In my earlier writeups on Nier: Automata’s first two endings, I suspected that the game would truly come together as its characters developed and came to stand in for larger ideas for the game. I don’t know if that’s quite as true as I thought, but it’s still a good lens to approach the game as a whole from. So here is route C — endings C, D, and E — through the perspective of the game’s central characters.
Devola and Popola
Heartbroken. These two were among my favourite characters from the first NieR, because they were the only characters left who knew the whole picture. They knew about the history of Project Gestalt, and were tasked with overseeing it to completion; yet they themselves were androids who understood the plight of the replicants. The shades started to lose themselves as the replicants started to gain themselves, and the twins were caught in the middle of it, tasked with defending what this game refers to as the ‘Original Gestalt’: Nier himself, who was the first shade to retain their consciousness during the separation of soul and body, who would theoretically eventually save the world. They played a manipulative role, but they also truly cared for Nier, the replicant, while attempting to defuse Nier, the shade. It was a line they couldn’t truly walk, and their compassion was their end, slain in the face of both Niers’ unrelenting thirst for violence.
The Devola and Popola in Automata are not the same people as before, one of many models sent to many different areas. But they’re clearly still Devola and Popola, with numerous nods to the previous game: Popola tells 9B not to overdo it, just like she told Nier; Devola’s a heavy drinker, while Popola avoids the stuff because she can’t hold her liquor; they say they’ve been waiting for 9S before the final battle, the same way they told Nier. Only this time, instead of fighting our protagonist, they help him. Helping, they say, in an effort to atone for their sins.
After the events of the first game, the Devolas and Popolas no longer had any purpose, Project Gestalt officially having failed. They were deemed outcasts, and were actually programmed with feelings of guilt. (By who, I’m not sure; who’s writing all these reports about Gestalt even after humans were wiped out?) They know that they weren’t the same Devola and Popola that caused the collapse of Project Gestalt, but even we can see that they are fundamentally the same people; they would have failed just as easily. Yet Automata takes place several thousands of years after the events of the first game, in an era where most androids believe that there are still humans on the moon; Project Gestalt is entirely unknown to them. Devola and Popola continue to be ostracized, but you get the sense that no one really knows why. That’s just how it’s supposed to be, and even Devola and Popola seem to agree. Even if they wanted to grow, it’s outside of their programming to do so.
The story you can read that details their history, struggling through life together, reads unbelievably tragic to me. Not only were they not actually responsible for the events of Gestalt’s collapse, it wasn’t even really a bad thing that it happened. The project was always a long shot, and even Automata’s Devola and Popola describe witnessing replicants gaining consciousness in real time, shivering in horror as they realized the chaos that would ensue. As that chaos did unfold, and shades died out, replicants became the new humans. Life carried on; even the replicants themselves were modeled after real humans, so it’s the same humans that lived. To what extend the androids of Automata are connected to replicants isn’t clear (9S discovers that they’re made from machine cores, so they didn’t exists in this form until the alien invasion, but they’re still clearly connected), but it doesn’t matter; the real goal was to preserve consciousness, and thousands of years later, it’s still there. Any of the problems facing the world now are decidedly not the result of any of Devola and Popola’s actions.
Yet they’re cursed. Cursed with the knowledge of what once was, of how things went to hell, with the feelings of their part in it, feelings that they literally cannot shake. It’s tragic, but I also find it beautiful how connected they are to each other. In their memories, Popola wonders, ‘I couldn’t have done this by myself. I would have descended into madness. I simply couldn’t bear such a burden all alone.’ Yet she also wonders about the cruelty of the humans who made them twin models, to know that would help them survive. Death, it’s suggested, would be the more humane option; and it’s what they finally choose when they help 9S (who resembles Nier himself more and more as he reckons with the truth of YoRHa’s existence and deals with the grief of 2B’s death). Pod 153 asks why they chose death, instead of letting one of them survive; 9S says he hopes the pod never understands.
Pascal
In many ways, Devola and Popola’s curse resembles those of the machines more than the androids. We know that androids have free will, up to a point, and what holds them to their endless cycle of death is their societal structure and their reprogrammable nature. In their world, there’s at least someone who knows the whole picture, and they have enough consciousness that they could drop the entire thing if they wanted to. Machines don’t have that luxury; they evolved like replicants did, but tangled with an explicit goal to ‘destroy the enemy’; whoever that enemy may be. After this led them to turn on their creators, they discovered human records and Project Gestalt, and those who managed to form their own societies modeled themselves off of humans they never had any direct lineage to.
Meanwhile, those still connected to the network locked themselves into endless war by crippling themselves just enough so that they would always continue fighting, so that they could always fulfill their prime directive. With that in mind, it makes sense that Adam and Eve would come away from their research on humanity feeling like the core of human existence is conflict. (And they’re not entirely wrong to think so; in fact, ‘perpetual struggle’ does seem to be the core ethos of capitalism. Marx and Engels are both among the name drops in this game, after all.) With both machines and androids committed to perpetual war, the idea of a self-sustaining community like Pascal’s (which quite literally does operate on socialist principles) a pipe dream. No one can truly isolate themselves from the world surrounding them; even Pascal’s village had to defend themselves from machines and trade with the resistance. Eventually war came to their village; his back to the wall, Pascal turned to fight. (With vigor, I might add.) He commands an Engels goliath for an ultimate kaiju battle, slaughtering dozens of machines in the process, only for his village to be completely destroyed, his children having killed themselves from the fear he taught them to feel.
He gives the player a choice: to delete his memories, or to kill him. (Or, a hidden third option, to leave him.) There’s no ‘right’ answer here, but this game makes it clear that wiping memories is only ever a temporary solution. In sidequests, we meet an executioner model who wipes their own memories of killing their friends over and over, only to relive the horror when they find out again; we meet a couple, one of whom has their memory wiped by the other until they become a warrior who can keep them both safe. And of course, 9S’s memory is wiped over and over after 2B kills him, only for him to find out the truth again and for 2B to kill her best friend, again and again. Forgetting only traps you in the same cycles, unable to learn for the future.
Yet, sometimes it feels as though learning only meaningfully leaves you with hardships. If we leave Pascal, what good does that do them? What good did that do for Devola and Popola? All they got out of their experiences with Gestalt was pain and guilt; they lived long enough to eventually crave death. There comes a point where learning just leaves you feeling entirely helpless, where people in control simply don’t care. They plan to keep things how they are, come hell or high water. Pascal pleads for A2 to spare him that cruelty if she leaves him, and he’s right to do so.
Does that truly leave death as the only option? Maybe — at least for Pascal. Both A2 and 9S learned something from Pascal, have carried Pascal’s existence forward with them, and they do have the power to change things, within the tower. A2 and 9S carry on after their tragedies for the wrong reasons — reasons that could never sustain Pascal — but something from Pascal lingers, bringing them to their next future.
Emil
Losing his memories certainly didn’t work out for Emil, who doesn’t play a major part in the main story but instead has his own sidequest chain. Emil, in many ways, felt like the first NieR’s most tragic character; a boy cursed with immortality who is unable to look directly at anyone lest they be turned to stone. His only way out was to merge with his sister, leaving him in a form that looks hostile and deranged no matter which era of the planet he’s in, one that leaves him just as unable to experience intimacy as his cursed human form. (Even more so at the end of the game, where he loses all of his body other than his head. Ending E of NieR Replicant ver. 1.22 brings him back in full-bodied form, but in this game we never see anything but heads.)
What he got up to since then, it’s hard to say; all the Emil we meet knows is that he used his powers to create copies of himself in an attempt to stop the alien invasion. As he split apart, though, he lost more and more of his memories, including those of Nier and Kainé, which he slowly regains as you complete his sidequests. The Emil we’re talking to probably isn’t even the original Emil; he probably doesn’t exist anymore. If you go far enough into the quest — stealing from his home, for some reason, and upgrading all weapons to their max strength — you can eventually fight a whole host of his clones out in the desert. (I came across them prior to this while exploring on my own, and it was a shock to say the least.) The Emil we’ve talked to is very amiable, perhaps because he seems to remember little of the recent past. And we help him to try and remember his best days, those of his closest friends.
These clones, however, only remember the endless struggles against the aliens. They fought, and they failed, and cycles of violence only repeat forever. They’re angry and exhausted, and it seems like they want to die; and it takes someone as strong as you to finally release them. Our Emil fights against this, finally fully remembering how his old friends always fought against the odds. (Though whether Nier was fighting for something truly good is debatable.) But even he succumbs in the end. As far as I’m concerned, all of the Emils deserve their rest; they’ve sacrificed more than anyone, and now they’ve got nothing left to give.
A2
Yet everyone seems to have different points where they’re spent. At the point where we first learn about A2, she seems like she’s been spent; abandoned and betrayed by YoRHa and victim of slaughter by machines, she doesn’t have much to live for. She claims to be fueled by hatred, but almost as soon as she mercy kills 2B and claims her memories, she seems to be different. What might have seemed a waste may still have room for redemption.
Though truthfully, A2’s prior hatefulness is entirely a suggestion; we barely see her before she acquires 2B’s memories, and even though she does seek to kill every machine she can find, she seems to do so out of aimlessness more than anything. When Pod 042 asks what her primary goal is, she’s just like, I dunno, I kill machines. Even when she kills the Forest King and fights 2B and 9S, she carries herself in a very calm way. That anger, it seems, might be a bit of projection from others and an excuse from herself. (It also calls back to Kainé from the first game, a character who did show her rage at every opportunity, and whose ragtag clothes and wrapped-up leg are very similar to A2’s disheveled appearance.) A2 isn’t angry; she’s just bitter and empty, choosing the easy narrative that still gives her a reason to exist.
That might be why she’s so quick to do an about-face after gaining 2B’s memories; it’s not that she necessarily learned from 2B. In some ways, she already is 2B, being an early prototype of her model. It’s more that 2B clearly had a purpose, and A2 picking up the pieces of her life means that she’s also getting tangled up with 9S, who is full of hate. I don’t know how committed A2 ever is to the cause — she mostly seems to be simply going through the motions, at least until the very end — but there’s enough inertia there to keep her going, pushed along by her new pod companion.
This arguably puts her in the same situation as the player, who at this point doesn’t really have a horse in this race. Until you enter the tower and discover its true purpose, there’s no real enemy to point yourself towards; you know that both androids and machines are victims here, and that the reasons for living that both A2 and 9S give themselves are kind of made up. I, at least, was mostly driven by motivation to see what happens, to unravel the mysteries, to hope that our player characters learn and evolve. That’s not much more than A2, so even though we don’t know much about her (and disappointingly, we never really do), she becomes easy to view as the protagonist of this route, in opposition to 9S’s blind hatred.
It seems like the game expects that of the player, anyway. Her ending, “meaningless [C]ode”, is given precedence over 9S’s D ending, and it feels a little better to get before the reveal in 9S’s ending undercuts it a little. After A2 and 9S spill all the secrets they individually know to each other, bringing each other to the same level of understanding, A2 emerges victorious. However, she has no real quarrel with 9S — he’s really the one attacking her, and he’s so far consumed by the logic virus that there’s no point in trying to talk him out of it. So she tries to remove the virus, at the cost of her own life, and also attempts to save humanity’s data that the tower is positioned to destroy. Somewhere along the way, I think A2 discovered a purpose, and this is her chance to fulfill that purpose. She wants to save what life she can, and I think in her final acts, she wanted to reveal all the world’s secrets to everyone. (Honestly, it’s hard to tell; we see so little into her interior life that it’s hard to gauge her feelings at any point, and I wish that the game spent a little more time developing her.) At any rate, that’s what happens; when you boot up the game again after getting her ending, you can see a report from Jackass detailing all the information that was gleaned from the destruction of the tower, everything from the lie of YoRHa to the true history of the machines.
It doesn’t matter, though. Jackass’s takeaway from that is that, if everything was and is meaningless, then we might as well just wipe everyone from the earth. A2’s mission failed, because violence is the fastest way for people to reconcile their own meaninglessness… At least according to this ending.
9S
That’s certainly the path that 9S chose, anyway. Hard to blame him, really; his existence was defined by betrayal more than anyone else, because even the one person who really, genuinely cared for him — who he cared for in return — repeatedly killed him over and over again. Yet that didn’t stop him from loving her, and after he learned the truth about humanity, she was his only real reason to live. But she dies right after that, and what does that leave him with? Hurt, pain, and nothing else. On top of that, he is ravaged from a virus within that leaves him with a ticking clock. He has to do something with what little time he has left. All that’s left is to destroy the machines at their source.
If A2 is meant to stand in for the player in this route, 9S might be the one who truly lies at the heart of the story. He’s the character who, in the end, the player spends the most time controlling, the one who the player processes most of the game’s big reveals through. He sees everything, the lies of the machines and YoRHa and his own best friend, and comes out the other end with enough existential horror that he just shuts down. It’s too much for him to process alone, and the tragedy is that he’s processed it before. It’s just that every time he has, 2B kills him. He can’t process things with her, because if he does, he dies; likewise, she’s also had to process it all on her own. She seems mostly able to function, especially once we see what she’s like without having to keep 9S at arm’s length, becoming a much warmer and more open person when he’s gone. They were both doomed to be alone, but at least 2B knew the circumstances in which she was alone; 9S relived it over and over, and from other sidequests I don’t think it’s unfair to infer that a part of it stuck with him each time. That pain builds up.
In the final battle with A2, 9S may or may not know whether 2B’s death was a mercy kill. It’s never explicitly brought up, and it doesn’t really matter; killing is his last pleasure (again reinforced by a sidequest, where combat and erotic pleasure are linked in YoRHa units). ‘You killed 2B,’ he says. ‘That’s all we need to kill each other.’ And so he does, in his ending, “childhoo[D]’s end”. (The death of YoRHa and 2B means that this is the first time he gets to live past childhood.) He kills A2, but he also gets impaled and dies there with her. In his final moments, he discovers that the cannon is actually an ark, sending the memories of the machines, including Adam and Eve, to a new world. The player can choose whether 9S joins them, though from my perspective it doesn’t really matter much. What are those memories going to do? No one involved seems really capable of building something new.
Pods 042 and Pod 153
Yet the game’s final ending, achieved after seeing both A2’s and 9S’s endings, the pods posit that something new is possible. After all their adventures, the pods started to grow consciousnesses of their own, becoming attached to our trio of playable characters and actively making decisions in those characters’ best interests. The pods make a concerted effort to ensure that A2 and 9S avoid each other until the very end, and as A2 and 9S lay dying, the final members of YoRHa eliminated, the pods are ordered to remove all traces of YoRHa’s existence. They defy those orders, though, bringing the playable characters back to life.
The pods are the real MVPs through the whole game, and I loved that they got the final spotlight. Their burgeoning consciousness is the first time we can see it happening in real time, in this game or the first. That consciousness developed out of friendship and camaraderie, not anything else; their everyday tasks were to support their assigned YoRHa androids, and eventually they did so not because they were supposed to, but because it became a core part of their beings. They were always forced to make logical decisions, not always from simple situations; this was the endpoint of that. At the beginning is hope, a belief in what unites us.
The game’s final sequence involves shooting down the credits of the game, a long and arduous process for a game with so many people involved. It’s not too hard at the start, but gradually the credits start firing more and more projectiles at you until Square Enix themselves make it practically impossible to proceed. And so you die, and die, and keep going. The pod asks some tongue-in-cheek questions about whether it’s worth going on for a silly game, but you can see messages left by other players encouraging you to continue on. (Well, there are message options that are discouraging, but I never saw any; I guess reinforcing that people do want to help.) Eventually you acquire the help of others who have completed the game, and every time you get hit, someone’s save file is sacrificed. I don’t know the full logistics of this — the ratio of saves to people who cleared the game without help has to be weighted in favour of the latter, whose saves are sacrificed before someone else uses them anyway — but the intention is clear. Basic shit, really. We’re all in it together. That’s it, full stop. Really is that simple.
As this all happens, we hear a new version of “Weight of the World”, which plays in different versions over each ending’s credits. I’ll go on record saying that the song is not very good, basic Disney credits nonsense that often felt disappointingly simple in the face of the game’s uneasy endings. But the message of this ending is very intentionally simple, reinforcing a simple truth that becomes easy to forget as you get mired in all the world’s shit. This version patches together all versions of the songs — J’Nique Nicole’s English version, Marina Kawano’s Japanese version, Emi Evans’ made-up-language version — and patches in a choir, full-on “We are the World” shit. “We are the World” sucks, this songs sucks, but I admit it fuckin’ got me. Lines like “even if our words seem meaningless”, “the truth is that I’m only one girl”, “we’re gonna shout it loud”, they hit different when you’re trudging through these long credits with the assistance of literal human beings from around the world. It’s the rare instance where some cheesy shit like this is actually backed up by what you’re doing.
Once you’re through, Pod 042 and Pod 153 spell it all out. Pod 153 says that life is all about the struggle between the cycle of life and death, that “being alive is pretty much a constant stream of embarrassment” (don’t I fuckin’ know it). As they restore 2B, 9S, and A2, Pod 153 asks whether this collection of the same androids with the same memories won’t simply lead them to the same conclusion. It’s a fair question; the entirety of both NieR games show the same cycle led over and over. But the possibility of a new world exists. So what do we think?
2B
I admit that I feel as hopeless as the next person on any given day. It often feels like we’re too far gone for any meaningful change to happen, where the ostensible good guys are just as dumb and useless as the ostensible bad guys, where the ostensibly smart people have enough of their own issues that it’s hard to be convinced that enough people are going to be able to get together. I know I certainly don’t ever feel like I’m doing nearly enough, but it’s also hard to imagine what ‘enough’ would even be. I don’t feel built for this world, and I look around and I don’t get the sense that anyone is built for this world.
Even after the moving final ending of NieR: Automata, I don’t really feel any different. That kind of unity is nice, very much appreciated, decidedly comforting. But it’s not real, it’s not meaningful. It’s an assertion that a lot of us want to help each other, but it doesn’t point us to how we can actually do that.
But it’s still nice to have with you. Because in the end, I have trouble imagining that the world of Automata wouldn’t be a better place. Fundamentally, every one of the core cast seem like fundamentally good people, all of whom have learned a lot, but have been trapped in a spiral of external circumstances and their own programming. Slowly, as the world crumbles, those circumstances start to fade away. The machine war may finally be over, YoRHa is gone. Many friends are gone, too, but some are still left. And that leaves a chance to start anew.
I get the sense that 2B wanted that more than anything. Despite her position, she seemed like the character that was most comfortable with herself, like she knew who she would be if everything went away, but just.. Couldn’t be. She was always going to be fighting machines, executing 9S, without any real hope of escape. Her posthumous messages say that she wants 9S to become a good person; that her memories with him were like ‘pure light’; that she wants A2 to take care of 9S. She had love in her heart.
Now’s her chance to build something better. And her example can light the way for 9S, for A2, for the remains of the resistance camp, maybe even for Pascal or Emil, if they’re still alive. Maybe, within the ruins of several apocalypses, there’s still hope. Not for us, not anyone we know, not for anyone we will know. But someone, eventually. For now, we keep with our silly little games, make the most of the small things, and try to picture something better.
