A Story Analysis of Nier Automata

So fun fact, I’m just starting this video, huge Nier fan btw, and I don’t know if you ever touch on this yet but there is also a raid series in Final Fantasy XIV that is a Nier crossover and at the risk at muddy-ing the waters even further where timelines are concerned, is confirmed by yoko taro to be canon to the Nier universe as well

No game has ever made me proud to delete my data until Nier:Automata

In one of the Terry Pratchett books (The Fifth Elephant) there is a scene towards the end where commander Vimes talks to the king of the dwarves. It's about a dwarven relic that has been forged and the king explain that the relic has to be replaced every few hundred years either way and he explains it by talking about his family heirloom axe: Of course sometimes the handle gets changed, embellishments are added or the blade gets switched out, but that doesn't change its status of being a family heirloom. The story of the android replacing most of his body reminded me of that.

After some twenty five years, this game finally took the #1 spot from metal gear solid as my favorite video game ever.

Another interesting insight is how the game rejects philosophers. All throughout the game you fight against philosophers like engels, simone, grun etc and you kill them which is symbolic of you literally rejecting their beliefs and ideals and instead the game is telling players to choose their own ideals and forge their own path, not have your life be dictated by others.

Imagine sacrificing your save file only for gingy to come along and destroy it along with 50 other saves because he cant dodge red balls properly. XD

Once again, you have absolutely blown me away with this story analysis. You have a serious talent for this and i absolutely love your content keep up the amazing work

So fun fact about the credits, it most certainly isn’t imposible, I know because I did not have internet when I beat the game and because of that I had to solo that shit not know there was an easier way. I didn’t now until I replayed the game last year. I just assumed Yoko Taro was being a bastard again. It took me a while but I love me some bullet hell so I enjoyed the challenge.

Im actually flabbergasted that you managed to obfuscate the story without lying until you said "all of them are on the moon".

The "white chlorination sickness ended and humanity moved on" was so slick I slid off my seat

You have to delve into rhe drakengard story. Drakengard 1 is my second favorite narrative in the series

Well done, Sir! 😊

Thank you for this beautiful video

fav game. Definitely the game I've thought about the most; the story is a masterclass on what humanity even is.

I finished up a second playthrough in preparation for the upcoming orchestra concerts and happened to see this video just days before completion. Great recap and analysis. I committed to wiping my save data this time, as I didn't have the heart to do so last time. My message was similar to yours: "This world is rife with hardship. And yet, the whole world is rooting for you." Such a touching game with one of the most beautiful endings. Thank you for this video.

another little detail is that 2B's appearance is based of A2

YEEEESSSS MY FAVORITE

Honestly I enjoy your content a lot I remember coming across this channel by mistake when I just wanted to find out more about dark souls and look at me now I have watched I think all if not just 2 videos or 5 videos remaining idk 😂 look man all I have to say is keep doing what you do I love your content and I do hope you do continue to do what you do as it gives us an insight into some of these games because we can't obtain them or don't have the time for them... Anyways I have said a lot of there is another platform you use to communicate with your fan base please tell me. Again thank you Gingy btw I'm from Africa Zambia to be exact, so just know you content is reaching many places

I remember seeing images of this game/2B and people praising it for how great it was and just thinking “well duh they’re playing as the most scantily dressed protagonist ever, there’s probably not much else to it”. I could not have been more wrong. To this day, Nier Automata has been one my favorite gaming experiences of all time. So much so, that even watching the this video brings back the emotions I felt while playing for the first time.

You make really good videos

Wasn't enough of a masterpiece for Square Enix not to give NieR Re[in]carnation the axe after less than three years of existence apparently.

yeah sorry i can't watch this shit when you call the androids "robots" showing you clearly didn't actually pay any attention to the story. absolutely embarrassing.

Have you thought giving a try to the Fire Emblem Franchise? 3 Houses which is my personal favorite has a lot of analysis of their characters and their world building and I would find it very interesting to hear your opinions

Nier is a story like no other. There is no compare. Yoko Taro is head and shoulders above the rest.

Yoko Taro is the Goat

Idk man i tried this game but the weird 2d 3d stuff and the gameplay was really odd and honestly boring

That was awesome

the weight of the world is such a perfect song to wrap up the game with.

the first line that is sang in that song made me go from feeling emotional, to instantly crying. i legit had tears going down my face because of how amazing it was. like, when we as gamers talk about good moments in gaming, good endings, good games, whatever have you, this is one of them. its one of those things that without context, you wouldnt understand at all. if you only played the last few sections of the game, you wouldnt understand it. if you played the first few sections and for some reason skipped to the ending, you wouldnt understand it. after playing through a solid 40ish hours of story and paying attention to all of it, i genuinely cannot believe someone would hear that song play and not feel at least somewhat emotional.

i dont have much to say that wasnt said in the video, but i cant get over how amazing the ending was. i just played the game in may of last year, and im shocked that it took me that long to give the game a try. i even gave up on it in the first couple hours the first time i bought it. refunded it because it didnt click. never stopped hearing about how amazing the game was, and after i watched the episode in the anime where they fight the opera singer machine, i decided to give it one last try. completely changed my mind before even reaching the end of route A. such a masterpiece of a game, albeit a hard sell to some people because of how many different things it tries to do, even if thats part of what makes it so good.

HI everyone! I've been another "ship with a message" for a few years by now.... I would like you all to listen to Skar Productions version of Weight of the World... It's as good as the original versión!

I played through this game half a dozen times i recently replayed it and still found things i hadn't before. The account of the hawaii incursion. And the fact you can spare pascal. And that 2B was modeled after A2. Or just realizing that Eve was far more human than Adam. Truly a masterpiece

I don't get why everyone jizzes over this game. it has one of the least visually appealing aesthetics of any sci fi game I've played. bland, washed out, staring at brown and grey for 30 hours.

You saying you hated the "not talking about things" trope at the end shows you didn't get the first Nier game...or this one.

The games are about people thinking they're right based on their perspective. Not talking about these things is the point. The first game was inspired by the war on terror.
Kaine could understand the shades, but her hate of them because of what one did to her grandmother is what drives her to hid this fact from the party.

How you misunderstood one of the games biggest messages is beyond me.

I've never cried for a game like I did for nier Automata, especially for the mission to beat simone I related to her all too well

This was amazing! Thank you!

On the topic of 9s's emotional arc, While 2B's name can be read as the question 2b or not to be, 9s's name can be read in german as Nien Es. Translating to 'not to be'.

A2's may also be referring to Julius Ceasers last words, but this one is admittedly a bit of a stretch.

That was a great analysis, loved the game

This is like my 20th Nier video!

This is my favorite game I loved it so much. They need to make another

If anyone is worried about combat or doubts themselves, you get chips to upgrade your character, you can add chips to you that effects movement, attacks, auto fire guns and dodging meaning your character will will fight and dodge all attacks you're basically just have to move your character to each location throughout the game, sit back and watch your character do all the work for you, it's cheating but hey it's a option for you

On paper, this game is interesting. In practice I was pretty over it long before the ending. The gameplay is passable, and story is interesting, but the way they deliver it just didn't do it for me. Route A didn't tell you all that much on its own, and having to do Route B just to learn a LITTLE bit more didn't justify it's runtime. The philosophy was pretty surface-level throughout. The story was somewhat predictable, and the revelations that I didn't see coming didn't really hit. I tried so hard to care. Some bosses are dope, the music is great, and I think all the gamey fourth-wall breaking stuff is very cool. but the final cherry on the 80 hour slog of a cake is that the game kept crashing during the credits after the 9S/A2 fight, so I couldn't even see that last ending lol. The PC port is godawful and they never fixed it. Great video though! It did make me appreciate it a lot more than I did while playing. If I ever feel like reexperiencing this game, I'll save myself the time and just watch this again!

thanks for the video. i would like to sugest a plague tale, i think they are so beautiful, i don't have the opportunity to play

Calm voice? Check
Long videos? Check
Tons of videos? Check

Well, I found who I'm watching while working for the next bit.

Ah yes, the memory of playing the ending trough a veil of tears. 😌
I think it's time to replay again.

I remember letting my savefile get deleted, then downloaded it again from the ps4 cloud :)

I loved this game so much it was my first tattoo

All your vids are top tier! Please do borderlands one day!

i dont play Replicant before i played automata.. but that fight with emil at the end of his quest make me cry... and when i watch a video about connection in replicant and automata.. i cried harder.. wkwkk

One thing that you missed is that Pascal is also based on a philosopher of the same name: Blaise Pascal. His most famous contribution to philosophy is a thought experiment called Pascal's Wager, which basically says that it is better to believe in God than to not, because Pascal believed that you gain more in the long run for believing in God, as opposed to being an atheist. He sets up 2 variables: God (and therefore heaven and hell) being real or not, and a person believing in God or not. Here are his thoughts on each outcome of the different variables when you die:
Belief and God is real: go to heaven
Belief and God is not real: nothing
Does not believe and God is real: go to hell
Does not believe and God is not real: nothing

Based on this experiment, Pascal says that the atheist has very little to gain and everything to lose. Either nothing happens when they die, or they go to hell. But the theist, either goes to heaven or nothing happens, so the theist has everything to gain, and very little to lose.

This argument has accrued many criticisms over the years, but the two most common are that this argument is made from a uniquely catholic perspective of the afterlife, and that the experiment assumes that there is only one religion. His logic completely falls apart when you try to use another religion's afterlife. For example, the wager almost seems to flip on its head when looking at it from a Jewish perspective. There is not Jewish hell, only a purgatory (called Gehenna), where everyone (with one or two named exceptions) is scrubbed of their sins for a maximum of 1 year, then go to heaven. When compared to magnitude of eternity, what does that one year matter? The other criticism is that it assumes that there is only one religion at all, and is a vast oversimplification of the actual problem. If we don't know that the Catholic God exists, then how do we know that the Greek Pantheon doesn't exist? With even just 1 more religion thrown into the thought experiment, the amount of possible outcomes doubles. Imagine trying to account for every religion on Earth.

You can kind of see the parallels to Pascal in Nier. He chose to believe in the closest thing he had to God: humans. He taught the machine children to live like them, to think like them, and most importantly, fear like them. He took the wager. And he lost.

Are we human because we have conflict, or is there conflict because we are human.

I am NOT deleting my save file