NieR: Automata (PS4)
Nov. 8th, 2019 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIt’s 11945 AD. An alien attack has driven the remnants of humanity to the moon, where they send their android soldiers to fight the alien’s machine lifeforms. You control one of those androids, because war is hell.
[Note: I spoil all sorts of things from both this game and the previous ones in the series.]
I was very grateful for this game’s easy mode, because they’ve “upgraded” the combat system into one of those crazy-blitz dodge-and-attack 3D things that I find generally unplayable. (Oh, and everything is in monochrome, and taking too much damage screws up your android’s visual sensors so it’s even harder to tell what anything is or what it’s doing.) Fortunately, the easy mode provides you with “auto chips” that make your character aim and dodge all on her own, and you just need to move around pressing the attack button.
Like the first NieR and the Drakengard games, this has multiple endings. The way they arranged them in the game this time was different, though: You play through a story starring 2B and you get Ending A. Then when you re-start that save file, you play through the same story again from the perspective of 9S—and that adds a new “hacking” mechanic that you can use instead of beating robots with swords. When you finish that, you get Ending B. Then when you restart again, you finally pick up the story from some time later (honestly, kind of ignoring some of the events of the first two endings, despite them clearly having happened) and now introducing interface-screwing status effects! Just in case the massive fight where you can’t see, jump, attack or hack depending on which enemies you’re near wasn’t enough to remind you that you’re playing a series that hates you; then you have a segment where 2B periodically glitches out and can do nothing but limp for 20 seconds, and you have a time limit in which to get past half a map of enemies who want to play kickball with your head. Anyways, finally getting through the third segment (depending on how you play) nets you Ending C or D. The fact that there’s a LP of the game by the Dark ID means that I know what happens in the third segment (and the DLC), because after multiple deaths trying to maneuver glitchy 2B across the map, I decided I was frustrated and perhaps two “real endings” were enough. Also, there are only half a dozen areas in the game, and you just keep going through them over and over.
(For good or ill: There’s a mechanic in the first two sections that if you die, your body and equipped plug-in chips stay where you died, and you need to retrieve them before you die a second time. That mechanic is quietly excised when you start the third run, and you just get booted back to your last save.)
While the first run through reveals that the aliens who invaded and created the Machine Lifeforms are dead (at the hands of their creations), it’s not until late in the second run that you get confirmation that history matches up with the rest of the series (The Giant and the Dragon, Project Gestalt, etc.) and shortly thereafter the reveal that humanity is indeed extinct (Replicant society collapsed a few hundred years after Nier killed the Shadowlord) and the only thing on the moon is a bunch of DNA and server data from the last of the Gestalts and Replicants.
Emil also keeps appearing, mostly go-karting around in a mobile shop and saying mysterious things. But apparently he was noteworthy in the wars against the aliens, had cloned or copied himself (many times) at some point in the past, and has lost a good chunk of his memory. (It’s very likely the Emil you meet isn’t the original.) He’s still very sweet, though.
A theory I’ve seen floating around is that the reason the machine soldiers have the big, round heads is directly because of Emil: He cloned himself into an army to fight them, so in turn the aliens designed soldiers who could mimic his tactics. Honestly, while there isn’t a lot of text to support it, I’ll do them one better and note that the aliens also had that head shape—they appear to just have been eye-and-mouth heads with tentacles as the rest of their bodies. What if there weren’t ever any aliens? What if, after the death of humanity, the androids started going nuts, so Emil made his clones to fight them? Then his memories got fragmented to the point where he couldn’t keep dividing, so he built robot soldiers instead? It’s been millennia and there’s only one Emil left (the machines killed the “aliens” hundreds of years before the game started) whose memories are disconnected enough that he doesn’t know the truth of his past, including which side of the war he fought on.
The third segment, because you need another punch in the face, proceeds to kill off 2B and replace her with the mysterious deserter, A2. 9S is naturally miffed about this, though he also gets distracted by the alien/machine tower that rises out of the ground around the same time. You then split your time between A2 being cranky and 9S being sent through an absolute misery parade (clearly orchestrated by the machines).
Two hologram women in red start mysteriously appearing in cutscenes during route B. It’s only in the final dungeon that any explanation is provided for them: They are “conceptual human entities” within the machine network. They deliberately set up the destruction of YorHa and the Bunker via Logic Virus as a cover-up to the fact there were no actual humans on the moon. They’re apparently the puppeteers behind the entire war—the machines had to “defeat the enemy” as their core command, which meant they needed an enemy, so they fractured their own network to keep evolving and manipulated the androids into fighting a Forever War. Oh, and they incorporated all the records of humanity they could find, which is why their behavior got so bizarrely human-like.
Or, in simpler terms: Everything that’s happened for millennia is pointless.
Other revelations: I hadn’t realized in the first time through that the robots in the desert settlement (right before Adam is born!) are having an orgy. Like, seriously. A2 and Anenome (the Resistance leader) were once comrades, and there was apparently a stage show in Japan depicting that particular bit of backstory. The Devola and Poppola models that show up here are from a different city from the ones who appeared in NieR, but they’ve borne the shame of their models screwing up (and dooming humanity) for the intervening millennia. YorHa black boxes (the android cores) are actually made from recycled machine cores, which in turn appear to have been grown from the aliens. A2’s personality data was used for the E-series of YorHa models, and 2B was actually 2E, whose secondary purpose was to kill 9S every time he figured out that the humans were all dead. And the giant machine tower was actually an ark to send all the data the machines collected into space to start over somewhere, which it does in (one) ending.
I’m not sure how a sequel could possibly follow this, as Earth is now home to a few disconnected androids and machines, there’s a useless server of DNA data on the moon as the only remnants of humanity, and this space ark...well, who the hell knows? I had a lot more hope for intelligent life coming out of the first game.
Overall: This entire series has a recurring problem with brilliant backstory and dark, character-driven angst in a world where terrible things just don’t stop happening…coupled with gameplay that is often deeply flawed and gets torturously difficult if you want to unlock all of the lore. Which means I end up with three pages of thoughts on it, and will never, ever buy the DLC.
[Note: I spoil all sorts of things from both this game and the previous ones in the series.]
I was very grateful for this game’s easy mode, because they’ve “upgraded” the combat system into one of those crazy-blitz dodge-and-attack 3D things that I find generally unplayable. (Oh, and everything is in monochrome, and taking too much damage screws up your android’s visual sensors so it’s even harder to tell what anything is or what it’s doing.) Fortunately, the easy mode provides you with “auto chips” that make your character aim and dodge all on her own, and you just need to move around pressing the attack button.
Like the first NieR and the Drakengard games, this has multiple endings. The way they arranged them in the game this time was different, though: You play through a story starring 2B and you get Ending A. Then when you re-start that save file, you play through the same story again from the perspective of 9S—and that adds a new “hacking” mechanic that you can use instead of beating robots with swords. When you finish that, you get Ending B. Then when you restart again, you finally pick up the story from some time later (honestly, kind of ignoring some of the events of the first two endings, despite them clearly having happened) and now introducing interface-screwing status effects! Just in case the massive fight where you can’t see, jump, attack or hack depending on which enemies you’re near wasn’t enough to remind you that you’re playing a series that hates you; then you have a segment where 2B periodically glitches out and can do nothing but limp for 20 seconds, and you have a time limit in which to get past half a map of enemies who want to play kickball with your head. Anyways, finally getting through the third segment (depending on how you play) nets you Ending C or D. The fact that there’s a LP of the game by the Dark ID means that I know what happens in the third segment (and the DLC), because after multiple deaths trying to maneuver glitchy 2B across the map, I decided I was frustrated and perhaps two “real endings” were enough. Also, there are only half a dozen areas in the game, and you just keep going through them over and over.
(For good or ill: There’s a mechanic in the first two sections that if you die, your body and equipped plug-in chips stay where you died, and you need to retrieve them before you die a second time. That mechanic is quietly excised when you start the third run, and you just get booted back to your last save.)
While the first run through reveals that the aliens who invaded and created the Machine Lifeforms are dead (at the hands of their creations), it’s not until late in the second run that you get confirmation that history matches up with the rest of the series (The Giant and the Dragon, Project Gestalt, etc.) and shortly thereafter the reveal that humanity is indeed extinct (Replicant society collapsed a few hundred years after Nier killed the Shadowlord) and the only thing on the moon is a bunch of DNA and server data from the last of the Gestalts and Replicants.
Emil also keeps appearing, mostly go-karting around in a mobile shop and saying mysterious things. But apparently he was noteworthy in the wars against the aliens, had cloned or copied himself (many times) at some point in the past, and has lost a good chunk of his memory. (It’s very likely the Emil you meet isn’t the original.) He’s still very sweet, though.
A theory I’ve seen floating around is that the reason the machine soldiers have the big, round heads is directly because of Emil: He cloned himself into an army to fight them, so in turn the aliens designed soldiers who could mimic his tactics. Honestly, while there isn’t a lot of text to support it, I’ll do them one better and note that the aliens also had that head shape—they appear to just have been eye-and-mouth heads with tentacles as the rest of their bodies. What if there weren’t ever any aliens? What if, after the death of humanity, the androids started going nuts, so Emil made his clones to fight them? Then his memories got fragmented to the point where he couldn’t keep dividing, so he built robot soldiers instead? It’s been millennia and there’s only one Emil left (the machines killed the “aliens” hundreds of years before the game started) whose memories are disconnected enough that he doesn’t know the truth of his past, including which side of the war he fought on.
The third segment, because you need another punch in the face, proceeds to kill off 2B and replace her with the mysterious deserter, A2. 9S is naturally miffed about this, though he also gets distracted by the alien/machine tower that rises out of the ground around the same time. You then split your time between A2 being cranky and 9S being sent through an absolute misery parade (clearly orchestrated by the machines).
Two hologram women in red start mysteriously appearing in cutscenes during route B. It’s only in the final dungeon that any explanation is provided for them: They are “conceptual human entities” within the machine network. They deliberately set up the destruction of YorHa and the Bunker via Logic Virus as a cover-up to the fact there were no actual humans on the moon. They’re apparently the puppeteers behind the entire war—the machines had to “defeat the enemy” as their core command, which meant they needed an enemy, so they fractured their own network to keep evolving and manipulated the androids into fighting a Forever War. Oh, and they incorporated all the records of humanity they could find, which is why their behavior got so bizarrely human-like.
Or, in simpler terms: Everything that’s happened for millennia is pointless.
Other revelations: I hadn’t realized in the first time through that the robots in the desert settlement (right before Adam is born!) are having an orgy. Like, seriously. A2 and Anenome (the Resistance leader) were once comrades, and there was apparently a stage show in Japan depicting that particular bit of backstory. The Devola and Poppola models that show up here are from a different city from the ones who appeared in NieR, but they’ve borne the shame of their models screwing up (and dooming humanity) for the intervening millennia. YorHa black boxes (the android cores) are actually made from recycled machine cores, which in turn appear to have been grown from the aliens. A2’s personality data was used for the E-series of YorHa models, and 2B was actually 2E, whose secondary purpose was to kill 9S every time he figured out that the humans were all dead. And the giant machine tower was actually an ark to send all the data the machines collected into space to start over somewhere, which it does in (one) ending.
I’m not sure how a sequel could possibly follow this, as Earth is now home to a few disconnected androids and machines, there’s a useless server of DNA data on the moon as the only remnants of humanity, and this space ark...well, who the hell knows? I had a lot more hope for intelligent life coming out of the first game.
Overall: This entire series has a recurring problem with brilliant backstory and dark, character-driven angst in a world where terrible things just don’t stop happening…coupled with gameplay that is often deeply flawed and gets torturously difficult if you want to unlock all of the lore. Which means I end up with three pages of thoughts on it, and will never, ever buy the DLC.
