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canmom · 9 months ago

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NieR Automata Anime episode 10-12

Previously: [part 1], [part 2-3], [part 4-5], [part 6], [part 7-8], [part 9].

This is a running commentary on the anime NieR Automata ver1.1a.

The last three episodes form an arc, largely following the game, so it makes sense to treat them in one post. Let's go.

Episode 10: over[Z]ealous

It's convenient that a two-cour anime of 26 episodes will hit every letter of the alphabet!

In this episode, we cover the 'Become As Gods' arc of the game, which has been tied into the Adam/Eve arc a little more explicitly. In the wake of Eve dying, the machine network has broken down, and a machine death cult springs up in the factory area. In the game, 2B goes in after receiving a peace offering, accompanied by Pascal; in the anime, she's looking to finish off Adam.

In both cases, shortly after 2B arrives, the head of the robot pope falls off, and the machines following the religion suddenly go berserk and start killing themselves and everything nearby. In the game, this is accompanied by the memorable chant 'become as gods' repeating on the soundtrack. Here, however, it's tied in to Adam's grief over Eve, and the machines instead chant about serving the gods and becoming as Eve.

...which perhaps comes as less of a non-sequitur? But equally, it ties everything more tightly to the main plot, and makes the machines less diverse. And 'become as gods' is such an iconic line that they used it as the subtitle for the console releases lol. So I have mixed feelings about this change.

The outline of the episode otherwise follows the game pretty closely. There's a fairly inconsequential boss fight against So-Shi, one of the four bug-like machines named after Chinese philosophers. 9S gets a cute YoRHa-branded VR headset...

Not quite clear why an android needs a VR headset, but hey, it's a good visual.

Since a lot of this episode is shot for shot from the game, there's otherwise less to talk about, but the moment where the machines form a big snake that all dive past 2B into the lava is pretty cool.

I like seeing the machines get all wiggly.

This episode does have an extended puppet skit in which Popola and 9S talk about some of the bosses that didn't make it into the anime. Devola and Popola don't get fully articulated puppets, but they are cute in puppet form...

The punchline is that 9S gets drunk on Devola's moonshine and lets them all die.

Episode 11: head[Y] battle

It's odd that they used this title here, since it refers to one of the most special endings in the game (and the only missable one), in which Emil blows up the world during his questline. The name is a joke about, well, all the Emil heads you're fighting. Here it's... idk, not really related to anything, but whatever lol.

In the game, Eve makes the machines go berserk, and creates a huge framerate-crushing snake of machinery to attack you. This episode follows a similar arc in that it's largely a big boss fight against Adam. I'm not entirely sure why they switched surviving brother from Eve to Adam since he does basically all the same things that Eve did, but anyway, there is one big change: Adam turns into a big kaiju...

...which prompted considerable speculation among fans since it strongly resembles one of the standard enemy types in NieR Reincarnation, so there was a lot of speculation that somehow the anime timeline would tie into the Reincarnation timeline. In the end... well, we'll see, but I think this speculation is baseless; they just reused a design for 'four-armed monster' but it doesn't seem to tie in with the monsters in Reincarnation in any meaningful way.

Nothing phallic about this at all.

This episode is largely a big fight. 2B is sent to deal with some small but fast red machines; 9S hacks into Adam in order to create an opening for the Resistance to blast him with a big artillery piece they have handy, collapse a ton of buildings on him, and launch him into the sky on a nuclear missile. Pascal shows up to help out, which seems a bit out of line for a pacifist, but hey.

There's an extended sequence of 9S in hacking space where he runs into various images of Adam, who's only thinking about Eve at this point...

which lets them play around with some more abstract imagery. Adam does his creepy smile and so on as he back-hacks 9S (spoilers for next episode...). But ultimately it's just a boss fight.

Probably the biggest addition is a conversation between the Commander and the Council of Humanity in which she pleads for approval to support the YoRHa units. As usual, they stonewall her. We get some cryptic NERV-y shit about 'attaining God through Process 11', so maybe this is going somewhere new...

At this point Commander White decides enough is enough and disobeys orders to call in an orbital laser strike on Adam to try to finish him off after the nuke doesn't take. But that doesn't quite take either and 2B and 9S need to go and stab him with a sword.

I think this kind of episode is tricky from an adaptation standpoint. In a game, you are controlling the boss fight: the strategems the boss deploys and which you deploy against it are meaningful because you have to figure out how to win the fight. The Eve fight in Automata is not particularly difficult, but it does have a pretty spectacular scale. However, there aren't really a lot of beats that would easily translate to TV. (You can't really have a boss that overwhelms the game's framerate in a TV show.)

For the anime, they evidently wanted to get more of the side characters involved, so they give more of a role to the Resistance and less to 2B, pretty much sidelining her entirely. Unfortunately, there isn't enough space in this episode for a proper buildup of these additional elements: weapons just seem to get pulled out of a hat - oh, there's a nuclear missile there now? Which can work (Godzilla movies kind of run on it), but here it feels like kind of a spacer episode, since all the stuff that actually matters is coming in the next one. Unfortunately, the action in this show is very hit and miss, so an episode that's pretty much all fight is dicey.

Still, we have another episode! And this one has a lot going on!

The puppet skit is good at least, focusing on 2B and 9S petting the Pods.

Adorable.

Episode 12: flowers for m[A]chines

This episode at least is a funky one.

The first half of the episode is 'just' Ending A of the game. 2B and 9S stab Adam in the head, We get a suitably intimate strangling scene as 9S contracts the Logic Virus.

"Why does it always end this way?" she says, portentiously - but this time, it's different, and 9S is able to spread his consciousness out on the nearby machines. In fact, this whole sequence is almost shot for shot from the game:

youtube

...and just like in the game, it goes into a credits sequence to Weight of the World...

...which is oddly enough in English; it lists the main staff for each episode, which is notable for the rather obscene number of animation directors (作画監督 sakuga kantoku - "drawing supervisor" is a more literal translation and arguably a better description of the role, since the sakkan's main job is to keep the drawings on-model. In recent years, hiring more and more sakkans and piling on their work has become a patch for the lack of proper training and shortage of skilled animators in the industry. But that's a drum to beat on another post.)

But we're actually only halfway through the episode! After the ad break we rewind and get some scenes exclusive to the B route of the game, in which 9S ends up snooping around the Bunker and discovering some things he shouldn't (namely, that the humans are dead). In this version, we tie it into the various stories about N2 (aka the Red Girls), representatives of the machine network, snooping around inside YoRHa to watch the androids. 9S comes face to face with them...

The Red Girls give 9S access to an archive of his past lives, represented by a small CRT TV and narration in the style of the 'picture book' sequences in the game. There, he gets a digest of previous 9S's discoveries about how YoRHa is basically all lies.

For whatever reason, at least in the version I have (by the [GLORY] fansub group), all of this text is in English. Not sure if that was hardsubbed in the source, or if they just decided to put that in English for some reason! All this text is in the game, in any case, as [Top Secret] Project YoRHa; in the game it's revealed to 9S directly by the Commander near the end of route B, but here it's the red girls.

We end with a little speech from 2B about how androids and machines don't seem to be so different after all, and a preview of the next arc, with the commander giving a speech to YoRHa as they prepare a big descent operation. It's gonna go well guys. Promise.

So, as a season finale, it's pretty much just the game with a few embellishments - and the game is really good so there's some good stuff here, but not a lot that's new if you're approaching this as a companion piece. The mid episode credits roll was a nice touch at least! Now we have a full cour to cover the C arc - I'm looking forward to more A2 and really hoping they can capture the increasingly intense, desperate, paranoid tone of the game. Many of the game's best sequences come in the C arc. Also, more Emil?? Where's our boy? He's only shown up in the background to Pascal's village... I hope they're saving him for a big Emil-focused episode in season 2.

Is it going to tie into Reincarnation somehow? Given Reincarnation is now shut down and unplayable, that would seem like an odd choice, but this anime has been in production hell for long enough that maybe something like that was planned, would be cool if so. I'm definitely scratching my head about what they're teasing with the Council of Humanity scenes - it suggests we might move towards some of the Drakengard 3-esque material explored in the FFXIV raid series, but maybe that's just wishful thinking lol.

I definitely wouldn't recommend this anime over the game. It's got its moments but it's never as consistently hard-hitting, the game is just a more satisfying version of the story. As a companion piece offering elaborations here and there, though, it's definitely pretty cool. Still wild to me that this got made.

OK, onwards to season 3! If I can keep up this pace I'll be caught up in a couple days...

#nier automata #anime #nier #Youtube #nier automata ver1.1a

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