Patreon Letter: 22nd December 2018

Happy Christmas my friends, it is my final patreon letter of 2018 and folks it’s a big one. I finally played Nier and Nier Automata, so I have to write about them. And not only that, I think Automata is a lot of hot air so now I have to write why the game everybody thinks is a masterpiece is bad actually and despite what my God of War piece might have you believe, I hate doing that I’d rather be podcasting about how much I love Judau Ashta.

Unfortunately that’s scheduled for Monday, so you get this instead. I hope even if you are the Nier Fanbase reading this you appreciate my takes. I’m gonna talk about both games separately because they are very different beasts. Let’s go.

I WILL BE SPOILING BOTH GAMES. A LOT

DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE ONE OF THE SIX PEOPLE WHO HASN’T PLAYED AUTOMATA

So: Nier. The original Nier. I love a lot of this game and I think it is the superior Nier. I wouldn’t call it a better game because I think it’s ultimately a failure in a way Automata isn’t, but the elements I do like stick out heads and shoulders above its successor.

First of all the characters are fantastic. Nierman (as he shall forever be known to me) not only loves his daughter, he also genuinely believes in doing the right thing. He does sidequests because he believes that it is important to contribute with tasks around the village. This helps not only ground the often tedious work of the sidequests in an emotional and thematic context but it also contrasts him with Grimoire Weiss, an ancient book who has succumbed to nihilism and believes that this is all pointless. The one thing we know about Weiss before we meet him is that he is, at his core, a dumbass. His insight is treated as such. Watching Nierman slowly peel the layers of disaffected superiority away from this dumbass and get him to open up is genuinely warm and moving. 

This is before you get to Kainé and Emil, who make up the rest of your party. Kainé is a sad and bitter girl who was bullied by her town who spent the best years of her life watching her Grandma wither away before her eyes. Emil is a nice boy who lives isolated in the mansion from Resident Evil because his eyes turn people into stone. Everyone is sad, and ostracised, and finds purpose in the sense of togetherness they get from their journey. The game has an excellent cast.

Also I’m a big fan of the game’s sense of space and worldbuilding. The way each town connects to the other, the way the sidequests build a sense of natural trading routes, this feels like a functional and stable post-apocalyptic world in a way that few do. I understand how people can live their lives here. Plus, the Aerie is legit one of the best locations in any video game. The game gets a lot of mileage from what is clearly a very limited budget and scope.

And then despite all that, the game simply doesn’t come together in its final stretch. The big twist of Nier is that the Shades who you have been fighting are the real humans, everyone in the world is a replicant clone waiting to be possessed by their original souls, and the Shadowlord is your original, having done all this to save his Yonah. 

Despite the fact that this is obvious the second the Shadowlord shows up six hours into the game, Nier goes through its entire first ending without acknowledging this out loud, going to great lengths to awkwardly talk around it, all so it can reveal on the second playthrough that he was you all along and Nierman thought he was killing his enemy but he was actually killing himself!!

It is especially frustrating as the construction of the lore allows for Nierman and the Shadowlord to inhabit the same body, and the natural thematic endpoint of the game’s plot is for its main character and main villain to acknowledge that they are the same person, with the same motivations. And the fact that they never do this is deeply frustrating, it is a big red plot button blinking on screen for the entire act that the game simply never pushes, instead opting for a secret double tragedy twist where you know the deal, but the characters never do as they blithely make the wrong decisions, even if it makes them look like complete idiots for never asking obvious questions.

At its best, Nier is a game about the violence and beauty of fatherhood and how there is ultimately no difference between those two things. A father that would tear down the world for his daughter would tear down the world for his daughter. It is the only Dad Game that both truly understands the cost of patriarchal devastation, and the unshakable need for a child to receive that love. Hang on I’m getting a call from Japan and the boys in the lab are informing me this was all on accident and Brother!Nierman was the original, giving the game an entirely different vibe.

The final ending of the game revolves around a choice for Nierman to sacrifice himself for Kainé, wiping out his existence entirely to save her (and deleting your save games in the process). It feels like a tacked on, unrelated tragedy as the ultimate conclusion to the game, especially when the main plot leaves so much on the table. Not to mention I think it’s the wrong choice, considering Emil, Weiss and an entire Army have just sacrificed themselves so you can bring Yonah home, and I simply don’t believe that my Nierman would think any of them less important than Kainé. 

It’s so disappointing because so much of the game is really rich and good and then it refuses to engage with its themes in the final stretch. It’s like if Metal Gear Solid 3 ended with Naked Snake shooting The Boss in the face and never asking any questions. Ah sweet, he got a new title! I know I’m being overly glib but it’s only because I was so invested, and the game had demonstrated through so much of its writing that it was capable of good character work, so it sucked to see it drop the ball so completely.

I understand that the grand tragedy of the game is that this connection is never made, I do understand what the game is trying to do, so this is perhaps less a failure as it is a fundamental philosophical difference between Yoko Taro and I. Let’s get into that a little more specifically.

Okay so Nier Automata. I mostly enjoyed playing the game. The video game part sands off the rough edges for good and ill, there’s nothing close to as cool as a Resident Evil mansion but there’s nothing as tedious and awkward as some of the less player-accommodating parts of the original. There’s a nice rhythm you can get into as you go through the sidequests and the main quests, allowing the polished feel of platinum combat to wash over you as you progress through the game. I played it for about 37 hours. I would say the vast majority of them were pretty good!

My problems with Automata are not that it is badly made, because it isn’t at all, but I just can’t get along with the way the game structures its story and themes. For the first, and most surface level point, Automata shares the emotionally numbing nature of its predecessor, but in changing its protagonists from extremely earnest dads to taciturn robot cops multiplies it by several factors. Every sidequest goes like this: someone asks you to find someone from somewhere, 9S complains about having to do a job and 2B is like ‘logically it is more productive if we do sidequests,’ then you find the thing and discover that person is already dead and kill the machine that killed it, then you bring it back and the quest giver swears vengeance on the machine and the cycle repeats ad infinitum. 

There are sixty sidequests and a good forty of them are this in different forms. It is completely unnecessary because the game is already set in a hell world of pointless forever war, the most affecting emotional sidequests are ones where the machines play out day-to-day domesticity in the shadow of the wider tragedy. My favourite one involved a kid running into the battlefield because he’s having a petty argument with his mother, so you go and bring him back. There’s no kicker, just characters living their lives in a shitty world. It is much more impactful.

In terms of the real deal main story, the game is about Androids vs Machines trapped in the Dramatic Irony Forever War as Androids - who are robots - are trying to fight machines - who are also robots - both on behalf of masters that no longer exist. This much is obvious before starting the game, to the point where one of the only surprising plot points in the game was that there ever were any Aliens in the first place. The game knows that you know this, so it then takes you through the responses that various characters and societies have to living in a nihilistic hell world, and then it destroys them one by one, saving the cruelest ending for its most hopeful character. Try as hard as you might cannot defy god, so says Yoko Taro, he will always come for you. 

And then you (the player) tell him to fuck off. You literally destroy the credits in a shmup as you say no, I will not let nihilism win, this wasn’t all meaningless and I will strive for a better future. A big song plays. It’s a pretty good song.

On paper, it seems like the exact perfect game. Even reading it back I’m like “yeah, you’re right, I won’t let nihilism win,” Except in the moment I was just exhausted and annoyed. Nier Automata does not earn its final, hopeful gesture. The message of the ending is one of class consciousness and collective action, as it says that if we all see the world for what it is and work together, maybe we can effect change. Which is true and good. But before this moment, it never allows for the possibility. Every player knows as they start the game that robot racism is bad, but it isn’t until the final few seconds of ending D that 9S realizes that maybe…. the machines aren’t his enemy? Which is the big release after having to put up with twenty hours of him resorting to robot phrenology to desperately support his bigotry.

Nier Automata does not understand that class consciousness is the beginning of the story, not the end. What do you do when you realise the world is fucked? How do you function day to day in a society that is fundamentally cruel and unjust? How can you turn your individual power into a collective action that can effect substantial change? Aside from the grand final gesture (made by the players), Nier Automata never asks these questions, all of which are more interesting than the long road to understanding in the first place. In a log unlocked after completing route C, the character Jackass learns the truth of the plot, and here is what she says:

So then! To sum up: For hundreds of years, we've been fighting a network of machines with the ghost of humanity at its core. We've been living in a stupid *****ing world where we fight an endless war that we COULDN'T POSSIBLY LOSE, all for the sake of some Council of Humanity on the moon that doesn't even exist.

I don't know what the point is to all this, but I swear I will kill every evolutionary dead-end machine lifeform, as well as every single asshole behind Project YoRHa. 

I'm coming for all your heads. ***** you. 

When the cosmic joke that is the truth of this world is revealed, every character simply descends further into alienation. 9S is so incapable of resolving his bigotry with reality that he straight up goes insane. A2’s route lets her get the closest through her interactions with Pascal and the revelations on the tower, but by then it’s the climax of the game and she dies no matter what. When the players/pods decide to bring the three main androids back to life, there’s no context to what comes next, only the hope that it go better this time, and the bodies of untold innocents.

Pascal, the character that gets closest to understanding, chooses pacifism. He builds a beautiful village for peaceful machines and constructs defensive walls so he may be safe. He is the nicest, purest puppy dog of a character and so of course he is doomed. But how much legitimately took me aback. Eventually, the Machine Network’s infection spreads inside the village and the beserk machines start eating the survivors. He takes the children to safe harbor, but it’s not enough, the network has sent an army after him. So he posses an Engels (get it) and after three routes of pacifism, he takes up arms to protect the children he loves. And he succeeds! Only to walk back into the room and find all the innocent beautiful children have killed themselves. 

It is maybe the most over the top tragedy I’ve seen in a game and it isn’t even done yet. Pascal realizes that this happens because he taught them fear. Because he wanted them to understand the danger of this world, he taught them fear, and so in this moment of terror they chose to end it all. You can either kill him or erase his memory. He doesn’t care which. If you erase his memory, he returns to the empty village and sells you back the corpses of his own children. 

Later it is revealed that his entire village was doomed from the start as his very existence (as with all Machine Cultures) was merely a tool engineered by the network to diversify the evolution of Machine Life. So it turns out he had no agency all along and his struggle was pointless. All of the characters struggles are rendered meaningless. Nier Automata equivocates between the legitimately genocidal robots and the ones on the pacifist commune because after all none of them are truly right. There is no room for a grey area. No wonder everyone wants to kill the awful god that set this all in motion.

Luckily, you can.

It makes criticizing the game hard because the game is, in a sense, its own critique. It revels in cruelty, nihilism and stamping on your hopes, then it gives you the power to reject it. And so I do, but not through the means the game so kindly grants me, by walking away and finding art that speaks to me. I watch Gundam every week, I am not starved for tragic sci-fi about the human cost and the moral necessity of class consciousness. The cure, as Nier Automata so helpfully argues, cannot be found within the disease.