#automata also has plays with and integrates the format well

[0ssianic]

watched the first ep of the nier automata anime!

pretty cool that it exists, but im not sure how to feel about the show itself yet. the 1st ep was the essential beats of the tutorial segment of the game, but it didn’t feel nearly as epic or emotionally engaging. partially due to time constraints of course, but still. (like the upcoming last of us show, games have more agency than films/animation which kinda automatically adds a layer of engagement). part of it may be me knowing whats coming so i already have it in my mind of how its supposed to go and will automatically compare. idk how many episodes its supposed to be, but hopefully they’ll be able to let certain things breathe.

i need a gif of 9s stepping off the beam and just dropping fr

finally...

!!!!!!!!!

adorable! great way to handle the bad/silly endings i cant wait till 2b dies from eating a fish

[thechcoman]

WIBP Nier Automata Week 4

One thing I usually cannot STAND in most JRPGs is how so many of them try too hard. This can apply to their gameplay, the story and the presentation as a whole. Instead of focusing on just making a good game with a good story and good gameplay, they always feel the need to make the combat as over-complicated and as cluttered as possible. The same usually applies to the story, ignoring the base foundations of a decent story and instead only focusing on overly complicated themes and philosophy. If not this, they focus too much on the plot and events, and not enough on the characters. There are numerous other problems with JRPG stories that I won’t get too into here, but generally speaking, most stories from JRPGs in the past decade or so tend to be not so great. This isn’t always true, but many do fall into these familiar traps. The designs of the characters tend to be cluttered and over-designed, and most of the music either sounds like generic J-pop, generic rock, or generic orchestral music.

Many JRPGs tend to feel similar in the modern day because of this. Yet, ironically this is all usually done in an effort to stand out. Back during the days from the NES all the way up to the Playstation 2, JRPGs actually were the reigning kings of storytelling in games. While there were good, story-based games that were made in the west, those weren’t all that popular in comparison to the JRPG-craze. However, once western games started to become popular and had better stories, JRPGs started to slowly fall by the wayside. In an attempt to stand out, many JRPGs started implementing more complex battle systems, and tried to look cooler; prioritizing things that look stylish over things that look good and played well. It’s repeatedly a problem.

Nier Automata is a JRPG in recent years that manages to take all of these frustrating aspects of JRPGs and make it into something that’s not only truly great, but also something worth talking about and has got me thinking about subjects and topics that I don’t normally think about. This is, in my mind, the mark of a truly great piece of art. It even manages to have its story and gameplay be completely integrated in a way where the story is not only enhanced by the gameplay, but only works as a game.

While playing through the game’s main story and sidequests, I began to notice two different reoccurring themes: one about the purpose of fighting and it’s necessity; and the other being questions about how much someone values their memories and the memories of those around them. These two are someone connected in this game. Is it worth sacrificing your memories to become stronger to protect what you value most? Is it worth it to be unable to fight and protect what you love to preserve the happiness of your memories, especially in a world that feels devoid of happiness? These are some of the questions that Nier Automata raises. Whether or not the answers to these philosophical questions are actually answered or not by the end of the game is yet to be seen however, and it’s something that makes me look forward to playing this game each week.

For this week I’d like to provide a few examples of these themes being seen throughout the game.

First and foremost, in the main story, we see extra information given to us during the “forest king” section of the story on this second playthrough. We learn more about something that felt odd on the first playthrough, and was kind of out of place. Towards the end of the forest section of the game, you find the “forest king” that many of the various machines have kept mentioning and well…this “forest king” is just a machine child. It was…odd, especially since a moment later, the child was killed by A2.

Now on the second playthrough, we get some backstory on this. We learn that the original forest king, who was wise, kind, and generous, had died giving up several of his parts to his followers to make them stronger and better. Before he died however, his followers took his various memories and implanted them into the mind of a machine child, and then plan to raise the child and so when he grows up, he will be able to rule them as the forest king once more.

In this section of the story, we see the theme of memory appear. We see how much the forest king’s people value the king’s memories of his subjects, along with them valuing the memory of the forest king himself, believing preserving his memory is important to preserving…well him. Here we see a metaphysical concept taken quite literally – the idea of immortalizing yourself through other’s memories of you.

This all also ties into the theme of why people fight, as we see the various subjects of the forest king throughout the forest area who attack you. They will say things like “Fight for your king!” and “This is what you’ve trained your whole life to do!” This, like many things throughout the game, parallels to the main characters, in that they are androids built purely for fighting and have a cause to fight for that’s probably futile (since it’s fairly obvious that the humans on the moon are either dead or don’t exist, even though the game hasn’t officially revealed that yet).

Let’s look at another example of these themes within the game. There’s a sidequest in the game focusing on a character from the first Nier game, named Emil. Emil asks for your help in finding specific flowers called Lunar Tears. Every time you find one for him, he manages to recover a little bit of his memory with each flower. We eventually learn that he’s actually a being from back when humans were around, and was built as an ultimate weapon; his purpose was to fight. He had friends and was a nice person, and when the aliens invaded, he tried to fight back to protect his friends by cloning himself thousands of times over. However, with each clone, his memories slowly began to disappear, in order to increase his fighting prowess.

I feel as though this entire sidequest is summarized and perfectly encapsulated in one single line. When 2B asks Emil about a certain memory (I don’t entirely remember what they ask about; I wish I wrote it down), Emil responds by saying “I don’t know. I didn’t need those memories to fight.” It was honestly the line that made me realize the existence of these two reoccurring themes and nudged me to look closer and more analytically at the game’s story. Here, Emil has sacrificed his memories to protect the ones he loves and holds dear…except once again, his friends end up dying anyways and he’s unable to protect them. Emil chooses to cast his memories aside to get stronger, but in doing so forgets the purpose behind his constant fighting. The game is trying to create a connection between fighting and memories, much like with the whole forest king section. Now that Emil’s fighting is over, his memories would be the only thing that remained and the only thing that matters, yet ironically, he no longer has those memories that could be considered precious.

There are countless examples of this connection made between memories and fighting, such as the sidequest “The Wandering Couple” In this sidequest, two androids that are in love want to escape from the resistance created by androids on the surface (Non-YorHa androids) as romantic relationships aren’t allowed, and they ask your help to do so. Eventually the quest has you helping them get money to pay for someone to get them out, but that person betrays them and nearly kills them. After helping them both, the man asks to have his memory reset so that the resistance will take him back and he doesn’t have to live in fear on the run. The woman agrees and his memory is formatted…only for the woman to then take him and say that she plans on updating him with programs designed for battling and fighting so that they won’t be in danger and that she needed him formatted to do so.

Another sidequest  that exemplifies these themes is “Amnesia”, in which an android wants to take revenge on the one who killed her friend, and at the end of the quest, we find out that she killed her friend, and blocked the memory out of her mind. She’s apparently an execution-model YorHa Unit (YorHa being the organization of androids created by humanity that 2B and 9S work for, in case you don’t remember) that was created in order to kill traitors, which he friend apparently was, and the event was so traumatic that she blocked out the memory.

Or how about the main characters themselves? 2B becomes upset at the beginning of the first playthrough when 9S doesn’t remember sacrificing himself to save her, since he didn’t upload his memory to the YorHa bunker and instead just got a new body. At the end of 2B’s playthrough we learn why she was so upset when 9S is going to do the same thing again: she doesn’t want the 9S that she had grown so attached to, to die off and lose the 9S that currently exists; the 9S she cares about. The thing is that he’s sacrificing himself in both occasions either due to a battle or to end one, once again, creating this connection between memory and fighting.

So what is the game trying to say with this connection? Well, this is just a guess, but I believe that the game is trying to tell us that memories are what make us who we are, and that they are the most important things to us. However, I also believe that it is trying to say that the natural state of humanity and of existence as a whole is one of violence, hatred and fighting. However, the memories we create and the connections we form with others transcends this natural state of violence and hatred. That our love for others is too important to let go, lest society and people in general fall apart, like it does in Nier Automata. We see time and time again that people are unhappy in this grim state of the world; that we are depressed because we keep sacrificing our memories to become stronger and fight more, yet not realizing the cost of doing so. And on the occasion in that the memories try to be preserved, like with the forest king, in the end the machines still resort to violence, as the memories that they try to preserve are within the mind of a child who could not possibly rule them properly. As such the machines go back to their original purpose – violence and fighting.

Through this, there is also a lesson that goes hand in hand with this idealogy. The idea that we have the power to defy our fate. If our fate is to be destructive and to fight and kill, yet we overcome this destructive and violent nature, we defy our fate, and have the ability to choose how to live our lives, despite our inner natural states and overall purposes in life.

There’s so much more to talk about with Nier Automata and it’s various themes and moral philosophy, but this post is getting to be incredibly long, and anything else I would say would just be redundant at this point.  As I play more of Nier Automata, I will continue to search for potential examples of these two themes within the narrative of the main story and the sidequests as well. With that being said, I’ll see you all next week.