I am going to have to start this one out by saying I have yet to complete Nier: Automata, still to this day. I may also have cheated in the eyes of the game director in how I initially consumed his story the first time. Which may make this post seem incomplete, but I think I got plenty of value out of the story for my own personal perspectives in the first half of the game that I played. I heard about Nier years ago when it was released, but I was happily not a PlayStation owner anymore, and a computer gamer by the year 2017. I had watched the first 12 episodes of the Anime on Crunchyroll before I decided to play the game, and with the anime only in its first season, much of the game’s events have yet to be explored. So yes, technically, I still have no clue how the story actually ends, only just inklings I have seen through foreshadowing.
Yoko Taro, the game director for Nier, borrowed creative storytelling techniques from other mediums and mixed them with game mechanics as unorthodox as anything you’d find in a Souls game. Taro purposefully antagonizes and frustrates the player from the opening moments of the game. Never leaving the player time to question their surroundings or how anything actually works. This was done masterfully, except I already had my hindsight going into the video game from the anime. Taro’s use of tight and awkward camera angles that put Resident Evil and Final Fantasy to shame, non-stop action where the game does not prompt you on how to do an action, or just completely lies to you. I am a masochist gamer, my dad once told me after I beat a game we had rented hours earlier that day, “Well, did you beat it on the hardest difficulty?” I had not beaten that game on the hardest difficulty yet, so I begrudgingly went back and beat it on the hardest difficulty. That stayed with me still to this day. I get a new game now and refuse to play on anything less than hard difficulty.
When it came time for me to choose the difficulty for Nier, I thought it would not be such a difficult game, since I had played plenty of hack-and-slash-like games before. Ohhhh boy…..was I wrong, very hard was an understatement. It took me three frustrating sessions over 3 days and 15 hours total just to make it out of the tutorial area. But the most important part to me actually comes when you finally get to control B2 outside her jet-fighter suit. For those who do not know anything about Nier: Automata, it is set in the year 11945 B.C.E., surrounding the events of humanity’s last hope for survival, Androids for humans against a machine race that was brought to Earth by aliens to destroy humanity. This story does not follow the perspective of humans but the Androids sworn to protect them, and the futile wars against the machines that have lasted thousands of years. Taro used all of these techniques to prevent the player from slowing down and asking what the machine you just killed was doing. He never leaves the player a second to stop and ask the true question he wanted you to ask all along, “Do those Robots have emotions and consciousness?” “Why do some have red eyes and others yellow or green?”
The concept of consciousness and the feelings of emotions has always left me in awe, yet baffled. I still digress on what it truly means to be conscious and if humanity is truly the only ones to have it. We may be a long way off from having Androids of our own, but just like Yoko Taro instilled in his players, “We may be the only sentient ones now, but who is to say that will last in the future?” Maybe what scared me most wasn’t the difficulty spike or the dying. Maybe it was how familiar those machines started to feel.
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