A Comprehensive Reading of Nier Automata [MASSIVE SPOILERS]

what was the most important game of 2017 was the breath of the wild popke I mean maybe but I think the most important game of 2017 was none other than near automata why well because it marks a landmark step in videogames storytelling for the first time ever videogames are starting to go toe-to-toe with the likes of film and literature in the philosophical arena and near automata is perhaps the best of the bunch it's a meta fictive surprisingly uplifting nihilistic postmodern masterstroke and don't worry if some or all of those words terrified you I'll explain them in a bit this video is going to be an exploration of some of Nier automata ideas and concepts through a literary perspective and how the game design and mechanics therein helped to convey them I'm gonna try and keep things fairly simple an entry level for people who might never have thought about video games in this way before think of this as a guide for how to be a games art poster like me it's gonna be a little bit different from my regular stuff by the hope you'll get something out of it new automata isn't the first example of post modernity in gaming but it is quite special that's because it's one of the few games of its kind to use post modernist themes to convey ideas that have relevance beyond videogames undertale doki-doki literature Club the Stanley parable etc they're all great games but the extent of their commentary exists solely within the gaming space automata on the other hand challenges not just post modernity but also the throwback neoclassical character culture which mimics Renaissance thinkers which is emerged in the past decade or so before we go any further I'd better explain some terms the classics and the Renaissance the classics usually refers to great artistic and philosophical works created in ancient Greece and Rome the Renaissance was an intellectual trend during the 14th to 18th centuries that was really really into the classics idealized versions of these ancient cultures were used as inspiration to usher in an age of great artistic growth but stuff like that fell out of fashion when the world became more cynical during the Industrial Revolution for history nerds the boundary between weather and a taunts ends and the enlightenment begins is it's pretty fuzzy as far as I'm concerned so I'll almost certainly unintentionally conflate the two at some point during this video post-modernism the dominant critical perspective of the late 20th and early 21st century post-modernism is critical of things like human nature morality objective truth and generally skeptical toward stuff like religion and ideology its reaction to the earlier schools of thought which were very concerned with universal ideas ideal ways of living spirituality etc etc nihilism the belief that there is no inherent meaning in the universe we do not exist for a reason there are no divine entities and we are cosmically insignificant animals who have tricked ourselves into thinking we'd matter there is nothing special about being human and the idea that we somehow are is an illusion whilst nihilism or post-modernism are very obviously deeply intertwined there's a lot of different ways of thinking about both so it's better to give them separate and finally the death of the author this was a landmark idea proposed by french critic roland baths and it states broadly speaking that who the author of a text was why they've wrote it what their ideological positions were and what they think the text is about are pretty much irrelevant details the only thing that matters is while you the reader got from the text the author is ant authority speaking dead because they don't matter they were just responsible for creating the text right with our theoretical basis covered for now let's begin with a big spoiler warning I mean seriously if you hadn't guessed it by now I'm gonna be sporting the entire game all of it I highly highly recommend you play near automata but if you can't or you just want to sound smart talking about this game you are in luck that's because I'm gonna have to go through the game chronologically in order to explain my points so you should be able to get your head around what's going on even if you do not play the game which you you know really should do the game begins on this quote from to be one of our main characters everything that lives is designed to end we are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death hers or some kind of punishment I often think about the God who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle and wonder if we'll ever have the chance to kill him pretty ominous right before we dive into things let's look at the big question this quote sense up something that is constantly refer back to across the whole game how can we derive meaning from a fundamentally meaningless world let's keep that in mind I think about it as we go through the game okay route a the first portion of the game despite being maybe upwards of 20 hours long is all set up so bear with me it introduces you to the world and several key concepts before subverting them later on rather than directly tackle that big question I just told you about root aid deals with setting up an important philosophical foundation that we're gonna have to address before we talk about nihilism meaning and all that good stuff what is consciousness is it something unique to humans why does it exist in the first place stuff like that those are the kinds of questions for the first portion of the game seeks to answer to be honest though stuff like this is pretty typical Japanese game fair which love appearing to get really deep and then not really doing anything with it see almost any final fantasy game which repeatedly poses the earth-shaking Glee radical idea that sometimes organized religion is bad but this is exactly what no retort is trying to do lull you into thinking it's a different much more shallow game it's got big robot fights sexy anime girls and its fair share of sexy anime boys not exactly a philosophical aesthetic the game starts with two bees attack squad getting annihilated by machines and a boss fight another trick this time distracting you with classic platinum spectacle fighter eNOS after that cold business like to be meets up with curious upbeat 9s and they team up to take out the machines in this Factory so you'd do just that murdering the little bastards who will more often than not attack you first it's during this portion that we're introduced to the idea that our main characters are androids that meaning robot still alive people midway through this stage there's a few subtly important scene firstly we're to be repeatedly reminds 9's that emotions and displays of unprofessionalism are forbidden even though the androids are clearly capable of expressing these things stop calling me man all right then tell me it is and another layer on a 9 s and to be discussed how the machine seemed to be accessing random portions of human data and broadcasting it they brush it off but you as the PI should recognize it for the Chekhov's gun it is and keep it in mind when the first proper boss starts to talk it's really only a few words but this shocks our to Android protagonists because this has never happened before anyway during the course of the boss fight 9s gets mortally wounded and he and to be detonated their black boxes which serve as their memory storage to kill the remaining robots so ends the intro we then filled in on some backstory aliens invaded earth with an army of self-replicating machines forcing the remnants of humanity to flee to the Moon humanity retaliated with its own army the much more intelligent and advanced androids who smashed to take back and have it a few corners of the earth but hadn't really made much progress to be and 9s are members of you're a dedicated military faction of androids led by the Council of humanity on the moon who thanks to to be and 9's his sacrifice and now poised to make a big push against the machines now the aliens nor the humans really make an appearance in the game and instead fight through artificial proxies a one hand the almost human intelligent conscious creative androids and on the other the numberless faceless machine hordes so you get put in a new body drop down into the actual main gameplay space and do boring tutorial stuff yadda yadda yadda but there is one talking point there's quite interesting here the fact that a lot of the game mechanics have ludonarrative explanations in particular the you I see you're not asked you're looking at the game for my lakitu style third-person camera what you're seeing is essentially what your Android is supposed to be saying do the point where you can remove computer chips from them to and/or remove human functions it seems like a neat gimmick Oh first and the optional ending from yanking our CPU is funny but it hints at some disturbing possibilities how do you know if what you're seeing is really there or what everyone else is saying keep that in mind neo really doesn't want you to commit to the viewpoint of one character for reasons that all become obvious later there's some more stuff to the fact that all the characters of the game of robots kind of trivializes the idea of death the androids are constantly destroyed and rebuilt over the course of the game and get new bodies through these literal vending machines what this does is focus on the only real constant that the androids have their identities near as a game wouldn't work anywhere near as well with human protagonists because our identities are unfortunately tied to the meat sacks they inhabit the androids first real mission takes them to a desert where things start getting weird the machines have graduated from just spouting nonsense human phrases to understanding the context of them they've started being afraid and even making disturbing futile attempts to procreate you'll then mate to kill them and they retaliate by creepily chanting this cannot continue which is a bit of a recurring motif this culminates in the creation of two weirdly human looking machines from a pseudo womb machines that make no illusion of being able to learn and evolve on the fly with one going from a fetal punching bag to an ion killable monster over the course of your fight after a narrow victory you escape it's at this point that both the players and the androids perceptions begin to break down it's becoming harder and harder to rationalize the machines as dumb soldiers a fact which is almost impossible to reconcile with the androids primary goal and core ideology despite that the androids keep getting messages from the Council of humanity on the moon and we keep getting reminded of their oft repeated catchphrase glory to mankind which is becoming more and more suspicious in a sort of cult II thought policy sort of way those council broadcasts are always so stiff this continues in the amusement park when we see machines that worked out that their best chance for self-preservation is to actively preach peace creepily mimicking children to do so we also see this terrifying boss machine who seems to have a crude understanding of beauty an abstract concept with no easily explainable military benefits this all culminates in visiting Pascal's village a society of intelligent pacifist robots who actually want to help you to be we can't trust anything while this is happening your goal of murder all the machines from the enigmatic Council of humanity is becoming steadily more suspect the only reasonable explanation is that this increase in intelligence is some sort of plan by the machines alien masters nope because they're all dead in an alien ruin underneath the city the two human-like robots from before now naming themselves Adam and Eve reappear and explained that the machines killed the aliens ages ago and they're now running by their own devices with Adam and Eve as the new leaders of the AI network the machines have been using human data to improve themselves copying patterns until they find stuff that works the peaceful machines the ones that show fear this is all the result of the machines applying a neural network to all of humanity and approximating what it's like to be human based on what works this is where the real philosophy of the game starts kicking in it's clear now that some of the machines are becoming indistinguishable from humans and are even starting to compare favorably to the androids in particular to be throughout the game to be serves as the voice of the status quo insisting on keeping even friendly machines at arm's reach and always keeping her objective of protecting the castle of humanity in mind she takes to understanding the machines more slowly and for all her loyalty neither knows nor understands much about humanity she's unable to get things like self care aesthetics or pleasure all of these core human experiences it's tubize journey the mirrors are learning about consciousness in route a the next mission takes to be and 9's to a goofy society of medieval robots who spout silly catchphrases and have a king and they wear pointy hats oh and then this one Android lady murders a child but let's move on let's move on let's worry about how silly the robots are Wow look at look it's a big boss fight what happens after being this boss is that 2b and 9s get separated prompting you to meet a pair of androids called develo and popullar who gives you a fancy scanner to help look for 9s no isn't that nice you try and hunt down 9s and eventually find him held captive by Adam in this creepy city modeled after an unspoiled human one Adam waxes lyrical about his obsession with humanity how he in the machine should aspire to replace them and how he wants to experience everything they could even if that means the thrill of death spoilers he dies 9s and to be a reunited and to be sure some genuine emotion for a change Adams big speech and subsequent death highlights an interesting pattern all of the most advanced characters stop being the androids Adam and Eve Pascal they all have an intimate understanding of their own relationship with the rest of the world to be is defined by a loyalty to your 9s by his not-so-secret crush on her the two bad guy BOTS by an obsession with humanity and Adam respectively Pascal has this position as a peaceful protector of his people it's here that we can kind of get a picture of one nearest trying to communicate about consciousness as the little machine groups get more complex so does their understanding of the world from a threat to a potential ally to an ideological foe same with the more advanced standalone characters it's their awareness of the world around them that informs their personality and their choices and with this increased awareness of the world comes an increase in power with the most successful machines being the ones most able to shape the world what nearest telling us is that consciousness is an awareness of the world around you it's externally derived but that's not the whole picture right animals are conscious but they're not exactly aware of the world in the same way the humans are that's because a human level of consciousness requires an understanding of your relationship with ideas beyond the physical world now I'm not saying the religions a prerequisite for consciousness but Nier automata does make a point of saying that all of the most human-like characters have a strong faith in something faith or at least the idea of it is perhaps one of the most recent and important developments in the human evolution of consciousness once we realize how small and relatively helpless we are compared to everything around us the world becomes a big complicated scary place and it's deeply unsettling to realize that we'll never be able to understand all of it which is my weak ways stories and explanations to make this fact less intimidating that's all faith really is some people choose religion some people believe in themselves you get the picture that's why Adam disconnects himself from the Machine Network during his final phase in order to truly understand humanity he needs to not be able to see via the Machine Network he needs the terrifying endless unknown in order to have faith in himself the final Machine Society in the game is an expansion on this idea we've slowly but surely seen the machines grow more and more advanced to the point of having a working society in the two forest civilizations so what happens next well because they're slowly getting more and more human they've started asking the big questions and they've made a religion so you go and check it out with Pascal while 9's is down for repairs the machine religion in this Factory is pretty light on details but it's made very clear that it affords the members a sense of purpose and tranquility because it brings meaning to an otherwise empty existence faith in religion is filling the existential void human beings to need a sense of purpose we need the little lies that help us understand the world we need to feel like we have control over a universe that is so large so as to make us basically meaningless by default without that we surrender to depression and eventually to death the progression from the simplest animal intelligence of the machines in the tutorial to the creepily human gsella tree of the cult robots and the anime boys might be reflective more of to be and 9ss biases being worn away than anything else but the order is still very important when communicating with the player the different robot groups represent the different stages in Maslow's hierarchy of needs what what even is that well a guy called Abraham Maslow made up a series of needs he thought humans needed to have fulfilled in order to become self actualized self actualized meaning in this context a position that means you're capable of thinking about the big questions and tackling existential stuff because you're not worrying about having enough to eat or whatever essentially a properly human level of consciousness each of the stages builds on the ones before it just like the Machine groups get more and more advanced the stages are physiological this is the animal need for sustenance reproduction sensory awareness that's all stuff we can see this in the almost bestial machines in the opening stages of the game they've got no real survival instinct or higher reasoning but they're able to keep themselves alive and they're shown to be essentially on the same level as animals safety this is the need for security primarily of the body but also of your possessions property and stuff like that we can see this in the tribal desert machines who've learned to run away from danger and also to use simple tools and seem to have grouped into a loose collective of sorts for protection belonging this is the need to be a part of something be it a family or a peer group or something like that we see this in the amusement park machines we're all about doing stuff together and talking about love and harmony and all that jazz fourth is esteem this is the need for a sense of pride and accomplishment in yourself and the satisfaction of work which is pretty easily noticed in the forest kingdom they've got an organized power structure concepts of loyalty and honor all things that feed into fulfilling the need for esteem second to last is the need for self-actualization this is the need to be creative to have a moral framework and to generally be able to express yourself that's where the religious robots are kind of at their happier they have their own ethical framework and they aren't really in danger note how all of these stages are explicitly all about how we relate to the world starting with the physical ones slowly moving on to more abstract concepts until we reach the final stage for Maslow called transcendence this is the stage that the Androids Adam and Eve and the cult wants are trying to reach with the fulfillment of all their basic needs they start to wonder about why they're here what they're doing this for the future the past and all those terrifying things the cult machines tried to find it through religion and are more human main characters also try various ways of fulfilling the need for transcendence one of the most important ways this happens for a lot of characters is the conscious or unconscious mimicry of humanity these supposedly perfect almost godlike beings that are so cool to the androids dedicate their existence to them and the machines decided if they were much better than the alias that created them the religious machines are doing just that by mimicking classical judeo-christian religion as an answer for the existential questions so what happens when the figurehead of the machine religion dies all the machines are looking for something to believe in for their worldview has just fallen off a chair and his head's popped off the short answer is that they go for Jonestown and tried to kill each other in an effort to quote become as gods the only way they can rationalize the death of their priest is to save her here send it to heaven when he died the this cannot continue motif also makes her reappearance here humans and human-like entities need something to contextualise the world but when the target of our belief goes away and we don't have that context things get messy fast so you've got to fight your way out in escape midway through 9s says he's hacked a robot and is helping you out okay we'll get to that later what I like about the crazy machine cult is that it isn't just a great standalone look into the growth of the machines but it's also a nice little microcosm of the larger plot developments see the finale with Adam dead that much more emotional Eve has gone well a bit nutty and so have all the machines under his control just as the Coke machines devolved into violence and anger when confronted with scary reality so do the surface machines after Eve this time the existential emptiness manifesting in eat some people gross there are a series of boss fights with this mini boss baked worm thing and finally Eve himself it's good to see here that Eve is bereaved and not handling it well he lashes our world that is now a devoid of meaning without Adam just as the cultist machine stood before him towards the end of this fight 9s hacks Eve to help defeat him Benz of gang corrupted by exposure to the Machine AI there is no cure and he needs to be killed it's at this point the blindfolds on 9s and to become off as the Ark reaches its emotional core and oh I see used pretty heavily as symbolism in near automata in particular red eyes used to convey more facial intelligence or insanity with all the hostile machines or other characters when they give in to their lower selves flashing red and the androids only really showing their real emotions when their eyes are exposed it's here in the remnants of the battlefield if to be finally exposes her affection for lioness while being forced to choke him out just like how she quote-unquote killed him at the start of the game just as things were about to end on a real downer this machine head starts flashing sending to B into a vengeful rage only for her to realize a copy of 9's is still alive because he hacked that machine during his repairs and got scattered across the network route a ends on the idea that with 9's is brain inside a machine the barrier between machines and androids is finally shown to be non-existent both are artificial life-forms yet with the potential for emotion and consciousness of a human because they both learn to understand the world and relate to it ah well that's that's some that's that's that that's it that's the end of the story what was the moment of that lady then Pascal and the machines and all that nonsense what the hell that's what I was thinking when I finished route a a profound sense of that was it something the game plays on when it hints you should really go and play new game + enter route B now if Rou a was the set up and outlining the things the game is gonna talk about the route B is the main portion and we can actually get into some philosophical nitty-gritty that big question again is how can we find meaning in a fundamentally meaningless world we now understand the with an awareness of the world and consciousness comes the existential threat of the unknown you're forced to comprehend a world so big and complicated so you can't really have any sort of meaningful effect on it something clearly shown when the story gets completely reset and you have to play all the way through again the first thing you'll notice is that this time we're playing through the eyes of 9s and not to be and with this change of perspective comes a a change in perspective namely the route a is filthy filthy lies why did you betray us command is the one that betrayed you you might recall how I've been talked about the machines evolving as you progress with the story as well as to bees we'll call it dedication to your heart and it's ideology well Ruby immediately opens with this little vignette showing that the machines have been conscious long before you arrived there's this goofy kind of touching scene with a machine trying to help repair its quote-unquote brother while 9's watches this little scene has family relationships non reciprocal altruism it shows the ability to learn and plan for future events all of these big hairy unconscious Flags during a point of the game where you didn't even know the machines could talk there's more stuff to all the bosses which previously just had weird alien characters for names now have names in English thanks partially for 9's is hacking abilities but also to his curiosity and open-mindedness to be sees only the alien characters because to her that's all the machines are mindless faceless servants of an enigmatic enemy but to 9's they're still enemies but their enemies with a personality behind them and we get a real insight into why 9's changes his tune faster than to be it's his childlike curiosity and naivety speaking of bosses nearly all of the bosses and a few non boss characters are actually named after famous philosophers in only the most deliciously ironic ways marks and angles are two of these big factory guys and they're named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is that I pronounce it an idea the two writers of the Communist Manifesto and their factories the very places where the proletariat toil for the benefit of capitalism you've also got Simone named after legendary feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir in brewed a this nameless weirdly feminized robot is a neat gimmick but ultimately pretty inconsequential it's only in Ruby do you learn the truth she like many machines pored over human records in their vast database for a solution to the existential tried to plague them as a result of their consciousness she found the concepts of romantic love and gender roles she tried everything to get another machine to love her even trying to make herself a sexless machine conform to human standards of female beauty by warping her body and eating other machines something that's explicitly state to make a wanton vomit in a clear allusion to eating disorders as well as taking parts from far more human androids but it was never enough the target of her affections rejects her and we get this haunting line I gaze into the mirror in its reflection I see owning my own meaninglessness and so I scream like so many other machines she looked for meaning and purpose in humanity and came up way short this led to help rejecting these ideas and finding meaning only in her more basal impulses you can actually meet the guy who turned her down in the machine village he's called jean-paul named after jean-paul Sartre philosophical contemporary and partner of Simone de Beauvoir in real life except the road what copying him has taken his real life open relationship and has instead become a controlling as tension seeking [ __ ] his SciQuest is pretty much a meet and greet of some female identifying robots who have developed an unrequited unhealthy love for him to the point of competing with each other for him jean-paul couldn't be less interested and Ashley pieces out long before he can be confronted with these feelings it's it's pretty funny at a sad song where we learn all about these moments in these little vignettes that happen when you beat bosses and when you enter a new area they fill in little bits of backstory but it's never clear where the simple is coming from as far as I can work out it's not really coming from anywhere these lost segments and interludes where 9s and Toby's pods have a chat deliberately break the flow of gameplay for a reason the separate you vanilla text it reminds you just as the switch from to beat and I nested that you aren't actually these characters you're just controlling them as some sort of God slash observer these vignettes continue as you progress through the midsection of the story we learn how the forest Kingdom was founded by a machine who wanted to protect the units under its command so what went rogue and created a society of its own and then when it died the machines put its memory into a childlike machine named Emmanuel after debatably the father of modern philosophy an Enlightenment era philosopher called Immanuel Kant of course this is another ironically or not Emmanuel the machine will never be able to grow so he simply stuck forever at the start of his life just like how car never got to see the fruits of his philosophical labor many machines and Androids Dylan released strive towards a human ideal trying to live lives the humans would have wanted this is a very traditional way of looking at things that there's a meta-narrative or a faith in this case belief in humanity that we can use to understand the world in its entirety and at least partially find meaning in a meaningless world the same can be said for Eve's adoration of Adam and 9s is crucial to be their affection towards their partner conceptually grounds them in the same way a belief in the power of humanity does to other less advanced machines at least Adam and other characters however approach this same issue in a very post modernist way he doesn't see humans as gods in fact these priests cynical of divinity in general he lusts after their power of creativity and emotion as a way of making himself more powerful than to give himself more agency he doesn't really care what humanity is is only what it can do for him and the machines under his control if we quickly backtrack Taub Roman Baths death of the author we can see how the characters who aspire to be more like classical thinkers consider the author in this case humanity be very much alive and they follow the perceived ideology of the human race for Adam and some other machines the author is dead the legacy of humanity is just as meaningless as the world that birthday Adam just wants to distribute four parts in a literal and figurative sense both to make himself more aware of the world and to make him physically more able the ways we find meaning in texts unsurprisingly translates into the different ways we see and experience the real world some people find meaning and purpose in ideas like religion or political ideology others find meaning in the self as other cool new details in route B like the sad backstory for this giant boss machine we mentioned earlier who just wants to find his way home but things play out mostly the same until 9s and 2b get separated whilst captured by Adam there's this great scene that plays out between him and 9s where Adam does the whole we're not so different villain speech pointing out that despite how much he tries to hide it 9s and all androids are fundamentally driven by emotion and sentimentality awesomely delivered in this out of nowhere line you're thinking about how much you want to [ __ ] to be it's awesome and totally lays bare the futility of the androids and no emotion rules your has rules to limit personal connection emotion and all the other things are literally keeping the androids from fulfilling that final part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and reaching their full potential because they were unable to totally express themselves and are punished for feeling affection of being creative even in small ways like 9s is nicknamed nines humans were made powerful by these things and so are the androids and so if he gets his way will Adam of course that's not the case and to me kills him 9s is then sent back to the Android base the bunker to recuperate while to be goes to talk to the machine church while hacking into the machine network to help to b9s discover some files in the network relating to the project has stopped now this is actually somewhat from the original Muir but the long and short of it is that it was an attempt to save humanity from a deadly disease whilst androids then called replicants filled in the gaps on earth after a talk with the yeha commander after uncovering this the real truth is revealed the project was a failure and all the humans died but they died thousands of years before the aliens of the machines even arrived this is by far the biggest twist in the game and it comes out of absolutely nowhere the Council of humanity you've the war against the machines it's all essentially a lie your heart isn't a special acting machine task force they exist to get the androids of purpose with their primary goal by design being to serve humanity without any humans to serve those behind project Cass don't fear the androids will go crazy so they put measures in place to pretend that humanity was still alive any androids who get to aware of what's going on and find out the truth well let's just say there's a reason you don't see them around this compromised allowed the androids to continue show of purpose without being forced to confront what's arguably the biggest threat in the game the existential dread of nothingness after that and the game's resolution happens like we'd expect cannibal machines Eve fight 9s dies the whole shebang but unlike route a things don't end there after a bit of R&R at a replacement body to B and 9s are ready to lead the charge against the weakened machines to hopefully finish them off now the Adam and Eve are around the strike seems to go well at first but machines managed to rally an EMP the hell have to be and the other androids when 9's runs in to help haxe to be in order to safer something weird happens to the other androids their eyes go red and they well you better see for yourself in a throwback to the intro to be kills 9s for the third time and detonates their black boxes to kill the crazy androids and wake up back on the base when they try to tell your commander about the crazy virus it affects the whole bunker in this very creepy scene mini 9s to be and the commander have to escape fighting past their comrades and all the infected Android in order to do so at the last moment it's revealed that the you are commander is infected two 9s and 2p escape leaving her behind and we watch the bunker and by extension yaja explode without a humanity to protect and with winning the war well out of reach 9s and to be pretty much now only have each other but they end up crash landing in different places with the duo separated 9s loses his chance that tells you be the truth about humanity but also about his real feelings we get control of juvie and as she fights off some robots she gets infected too this is one of the most genius scenes in the game as the virus begins to infect you first you get graphical glitches like when you get hacked by an enemy then you start shorting out before long you lose the ability to attack or run or really do anything as the little percentage counters showing your infection creeps ever higher then the distorted Council of humanity message starts playing reminding you that everything that happened all the time you put into two playthroughs if the same game was for nothing and you didn't even get to see to be and diners make out [Applause] [Applause] tbh resolves to essentially kill herself to stop the virus from spreading so she needs to get to a safe place so that when she shuts down for good she doesn't infect anyone else right before you get to a safe area you get ambushed by enemies that ordinarily wouldn't be a challenge but in your weakened state beat the hell out of you right up until huh this lady again you get to briefly play as eight - as she wipes the floor with these enemies and seems to recognize to be take care of everyone for me take care of the future eh - you'll then switch to 9s just in time - you know what just watch the cutscene in all of its melodramatic anime glory to be to be are you nice to me and there's the title card this is where the game actually begins welcome to route C route C the final and shortest route is where the game goes from simply presenting these complicated philosophical ideas to actually taking a stand on them let's review where we are right now machines and androids are intelligent and capable of consciousness however with that awareness comes the existential threat of the big unknowable questions it's this dread that can drive people to madness if not tackled in some way but the question is how to do that near presents two main schools of thought firstly finding meaning in the past in this case the Bolton line worship of humanity by both the machines and the androids this faith in humanity as are still living author acts as a philosophical anchor for the Androids and the disconnected machine societies giving them an unreachable ideal to constantly work towards reinterpret and study however this outlook is insular and at times reductivist neither the androids nor the machines disconnected from the network have made any meaningful progress in thousands of years once they've set up their little societies they just do the same thing over and over again in arbitrarily different ways because they can't see past a bit of humanity they're so desperately trying to copy the reason why the Renaissance and the Enlightenment kind of burnt out is because it obsessed over a tiny part of the world that existed more than a thousand years prior and was easily muscled out by people like the romantics who had a far more current and inclusive world view counter that with a more nihilistic post modernist viewpoint this is a view held primarily by Adam and Eve to varying degrees the euro commander Simone post going crazy and some of the other wise disillusioned characters in the game post modernity rejects the idea of an author telling us what to do and embraces the meaninglessness of reality by finding meaning in its own subjective relative experience post modernity is all about skepticism of morality faith good and evil and all the very things that the classical characters are trying to copy this means that the postmodernist characters have a much greater understanding of the reality of the world sure a lot for characters with a post modernist outlook are among the most powerful but at what cost invariably these characters end up destroying or consuming everything around them in order to fuel their growth eventually consuming themselves both physically and mentally as they slip further and further into meaningless directionless hunger with no inherent meaning to the world sooner or later they lose a sense of self for the best representation of post modernity taken to its worst extreme take a look at Tyler Durden in Fight Club the cancerous manifestation of hyper masculine self obsession it all boils down to the choice between stagnation and endless hopeless consumption of course you might be thinking despite how obsessed both of these sites are with humans that doesn't describe us at all first and foremost were hardly transcendental and unlike these two groups we neither totally obsessed with replicating an imagined ideal nor are we destroying everything around us yeah well for the most part at least what are the characters in new automata missing well that's one ending C D and E which I'm gonna broadly call route C for ease is trying to tell us route C starts off by showcasing yet another emergent intelligence in the form of the pods to B and 9s is little floating AI helpers / guns you might have seen a little scene of them talking a while back but now they're making decisions for themselves they decide that because they're all that is left of the your support system is their duty to guide the two remaining your androids one pod one-seven-five keeps helping 9s and the other 42 goes to help a to who now has all the two-piece admin privileges from there you get to choose two to play us the game kind of intents you to keep switching between the two of various points but for ease of explanation I'll just do all of 9s first 9s is portion of the game begins with him in pretty rough shape but gets saved my devil at poplar the androids from earlier your Hut is gone two beers gone the war is well and truly lost the only thing keeping him going is his hatred of the machines now a two who took everything away from him the two redheaded Androids tell him to take it easy but 9s refuses running to try and destroy that big tower than emerged at the end of route B he gets knocked out and taunted by a creepy little girl voice it turns out that he needs to go to three resource gathering structures that have appeared across the map and get keys within them to unlock the tower pretty videogame II but okay the first one he goes to his in the forest and we see that the forest kingdom has all but devolved into vengeful far more aggressive soldiers with none of the discipline or structure before now that their king is dead the resource gathering platform is well it's literally that the tower is absorbing the forest kingdom machines and reprocessing them into raw materials to be shipped back to the tower 9s having sworn vengeance on the machines climbs through an enemy gauntlet right to the top during the dialogue sections it's clearer than 9s is becoming more and more unhinged even killing machines that are begging for mercy and this one captured forest Moria who taunts 9's as a last resort it's pretty brutal the second platform unfolds in much the same way but it's this weird gamey series of hacking challenges just like how the previous platform was a combat challenge the creepy machine voice even goes so far as to reward two 9s for his hacking and combat abilities as he progresses [Music] they're just messing with us either metaphorically or because they merged minds admit during the hacking sequence 9s is beginning to take on a demand particularly Eve's philosophical outlook a destructive cycle into meaninglessness as things that were once important stopped mattering it becomes clear that 9s is beginning to lose sight of why he's fighting in the first place with this disturbing scene that shows him blindly hacking away a representation of to be his love for her and her subsequent death that pretty much all that's keeping him going but even that is starting to slip away the targets for his rage aide to and the machines are basically completely arbitrary and he knows killing them won't suffice problems 9s his ambivalence is also shown when he totally brushes off the plot bombshells that stake that your ha Android black boxes are made out of repurposed machine course and of the wall between androids and machines is a farce from the start there's something that kept them locked in a stalemate whenever the Android started to win they were pushed back by the same logic virus that blew up the bunker to reset the status quo the fact that yoha androids and machines have the same makeup is what made them so easy to hack this would have been an emotional climax anywhere else and 9s just kind of denies it just as the foundations of 9ss reality of fallen apart so are your whole reasons for playing the game literally nothing you did in the entirety of roots a or be mad at all everything you knew was a lie one of the protagonists is dead and the other is becoming impossible to relate to when what's worse is that you've got nothing to replace it with you've got to carry on with 9s slashing through legions of machines without context without purpose just the thrill of destruction and the drip-feed of simplistic video gaming rewards so then what happened to command let's go take a look at a to a character who's been a bit of an enigma for ages throughout our playtime with her we get little snippets of her past and it's made pretty clear that she was one of the first your high units and she and her squad were essentially sentient to die together Intel a two survived and then defected and began a one-woman war not just on your ha but also the machines that killed her friends her first segment sees her facing off against a really [ __ ] boss that I hate and a brief hacking segment that shows her memories merging with two bees it's mostly an introduction to ATO as a character but there is one thing I want to talk about a2 is quite clearly a fan of the destructive cycle that 9s is slipping down into to begin with she's even got a special ability Berserker mode that consumes her health to deal more damage forcing you to use upgrades that heal you when you deal damage or destroy enemies furthering this cycle however I at least quickly realized that this ability is a total trap it makes you feel powerful but you'll never be in a situation where you're not an immediate risk of dying and when you run out of health you're put in a vulnerable situation where this boss which just spams attacks at you can easily finish you off B mode actually makes you play the way how a to Adam and now 9s think a tornado of destruction really only concerned with sustaining yourself because what comes afterwards is the vulnerability you're so desperately running away from I didn't use B mode at all after this boss and I think that's the intended play style as a 2's route is all about her moving away from that and into the other main philosophical outlook while a2 certainly starts off as directionless and savage as 9s now is throughout her quests you don't actually do that much fighting instead you meet and get to know Pascal in the passive his robots and over time a twos rough edges soften while she never really fits him with Pascal the machines a2 begins to understand that this something was protecting from the all-consuming machine Network the legacy of humanity in the remaining non-hostile machines and androids which the tower in the machines thrown to destroy however the good times don't last and Pascal's village is attacked from within with many of the once peaceful machines going berserk and forcing him in a - to flee with a group of childlike machines but the bad guy machines clearly catch up forcing Pascal on a - to take up arms to defend a children in any other story the moral here would be how pacifism is all well and good but the right way to live is to stand up and fight against evil that's certainly where the game makes you think it's going when it gives you this awesome cathartic fight with Pascal controls the angles Goliath from the very start the game to do battle with this big army kaiju style however this is near automata when a - and Pascal get back they find all the child machines dead not killed by an enemy they committed suicide out of fear a fear that Pascal himself instilled in them this destroys Pascal almost literally and it makes one thing very clear that there is no single right answer pacifism defending yourself both are imperfect misery failure and suffering are inevitable parts of being human and the matter what you believe in what meta-narrative you follow you'll always have to confront this eventualities a distraught Pascal asks you to either kill him or wipe his memories both options are equally horrifying both of these options once again represent that jewel failed ideologies on display to kill Pascal would end his meaningless existence but it does nothing but perpetuate the meaningless cycle he spent his whole life tried to escape to delete his memories is to sacrifice everything for an imaginary ideal the damage is done and if Pascal memories are deleted will Pascal as we know him die - you're left with nothing but a hollow shell filled with nothing but the same timid pacifistic rhetoric that caused this whole mess to begin with I did neither I walked away leaving Pascal to his suffering why well to understand that we've got to finish the game the third and final resource collection platform is pretty vague details wise you meet up with devil a popular one last time before fighting up as 9s when you get to the top there's a boss fight with the corrupted Android a - saves 9's in the nick of time and just as they're about to fight 9s drops to the floor leaving you with a crazy boss version of the brother BOTS from the start a brute be nothing much to be said here to be honest - beyond the continued break down with your preconceived notions about the game their very finale of nuit or two though oh boy is that loaded with stuff to talk about the first segment sees you finally hacking into the tower now that the three platforms are offline it's really long and impossible to do because you keep getting attacked that's until develo a popular turn up to help you sacrificing themselves to open the door it's here you get a look at their backstory which I'd highly recommend you read as it fills in a lot of the gap between automata and the original near game but that's not really relevant to this video the important thing about this vignette is develo and Popular's relationship they wander the world as pariahs because of a terrible crime committed by a different pair of Androids of their model as such their lives are miserable pointless and filled with a decidedly unearned guilt but unlike so many characters they persevere because they have each other their suffering only brings them closer together right until the end where they sacrifice themselves to help 9's symbolically redeeming all devilish and Popular's everywhere why do the Android Stella impalas seem to prefer death over surviving alone there was a very high probability that at least one go to the state I hope you never have to understand affirmative this is a pan repeated throughout the game that we only really noticed when it shoved in our face by devil and popular Adam and Eve start off as brothers but they grow more distant and that leads to Adams obsession and Eve's crazy bereaved tantrum Simona has a love for jean-paul but goes mental when it's not returned to be and 9s stuck together through thick and thin but 9s breaks down the moment she dies all of the characters for a loan lose their sense of self and their higher levels of consciousness but characters who form interpersonal connections actually gain it look at the pawns who go from emotionless robots to a fully fledged characters over the course of the game some of the best bits in brutes see other little quips pod oh four - makes the 80s expense constantly calling her stupid they're actually really funny the journey up the tower sees you switching between 9s and a-two as they try to reach the top 9s and a twos respective segments in the tower both exposed the same flaws in the opposites viewpoint 9s runs into a bunch of stuff that just totally annihilates any hope he could possibly have him big-picture meta-narratives like love pacifism and stuff like that by reminding you - the universe is a cold uncaring place that doesn't give a [ __ ] if you have to fight clones of your dead girlfriend get blown up or have to infect yourself with a machine virus just to keep going a 2's route is much the same it exposes the fallacy of a singular perfection in this virtual fight with the AI network itself personified by this little girl the AI network is defeated when a - lets it keep recursively evolving changing itself over and over again until it's devoid of coherent meaning and turns on itself holding up a mirror to the trajectories of Adam and 9s it also gives us some extra details about the machines hacking into the bunker essentially the machines were always in the bunker systems and could have won the war at any time but kept the androids in the fight as an army of living training dummies the second-to-last boss is an awesome fight the switches between 9s and a-two as they fight - harms of a single mega robot the robot harms are named Koshi and Roshi which aren't Japanese for Confucius and lousy two Chinese philosophers credited with popularizing Taoist ideas of mutual balance and harmony illustrated when they form of Voltron style into this yin-yang form to become greater than the sum of their parts this bit is actually really on the nose 9s and eighties philosophies despite being in many ways polar opposites share a floor in common they're both intrinsically narcissistic one in obsession over personal adherents to a made-up immaterial idea the other ring cutting itself off from a world it perhaps quite rightly infuses false it's as we ramp up to the final battle that we can now get a handle on that big question how can we derive meaning from a fundamentally meaningless world the answer is somewhat paradoxically by sharing that meaninglessness in a world that doesn't care about you where bad things will happen whether you like it or not and where your very existence is cosmically arbitrary the only real source of meaning is in how you relate to the only other thing that can understand where you're coming from other people consciousness as we've seen is nothing more than the ability to understand and react to the world around you and actively affect change within it by following only your interpretation of a single idea we're not questioning it we'll never advance your understanding of how it and by extension the world really work by cutting yourself off from everything for your own relativistic understanding you'll only spiral deeper into a warped increasingly more insular worldview until there's nothing left to reject but yourself but by sharing in this cruel arbitrary suffering something special happens we become the barfi and author what near automata is trying to tell us is that the author is no longer dead nor really alive we need to kill the author and take their place we need to interpret the world but use our own relative understanding to shape that interpretation and then crucially share it for others to repeat the cycle for the more literature minded among you News philosophy has the goal of ezra pound's modernism but from a border Rd and post modernist perspective the world might still be pointless and bad things still might happen but by deriving a fluid externally derived meaning in other people that suffering can instead inform our understanding of the world rather than jeopardize it that is why I let Pascal live because whilst his experiences have been horrible so long as he and a to learn from them and share those experiences the suffering won't have been in vain speaking of suffering in vain as 9s and a to face off at the top of the tower there's one final bomb shelter we drop all the fight begins the to be wasn't who she said she was she was a special you're her unit designed to kill 9s units who learnt the truth because they were too smart for their own good this little reveals serves to purely finish emotionally detaching you from the characters themselves and focus more on the abstract ideas the game is playing with as you'll make to choose between 9s and a2 of course this choice is pretty much arbitrary the game has been setting this fight up is the most inconsequential possible choice for about eight to ten hours now it's a battle between two pointless life-forms over ideas that don't exist people that died long ago in a crumbling testament to the futility were all with pretty much nothing of consequence on the line in the event 9s wins he kills a two but true to his outlook ends up getting mortally wounded and we treat to a little dream sequence when 9s is shown the error of his ways before he either dies always uploaded into the machine Network if a2 wins she cures 9s and destroys the tower sacrificing herself to do so it's the better ending of the two but all it does is restore the status quo neither ending is really very satisfying but maybe that's the point maybe the pointlessness of the vowel was because we're supposed to realize there's no way to answer that big question at all and my conclusion is total [ __ ] right wrong once you've seen both endings C and D the pods interrupt the credits to say that they're not happy with how things worked out their programming states that they should wipe everything and complete their purpose given to them and that's it but they like you and me find that arrangement unsatisfying they have found meaning in spite of the futility of ending C and D ending e the real final boss is a fight against the authors of the game as you figuratively kill them to make the story your own this shmup section starts easy but eventually gets nigh impossible every time you die the game challenges the conclusion you should have drawn asking you do you want to continue do you think the world is meaningless do you accept defeat the answer of course is no the game confronts you with the meaninglessness of existence but if you'll notice in the background messages are appearing not from the game but from other players eventually after you've died a few times the solo singer in the credit song will be joined by a choir and your lone ship will be joined by all the players who've been encouraging you giving you the necessary boost that beat this shmoop segment and get to the end for a game about death and suffering and existential dread the fact that the conclusion it draws at the end of it all is thus a pious twist wholesome possible one is the mark of a very special experience you've become the author of your own story but there's another side to it just as we've metaphorically killed the author loco taro and the entire automata team and taken their place so do we need to accept that the story we've just created can't exist forever and needs to be allowed to die in order to inspire new people and help them understand the world that's why once you've left an encouraging message for everyone playing ending e you're asked to give up your rights as an author to give someone else that same chance the only correct answer is to delete your save data to do just that and maybe make a youtube video to share this experience with people who haven't played the game you know just throw it out there 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 one five three two pods zero four two how is it going I am embarrassed why is that I launched a suicide attack and yet here I am still alive I must look very silly do not feel bad about it we are alive after all and being alive is pretty much a constant stream of embarrassment that concept is a bit too abstract for me to understand it time I will save it in my list of things to analyze later question pon 0 4 - did the data Salvage restore all of their past memories yes and are those recovered parts of the same design as previous ones yes then won't that simply lead us to the same conclusion as before I cannot deny the possibility and as the final cutscene rolls pod Oh for to fittingly named after the meaning of life sums this whole thing up beautifully a future is not given to you it is something you must take for yourself glory to mankind and thank you for watching you

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 577,141

Keywords: Nier, Nier Automata, 2B, 9S, A2, Adam, Eve, Pascal, Architect of Games, AoG, Video Essay, Philosophy, Critique, Review, Music, Automata, Adam Millard, Nihilism, Postmodernism, Gaming, Games, Videogames, Video game, RPG, Story, Platinum, Narrative

Id: 4EnbSokFpjQ

Length: 60min 39sec (3639 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018