Nier: Automata: A review of how Machines Have Feelings Too, Actually

20 min readJun 1, 2021

*note: This was planned to be a youtube video, but I’m being lazy and have not yet actually shot it. Eventually I might. Work is tiring. But I went through really quickly and formatted it for text instead. Let me know if anything is annoying.*

Hey there. My name’s Iris, and I just played through Nier: Automata for ten hours, until I got all the way to the end. You might be asking why I played through Nier:Automata and not Nier:Replicant, and to that, I say … It took me three years to get to Nier:Automata. Replicant will come out for me in another three years, so if you want to see that review, follow my Medium channel. I ended up thinking it’s okay, but sort of meh, and I wanted to talk about why. Fair warning: we’re going to be talking about the whole game, so *spoilers*!

The combat’s pretty good. You have two buttons for light and heavy attacks, a ranged attack with your pod, and a lock-on if you’re playing on normal or easy like I was. Movement just looks cool — there’s a lot of freedom in it. You can double-jump /and/ anime run, so they have all the basics covered.

And the graphics are beautiful. The commercial facility really feels like what it’s supposed to be, with vines everywhere and a giant escalator in the middle. The desert has all these intriguing half-empty pipes you can’t go into, the flooded city has all these crumbling buildings and flowing water, the desert apartments have a playground in the middle of it. It’s not realistic, but it’s anime-realistic, and there’s a real sense of place to it all.

… I do wish the camera was less pervy. I constantly have to move the camera view to tilt it so it isn’t directly looking up 2B’s butt. … I can mostly ignore it, but it still bothered me, so there you go.

Playing through the story itself, the … sheer auteurness of it is a bit heavy-handed but not overly so, in my opinion. Your mileage may vary. A short list of Nier’s bullshit: all the machines are named after philosophers, the main antagonists are named Adam and Eve — they’re brothers for some reason? — and the main characters’ names are all codenames. It’s hard to take it seriously sometimes. Like in one scene, you’re standing there and a random-ass android shows up for like two seconds to fly in, stab a baby who’s supposedly also a king, and then just fly away again.

…

Anime bullshit!

…

The plot is /SO MUCH/, but I’ll try to just go through the basic beats. You’re 2B, an attack android created by humans to save humanity. Your whole squadron dies in the first fight you’re in … except for you. Then a support android unit comes to help you — 9S! Skip forward a bit — staging missions from their orbiting magic android bunker, 2B and 9S kick some machine ass, while saying machines have no feelings, while being androids … which are a type of machine. Hmm. … What’s that? It’s the foreshadowing horn? Nah. Couldn’t be this story.

So … skip forward a bit more, and there’s a big epic fight with a ton of machines that culminates with a … machine that looks like a human, who bleeds blood? It looks like you kill that … machine?? … but they just sort of disappear instead for some reason. … So you fight some more people, and then it’s brought up that aliens apparently /created/ machines — everyone knows this already, isn’t it obvious?? — so you try to stop the aliens. Which will stop the machines. But when you go to their cool underground alien base to do so, all the aliens are dead already. But the machines they created are still running, because of Adam and Eve, the coolest twin brother machine IT administrators ever. You fight them, then Adam — who was the blood-filled machine human from before — kidnaps 9S, and you go to a fake city to save him so you fight Adam again. And there’s this big monologue where he’s just like

”The truth…the core of humanity…is conflict. They fight. Steal. Kill. This is humanity in its purest form!”

Then he removes himself from the network which I guess was the reason he didn’t die the first time you kill him, “so that he can die”, because it’ll make living more exciting for him? So you … immediately kill him again, so he dies. Good job, Adam. I guess if he didn’t do that the game would be literally impossible, so phew.

Uh … and Eve is driven mad by Adam’s death, so you destroy Eve. Wait! Oh no! 9S was corrupted by a machine virus macguffin! And 2B has to kill him! So she does, but then he regenerates his consciousness through the … machine network. How does that work? Fuck if I know.

One interesting thing is that there are all of these locked chests everywhere, too. It’s kind of … hinting at something. It’s weird — the game feels like it’s going really quickly and really slowly, like it’s done but it also hasn’t said very much. But I liked it! Kind of disposable, but good. Eight out of ten.”

Oh, hey there! My name’s Iris. I just played through Nier:Automata for twenty-five hours, until I got all the way to the end. You might be asking why I played through Nier:Automata and not Nier:Replicant, and to that, I say … It took me three years to get to Nier:Automata. Replicant will come out for me in another three years, so if you want to see that review, follow my Medium channel or something. I’m over 60 percent complete with all the sidequests, so I’m basically done, right? And I thought wow, this is a great game, and I should tell everyone about it and why it’s so good! Fair warning: we’re going to be talking about the whole game, so *spoilers*!

So, let’s talk about the combat first. There’s a dodge that feels great. You only have one button for attacks, but you do have the ability to hack machines. Hacking is … basically a 2d shooter minigame. It looks cool, and most importantly to me is much easier than the actual game fights. So I hack everything whenever possible. It’s also used to open up item boxes and possess machines, and play /as/ the machines, which is really cool.

Movement just looks cool, also — there’s a lot of freedom in it. But … you can double-jump, but for some reason you can’t anime run. THEY NEED TO ANSWER FOR THIS. :(

But the graphics are beautiful. The commercial facility really feels like what it’s supposed to be, with vines everywhere and the giant escalator in the middle. The desert has all these intriguing half-empty pipes you can’t go into, the flooded city has all these crumbling buildings and flowing water, the desert apartments have a playground in the middle of it. It’s not realistic, but it’s anime-realistic, and there’s a real sense of place to it all.

The camera basically stopped being pervy at all to me, but I think that’s mostly because 9S has shorts on! And is a guy! I was able to ignore it /almost/ completely, which was nice.

The plot is /SO MUCH/ but I’ll try to just go through the basic beats. At the beginning of the second part you ACTUALLY SEE the things you selected in the first playthrough at the beginning, which I thought was really cool — like the game took a video and then the intro of the second playthrough is that video. Neat stuff.

So. Since you’re 9S now, the plot’s just a bit different. You’re a support android created by humans to help save humanity, who lives on the moon; you need to help 2B, a battle android, from your orbiting magic android bunker that isn’t on the moon.

You hate machines! Ooh, they’re bad. As time passes, though, you figure machines out more, and get more depth and different parts of the original 2B fights, since you’re playing as 9S! And there are /so many/ cool sidequests too. Like, there’s an android sad about her friend dying, and you have to use science to figure out who killed her friend, and it turns out it was her. She’s an E-style YorHA. E for execution.
… What’s that?? It’s the foreshadowing horn! Again?? What a weird … I think it’s broken. …

Anyways, leading up to the 2B Adam fight, you’re supporting 2B but get captured, so instead of fighting the game monologues at you for an hour. I loved this — you get to hear more about why the Machines are doing what they’re doing, and you get the best line in the game where Adam just talks about ‘the appetite of Man’ and then says (via censored text) straight up,”

“You want to **** 2b, don’t you?”

But, on a negative note … there is so much death. SO MUCH DEATH. It’s hard for me to overstate how much death is in this game, it’s on the edge of being too much but … it’s bearable.

And the game plot uses these deaths well, mostly. It asks questions that are really neat to ask in a game like this that’s so obviously about the self-determination of thinking beings. It’s really nice to have a game just straight-up be like “What is the point of existence?” in dialogue and actually struggle with that question in plot. Basically just imagine that Yoko Taro has a bullhorn and is yelling “HEY. I HAVE THESE IDEAS.” into it 24/7. That’s the game!

I went in pretty blind, and I preferred that. So if you’re reading this review I’m sorry! But the whole perspective shift in the second playthrough is really smart. I also like all the story background you can find and read, like A2’s background and all the archives you collect … I spent an hour or two just reading as much as I could, and I like that these things are explained to some degree. The world has a lot of unique ideas, is full of anime /and/ philosophy bullshit — my two guilty pleasures! — and has a pretty cool ending thesis and story. I really enjoyed it! 9 out of 10.

Oh, hey there! My name’s Iris. So I just played through Nier:Automata for forty hours, all the way to the end. I’m over 90 percent complete with all the sidequests. You might be asking why I played through Nier:Automata and not Nier:Replicant, and to that, I say … It took me three years to get to Nier:Automata. Replicant will come out for me in another three years, so if you want to see that review, follow this Medium I guess. And I’m thinking wow … what the fuck is wrong with this game?? And I wanna talk about it. Fair warning: we’re going to be talking about the whole game, so *spoilers*!

So, let’s talk about the combat first. It’s still good! There’s a dodge that feels great. You have different abilities to fight depending on if you’re controlling A2 or 9S. You also play as B2 for a little bit, but B2 and A2 are basically the same — two attacks and no hacking. Mostly I played as 9S because in the world of Nier:Automata, women can’t open locked doors. And 9S can, so … yeahhh. Look, I get lost all the time. I have to be able to open the doors, okay?? Sometimes you do /have/ to play as A2 in this part though, regardless of your preferences.

The graphics are great. Controls are great — you can double-jump /and/ … sometimes you can anime run!”

However … you’re playing as a woman again so there’s some perviness here. To be honest, part of me feels like the plot switched from B2 to A2 just so the cool girl fighting android could wear less clothes. Like, the game conditioned me to hold the analog stick down when going up ladders so the camera would stop flashing me, but I can’t stop seeing A2 from being like “Hello I’m a loner also learning emotions now, like 2B was, but with no clothes!” and flashing me, since she’s just not wearing a skirt or pants at all. … Why. Just. Why.

Playing through the story itself, the … sheer auteurness of it is /very/ heavy-handed but not overly so, in my opinion. Your mileage may vary. A short list of Nier’s bullshit: all the machines are named after philosophers, the main antagonists are named Adam and Eve — they’re brothers for some reason? — the main characters’ names are all codenames — one character fake-reincarnates through their sword? — characters lose all emotions and defining personality to become standins. It’s impossible to take it seriously sometimes.

We’ll talk about it in a bit, though — the plot is /SO MUCH/ but I’ll try to just go through the basic beats. We start off with the bunker immediately being hacked. The Stakes have capital-C Changed. If you die here, you actually Game Over and have to reload your save — I know from experience.

This is just a general statement here, but I love how the game plot feeds into the mechanics like this. Like, with the hacking — there are chests that are a really long jump away. You can use a pod jump to get them, but I only found the pod jump through Googling it. I did the jump by hacking a snake enemy and doing a longboi jump instead. So the mechanics give you all this flexibility. … Uh, more good things: while it was the most obvious thing in the world, I liked how bluntly the ‘androids and machines? They’re the same!’ reveal was delivered, with the black box cores being machine cores. The ‘The humans don’t exist?!?’ reveal was decent too, though I knew that was the case as soon as it was brought up in the first bit.

But this part of the plot, at least in my opinion, is where the auteur-ness of the game finally … as it inevitably must … bites back. Yoko Taro just has a bullhorn and is like “HEY. I HAVE THESE STUPID IDEAS.” and basically the entire third act after you leave the bunker is pure bullshit. It sucks. It /suuuuucks/.

Why does it suck? I’ll break it down for you.

First, the plot starts with the highest point in the game and then immediately implodes on itself. Basically, the bunker has been destroyed by a machine virus, so you start having to kill YORHA androids because they’ve all been taken over by the virus. But 2B also has the virus! She tries to find a place to die, and when she does finds A2 there — so she asks A2 to execute her, so B2 doesn’t spread the virus. A2 executes B2, and 9S sees that happen, and /also/ finds out that his life was a lie generally with learning about the human thing, and it wrecks him completely. He turns into an Android Main Character version of Eve, the insane murder machine robot. Uh, also when A2 killed 2B she took 2B’s sword, which … contains 2B’s memories, so A2 sort of becomes more like 2B, only a version of 2B that 9S wants to kill? It’s justified in the plot as A2 being an earlier model of 2B so they’re really close anyways, and the memories put it over the edge, but really what I think is happening is that the characters all sort of have to turn into parodies of themselves so the plot can be Big Horny and talk about Big Ideas. 2B stands for Too Bad.

… It really feels like 2B and A2 are only in the plot as a contrivance, because the plot needed someone to save 9S after he headbutts machines one too many times in his quest to destroy all life on earth because he’s mad his friend died.

Random cool plot surprise: 2B was an E-class, Elimination YorHA! I didn’t see this coming and it’s really awesome, /and/ it explains a bunch of weird things in the earlier cutscenes!
Random uncool death surprise: 9S has to kill his operator, Operator 21, who tasked him in the last arc to find a bunch of things about family. Looks like your family … is death! Oh, she says “I just wanted a family” while she dies, too. Great. Loved that!!!!

… Related to that, the second problem I have with this is that there is so much death in this game. SO MUCH DEATH. Even more death than earlier! It’s hard for me to overstate how much death is in this game, and this is where it makes playing through the game itself a chore.

For example, you get to watch an entire village of peaceful machines die except for the children. They’re killed in such a way that their machine cores are destroyed by the rampaging evil machines, so they can never revive or be alive again. When you go to save the children, first you save them, and fight a big robot. But then when you go back to check on them all the children have killed themselves in a death cult, because … apparently the smart machine taught them what fear was and it made them too scared. … So that smart machine asks to have their memory wiped. You get to decide what to do, but it doesn’t … have any real ramifications to the story, other than making you feel real sad! I chose to walk out so people don’t repeat their mistakes? But … /shrug/.

Nier: Automata has so many different story beats! It has: android death, machine death, animal death, androids causing machine death, machines causing android death, androids causing android death, machines causing machine death, machines eating machines, machines eating androids, androids eating animals and dying … if you can think of a way that one thing will cause the death of another thing, that’s basically going to happen!

It reminds me of nothing so much as what I read about The Last of Us 2, where the game is just like “Did you know? You’re killing beings with their own lives!” Yeah! I do fucking know! Why do I need to be reminded with bullshit plot contrivances? And why does the main playable character I have need to hate everything so much?? 9S goes from being interested in the world, and being the one with feelings, and hope, to being death itself. And without him being a voice of at least semi-sanity, the feel of the game falls apart into just pure sadness. I could have stopped it by quitting the game, but that’s not the point of a game, is it? … I streamed the entire game on my twitch and honestly, if I wasn’t streaming it, and if I hadn’t already invested so much time in it, I would’ve just quit the game at that point. There’s no saving it.

… But. Let’s finish up the plot: in the end, 9S goes around destroying these weird tower things to destroy the rest of the machines. The towers are /extremely/ anime, by the way — they have this fun perky anime voice for some reason? Popula and Devola, other side characters with no real point other than this, end up saving 9S’s life and sacrificing themselves so he gets into the tower. Then 2B and A2 basically sacrifice themselves for 9S too, almost regardless of your playthrough. Long story short: All the female yorha sacrifice themselves for 9S, so 9S can maybe save the world. But he doesn’t, because … he’s mad, so I guess he doesn’t want to.

There are two main ‘real’ endings, and then one ‘true’ ending. The good final ‘real’ ending is C, where A2 saves 9S and sacrifices herself for it. The worst final ‘real’ ending is D, where 9S kills A2 because A2 is distracted by the B2 memories her sword has — one of the forty swords she holds, but let’s ignore that for now — and then, after killing A2, 9S slips on A2’s blood like it’s a banana peel and impales himself on her sword. As he’s dying, the machines … were planning to fly into space to destroy a new planet or something. So you get a choice, to either be sent into space to colonize a new planet, or let 9Slive in the machine network for some reason.

The anime bullshit is so, so much … but the “true” ending E, which is specifically set up as a wish fulfillment ending, is /even more/ bullshit. So it makes you finish the game with the bad 9S ending, right? But then these pods, who you use as just a ranged attack initially but talk more and more as you get further through the game — they do this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern thing, and you can have them ‘save’ everyone from deletion by “hacking the credits”. It’s like a 9S hacking scene but the enemies are just credit titles. This is, actually, SUPER cool. Then the game asks if you want help — this part is really hard — then asks if you want to delete your save to help others! Also cool, though a bit much. I didn’t delete mine since I was streaming it.
… But the actual cutscene after says “maybe they’ll make different choices this time!,” and then you’re thrown back into the game at Chapter Select. Chapter Select … where you can only play through story you’ve already seen, where they fail. The game doesn’t have a different ending coded in. So … it will never change. I guess getting the final ending was pointless in the end, eh?

And there’s nothing to do in the game that isn’t killing things except fish, so there’s no real reason to hang out in the world afterwards. It’s like … given that a lot of the thesis of the game is ‘beings need companionship’, to just be like ‘well, I guess you’re fucked for companionship in the game unless you go back to B2‘s arc with Chapter Select’ just feels … dumb? … Like, just seeing Chapter select makes me think that the ending point of this game is to say ‘All sentience is doomed to repeat its own mistakes’. To use philosophers as a benchmark: the game starts off as Nietzche and turns into Schopenhauer. And boy, do I ever hate it! It has a lot of unique ideas, is full of anime /and/ philosophy bullshit — my two guilty pleasures! But I wish I quit after the bunker. 7.5 out of ten.

Oh, hey there! My name’s Iris. So I just finished Nier:Automata at 50 hours with all 27 endings and 95 percent quest completion which is all the way past the end and, as they say in the biz, “that’s good enough for me”. You might be asking why I played through Nier:Automata and not Nier:Replicant, and to that, I say … It took me three years to get to Nier:Automata. Replicant will come out for me in another three years, so if you want to see that review, subscribe! And I thought well, that was weird. And I wanna talk about it! Fair warning: we’re going to be talking about the whole game, so *spoilers*!

Nier:Automata is in the pantheon of games that should be really good. There’s a lot going for it, and honestly at one point I thought I’d end up loving this game! The combat’s great, the act of moving around the world is great, and it’s a beautiful game.

The game also asks questions that are really neat to ask in a game like this about self determination. A lot of the little plot touches are nice — there’s some really fun surprises and foreshadowing. The whole second playthrough character change and how that works is genius, the hacking making the game faster is done really well, 2B being a secret YorHA model was cool. The ‘android souls and machine souls are the exact same thing’ stuff was a nice touch. And the general conceit of multiple perspectives to tell the story is also just … really nice. Going through it felt like peeling an onion back. (Without any eye protection, so you’re crying a bunch too.)

I do also like how the game blurs the lines between gameplay and game.The boot up sequence is neat, the fact you can self destruct in multiple ways at any time is neat — you’re ‘really an android’! I loved the part in the DLC where you play through a day in the life of a machine with Plato 1728 — where the machine factory really feels the same as the floating bunker — and that this DLC is hinted at through one of the weapon stories. It’s a really great capstone on the idea that we use false or meaningless divisions to split ourselves apart as beings … and in the end any being that we can conceive of is, in a sense, very similar.

The little snippets of story within the weapons is also really cool, I just really … liked reading all of it, and all of the archives. Choosing to show A2’s previous story as text was really interesting and, I felt, was really effective. There’s a sort of meshing of mediums that happens at times in this game, and it’s just … thought-provoking. Which I think was a lot of the goal of the game.

But I hated most of the third act, though. And in postgame content, when you fight the trials, the gambler’s colosseum drones you fight beg for their life … but you can’t help them. You’re forced to murder them. This happens a lot in the game actually, not just in the colosseum — and it just keeps going. It never stops? The game never stops wanting you to stop playing it.

Like, If you need to replay the arenas multiple times because you’re not great at the combat like me, you have to hear machines constantly being like “why did you kill my brother!” Or “why did you kill my sister!” Or “you murdered my family!” Or “why would you do this! We just want to live!”. As a reward for this, you unlock a bra and panties for 2B that you can see with Chapter Select. If you do them in the general order they’re discovered, you … then unlock the Plato subquest.

…

It’s almost like the game is trying to break up its sadness with horniness. But, like, that doesn’t … make the sadness less terrible. It sort of makes it more terrible? And yes, I know that the bra and panties unlock is a reference to the previous game. I didn’t know it when I was initially playing through, and it had that effect on me. So there you go.

So! To summarize.

1, if we think of the game as a high school English paper — which I don’t think is that inaccurate of a way to think about it, to be honest — we have Adam’s monologue as a thesis statement and Eve’s insanity and the 2B/9S relationship as topic sentences, kind of showing an alternate and better way to have a familial relationship.

Then 2, most of the second act builds on top of it, which was neat and new!

Then 3, most of the third act is like DID YOU SEE THAT SECOND ACT? IT WASN’T ANIME ENOUGH FOR YOU, RIGHT??? HOW MUCH FANSERVICE DO YOU WANT??? WE WILL KILL OFF ALL THE CHARACTERS NOW. PLEASE LOVE ME ANYWAYS.

9S becomes Eve. The cycle is shown to be inescapable and the game is just like “Yup, we’re all doomed. Life is pointless.” The game just simply seems to run out of new things to say, and — at the same time — decides to say the old things again in a loop through its characters, regardless of how suited to saying it the characters are. So the characters turn into myths instead of … being the actual characters they’ve been for the entire game before this, and it simply just doesn’t work for me.

So I give Nier:Automata an: initial 8/10, second playthrough 9/10, second playthrough + bunker twist 9.5/10, first 5 endings 7.5/10, and post-Plato DLC 8/10. I also watched the ending of Nier:Replicant, since my friend played it, and that game made me realize … I feel like Nier is the emotional equivalent of Hostel. People are just so unused to … sad games in this genre that they cut Nier a lot of slack, and call it a masterpiece. But the game is just … The Incredible Machine, just instead of making sure the machine works, you’re making sure that the game is sad. I think it’s worth playing, even with that — an 8/10 is a pretty good score! — but it just feels like there’s a lot of wasted potential and frustrating parts.

…

Also, before I end this — I haven’t really mentioned him here otherwise, but Emil and both of his quests are random but pretty cool also. I can’t overstate how much flavor the sidequests add to the world, and … in general, there are so many cool concepts here. Just please stop depressing me and showing me your torture porn. God damn.

*edit* I saw a twitter thread about not assuming intent, and I think it was a good idea, so I’ve toned down some of my direct frustration at this game’s author/declarative statements of intent. Everything else should be as it was.

Nier: Automata: A review of how Machines Have Feelings Too, Actually

Anime bullshit!

Written by Iris