Big Spoiler Warning
To surmise this without coming off past the pedestal of philosophical repartee, Nier Automata is the kind of game that makes you question your biological disposition in this world. Like, am I born to make people feel bad, or is it something else to ponder about, like why I don't fix my life problems for the sake of helping myself progress to be a better person? Both functionally and to have a future to look forward to.
This game made me think that machines could almost struggle with their purpose in life than human beings do. While we're blessed with biology and our connection to mother nature, the androids, and robots here have nothing but absolute carnage to bring on one against the other. In the meantime dealing with their problems in 1s and 0s.
I guess I shouldn't have to care since it's robots fighting against one another, basically, beings that have no biological or real holistically conscious proponents that have human beings come with.
Machines are easy to create, fix, and destroy. So why does a game like this make me reconsider how I look at what values life? Even if they are built facsimiles based on our image? Like god, like his creation.
Ok, enough introspective mumbo jumbo then, I will be deciphering just exactly what Yoko Taro was trying to tell me while playing this game. Yoko Taro likes to be cryptic about his work in general anyways. So time to enlighten ourselves.
Nier Automata is a sequel game to Nier and a spin-off series to Drakengaard. In the original game, mankind faced a threatening disease that has wiped out most of civilization. The modern world faced desecration and ruin as the disease took over the world, so project Gestalt was created.
A way to create synthetic bodies to protect themselves by making them immune to it while their subconsciousness, stored in protected facilities would be transplanted in those bodies.
Meanwhile, other humans had no choice but to join the Legion. A terrible force created by a monster from Drakengaard's world that was wiping humanity out, no other options, they used the magic from a dragon they've killed to create project Gestalt. Humans hibernated till the world was safe and returned to their bodies.
But, the bodies became A.I. sentients. They were called Replicants. They were starting to reject their Gestalt hosts. Playing Nier Replicant will tell you more, but am going to refrain from mentioning more of the lore, because that part is very tricky to explain and time-consuming.
Here's a video that should help. Now back to Nier Automata, you play as two androids from an organization named YoRHa, and another android that has defected from that group. After playing through different routes with different characters, you realize that character 2B, is actually 2E, that she has to stay close to 9S because his curiosity got the better of him, before realizing that it was all a ruse. That if he learns of YoRHa's darkest secret, 2B would have to kill him.
YoRHa(an organization made for humanity's salvation) is lying to every android model on earth fighting against the robots created by the alien races several years ago, of whom died after their own creation rebelled because they too were becoming sentient, after reading human data, they began to contextualize things. Humanity also died after project Gestalt failed, but none of the androids created by YoRHa knows that.
Some of the machines are fighting because remnants of the alien's programming still dwell within some of them. While others realize that it's all for nothing and begin to question their own existence. Both sides are now doomed to co-exist in this neverending fight, and lack of progress towards betterment, like humanity did for years. Nothing but pain and misery. While the androids have fragments of human emotions that came from their design, they have to be constantly reprogrammed after losing faith in the organization that made them.
The machines are recently learning what it feels to be alive, as they now have families, friends, in-laws, relatives, and so on. Mimicking human social relationships, before they get suddenly reprogrammed by a higher force working for the alien agenda, and then start killing each other.
Now, to divulge on the philosophical references, and make some comparisons, to understand the insane world, and the stories that Yoko Taro create.
Harlan Ellison wrote a book called "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". In it, 5 people have been tortured through various methods thanks to an A.I. that saw to it that the rest of humanity was destroyed and that to please himself, he has 5 humans to torture for eternity.
What's that to do with Nier Automata? Well, look at both factions fighting. Their torture is not finding the escape from the grueling cycle of death, and destruction. In Ellison's book, the A.I. tortures them because it wanted them to suffer much like the suffering they've caused on their own species. Whatever bit of humanity that was gained, was constantly tested, and destroyed time and time again. This was the hellhole they got stuck in while humanity was forever lost for thousands of years since the aliens invaded over 7 thousand years ago.
Though, the game didn't specifically state that this will always be the case. As the grand lesson is despite it all, is to try and break the cycle. And after reaching near the climactic ending of its last route, the game hints most of the time that eventually, after all that suffering, there's hope.
A bit of an oasis here, a village full of harmless alien robots there, and some fun to be had against one that becomes your sensei. Testing your skills and abilities to your limit. Not everything in this game is morose.
While it was Nietzsche who said time is a flat circle and also paved way for nihilism, he didn't mean that everything was just doom and gloom. Nietzsche's main philosophy is about looking at the despair that life gives, and finding drive through meaning. Finding purpose to overcome such a sad, decadent state of life. For anyone can find their convictions if they will it. A lot of the game's philosophy references Nietzsche the most. As well as Blaise Pascal, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Yoko Taro would describe the game's central theme with one word, "agaku". In this case, it means struggling out of the problem. The struggle to free oneself from the burdens of life is something we all kind of strive for. And is something I want to also reflect on as well.
Humanity is flawed, in so many ways. Some of us lack the thing that others have, so our envy drives us towards a goal of finding success, finding ways to spoil ourselves with materialistic needs. Sometimes there are things like pleasing your family that feel like a genuine goal, but not everyone gets what they want from it.
We are stuck in a so-called free world that is competitive, exhausting, and we struggle to find ways to validate ourselves. All the while we deal with resource crisis, the earth becoming hotter, the current predicament involving a virus, and then there's inflation.
As much as it's hard for these robots to find meaning in life, and break their cycles, it's also harder for us to make any big changes in our life without some sacrifice in order. And it's the kind of stories that Nier has with its densely rich lore, that makes it a great work of art for games as a whole.
But also, had an effect on how I view life in some shape or form. I am still playing the game, finishing the leftover side quests right before ending it on the last route. I am not a completionist, but for this one, I'd like to make a big exception.
