Yoko Taro and the Pointless Battle
This article contains spoilers.
After a good friend of mine, let’s just call him Matt, failed to get into NieR: Automata for the umpteenth time, he had this to say about why he just couldn’t click with it:
“Fast-paced action games like this depend on the player making improvisational, dexterous use of the systems. Not only do the AI patterns not necessitate this, but the areas are so open that there’s rarely an immediate threat to the player. Thus no urgency to the fights. It feels like if Devil May Cry let you get away with just blasting everything with your guns from across the room. Meanwhile, it renders the unlock system a menu of how flashily you’d like to do things that could be accomplished by pressing light-heavy attack a couple times.”
It always sucks when a good friend of yours doesn’t gel with something you love wholeheartedly; and this is no exception, as NieR: Automata is not only one of my favorite games of this generation but one of the most exciting things to come out of the medium for me. But never mind how Matt also decided to play the game largely without plug-in chip upgrades or experiencing its many side missions, because at the end of the day, Matt’s main argument remains cogent: NieR: Automata is no Devil May Cry. But then again, is it even trying to be? Why did the developers of demanding character-action games like Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising decide to make NieR’s combat simpler and, one could argue, a more rudimentary element of the gameplay experience?
This is a point I’ve discussed with other friends who enjoyed the game much more than Matt, but had similar qualms with NieR: Automata’s gameplay. I would point out how the game’s director Yoko Taro has stated many times that he prefers making games that anyone can beat regardless of skill, but while that explains the “why” of the combat on a surface level, it does little to refute their points or properly examine what I personally get out of it, while finding it to be an important element of the game’s DNA.
This forced me to really consider what I personally value in not just this game, but combat design in general. Because while it’s objectively true that there is more depth to the combat of Metal Gear Rising, the simplified flow of NieR: Automata managed to stick in my memory for much longer. Why is that? The answer, of course, led me back to the rest of Yoko Taro’s oeuvre.
While conflict is rife in the worlds of Yoko Taro, combat itself is never the central element to his games. This goes all the way back to Drakengard (2003), which puts you in the shoes of Caim as he hacks and slashes his way through massive enemy armies with only your dragon to accompany you. Drakengard’s initial reception was divisive due to the Dynasty Warriors-like combat, which features little variation and beats you down with hordes upon hordes of largely repetitive enemies.
Arguments in favor of the way Drakengard plays point to how many of the characters, including your protagonist, are mass-murderers, psychopaths, pedophiles, cannibals, all-around abhorrent people. The game, they argue, never tries to glorify their actions by emphasizing the cold inhumanity of their actions through gameplay. In other words: you’re supposed to feel bad about being these people.
This reading fits. Classics like the original Silent Hill games, for example, use their gameplay limitations to communicate character and instill a better sense of fear and isolation in the player. However, “the gameplay is bad because you’re supposed to feel bad” is merely surface-level, and fails to highlight the specificities Taro communicates through his combat design. Is NieR: Automata’s combat simple because the characters are simple? No. To examine the combat systems of all Yoko Taro’s games is to contemplate the idea of power dynamics in general game design. We already know why Silent Hill 2 doesn’t make James Sunderland a loaded powerhouse; so then why are 2B and 9S able to more easily mow down machines than Dante or Bayonetta?
To answer this requires us to dive into spoilers for the first NieR.
NieR: RepliCant/Gestalt at first presents a dire scenario where humanity is nearly wiped out by spectral creatures called Shades. But as is the case with any Yoko Taro game, we gradually shift perspectives to discover a more horrifying truth: that the Shades were the true humans all along, with you, your party, and everyone you care about mere “replicants” created as vessels for the Shades to regain their prior humanity. By that point, the power dynamics of that game should make more sense to the player: you aren’t saving humanity, but extinguishing it. Why are these smaller shades so easy to kill, and why are they dropping items like used coloring books and broken toys? Well, it’s hard to bring challenge to a game when you’re ostensibly slaughtering small children.
So what are the power dynamics of NieR: Automata, then? Perhaps the feature that best answers this is 9S’s ability to hack into and take control of enemy machine lifeforms. Controlling these clunky little guys is, of course, remarkably different from controlling the fast and loose 2B and 9S. Attacks have much longer windups, movement is significantly more limited, and shooting projectiles is nowhere near as accurate as YoRHa’s pods.
Meanwhile, 2B & 9S can slash, shoot, and hack into every machine lifeform with relative ease. One can not defend the criticism that the combat is “trivial” because that is exactly what it is. Slaughtering the machine lifeforms is a trivial affair to 2B and 9S. After battles, the two quip casually like it’s nothing because the encounters they face are just that. Nothing. The only times they ever feel challenged are from larger boss fights like Simone, or being overwhelmed by sheer numbers as opposed to actual combat prowess. The game never lets you forget that you are the highest standard of power in 90% of the encounters. There’s a popular Steam review of the DOOM reboot that succinctly expresses this: “In Dark Souls, you’re stuck in a room with demons. In DOOM, demons are stuck in a room with you.” NieR: Automata is the latter, but with a very different feeling. DOOM is a power trip. NieR: Automata deflates your power constantly, until it’s too late.
In both NieR games, it’s more than just “you are the bad guys”. Nier, 2B, and 9S, and even Drakengard’s Caim are not “bad”. But the power dynamics of Taro’s games represent something maybe far more sinister and unshakeable; something very few other games ever try to depict, let alone force you to be a part of:
You are not the “bad guys”. You are the oppressors.
And being an oppressor is a very different thing from outright villainy because oppressive systems require their participants to be largely oblivious of their contributions. To draw from a personal, real life example: as a transgender woman, my parents never intended to damage my self-perception when they told me to “man up” as a young child. They were just wired by a cisnormative society to respond that way, which in turn was empowered by my silence.
Both NieR games rely on the player’s initial ignorance toward the people they are oppressing, only to slowly peel back the layers. The first NieR was more gray in terms of presenting both sides as tragic victims of each other’s prejudices — literal mirrors of themselves. NieR: Automata eschews that morality by making it explicitly clear that you are the dominant power, even when you do not realize it. And oppressive systems rely on you never, ever realizing it.
Going back to Matt’s argument: “[The game] renders the unlock system a menu of how flashily you’d like to do things that could be accomplished by pressing light-heavy attack a couple times.” This was his reasoning behind not using plug-in chips most of the way through. Why bother with all these flashy moves when you can just mash regular attacks? Why even bother attacking when you can just shoot with your pod the whole time?
The power dynamics of Platinum-style action games rely on each of your moves and combos meaning something in the heat of battle. But couldn’t the same argument be applied to any of these games? You technically can reach the end of Bayonetta through simple button mashing — lord knows I’ve done it. The difference is that Bayonetta offers a challenge that makes your encounters meaningful. Does that make NieR: Automata’s combat meaningless?
Well… yes.
Meaninglessness is at the heart of NieR: Automata. 9S is driven mad when he discovers the truth about YoRHa. The war with the machines is pointless. Dying for the cause you believe in doesn’t mean anything because there was never really a cause to begin with. You are not the hero of this story: you are the oppressor, ascribing fake meaning to find true meaning, only to grasp at thin air.
If your reason for fighting is meaningless, then it stands to reason that combat is itself a meaningless affair. Combat in NieR: Automata for me was never a challenge, but a time for contemplation. It is a space between things, the same way directors of “slow cinema” use silence and stillness to give the viewer space to meditate on the image, or how “walking simulators” like Dear Esther and Gone Home let the player simply take in an environment and examine its finer details for meaning.
The feeling I get from NieR: Automata’s combat is not “autopilot”, but rather “zen”. There is only one goal: to destroy. The meaning is that there is no meaning. The cyclical war between YoRHa and the machine lifeforms persists only for its own sake. What does any of it matter? Why even do a flashy combo when you can achieve the same thing with holding the Shoot button?
It is telling, then, that one of the few segments that offers a significant challenge to the player is the extended, unwinnable bullet-hell credits sequence — it’s the one moment in which you actually topple the oppressive system that held your existence together… by destroying the names of the game’s creators themselves.
These bullet hell patterns, one of the few recurring elements in the series, wind up best representing the zen state Taro hopes to achieve. Visually, they bloom from enemies like flowers. Mechanically, they turn navigation into a dance, often deemphasizing the actual hacking and slashing at times. And in the final sequence, the only way to win the unwinnable is to accept that, in facing the void alone, you are powerless.
“So what? None of it matters. Or didn’t you know? We aren’t required in this world anymore […] The commander? Me? 2B? Sacrificial lambs. All of us. Isn’t that HILARIOUS!? Doesn’t it make you LAUGH!?”
This presents us with the game’s ultimate contradiction: how do you devise a game that’s predicated on the idea of conflict being pointless, while working with a studio like Platinum, who revels in the flashiness of their encounters? The answer is the same as the central theme of the story: none of it matters. But you don’t let it not matter.
Divorced of any tangible meaning, the mechanics of Yoko Taro’s games are not of necessity but pure expression — of the characters, of the setting, of Taro’s own sensibilities and worldview. In its own kind of roundabout way, the game’s simple, rudimentary combat is a perfect fit to everything NieR: Automata is about. Why even bother fighting? Because. Existence is meaningless, buttons are just buttons, war is pointless, God is dead and we killed him, nothing matters; but you have the tools to make it matter. Don’t give in. You may not have meaning, but you are not powerless.
Does that mean the game is purposefully “not fun”? That, of course, depends on the player. To me, the game is often very exciting, but that’s not the same as “fun” in the more traditional sense we ascribe to video games. Even when it skirts that line, Taro constantly deflates any sense of pure enjoyment by reminding you what’s at stake, whose lives you’re hurting, and how it affects your own characters’ mental wellbeing. It’s the character-action game inverted. You are not the underdog overcoming challenging enemies, you are not expressing skill. You express power and only power. To play NieR: Automata is to reckon with the power dynamics of action games, as combat is stripped of all imposed meaning to expose its only truth: the only point — if there even is one — is extermination, pure and simple.
How do players reckon with a pointless battle system? Some don’t, and that’s fine. Some do, and that’s also fine. While Taro’s games highlight the player’s monstrous actions, he often stops just shy of judging them. That’s not what he’s there to do. He offers the tools for players to examine their own place in the oppressive power structures of his games, and lets the experiential nature of the medium tell the rests. That makes his games borderline unlikable for many, but he doesn’t seem concerned with that. In an interview (that I sadly can’t find the link to), he stated how he doesn’t mind making games that a lot of people dislike while a certain few feel incredibly passionate towards. I think that’s where he finds his meaning in game design, and in the worldview he presents in all his games. You live in a world where nothing matters, in a system that brings only suffering. And still, there is beauty in the world.
So, to answer the question: why not just hold down the Shoot button instead of doing more? Because nothing matters.
