—WARNING—
SNESSER

Videogames are for media perverts.

Really, is it not enough just watching a character perform an action from the comfort of the living room sofa? We’ve got the written word, the stage, the projector, illustration and sound, but for the weirdos among us, that doesn’t cut it. No, we just have to crawl into the screen and take up residence in their skin. We need to feel their digital knuckles scraping against the robo-flesh of their adversaries, we need to breathe the air of that post-apocalyptic wasteland and go fishing in the little streams that have formed between the cracks in the asphalt. In "A Play of Bodies", games researcher Brendan Keogh (the man responsible for my treatment of "videogame" as a single word) writes that video-gameplay creates a circuit between the player and the software. We enter the machine, and there is a “meshing of materially different bodies into an amalgam cyborg body through which the player both produces and perceives the play experience” (41).

It’s a little twisted, isn’t it? Just the slightest bit deranged?

I think about that whenever I consider recommending NieR: Automata to another person, because even if it didn't mean asking someone to take control of an android soldier inexplicably dressed as a blindfolded french maid in a billowy skirt and heels (“Taro just likes girls, man”), it still demands a degree of investment which isn’t remotely common in media. For games, it’s a high bar. I have to remind myself that even in 2023, the year when my Mom called in to rave about HBO’s The Last of Us, picking up a controller to actively involve oneself in a play experience of this kind is still a lot to ask. That show managed to reach an audience of people who had never considered conversion into one of Keogh’s cyborgs. If even one of them asked me which videogames to start with, Automata wouldn’t make the shortlist. You’ve already gotta be quite a ways down the rabbit hole. You have to love giving yourself over to and becoming entwined with these things for hours at a time. You have to be aware of their conventions. It’s one for the video-perverts.

Luckily, there are plenty of us to go around if you know where to look. Media literacy is an odd thing. I’m enough of a ridiculous videogame/media cyborg person that I might’ve written off Automata as passé on first blush; a little too indulgent in some unfortunate tropes and well-trodden themes.

If you’re just joining us, the premise is this — In the future, aliens have sent a mechanical army to conquer the Earth, forcing humanity to take refuge on the moon. We’ve constructed a squadron of android soldiers to take back the planet, resulting in an ongoing proxy war between the two robotic factions on the surface. You, the player, follow androids 2B and 9S in their righteous quest to drive back the alien menace and reclaim the world.

Incidentally, this is pretty much the plot of DoDonPachi DaiOuJou. You have the right to remain suspicious.

I’d played my share of JRPGs, done some hacking and slashing, wasn’t terribly impressed with 13 Sentinels, seen Evangelion, Lain and Ghost in the Shell, I’ve had Space Runaway Ideon: Be Invoked in my queue since that one Hazel video, alright. I wasn’t…pressed, exactly. I didn’t discount what I’d heard about its excellence and experimentation, but I was pretty sure I knew what I’d find. No matter how you slice it, the broad questions of existential philosophy can only have so many possible conclusions. Everything is futile, or it’s not. To paraphrase Albert Camus, you either live for some reason, or you don’t. And if you do, you have to accept the beauty that you can find in whatever corner of this world you inhabit, or else rage against it and build a better one.

Really, I hoped it was hiding a perspective or a problem that would change my mind. I want to be wrong and I want to learn, my diagnosis here is so broad as to be useless to anyone. But Automata didn’t show me “The Gospel of the New Age,” it didn’t pretend it could arrive at unique conclusions about life and its meaning. Rather, it’s frustrated with the answers that have been given. It just doesn’t know how to escape from them.

SYSTEM MESSAGE
(It's gonna be a long one)

The opening says as much, states in no uncertain terms that we’re “perpetually trapped” in The Wheel of Samsara, and then drops us into a top-down arcade shoot ‘em up. I watched the rest of my squad get picked off one by one, and knew I was in the hands of a director. So let’s talk Taro. Yoko Taro, the all-but undisputed creative force behind NieR, has spoken loudly about his love for 2D shooters, and that inspiration isn’t limited to gameplay. It comes through in Automata’s premise, themes, and looping narrative. Shoot ‘em ups are about dying again and again, setting one’s own goals, finding meaning in their madness. They’re about lone pilots in their last stands to save already doomed worlds. Their characters never escape the five to seven manic stages that contain their stories. Yoko Taro may have wanted to make ZeroRanger (and if he had, it’d had said all he’d wanted to say), but given Square Enix’s requirement that it be an Action RPG, I think the team came to a solid compromise.

Automata’s control scheme is cleverly designed to seamlessly shift between 2D shooting and 3D action without twisting the fundamentals. Melee attacks, specials and evasion are all mapped to the same buttons no matter the perspective, and that’s a powerful gesture. NieR: Replicant was bent on shocking the player out of their comfort zone with shifts into text adventuring and fixed camera Resident Evil…ing, its parts as cobbled together as any of Automata’s machines (and make no mistake, I love it for that). Automata, meanwhile, is sleek. Its mechanical consistency more readily invites the player to slip into a state of cyborg-dom, even as the shape of the game morphs around you. Nowhere is this better felt than the final stretch of The Tower, and those who’ve played the game will know what I’m talking about. Whatever form it takes, whoever you are, your index finger is for shooting. Customizable chips inform your abilities and interface, and it does plenty to contextualize game elements as features of the android protagonists. Whether or not it measurably contains “zero unintended ludo-narrative dissonance”, Automata goes the distance.

But few players I know would accuse Automata of “consistency,” and for good reason. Its narrative structure is easily one of its strangest features. I wouldn’t call it subtle so much as…selectively cryptic? Kinda messy. I wouldn’t say there’s anything presented in the critical path that doesn’t serve at least a thematic purpose, but events rarely build directly on top of each other throughout the A/B playthroughs, and only the barest threads actively cause the events of Routes C/D. Much of this is by design, seeing as you’re taking direct orders from your commanding officers as soldiers of YoRHa, simply doing as you’re told without the agency to decide your path, but I wouldn’t argue if someone found Automata “half-baked”.

I’m getting ahead of myself — I’ve seen it discussed that the mystery of the machines’ sentience is badly handled, that it’s too obvious and heavy-handed right from the get-go, but I think it’s clear that’s not the question being raised by the story. It’s not “do the machines really have emotions,” it’s “why are the androids so bent on deluding themselves into believing that the machines lack emotion?” What’s so qualitatively different about the two robot factions? What drives people to ignore the pleas of others and deny their personhood? We find them in distress in the desert, quite literally birthing two beings called Adam and Eve. It takes just three hours to encounter a village of machine pacifists, and, when he’s no longer able to deny their sentience, 9S just pulls out some other lame excuse to maintain his worldview. This might be frustrating as a player, to be required to carry out actions you don’t believe in for the sake of progress through a story. You could call it stupid, maybe cruel, or you might appreciate that your doubts echo those of the characters.

But some cracks begin to show as you await each revelation.

_________________________________

After a climactic battle with a gargantuan mech results in the loss of your sidekick, you follow a trail of breadcrumbs to a rusted elevator in the depths of a dimly-lit cavern. You’re warned it may be a trap. Both you and your character shrug off the suggestion.

At the bottom of a long descent, you emerge beneath a subterranean sky, a void of white. Before you, an eerie facsimile of civilization. The architecture is reminiscent of a metropolis that once stood, but colorless and incomplete. One of the top three songs in the game starts up.

Pressing forward, you find the bodies of androids strewn about the scenery. Further and further, until you come face to face with the perpetrator. You have a dramatic rematch with Adam. Philosophy is spouted, combat ensues, and you kill him. You retrieve 9S.

You then…report back to the Resistance Camp and receive your next assignment.

The Copied City is never directly relevant again.

_________________________________

(Tangentially, Adam and Eve confront our heroes a total of three times, which doesn’t give them much room to interact beyond being born and dying. This is interesting on the face of it, but none of these interactions shake up the status quo. Killing Eve supposedly alters the machine network, but not in a way that interferes with its normal functioning. 9S then enters the machine network during the first ending, and little seems to come of it beyond perhaps the intermittent vignettes you receive before and after boss fights during Route B. Tragically, none of these vignettes seem to influence 9S’ thoughts or actions later on)

I’m not here to slap a “bad writing” stamp on NieR: Automata, despite what I'm about to say. Honest. All of this is kind of fascinating to me, partially because it’s just so dang weird. The fact that Adam and Eve’s story doesn’t affect the characters as much as it should might speak to how little regard the androids afford machines in general. The fact that the status quo is not affected by any of these wild moments sort of makes sense when you consider the cyclical state of the setting. Maybe. But a certain thought cloud began to hang over me as I continued playing, and then it grew as the story revealed itself.

Any suspicions I had were confirmed by Taro’s 2014 GDC Talk where he lays bare his process. Before arriving at any character or premise, he whips up an emotional climax. He decides where he wants his audience to cry, and then works backward to create context for that moment. I’d like to be charitable, everyone expresses themselves differently, but yeah, it’s hard not to look at this and find some Hack Behavior. Taro does explore themes and questions and characters, but it’s obvious when a moment is crafted in isolation for the sake of shock value, and it doesn’t help that many of them lack long-standing consequences. Of course there are great, hard-hitting scenes (the intro to the game’s second half comes to mind), but I know when I’m being punked. And as it pulls this sort of thing again and again, it becomes easier to see the mirrors behind the smoke. Final Fantasy VI’s opera setpiece might be very obviously tossed in there, but the development that happens in and around it, before and after, makes it worthwhile.

And so is Automata, just not for the same reasons. I was convinced at one point that it had actually been about the conflict between A2 and 9S all along. Whatever inconsistencies there’d been or questions that had gone unanswered, everything had been built to explore how they’d end up as ideological opposites. But for that to be true, A2 herself would’ve needed more time. I’ve got just enough of a speedrunner’s brain that I enjoyed replaying the first third as 9S, especially for recontextualizing his role in the duo and containing late-game reveals only he was privy to. Likewise, we’d have needed to see what made A2 who she was at the beginning of the story. After ages of aimless rage and rebellion, it should have taken more than just one late-game subplot to alter her worldview (2B-pilled or not). It’s a testament to the music, pacing and performances that I was able to buy her character, but it would be a stretch to say that the story is squarely about her.

Maybe it’s become clearer as Taro has progressively dominated this write-up, but I don’t feel this is a game about its characters, but a mind at odds with itself. It won’t be obvious if you’re only reading this review without having played the game, but NieR is the story of a man grappling with existentialists, admitting that none of their perspectives have managed to convince him or offer a satisfactory route to purpose. Maybe he’s frustrated that none of them click. Whether you’re driven by fear or beauty or selfishness, spirituality or revenge, we’re all made of the same stuff, and we’re all going to the same place.

I don’t think it’s unfair to criticize Automata for failing to thoroughly explore those avenues of meaning. Fair or not, I’ll posit this dismissal comes from the honest place of a person who’s become lost and resentful toward structures built to fabricate meaning at the expense of others. Religion and love and community are all represented in unflattering extremes, and having one’s purpose stripped away is immediately met with violence against oneself and others. Even when I disagreed or wanted more in the way of nuance, I had to admit that I could sympathize with the author. Around the time I played Automata, someone I know told me that life would not be worth living without the existence of G-d. He would not get up in the morning. His family couldn’t possibly be happy.

It’s a good thing He’s up there, then.



…Isn't it?



So we play as this torn mind, inhabiting both characters and driving them toward opposite objectives. These androids are only granted agency by the player, after all. Whichever of the two you gravitate toward, each must be defeated by the other.

It’s a bleak lens, and it’s not shy about that. Maybe it shouldn't be any sort of surprise that Automata’s ending invites its players to rebel against its worldview, unite and collectively destroy it (and in the form of a vertically-scrolling shoot ‘em up, no less). It wants us to demonstrate that we can find purpose in each other. As far as I can tell, Taro wants to be proven wrong. He wants to learn something. Of course, it could be that I only found what I wanted to see.

But that’s not what I saw in the moment. Ending E didn’t hit as hard as I’d wanted it to. I nodded in acknowledgment of the gesture, knew that it was a modern Shigesato Itoi finale. Automata contains some real sparks of bottled magic, but it rarely managed to pull me out of my own head, maybe because the mind behind it was made so painfully visible. It never brought me to tears (TieRs?). Despite the gorgeousness of its soundtrack, I felt more distant than I’d have liked to be. I became uncomfortably aware of myself in that desk chair, holding a plastic videogame controller, watching my screen flash with the light of real people who’d given up their save data to help me, someone they’d never meet.

It felt like getting caught in the act.

The summer movie action blockbuster interpreted as a video game but the best one.

I also want to stress that "summer movie blockbuster video game" is not a dig or criticism, but an emblem of pride these Uncharted games should wear boldly and brazenly on their chest. It's all the thrill of a Indiana Jones, but you get to shoot the baddies, drive the car, do the stunts, solve the riddles. And not only that, but you get to be the camera and get to spend as much time in these luxurious unachievable Hollywood sets as you want.

The writers snuck letters into that set and they give you the time to parse handwriting, build identities for unseen characters and revel at weathered paper. The finely crafted ruinous locales of Uncharted 4 contain repeated jaw-dropping vistas which of course, are full of random trinkets in those sets so you can collect precursor orbs points to unlock cheats extras. And sometimes find optional dialogue and interactions to help flesh out its story and characters and world.

Like, you're watching Ocean's Eleven (2001), but you get to stop and walk around the casino, pick up some poker chips and look at the back of them and read the cocktail menu. And it's big head mode.

Why did I pick Ocean's Eleven (2001) as the point of comparison there? Because I think it is the last action movie film I saw, about 5 months ago. I haven't seen the other ones, or Mission Impossible. I think I saw Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift one time. I did like Indiana Jones a lot though.

Oh, and I've also not played Uncharted 1 or 3.

(Story of Uncharted 4 is pretty good btw, having only played the second one prior to this. Not much to chew on after, but it certainly has momentum and intrigue - keeps you wanting to play).

Summer movie blockbuster movies aren't my thing. But video games certainly are. And so, Uncharted is half my thing. And that half that is my thing elevates the other half that is less my thing. While I am in no rush to play the others, when the mood strikes that I want to play a big expensive AAA title, I shall plot my course for Uncharted.

(there is no big head mode btw).

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or i'll get around to playing the last of us, heard that one is pretty good. but i know its got zombies in it. there's absolutely gonna be a sneak past them section and I'm gonna get got repeatedly and it's gonna suck. and there will be more boxes to push to reach high places. indiana jones is cooler than the walking dead though, so i might actually play that spin off with elena. looks like it could be shorter too, which would great.

spoilers for uncharted 4 but why was that swordfight at the end so long? i died to it, got kinda bored leading to a sapping of my momentum so close to the ending.

A really fun, whimsically charming platformer that's pretty much unlike anything else on the market right now.

It's got some jank to it and isn't perfect by any means, but it's the sort of game I love, an early 2000s-styled weird Japanese platformer, the type of which sadly doesn't get made nowadays.

The art and designs are great, and the game just oozes charm, arguably my favorite release this year on just sheer whimsy and charm alone. I had a blast with this game.

Surrealism might as well not exist in our pointless efforts to reach realism in the modern day space of video games. While every studio is currently looking to make the AAAA metaverse game that will consume the rest of our lives, this quirky, downright nonsensically designed one-button 3D platformer recalls the glory days of the Dreamcast with a sincerity embedded in its cast of regular folks who just need some cheering up, clearly coming from a place of bizarre, but undeniable empathy via Yuji Naka's direction. If you've played Naka's NiGHTS into dreams... before, you should know what I'm talking about. There is a deep, Seuss-like respect for childish imagination that has no place in our angry, confused current world. Of course everyone hated it.