Games, Lets Talk

Lets Talk: Nier: Automata

Posted on by pandanview

I want to talk about Nier: Automata. I finished this game on Sunday, so it has only been two days. This post isn’t a review, but my thoughts and my current feeling as of this time. As such, there are spoliers so I suggest you don’t read this if you have fully finished the main endings.

Also this isn’t a full anylsis, it’s literally my thoughts so I probably won’t talk too much. There also won’t be any deep philosophical discussion, you can find them elsewhere on the internet.

Lastly, I made this post because I need to write my thoughts down. This game had a immense effect on my psyche.

Background

Finished the game on Sunday 18th, 2019. As of writing this post, it is Tuesday 20th, 2019. Thus it has only been two days. When I say finish, I mean completing ending E, meaning doing the 5 main endings (A,B,C,D,E)

I however did not finish this within a few weeks or so. In fact I started this game last year, play for about 3 days and reached had just finished ending B (9s route). When I was intending to start ending C straight after, I managed to die to an enamy and decided to stop playing for a bit. To me, I believed the game got repetitive, especially when you just do ending A and you start ending B as your essentially doing the smae thing. Sure the story is very interesting as you learn from a different perspective, and also you get the neat bullet hell hacking game, but because I knew what was going to happen, it felt like a drag to get to new information. With the bullet hell game especially, it took too many sessions to actually kill enamies, and the timestop cutscene between you activting the hacking and also the destroying the cores really do add up and stops the action rythm too abruptly. As such, the moment I died at the beginning of ending C I really couldn’t be bothered and stopped.

I started playing again on Saturday (19th) and decided to finish it all off. The main issue I had was that I forgot autosave wasn’t a thing a lost a huge amount of progress. Getting past that though, I managed to get to the rest of the endings. Overall, it was a fun game even though it had some small annoyances. I don’t want to say the gameplay is a masterpiece, and the story technically isn’t mindblowing too (even though it had some twists), but it’s the meaning behind the story is where it shines.

Demise

When I finished ending E, I was a bit sad. However, this sadness is the sadness of finishing a story off. You know when you finish reading a whole book series and asking yourself “I want more” or “What do I do now” with the emptiness in your heart? That’s the feeling I had, a feeling of emptiness. The ending itself wasn’t the best for me, know that 2B, 9S, and A2 will live on in the future is nice and happy, but of course I really want to know the story from there. Of course most likely won’t happen as these stories are always left up to the player’s mind, and so we’ll never know what will happen to these 3.

As the minutes went on, I started reading up about the ending. This is where my demise started. Lonliness, sadness, cycle, and existentialism. The philosophers mentioned and referenced throughout the game. The cycle of life and death. The suffering of of existing.

The amount of self-thinking caused me to really question my own being. These sorts of things I knew, I enjoy reading about philosophical topics, but to see and read these in this video game absolutely blew my mind. Reading about it is less intesive then actually experiencing it, and this game really hit me hard. These past two days has been horrible for me, the sadness and depression of reading the hardship that the androids and machines go though really put a perspective on my own life.

As such, I spent the last two days reading and watching youtube video discussing the themes of the different philosophical meanings and references (List at the end for the ones I liked). Today, I had to write this post in order to put my thoughts down so that I can move on, otherwise I would be bottling these emotions in me for too long.

The meanings

This is all based on my own jumbled thoughts that will be rambled out here. These are all my personal feelings, so everything is a “I believe“. They are also based on other people’s interpretations so I suggest you seek out those for better reading other then my badly worded opinions.

This game is about existentialism. It’s about human being trying to find meaning for their lives. Throughout the game we see machines exploring different ways to become human. Adam and eve, the reproduction bots in the desert, the amusement park, the pacifist village, the dancer, the forest kingdom, and the religious cult. Dotted in between we have a robot who wants to be the fastest, a martial artist who wanted to be the best, and a robot trying to revive his brother. All of these try to mimic human by doing human things, but because they are robots, sometimes they cannot progress and be more, limited by their own physiology. However they don’t give up, they percivier and try over and over again, having a strong reasoing to keep going.

As you progress through the game, you destroy their reasoning, as that’s your job, your order. You’re doing it for the glory of mankind. You start the game thinking they’re just normal robots, they have no emotion, just another thing. But as you progress and learn through the game and through the different endings, you realise they all have desires, ideas, a purpose they want to achieve. They’re more than just a thing, they all have something they believe in, and you’re saying you’re better than them all the time, but what right do you have to do that?

When we find out that Yorha was all a lie, that the humans are dead long ago, that all androids were just test combat units used to prolong the war due to the fundemental instincts, we start to see similarities between the machines and androids. They both had a core belief that they were following, something that pushes them every day to keep going, to keep doing what they’re supposed to do. Either from a biblical figure such as god, or a desire that they wanted, that was what gave the resemblence of being human being.

However the limit of androids and machines is when they lose their reasoning, their faith. As we see with 9S once 2B is killed, he starts losing himself, start ignoring his insticts and become mentally enranged. He has lost his entire reasoning of being (much like Eve). He didn’t want to continue with his ideas but instead run away from them as he felt he had no reason of existence anymore.

The best example I like is Pascal. The moment his children all died, he asks the player to erase his memory or kill him. This scene really shook me up. Seeing the whole village die, and after the fighting gameplay, seeing all the children kill themselves out of fear really hit me hard. Watching Pascal suffer was all the more worst, and in the end he couldn’t handle it and wanted to stop the suffering.

In reflection, these ideas apply to real life too. When we’re born we follow our parents orders, we go to school expecting education to give us a stable income, but when we finally become adults, what are we living for? Most people find religion and faith they believe, however others are hard to say. The average life is to go to work, eat, and sleep. For what purpose is that for, are we all just machines in our word, following the order of society based on expectations? Doesn’t it all sound meaningless in the end? Yeah, it does, life has suffering. What makes us human is to accept it.

We must accept suffering is part of life, and be able to move onwards. Imagine a life where nothing bad happens, if so, how can we say it’s a good life without any comparisons? To be human is to live through different hardships, emotions, feelings, and to keep moving. We don’t need something to tell us what to doWe don’t need a faith in something known, we just need to know that there’s a tomorrow, faith in the unknown.

I believe in general that’s what the game ending is trying to say. Not everything is happy ending, but as the end credit shows with the bullet hell, you need to reject the status quo and perceiver, and with that you’ll have friends helping you. You have other human beings all in the same boat, but together you can support each other and do find meaning in places that don’t need meanings.

With the end of the credits where you’re asked to if you want to delete you file to help others, that’s where you look back and accept the emotions, the feelings, the knowledge you gained from the game. You accept that life is never stops and let go of the past. By doing so, you too can help others along their journey.

To live and to be human is to not know your destination. You struggle along the journey but exist along the way.

Conclusion

Honestly I don’t know what I just written. Even though I wanted to clear my mind a bit I’m still just as lost, but I feel much better about it. I’m just going to end with some of the quotes that really stuck to me now.

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 who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle…and wonder if we’ll ever get the chance to kill him.

2B

Everything that lives is designed to end.

They are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death.

However…life is all about the struggle within this cycle. That is what “we” believe.

Pod 153

Pod 042: I am embarrassed.
Pod 153: Why is that?
Pod 042: I launched a suicide attack, and yet here I am, still alive. I must look very silly.
Pod 153: Do not feel bad about it. We are alive, after all. And being alive is pretty much a constant stream of embarrassment.

Pod 153 to Pod 042

A future is not given to you. It is something you must take for yourself.

Pod 042

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