I love Tyler Colp for this:
per PC Gamer roasting beloved games, Colp says, "Nier: Automata is for weebs who haven't read a book or watched a movie. It's cliché sci-fi anime garbage that only feels like it means something because the music owns and Yoko Taro Googled "socialism". Nier: Replicant is a better game because it gives its characters space to be humans, which is pretty important in a game about what it means to be human."
per PC Gamer roasting beloved games, Colp says, "Nier: Automata is for weebs who haven't read a book or watched a movie. It's cliché sci-fi anime garbage that only feels like it means something because the music owns and Yoko Taro Googled "socialism". Nier: Replicant is a better game because it gives its characters space to be humans, which is pretty important in a game about what it means to be human."
5 Comments
I appreciate the different opinions that are informed by which facets of the game people magnify for their own enjoyment in Nier Automata; for me, the astonishingly shallow reads of modern philosophers, not just misrepresenting their texts but blatantly stealing the valour of their name association while utterly forgoing any of the actual rigour and nuance of their world views, is too blatantly vapid to consider the game anything other than a failure. It coloured the combat as an addendum to malpractice of language, even though I could have enjoyed the gameplay when unadjoined to the script. And I really do dislike the character designs - sexist character models, regardless of how the aesthetic completes them or how they are justified in the the text, will always kind of bum me out.
Oh brother
How much of this idea that he "googled socialism" and "has shallow reads of modern philosophers" is because he went a bit on-the-nose naming boss robots. They were just meant to show the player how desperately the robots were trying to imitate the humans when looking for meaning by cribbing their philosophers imo?
I don't think Automata spends time trying to represent Marx or Kierkegaard or whoever just bc it namedrops them, unless there's something I missed
I don't think Automata spends time trying to represent Marx or Kierkegaard or whoever just bc it namedrops them, unless there's something I missed
@turdl3 I sympathise with the idea that Colp was exacerbating something which is perhaps more lampshaded in the text of Nier: Automata - the article, which is, maybe with a mean spirit, meant to go after beloved things for the dual purposes of humour and seeing how clothed our emperors of gaming really are, is taking an inherently harsh tone without reserve.
My quoting it was largely doing the same thing: I don’t like the game, so I took the piss out of it a little by not writing my own review as well as quoting a highly negative quip. But the assertion that Yoko Taro just went overboard with naming bosses is simply untrue: more than a dozen of the named characters in the game are titled after famous modern Western philosophers, and the NPCs named in this vein have quests themed with inseparable allusions to their titular philosopher’s projects. Equally, the bosses named in this scheme are explicitly designed after the tones taken culturally surrounding their legacies and the worlds those philosophers were working in - Engels and Marx are factories, Auguste is a levelled and equal formation of his brothers, Beauvoir is a highly feminised android. etc. And even if this schema of naming wasn’t meant to signpost philosophic attention to the actions and words of Nier’s cast, which would mean that all the praise (including that evidenced on this website) that Nier and Taro get for investigating philosophic depth would be moot and proof of poor textual analysis regardless, the inclusion of those highly recognisable and highly potent signs is careless. Sorry to quote an academic in a comment, but Umberto Eco states in a Theory of Semiotics on the incisiveness of a sign:
“The only solution seems to be: /this is a [philosopher]/ means «the semantic properties commonly correlated by the linguistic code to the lexeme /[philosopher]/ coincide with the semantic properties that a [philosophical] code correlates to that perceptum taken as an expressive device». In other terms: both the word /[philosopher]/ and that token perceptum [philosopher] culturally stand for the same sememe.”
In short, if you name the philosopher you name the philosophy coexistent with their name. So if the characters act in ways consistent with their naming convention, the philosophy is evoked; if the characters are named, particularly in aggregate (I mean, it’s not like any of the NPCs or bosses are named Doolittle or Spiegelman), the philosophic semene is evoked. Of course there is a lot to like about the game in its many other facets of play! Everybody has different criteria weighting different aspects of any game towards positive or negative evaluation. The above is just part of why I dislike the game.
My quoting it was largely doing the same thing: I don’t like the game, so I took the piss out of it a little by not writing my own review as well as quoting a highly negative quip. But the assertion that Yoko Taro just went overboard with naming bosses is simply untrue: more than a dozen of the named characters in the game are titled after famous modern Western philosophers, and the NPCs named in this vein have quests themed with inseparable allusions to their titular philosopher’s projects. Equally, the bosses named in this scheme are explicitly designed after the tones taken culturally surrounding their legacies and the worlds those philosophers were working in - Engels and Marx are factories, Auguste is a levelled and equal formation of his brothers, Beauvoir is a highly feminised android. etc. And even if this schema of naming wasn’t meant to signpost philosophic attention to the actions and words of Nier’s cast, which would mean that all the praise (including that evidenced on this website) that Nier and Taro get for investigating philosophic depth would be moot and proof of poor textual analysis regardless, the inclusion of those highly recognisable and highly potent signs is careless. Sorry to quote an academic in a comment, but Umberto Eco states in a Theory of Semiotics on the incisiveness of a sign:
“The only solution seems to be: /this is a [philosopher]/ means «the semantic properties commonly correlated by the linguistic code to the lexeme /[philosopher]/ coincide with the semantic properties that a [philosophical] code correlates to that perceptum taken as an expressive device». In other terms: both the word /[philosopher]/ and that token perceptum [philosopher] culturally stand for the same sememe.”
In short, if you name the philosopher you name the philosophy coexistent with their name. So if the characters act in ways consistent with their naming convention, the philosophy is evoked; if the characters are named, particularly in aggregate (I mean, it’s not like any of the NPCs or bosses are named Doolittle or Spiegelman), the philosophic semene is evoked. Of course there is a lot to like about the game in its many other facets of play! Everybody has different criteria weighting different aspects of any game towards positive or negative evaluation. The above is just part of why I dislike the game.
mysterio50k
1 year ago