#there’re plot holes and everything but it’s a work in progress

[random-civilian-number40]

big ol bug eyes

[hot-chocolate-with-marcemallow]

So unrelated to all other postings here: I just finished Nier Automata, and boy howdy do I have feelings about it.

So, let’s start with this: I really liked Nier: Automata. I think it had a gorgeous soundtrack, I think it had some excellent characters and some astounding gameplay moments, really cool side-stories and emotional bits, and overall, a moderately esoteric, possibly plot-holed, but ultimately entertaining story.

That said, that story could have been a lot better. For those of my like 20 followers who aren’t porn bots and want to avoid spoilers, this is absolutely not spoiler free, so read ahead at your own risk!

Okay so you play act one as 2B, the cool goth-lady in all of the promo material. 2B is a combat android. The game starts with her lamenting the constant struggle and infinite cycle of life and death, summed up in the line "Everything that lives is designed to end. We are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. Is this a curse? Or some kind of punishment? I often think about the God that blessed us with this cryptic puzzle, and wonder if we’ll ever have the chance to kill him."

This lament is particularly relevant to her because, as a combat android, she has more or less experienced death multiple times over, both that of her allies, and in some cases, her own. (When androids die, they can upload their backed up data into new bodies, at the expense of any memories they had that were not backed up before they died. So really she probably doesn't remember experiencing her own death, but she certainly knows that she has died a lot, and has also definitely experienced the death of friends. This is made particularly clear in a part where her sidekick character, 9S, dies before he can back up his memory, so when she sees him again, he does not remember her at all).

She's very adamant that androids can't show and aren't even supposed to have emotions, even though most androids DO have them, herself included, and she often keeps her own emotions in check. She's been made to fight "machines", which are, as far as anyone is aware, mindless killing robots. Through the course of the game, she starts to see more and more "humanity" in them, and visibly struggles with killing them, recognizing their sapience and budding humanity, but oftentimes does so anyway because that is her designated purpose.

To me, at least, she is hecka interesting because she obviously suppresses her emotions and tries to distance herself from what she is doing, because the horror of watching her friends die and forget about her again and again, alongside the horror of possibly just slaughtering other sapient machines, is too much for her to accept. In essence, she's a determined soldier struggling with her own misgivings about her duty, but doggedly pushing forward in pursuit of her ideals. Even so, as the first ending of the game outright states, she eventually accepts that machines are conscious beings, and hopes for a time when conflict against them can come to an end.

Then, you play act 2 as her sidekick, 9S. Act 2 is a retread of act 1, but because 9S is a support robot specialized in information gathering, you are able to get more data (and therefore more context) about what is happening in the story, as opposed to 2B's side where you are kinda operating blind and just have to make due with what you know and can assume. (The data you gain is both part of the story, as in, 9S gathers the data himself, and also purely meta, as in, there is some data that you just experience as a player that recontextualizes what you did in certain events).

9S himself is rather openly emotional, and is shown to be affable, inquisitive, and pretty self-assured. He's really interested in researching these enemy machines, finding out as much as he can about them and their strange behaviors, but is very strong in his belief that they are distinctly not sapient, and more or less refuses to accept them as otherwise, summed up with the line "There's no meaning in anything these machines do", which he repeats a few times. So while 2B agonizes over the fact that she's sure machines are sapient and tries to distance herself from the openly friendlier ones because of that fact, 9S is sure they are not sapient, and eagerly helps the friendlier ones to do things for the sake of furthering his research.

He has some depth as a character, but not a whole lot; ultimately, he doesn't care for machines, and doesn't ever reach a point where he really starts to care about them. He cares about other androids, though, like 2B, and his operator, 21O. So, while 2B has a lot of stuff that she could unpack, a lot of cool development that she could have (and some of it that she does have), 9S is kinda "what you get is what you see".9S doesn't think of machines as conscious beings, and views the conflict against them as inevitable.

During Act 1/2, you are briefly introduced to A2, a rogue android who is labeled a deserter and a traitor, and who seems to be of the impression that the chain of command of your organization betrayed her. She appears for a moment, and then disappears and isn't heard from again for the rest of the act.

So, you start act 3, which is a new part of the story. At the beginning of act 3, the game makes it obvious that for this section, you're going to be repeatedly trading off between 2B and 9S to accomplish various goals and to forward the story to its ultimate climax. There're some really cool segments where you play as 9S deactivating anti-air installments with his hacking, then switch over to 2B flying in with her squad to destroy the enemy air forces and start ground combat. Then the battle goes south, their allies all get giga-hacked and turn on them, and there's a section where you're trading between them as they make their way through this crazy conflict.

Eventually, things go super irrevocably south, their home base gets utterly destroyed, and they lose the ability to load themselves into new bodies if they die. The game makes it clear that from that point on, rather than respawning, death equals a real game over. So that's cool. You get shunted into hardcore survival mode, where your allies have all died or turned on you, and a relentless force of machines promise to dog you at every turn. Ostensibly, 2B and 9S's mission from then on is to survive, and perhaps figure out what it is that destroyed their organization (known as YoRHa), how, and why.

And then 2B dies.

And she enters this weird narrative nullspace where she both is and is not a significant part of the story, known as Schrodinger's plot relevance.

For the rest of the third act, instead of 2B, you play as A2. When you met her in the forest, she was a rogue android, and didn't get a lot of development past that. When you start to play as her, she is a rogue android who mercy-killed 2B and has 2B's memories kinda? And... doesn't get a lot of development past that. She's callous, ruthless, and outspoken, which are all neat traits, and I like her character, but she doesn't have a whole lot going on, as evidenced by the fact that, as soon as you take control of her, her first goal is to "I don't know, just go kill as many machines as I can". She has 2B's memories, to some degree, but she ISN'T 2B, but she kinda acts like 2B every so often, and a lot of her decisions towards the later parts of the game are influenced by 2B. But she doesn't have her own strong identity, and she is also not 2B.

She COULD have her own strong identity. The game COULD have taken the time to develop her as a jaded soldier, betrayed by the people that made her, deprived of her purpose, and left to fend for herself in the wilds. She COULD have a lot of feelings about YoRHa, especially the fact that it is now utterly destroyed, but she doesn't express any of that. She expresses a hatred for machines, because she was built to destroy machines, and disinterest in YoRHa, because they abandoned her. She is, however, tangentially interested in 9S, because 2B asked her to keep him safe. But she overall doesn't have a strong motivation or character arc, in part because she only exists as a strong presence for the last 1/3rd of the game.

It's particularly frustrating because they even specifically introduce plot elements that are relevant to her, and should elicit a strong reaction. She finds out that her entire line of androids, the people she was sent into combat with, that she made friends with and treated as her family, all of them and herself were all purposefully created to die, and the fact that she survived was a mistake. She COULD have had a lot of development there, finding that information out, and struggling both with the fact that YoRHa made her and her companions with the intention of their ultimate destruction, AND the fact that the organization itself is now destroyed, giving her nowhere particularly constructive to vent her anger or desire for revenge. But none of that happens. She just kinda learns that information and then relays it later to 9S.

She does take part in one solid story element, where she tries to save a village of friendly machines, but that... doesn’t really make a lot of sense for her. It could be taken as her trying to find a place in the world, and kinda slowly turning towards allying with these machines, or her absorbing more of 2B’s memories and sense of self, but ultimately it is ambiguous enough to feel out of character, or like some really rushed character development.

9S, meanwhile, basically goes insane and vows to kill all the machines. All of them. Every machine. Except, that story doesn't WORK for 9S, because he didn't have an arc that would make that relevant or meaningful.

Everyone 2B loved died, too. If we followed her as she had an emotional meltdown, finally releasing all of her pent up feelings and channeling them into rage against the machines (lol), it would be heckin’ cool, because it is a natural progression that is nonetheless in conflict with the character she normally is, very stoic and at the same time very conscious of the fact that she was essentially slaughtering sapient machines. Her going into this rage and destroying a bunch of the very people she earlier wished for peace with, parroting 9S's lines of 'Nothing these machines do has any meaning' would be really meaningful and powerful.

When 9S does it, it feels flat. When 9S kills a bunch of machines while saying 'Nothing these machines do has any meaning', it doesn't feel any different than the first time he said it, even though he's really mad now, because he has always felt this way. 2B and everyone he loves dying hasn't changed him from 'contemplating the sapience of machines' to 'forsaking thought and mercy in favor of blind rage', he has simply gone from 'Machines aren't alive and it's our duty to study and then kill them' to 'machines aren't alive and also I hate them and want to kill them'.

Even so, 9S is the one who is there, driving the story forward, purely through his hatred of machines and his desire to end them once and for all, forsaking any desire to understand them.

We also find out, kinda awkwardly and offhandedly, that 2B was secretly a particular model of android designed to stealthily execute potential traitors or deserters, and that she was particularly assigned to 9S because, as the most advanced hacker model android, there was a high risk of him discovering really highly-secretive files, or otherwise learning things he shouldn't, or damaging himself in various ways via machine interfacing. So obviously, this adds another layer to 2B, and like... how ludicrously awful she must have felt, having to kill this person again and again, having to stay close with him and be his friend, only to kill him each time he stepped out of line, forcing him to forget her, and losing the person he was each time.

If this information had been revealed as part of the start of act 3, we would have even had a good reason for 2B and 9S to split up; 9S is terrified and betrayed by this information and runs from 2B and does his own thing for a while, learning more about machines and talking with the most philosophical machine, Pascal, in great detail. Through their discussions, 9S could come to adopt 2B's idea that continuing to fight would be utterly senseless, could seek to co-exist with the machines, and could even come to understand 2B and how all of this was affecting her, while 2B, already fragile from the loss of the rest of her friends and everyone at YoRHa, is finally pushed over the edge knowing that her last friend in the world no longer trusts her, and falls entirely unto a pure emotional outburst (as stated earlier) that drives her to want to destroy the machines for taking everything else from her. Essentially, the characters' motivations would be swapped, which we'll come back to later because this would become a really important plot thing if it happened.

But back to reality.

So, you progress through the game mostly as 9S, as stated, with A2 occasionally popping in to watch 9S fall down holes before she fights bosses (seriously he falls down holes several times in her presence). This all culminates in 9S and A2 simultaneously but independently trying to get into this huge machine structure because... well, 9S wants to get in because he wants to destroy all machines, and A2 wants to get in because... ? I'm not actually certain. Maybe cause 9S is there?

So this leads to a really really cool scene where  9S and A2 are both racing up this tower, going high above the clouds, and they're both fighting these two massive machines; 9S is fighting one in the air using a flying personal mech-suit type thing, while A2 fights one by hand an elevator. And every so often, during the fight, there'll be a cloud transition and you're fighting as the other character, and it's really seamless and feels really good. And as you get higher/take the bosses down lower, the swaps become faster and faster, culminating in a scene where both characters arrive at the same time at the top of the tower. The two bosses combine into one, and you have a fight where both characters are working together to defeat the combined boss, and you swap control of them seamlessly at various intervals, faster and faster until it ends with a scene of them tag-team finishing the boss off.

And then soon after that, they stand off and have a duel, because 9S is hella mad at A2 for ostensibly killing 2B, and A2 wants to stop 9S from messing up some important stuff in his blind revengerage. And you select who you play in the duel, and the outcome of the duel depends on who you play as, so there are two different endings depending on which character wins. Unfortunately, because of how the story has played out, all of the emotion in the duel is entirely one-sided. 9S hates A2 for killing 2B, and A2 is kinda ambivalent towards 9S but 2B wanted him safe so she's gonna try to keep him safe I guess.

If you side with 9S during the duel, he and A2 kill each other, and his fading consciousness is uploaded into the machine network and launched into space. If you side with A2, she saves 9S (by hacking into him, because at some point she gains the ability to hack for almost no reason), and destroys the thing that would launch stuff into space, believing that it is intended to destroy some really important stuff, and also she dies. So either way A2 dies, and either way, in some form, 9S lives.

So, I'll take this moment to call back to that part that would become a "really important plot thing" if it happened. See, these scenes were really cool, and the idea of them was really cool. But the execution was utterly lacking, and the strongest reason for that is lack of character motivation. You know what would have been hecking cool? A2 is not part of the story, or at least plays an entirely different role and you don't play as her. Instead of 9S driving the story along, he and 2B are both doing it in their own ways; 2B tears a  hole through the machine forces in order to gain access to the final huge machine base so she can destroy the machines once and for all, while 9S uses his hacking and more pacifistic means to gain access, both to stop 2B, and to find a way to co-exist with the machines. They either briefly encounter or narrowly miss each other a few times, and if they do encounter each other, tensions are high (a perfect example: one of the meetings between 9S and A2 ends with A2 killing 21O, 9S's old operator and close friend, because 21O was corrupted, essentially murdering her in order to save him. Replace A2 with 2B. 2B kills 21O to save 9S, but he's distraught that his friend is dead by 2B's hand, and they don't come to a resolution there).

Then you have the scene where they're both ascending the tower. Instead of 9S and (secondary character), it's 9S and 2B, both working towards the same end point but with different goals in mind. They team up like they had before, finish off this huge enemy using the power of teamwork, and then face off in this duel. And in this case, the duel actually means something, because it's a battle between people who actually care about each other, both of them fighting the person they want to preserve the most, over their now very disparate ideologies. And the ideology you, the player choose to side with ultimately determines the ending of the game.

Like really at that point you could even just cannibalize the endings already in place. You side with 2B, you mistakenly kill 9S, and destroy the machine structure, destroying all of the machines and also yourself in the process. If you side with 9S, you end the duel by hacking into 2B to calm her down, and then upload both of your memories into the machine network to coexist with them. Boom. Give me a story writing medal. Okay not really, like I don't even know if that would have been a *good* story. But I think it would have been better than what we got.

Ultimately, though, my biggest complaint is that I felt lied to. I signed up to play 2B's story, and instead, I played a story distinctly and unflatteringly centered around 9S. I expected cheesecake, and honestly, I was fine with that, because 2B felt really interesting to me despite that, and felt like a character I was supposed to sympathize with, but 2B died to give 9S a flimsy revenge motivation. A2 felt like she didn't even belong in the narrative for how hollow her character was, despite the cool trappings (not literally, I kinda hated her outfit, but I loved the berserker aspect), and basically served as a vessel to make sure that 9S could get to where he needed to go, and to sacrifice herself for his survival (in her ending). Devola and Popola were awesome and I loved them, and they essentially both died to get 9S where he needed to go. Operator 21O, dead, in order to make 9S even more angry and emotional. All of the cool women of YoRHa were just set-dressing to make things more sad because women dying is more sad, I guess? I actually don't know. I can make some insidious guesses, but I kinda doubt willful malice is a part of it.

Anyway, there's my thoughts. Please feel free to comment, I'd love to have a discussion about this. Maybe if some of you have played yourselves, you can point out things that I missed that would help me to like the game as it is instead of as I wish it had been! Or something. Either way, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading! (Thank you to everyone who read, too, even if you didn't finish and aren't reading this right now).