#But Yoko Taro said ☝️

[nickpeppermint]

Vague Hope

(1/3)

[abimee]

so tbh i was hard on nier:a while playing it cos i don't really like a lot of the anime tropes BUT i really like tragedies and i was promised some twists, and got some. but i wanted to ask you how you felt about the pacing. basically, did it feel like there was a solid line connecting plot points, or do you feel like certain things happened at random? barring the fact that yoko taro said he literally wrote the story out of order, is that how it felt to you? imo it felt really rushed through super cool parts and like things that were annoying or setpieces ran on for too long. ig i'm still fked up over how much it fell short of my expectations bc even after playing nier:a completely thru and h8ing how absurdly film-student its tone and ideology are, i was hyperfixated enough to read some of the side literature and learn drakengard lore. tl;dr, nier:a is cool and has some fun parts but i wish the android were more mature (or artificial) in physicalilty to avoid weird anime loli baiting in the fans and also they'd asked a writer to help revise and implement the og author's ideas okay bye thx for reading my rant ♡ i'm glad u had fun and ur fanart abt a2 and the indoor grill made me cough

ill gladly listen to people bitch about yoko taro ive had PROBLEMS with this man since a young age ☝️☝️☝️☝️

I was actually thinking about the pacing and insertion of certain scenes/plot points today because admittedly like. okay this might be all over the place but

The start of the game (Route A + B) was like pretty solid pacing I think due to being low risk, and I thought it was cool that the game let you see 9S' side of things --- but it really started to fumble when it got into it's moe complex storylines in C-D-E and went on to deposit a lot of information on it to the point where it felt like we were forgetting entire plots and characters because something new and shiny showed up

Like okay first off. Adam and Eve and the aliens. We never once got any sort of explanation WHY adam + eve killed the aliens, or why the aliens made the machines, but within that general thought we did learn that humans died before going to the moon (and possibly even before the aliens came?), and that YoRHa's only goal was to fight the machines until a specified amount of data was gotten and then they were to explode. Never did we get more elaboration on the aliens or adam/eve, and while we got some YoRHA spotlight stuff it also entirely just decided that explaining the true mission behind making YoRHa and why the androids had to die is beyond it. Which frustrated me because it Brings Up Ideas but doesn't specify if thats the true reason, like we learned that the machines fight purely because that was there sole reason, and so they made an enemy for themselves purely to enact that goal that the aliens gave --- but then it even goes ''haha okay but hear me out'' and introduces Red Girl and this vague idea of the Machine Ego and wanting to defy their masters of the aliens, but then DOESN'T ELABORATE WHY. Like we don't know WHY adam and eve and the machine ego wanted to develop enough to defy their machine logic and purpose because it wraps back around to ''theyre human just like us because they want to defy their masters because.... they're human like us?"

Like it often felt like some concepts or plots brought up walked itself in a circle, dog-chasing-tail style, where it's entirely contained within itself and refuses to expand upon it's existence, which then causes it to get sort of left behind when the plot finds a new fancy idea to latch onto. Like how quickly the story introduced, focused on, then discarded Adam & Eve is almost criminal because of the things it could've done with them literally as the closest approximation to what the Machine Ego/Red Girls wanted, since they defied their creator's orders to be their own selves. Eve especially feels wasted in this regard --- like if the plot spent a little more time focusing on Eve & Adam in a B-plot scenario showing Eve and Adam learning more from humans and even leaning into Eve's wants that we saw in his mind when 9S hacked him (the human home built around him and his brother, and his brother wanting to go somewhere peaceful with him). Like they even could've tied that to when they get on the Ark and leave and Adam is holding Eve, that's literally Adam bringing Eve somewhere peaceful, but because those two instances are so seperated from each other and their own sort of throw-away concepts it becomes hard to Remember the tether between those two thoughts

This is also my biggest problem with A2's writing, I can only assume she's meant to be a Kaine-type character (and boy did my eyes momentarily widen seeing Emil say ''it must be fate that we've met!" to her) where her reserved nature and somewhat limited character blends in with her personality, but they really could've just given us like at least 2 more hours-game to learn about her past rather than just infodump us with her lore in some logs at the Resistance Camp. This is another problem Red Girl had where I feel like the fact you get unit data on them that basically explains away the confusing parts of their involvement in the lore felt cheap because this game has over 40+ hours under it's belt but couldn't be damned to give us information on our main antagonist directly in the game instead of in a post-credit LOG?

Like okay. I love my baby boy emil. He is the most special boy in the world to me and I am so happy seeing him get a pretty decent character arc for himself in the sequel to his original iteration. But why do we learn information about Emil more easily than the Red Girls? No unit data paragraph, no document information to read, no external book needing to be sourced. You learn whats up with him, why his big event out in the desert happens, and how it ends. You even get TWO special areas involving him. Red Girl gets to speak for a little bit and then vanish. It just astonishes me a bit

And it's not like the game doesn't try to expand characters last-minute either, that entire cutscene where Pascal reads Nietszche and then gets surrounded by the baby machines before the events of the Factory/suicide felt so forced in suddenly that it felt rather obvious something was going to happen. And I say this as someone who was in tears seeing Pascal get called ''uncle Pascal'' and see him defend the children in the factory --- it was super obvious that they possibly didn't originally plan that scene but needed something to really show that Village acted just like a human community with children and babysitters and family. Like not to be like ''this couldve been something beautiful'' but i think giving us a little time between A2 and the Village more could've done something beautiful. A2 getting the necessities to build the slide definitely made me drop to my knees but I noticed even the LPer was confused why A2 had a crying child inside of her as her enemy at the end of the hacking (like how 9S had 2B at the end of his destroying his memories), but the game didn't do anything with that besides lightly imply A2 lets down her mean bit for children sometimes (and again. why is this Kaine behavior). And then the fucking laughing children sound at the end of the route where she hacks 9S and she looks to the sky like ? This is all very interesting but it doesnt mean anything.

NOT TO MENTION 2B BEING AN EXECUTIONER TYPE. COOL CONCEPT BUT IT DOESNT MEAN ANYTHING IN THE END. It's just another thing to tack onto 9S's migraine of learning everything is a lie but nothing gets DONE with that incredibly interesting though afterwards because we never see 2B after that because she's been dead for a while now. We had a brief hint at it when we heard that transmission of 2B being her new name but the payoff just doesn't work if you just state it and then not do anything with it.

There's many cases of this and I notice it with how much questions I have that simply have no answer in this game despite the fact we have nearly 5 routes worth of time that could've gone into either sticking to like 3 ideas to the end or bridging the gaps, Which the story Does Do Sometimes! Red Girl talking about fucking up its own network to make pacifistic machines that want nothing to do with the war, the lie of YoRHA

OH MY GOD ALSO. SPEAKING OF RANDOMLY PUSHING STUFF IN. OPERATOR 210. The fact that they wanted to pull the whole ''she was curt and distant with 9S but secretly saw him as like a son because she wanted a family :(" could've gone INSANE if they didn't decide they wanted to bring that idea in at the last possible second and make 210 randomly baby 9S (and then make him point out how strange she's acting), and then ignore that until we get to the cutscene that they wanted to make for it. Like they could've had 210 start out as curt and distant, but as 9S operations with 2B got more dangerous she could've started laying on the doting mother thing, but it just came so abruptly in Route.....C? That it felt forced and rather last-minute, like they finished writing A and B and someone walked in and went ''wait I want 210 to see 9S as her son :(" and this is how they crammed it in

oh this post isnt even about the pacing i'm just talking about dead end plot concepts. But I can definitely see where you're coming from there because we spent an awfully long time with the Resistance only to know so little about them, but it defos felt more ''a lot of stuff is getting brought up but we dont have enough time to give it developing room because we want to bring in the next concept asap". A2, the forest king, Red Girl, hell even Pascal and Adam & Eve all suffer this. the only person who really got a steady character Was 2B and 9S but 2B felt like she got cut short and just became a puppet for 9S' plot which is so tiring how often we get dual man/woman protags and the woman's story just becomes part of the man's story and she becomes a nebulous concept. that yoko taro brand Misogyny

I SPENT AN HOUR TYPING THIS? I haven't even gotten to how I feel like 9S' plot feels like it was destined for something more but got bottlenecked for time and cut off at the like 80% mark

I can definitely feel that though of feeling like Nier:a didn't meet expectations, when I finished all the routes and the playlist i was watching just Ended I genuinely sat up and bed and just felt a deep sense of ''THAT'S IT? THATS ALL?"

it's crazy too because I really, REALLY loved what it had going and im going to be thinking about this game forever but it also just left me feeling like i'm missing something so badly that when I try to think about it sometimes my mind just draws blanks like im left speechless at it.

Like that was nier: automata? that was just 40 hours of being asked what it means to be alive