, even when you leave, even when the world is under threat; and when you return, the music fades in, directly to the percussion, bringing you right back into the fold. I keep expecting the beauty to wear off, but it never does.
“City Ruins (Rays of Light)” is, of course, the classic. The city ruins are the only space in the game where you can feel a palpable sense of what once was; most other areas are overcome by nature or taken over by the machines, but this still distinctly resembles a city. It stands to reason that the music is more somber than the rest, J’Nique Nicole’s comparatively deeper vocals and Keiichi Okabe’s circular piano melody leaning into the moody reflections of what once was. (Emi Evans’ vocals on the “Shade” version are incredible, too, but I like how Nicole’s vocals are a little less reserved; it makes the peaks, like at 2:22 on the official soundtrack, feel more encompassing of the city’s expanse.) As the game’s central hub and largest area, it’s also the music that reflects the tone of the playthrough as a whole, and no matter where things are, it just feels right.
And of course, there’s lots of other great ideas in the music throughout: the soothing bagpipe in “Peaceful Sleep”, the blippy synths in “End of the Unknown” (Keiichi Okabe returning to his Tekken roots there), the robotic child’s choir in “Pascal”. Callbacks to the first game in the epic “Grandma (Destruction)” and “Dark Colossus (Kaiju)”, both of which take on even more grandiose proportions than their originals. Even Emil’s theme, the most achingly sad piece of music in NieR, gets reworked into a goofy fanfare as he drives around his golf cart. MONACA, the team behind the music (mostly Keiichi Okabe and Keigo Hoashi), bring so much more variety to this game compared to the first, and there’s still plenty more that doesn’t show up on this first playthrough.
It’s great that the music and aesthetics are so continually rewarding to revisit, because there’s still got four more endings to grab. (And the gameplay doesn’t really reward you in the same way; the combat is a little boring by Platinum standards. Flashy, but without much depth. Dodge roll’s got invincibility frames for days.) The first game circumvented this by only making you replay half of the game, but here we’ve gotta go through the whole damned thing again, and the abundance of locked chests that I gather only 9S can open means I’ll want to explore all the same nooks and crannies. Only the beginning and the end are going to be substantially different, meaning you have to like the middle enough to enjoy going through the same beats again. And I can soak this in for quite some time.
