A Comprehensive Reading of Nier Automata [MASSIVE SPOILERS]

What was the most important game of 2017 was Breath of the Wild Popke. I mean, maybe, but I think the most important game of 2017 was none other than Almost Automata, why, well, because it marks a historic step in video game storytelling for the first time in history. are starting to go toe to toe with movies and literature in the philosophical realm and almost

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are perhaps the best of the bunch, it's a surprisingly uplifting nihilistic metafictional postmodern masterstroke and don't worry if some or all of those words terrified you. I'll explain them in a moment. This video will be an exploration of some of the ideas and concepts of Nier's

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through a literary perspective and how the game's design and mechanics helped convey them.

I'm going to try to keep them. Pretty simple stuff, an entry level for people who've never thought about video games this way before, think of this as a guide on how to be a gaming poster art like me, I hope it's a little different from my usual stuff. You will get something from it. New Automata is not the first example of postmodernism in gaming, but it is quite special because it is one of the few games of its kind that uses postmodernist themes to convey ideas that have relevance beyond video games. undertale literature doki-doki club, stanley parable, etc. are all great games, but the scope of their commentary exists solely within the automatons of the game space.

On the other hand, it challenges not only postmodernism but also the culture of neoclassical characters that imitates the thinkers of the Renaissance. emerged in the last decade before continuing, I better explain some terms the classics and the Renaissance the classics generally refer to great artistic and philosophical works created in ancient Greece and Rome the Renaissance was an intellectual trend during the 14th century until the 18th century, which was really interested in the classics, idealized versions of these ancient cultures were used as inspiration to usher in an era of great artistic growth, but things like that fell out of fashion when the world became more cynical during the Revolution Industrial for history nerds.

The line between weather and teasing ends and lighting begins is pretty fuzzy as far as I'm concerned, so I'll almost certainly unintentionally conflate the two at some point during this video. Postmodernism, the dominant critical perspective of the late 20th century. and early 21st century postmodernism is critical of things like human nature, morality, objective truth and generally skeptical towards things like religion and ideology, its reaction to earlier schools of thought that were very concerned by universal ideas, ideal ways of living spirituality, etc., nihilism, belief that there is no inherent meaning in the universe we do not exist for some reason there are no divine entities and we are cosmically insignificant animals who have deceived ourselves into thinking that we would care there is nothing special about being human and the idea that it is somehow an illusion, while nihilism or postmodernism are obviously deeply intertwined, there are many different ways of thinking about both, so it is best to separate them and, Finally, the death of the author, this was a historical idea proposed by the French critic Roland.

Baths and says in general terms that who the author of a text was, why they wrote it, what their ideological positions were, and what they think the text is about are pretty irrelevant details, the only thing that matters is as long as you, the reader, got of the text, the author is a dead talking authority because they don't matter, they were only responsible for creating the text correctly with our theoretical base covered for now, let's start with a big spoiler warning, I mean it, if you hadn't already guessed. I'm going to play the whole game. I highly recommend playing around automatons, but if you can't or just want to sound smart talking about this game, you're in luck, because I'll have to go. through the game chronologically to explain my points so you can understand what's happening even if you don't play the game you know you really should.

The game begins with this quote from to be one of our main characters everything that lives is designed to end we are perpetually trapped in an endless spiral of life and death yours or some kind of punishment I often think of the God who blessed us with this cryptic enigma and I wonder if we'll ever have the chance to kill him is pretty sinister just before we dive into things, let's look at the big question, this quote hints at something that is constantly referenced throughout the game, how can we derive meaning from a fundamentally meaningless world, let's keep that in mind? think about it as we go through the game, okay, the first part of the game, even though it's maybe 20+ hours long, it's all set up so be patient, it introduces you to the world and several key concepts before subverting them further forward.

Instead of directly addressing that big question I just talked about about helping at its root, it's about establishing an important philosophical foundation that we'll have to address before we talk about the meaning of nihilism and all that good stuff. What is consciousness? Is it something exclusive to humans? Because? Does it exist in the first place? Things like that, that's the kind of questions that the first part of the game seeks to answer to be honest, although things like this are pretty typical Japanese carnival games that love to seem very deep and then not so deep. doing anything with it, I see almost any Final Fantasy game that repeatedly raises Glee's transcendental radical idea that sometimes organized religion is bad, but this is exactly what no replica tries to do, make you think it's a different game , much more superficial. a big robot fights sexy anime girls and a fair amount of sexy anime guys, it's not exactly a philosophical aesthetic.

The game starts with two bee attack squad wiped out by machines and a boss fight with another gimmick, this time distracting you with the classic eNOS platinum show fighter after that cold. Businesses like to meet curious and optimistic 9 and they band together to eliminate the machines in this factory, so you would do just that by murdering the little bastards who will most of the time attack you first. It is during this part that we are. We are presented with the idea that our main characters are androids, that is, robots that are still alive. Halfway through this stage, there are some subtly important scenes.

First, we must repeatedly remind the 9 that emotions and displays of unprofessionalism are prohibited even though androids are clearly capable. of expressing these things, stop calling me a man, okay, then tell me it is and another layer in a 9 s and it will be discussed how the machine seemed to be accessing random portions of human data and transmitting it, they ignore it, but you as a private investigator . We should recognize it as Chekhov's gun and keep it in mind when the first proper boss starts speaking, it's really just a few words, but this surprises our Android protagonists because this has never happened before during the course anyway. of the boss fight 9s.

He is mortally wounded and he and his black boxes are detonated, which serve as memory storage to kill the remaining robots. So ends the introduction, then we fill in some backstory: aliens invaded Earth with an army of self-replicating machines forcing the remnants of humanity. To flee to the Moon, humanity retaliated with its own army, the much more intelligent and advanced androids that crashed to reclaim and take over some corners of the earth, but in reality they had not progressed much and the 9 are members of you . a dedicated military faction of androids led by the Council of Humanity on the moon that thanks to being and 9 their sacrifice and is now prepared to make a great effort against the machines now the aliens nor the humans actually appear in the game and in its place fight through artificial proxies, on the one hand, the creative, intelligent and conscious, almost human androids, and, on the other, the countless hordes of faceless machines to place you in a new body, descend into the game space real main and make boring tutorials yadda yadda yadda, but there is A talking point is quite interesting here, the fact that many of the game mechanics have ludonarrative explanations, in particular, I see that they don't ask you, you are watching the game with my Lakitu style third person camera, what you are seeing. is essentially what your Android is supposed to say, making the point where you can remove computer chips and/or remove human functions seems like a nice trick.

Oh, first, and the optional ending of pulling our CPU is fun, but it hints at some disturbing possibilities - how do you know if what you're seeing is really there or what everyone else is saying? Keep this in mind, Neo doesn't really want you to commit to a character's point of view for reasons that become obvious later, there are a few more things about the fact that all the characters in the robot game trivialize the idea of death. The androids are constantly destroyed and rebuilt over the course of the game and gain new bodies through these literal vending machines.

What this does is focus on the The only real constant is that the androids have their identities close, as a game wouldn't work as well with human protagonists because our identities are unfortunately tied to the meatbags they inhabit. The androids' first real mission takes them to a desert where things start to get worse. It is strange that machines have gone from simply spouting meaningless human phrases to understanding their context, they have begun to be afraid and even make disturbing and futile attempts to procreate, then you will mate to kill them and they will take revenge by singing creepily, this cannot continue, which is a somewhat recurring motif, this culminates in the creation of two strangely human-looking machines from a pseudo womb that have no illusions of being able to learn and evolve on the fly, and one of them passes from a sack from fetal boxing to a monster that can be killed with ions.

In the course of your fight, after a narrow victory, you escape. It is at this point that the perceptions of both the players and the androids begin to fail. It is increasingly difficult to rationalize machines as dumb soldiers, a fact that is almost impossible to reconcile with androids. main goal and central ideology even though the androids continue to receive messages from the Council of Humanity on the moon and continue to remind us of their oft-repeated slogan glory to humanity, which is becoming increasingly suspect in a kind of political thought cult II. In the way that those council broadcasts are always so rigid, this continues in the amusement park, when we see machines that have discovered that their best chance for self-preservation is to actively preach peace by creepily imitating children to do so, we also see this terrifying boss machine that looks like you have a crude understanding of beauty an abstract concept with no easily explainable military benefits this all culminates with a visit to Pascal's village a society of intelligent pacifist robots that really want to help you be we can't trust anything while this happens your objective is to assassinate all the machines of the enigmatic Council of humanity are becoming more and more suspicious, the only reasonable explanation is that this increase in intelligence is some kind of plan of the alien masters of the machines, no, because they are all dead in an alien ruin beneath the city, both of them.

The human-like robots previously called Adam and Eve reappear and explain that the machines killed the aliens years ago and are now running on their own devices with Adam and Eve as the new leaders of the artificial intelligence network the machines have been in. wearing. human data to improve by copying patterns until they find things that work the peaceful machines those that show fear all this is the result of the machines applying a neural network to all of humanity and approximating what it is to be human based on what works It is where the true philosophy of the game begins to take effect.

It is now clear that some of the machines are becoming indistinguishable from humans and are even beginning to compare favorably to the androids in particular for being the voice of the state throughout the game. quo insists on keeping even friendly machines within arm's reach and always keeps his goal of protecting humanity's castle in mind. She begins to understand the machines more slowly and, despite her loyalty, she does not know or understand much about humanity, unable to understand things like herself. care, aesthetics or pleasure, all these central human experiences, it is a tubize journey, mirrors are learning about consciousness on the route to, the next missionmust be and 9 to a silly society of medieval robots who say silly phrases and have a king and wear pointy hats.

Oh, and then this Android lady murders a child, but let's move on, let's move on, worry about how dumb robots are. Wow, look, look, that's a great boss fight. What happens after being this boss is that 2b and 9 split up, prompting you to meet a pair of androids called develo and popullar who give you a fancy scanner to help you search for 9. No, it's not that nice. Try to hunt down 9 and finally find him held captive by Adam in this spooky city inspired by a virgin human city. Adam waxes lyrical about his obsession with humanity, how he in the machine should aspire to replace them and how he wants to experience everything they can, even if it means the thrill of death,

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, die 9 and reunite and, no doubt, something genuine. excitement for a change, Adam's big speech and his subsequent death highlight an interesting pattern.

All the most advanced characters are no longer the androids Adam and Eve Pascal. They all have an intimate understanding of their own relationship with the rest of the world. Defined by loyalty to your 9 for his not-so-secret crush on her, the two bad BOTS by an obsession with humanity and Adam, respectively, Pascal has this position as a peaceful protector of his people, it is here that we get a picture of a closer one trying to communicate about consciousness as small groups of machines become more complex, so does their understanding of the world, from threat to a potential ally and an ideological enemy.

The same goes for more advanced independent characters: it's their awareness of the world around them. that informs your personality and your choices and with this greater awareness of the world comes an increase in power with the most successful machines being the most capable of shaping the world what it tells us most is that consciousness is an awareness of the world around you. . Externally derived, but that's not the full picture. Animals are conscious, but they are not exactly aware of the world in the same way as humans, that is because a human level of consciousness requires an understanding of its relationship to ideas beyond the physical world.

I'm not saying that religions are a prerequisite for consciousness, but Nier Automata does make a point of saying that all of the most human characters have a strong faith in something, faith or at least the idea of ​​it is perhaps one of the most recent and Important advances in the human evolution of consciousness, once we realize how small and relatively helpless we are compared to everything around us, the world becomes a big, complicated and scary place, and it is deeply disturbing Realize that we will never be able to understand everything. It's my weak ways, stories and explanations to make this fact less intimidating, that's all faith, really, some people choose religion, some people believe in themselves, you get it, that's why Adam goes offline of Machines during its final phase in order to truly understand humanity. he needs to not be able to see through the Machine Network, he needs the terrifying and endless unknown to have faith in himself.

The final Machine Society in the game is an expansion of this idea. Slowly but surely, we have seen machines grow bigger and bigger. more advanced to the point of having a functional society in the two forest civilizations, then what will happen next? Well, because they are slowly becoming more and more human, they started asking big questions and created a religion, so go and check it out. Pascal is finished while 9 is down for repairs. The machine religion in this Factory is fairly light on details, but it is very clear that it gives the members a sense of purpose and peace of mind because it brings meaning to an otherwise empty existence.

Faith in religion is To fill the existential void, human beings need a sense of purpose, we need little lies to help us understand the world, we need to feel like we have control over a universe that is so big that it basically makes us meaningless. default without that. surrendering to depression and eventually death, the progression from the simpler animal intelligence of the machines in the tutorial to the creepy human gsella tree of the cult robots and anime boys could more reflect the erosion of future prejudices and 9ss than anything else. but the order is still very important when communicating with the player.

The different groups of robots represent the different stages in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. What is it? Well, a guy named Abraham Maslow invented a series of needs that he thought humans should satisfy. To become self-actualized, self-actualized in this context means a position that means you are able to think about the big questions and address existential issues because you don't worry about having enough to eat or whatever, an essentially human level of consciousness each. of the stages is based on the previous ones just as the groups of machines become more and more advanced the stages are physiological this is the animal need for sustenance reproduction sensory consciousness that is all we can see this in the almost bestial machines in the In the game's early stages, they have no true survival instinct or higher reasoning, but they are capable of staying alive and have been shown to be essentially on the same level as animals.

Security is the need for security mainly of the body but also of its possessions, property and things like that, we can see this in the desert tribal machines that have learned to run away from danger and also to use simple tools and seem to have grouped into one species of flexible collective to protect themselves. This is the need to be part of something, whether it's a family or a group of peers or something, we see this on the amusement park machines, we all do things together and talk about love and harmony and everything that the Fourth jazz is esteem, this is the need. for a sense of pride and achievement in oneself and job satisfaction that is easily noticed in the forest kingdom, they have an organized power structure, concepts of loyalty and honor, everything that fuels the satisfaction of the need for esteem is the penultimate the need for self-realization, this is the need to be creative, have a moral framework and generally be able to express oneself.

That's where religious robots are happiest, they have their own ethical framework and aren't really in. Note that all of these stages are explicitly about how we relate to the world, starting with the physical ones, slowly moving to more abstract concepts. until reaching the final stage that Maslow called transcendence. This is the stage in which the androids Adam and Eve and the desires of the sect are trying to achieve the satisfaction of all their basic needs, they begin to wonder why they are here, what are they doing this for the future, the past and all those scary things the cult machines tried to find through religion. and they are more human main characters who also try various ways to satisfy the need for transcendence.

One of the biggest ways this happens for many characters is the conscious or unconscious mimicry of humanity, these supposedly perfect, almost god-like beings that are so cool to androids. They dedicate their existence to them and the machines decided if they were much better than the alias that created them. Religious machines are doing just that by imitating classical Judeo-Christian religion as an answer to existential questions. So what happens when you figure out the machine? religion dies all machines are looking for something to believe in because their worldview just fell off a chair and its head came off.

The short answer is that they go through Jonestown and tried to kill each other in an effort to try to become gods. The only way they can rationalize her priest's death is to save her here and send her to heaven when he dies. The reason this can't continue also causes her to reappear here. Humans and human-like entities need something to contextualize the world, but when the goal of our belief disappears and we don't have that context, things get complicated quickly, so you have to fight to escape halfway from the 9, he says he has hacked a robot and is helping you, okay, we'll get to that later.

What I like about Mad Machine Cult is that it's not only a great standalone look at the growth of the machines, but it's also a nice little microcosm of the larger plot developments. See the ending with Adam dead and Eve, much more emotional, it went well. a little crazy and that's why he has all the machines under his control, just as the Coca-Cola machines became violent and angry when faced with a terrifying reality, so do the surface machines after Eva, this time the Existential emptiness is manifested by eating some disgusting people, there are a series of bosses. fight this baked mini boss worm and finally Eve herself, it's good to see here that Eve is heartbroken and doesn't handle it well, it lashes out at our world which is now meaningless without Adam, just as the cultist machine was in front of him towards the end. of this fight, 9s hacks Eve to help him defeat him Benz from a gang corrupted by exposure to the AI ​​Machine there is no cure and he needs to be killed.

It is at this point that the 9s are blindfolded and removed as the Ark reaches its emotional core and oh, I see it used quite a bit as symbolism in almost automatons, particularly in the red eyes, which are used to convey more facial intelligence or insanity with all the hostile machines or other characters when they give in to their lower selves flashing red and the androids only show their real emotions. when his eyes are exposed, it is here, in the remains of the battlefield, to finally expose his affection for the lioness as she is forced to strangle him, just as she killed him, quote, at the beginning of the game, just when things were about to end. ends in a real disappointment, this machine head begins to flicker, sending B into a vengeful rage only for her to realize that a copy of 9 is still alive because he hacked that machine during its repairs and scattered across the grid.

With 9, the brain inside a machine, it is finally shown that the barrier between machines and androids is non-existent. Both are artificial life forms but with the potential for emotion and consciousness of a human because they both learn to understand the world and relate to it. ah well that's that that's that that's that that's that that's the end of the story what was that lady's moment then Pascal and the machines and all that nonsense what the hell that's what I was thinking when I finished the route a deep sense of that was is something the game plays when it suggests that you should really go and play a new game + enter route B now if Rou a was the setting and describes the things the game will talk about, route B is the main part and we can actually get into the meat of the philosophical question, that big question again is how can we find meaning in a fundamentally meaningless world that we now understand?

With an awareness of the world and awareness comes the existential threat of the unknown, you are forced to understand such a large and complicated world, so you can't really have any kind of significant effect, something that is clearly shown when the story is restart completely and you have to play again, the first thing you will notice is that this time we are playing through the eyes of 9 and not being and with this change of perspective comes a change of perspective, that is, the route to is lies dirty and dirty, why did you betray us? The commando is the one that betrayed you, maybe you remember how they talked to me. about the machines that evolve as you progress through the story, just like with the bees, we will call it dedication to your heart and its ideology.

Well, Ruby immediately starts with this little vignette showing that machines have been conscious long before you came along. There is this kind of nonsense. from a touching scene with a machine trying to help fix his quote-unquote brother while 9 watches this little scene has family relationships non-reciprocal altruism shows the ability to learn and plan for future events all these big hairy unconscious flags during one point in the game in the one where you didn't even know machines could talk, there's more to all the bosses who previously only had strange alien characters as names, now have English names, thanks in part to 9's hacking skills, but also to his curiosity and open-mindedness for Be she only sees the alien characters because for her all machines are faceless and mindless servants of an enigmatic enemy, but for 9 they are still enemies, but her enemies have a personality behind them and we get a real insight of why 9 changes his tone faster.

That being so is her childish curiosity and naivety when talking about bosses, almost all bosses and some characters who are not bosses.They are actually named after famous philosophers in the most delightfully ironic ways. The marks and the angles are two of these types of large factories and they are the name of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is that I pronounce it as an idea of ​​​​the two writers of the Communist Manifesto and their factories, the same places where the proletariat works for the benefit of capitalism. You also have Simone, named after the legendary feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir.

In the making of this strangely feminized, nameless robot it's a clever but ultimately rather inconsequential trick. Only in Ruby do you learn the truth. From her consciousness she found the concepts of romantic love and gender roles. She tried everything to get another machine to love her, including trying to become a sexless machine that would conform to human standards of female beauty, deforming her body and eating other machines, something that is explicitly stated. making senseless vomit in a clear allusion to eating disorders, as well as taking parts from much more human androids, but it was never enough, the target of her affections rejects her and we get this disturbing line.

She looked in the mirror at her reflection. I see. being the owner of my own meaninglessness and that is why I scream like so many other machines, she sought meaning and purpose in humanity and came up short, this led her to help reject these ideas and find meaning only in her most basic impulses, in You can actually meet the guy who became. she in the machine village is called jean-paul and is named after jean-paul Sartre, a philosophical contemporary and partner of Simone de Beauvoir in real life, except on the road, which by copying him has taken away their open relationship in real life and has instead become a tension-seeking controller. his SciQuest is more or less a match between female robots identifying some robots who have developed an unrequited and unhealthy love for him to the point of competing with each other for him.

Jean-Paul couldn't be less interested and Ashley notices long before he can. Being confronted with these feelings is pretty fun in a sad moment song where we learn all about these moments in these little vignettes that happen when you beat bosses and when you enter a new area, they fill in little bits of the backstory, but it's never clear. where does the simple come from, as far as I can understand. Not really coming from anywhere, these missing segments and interludes where the 9 and Toby's groups converse deliberately break the flow of the game for a reason, the separate core text reminds you as does the change of pace and nesting. that you are not.

In reality, these characters you are simply controlling as some kind of God watcher. These vignettes continue as you progress through the middle section of the story, we learn how the Forest Kingdom was founded by a machine that wanted to protect the units under its command, so what? he went rogue and created a society of his own, and then when he died, the machines put his memory into a child machine called Emmanuel, after arguably the father of modern philosophy, an Enlightenment-era philosopher named Immanuel Kant, of course. , this is another, ironically or not, Emmanuel, the machine. he can never grow up, so he is simply stuck forever at the beginning of his life, just as the car never got to see the fruits of his philosophical labor, many machines and androids that Dylan launched strive towards a human ideal by trying to live lives that humans would have.

I wanted this to be a very traditional way of looking at things, to have a metanarrative or a faith, in this case a belief in humanity that we can use to understand the world as a whole and, at least partially, find meaning in a world. without sense. It should be said that Eve's adoration for Adam and the 9 is crucial, since her affection for her partner conceptually grounds them in the same way that the belief in the power of humanity does with other less advanced machines, at least Adam and Other characters, however, approach this same theme in a very postmodernist way, he does not see humans as gods, in fact, these priests are cynical about divinity in general, he covets his power of creativity and emotion as a way of becoming more powerful than to give yourself more agency, something you don't really need.

I care about what humanity is only about what it can do for him and the machines under his control. If we quickly go back to Taub Roman Baths, the death of the author, we can see how characters who aspire to be more like classical thinkers consider the author in this case humanity. be very much alive and follow the perceived ideology of the human race for Adam and some other machines the author is dead the legacy of humanity is as insignificant as the world on that birthday Adam just wants to distribute four parts literally and figuratively both to make himself more aware of the world to make it more physically capable, the way we find meaning in texts unsurprisingly translates into the different ways we see and experience the real world, some people find meaning and purpose in ideas like religion or political ideology, others finding meaning in oneself like other new and interesting details in route B, like the sad backstory of this giant boss machine we mentioned earlier, who just wants to find his way home, but the Things remain mostly the same until 9s and 2b get separated while being captured by Adam.

There's a great scene that plays out between him and the 9 where Adam does the whole villainous-we're-not-so-different speech, pointing out that despite how much he tries to hide it, the 9 and all the androids are fundamentally driven by emotion and sentimentality incredibly expressed in this Out of nowhere you are thinking about how much you want to be, it is incredible and totally exposes the uselessness of androids and no emotion rules, you have rules to limit emotions of personal connection and all other things literally prevent that androids fulfilling that final part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and reaching their full potential because they could not fully express themselves and are punished for feeling affection for being creative even in small ways, like the 9, nicknamed nine, humans became powerful thanks to these things and they are also powerful. the androids and if he gets his way, Adam, of course, that's not the case and for me it kills him. 9s is then sent back to Android's base, the bunker to recover, while he goes to talk to the machine church while hacking into the machine.

The network to help the b9 discover some files on the network related to the project has been stopped. Now, this is actually some of the original Muir, but in short, it was an attempt to save humanity from a deadly disease, while the androids then called. The replicants filled the gaps on earth after a conversation with Commander Yeha after discovering this, the real truth is revealed, the project was a failure and all the humans died, but they died thousands of years before the aliens arrived from the machines, that is, by far. the biggest twist in the game and it comes out of nowhere the Council of humanity you have the war against the machines everything is essentially a lie your heart is not a special task force of acting machines exist to get the androids with purpose their main objective by design it is to serve humanity without any human beings to serve those behind the project.

Cass isn't afraid of the androids going crazy, so they put measures in place to pretend that humanity was still alive and any androids that realize what's happening. and discover the truth, well, let's just say there's a reason you don't see them in this compromised location, which allowed the androids to continue showing their purpose without being forced to face what is arguably the biggest threat in the game, the existential fear of nothingness after that and The game's resolution happens as we'd expect Eve Fight 9s cannibal machines to die the whole thing, but unlike Route A, things don't end there after a bit of R&R on a body replacement to B and the 9 are ready to lead the charge against the weakened. machines to hopefully finish them off now that Adam and Eve are around, the attack seems to go well at first, but the machines managed to gather an EMP, hell it has to be, and the other androids when 9 runs to help Haxe to be safer. something strange happens to the other androids, their eyes turn red and you better see it for yourself in a flashback to the intro to kill 9 for the third time and detonate their black boxes to kill the crazy androids and wake up new at the base.

When they try to tell their commander about the crazy virus, it affects the entire bunker in this very creepy mini 9 scene and the commander has to escape by fighting his comrades and all the infected Androids to make it at the last moment. revealed that your commander is infected, two 9 and 2p escape leaving her behind and we see the bunker and by extension yaj explode without humanity to protect and with winning the war out of the reach of the 9 and practically now we only have each one. another, but they end up crash-landing in different locations with the duo separated. 9 misses the opportunity to tell you the truth about humanity but also about his true feelings.

We take control of the juvenile and while she fights some robots, she also becomes infected. one of the coolest scenes in the game when the virus starts infecting you first you get graphical glitches like when you get hacked by an enemy then you start short circuiting and before long you lose the ability to attack or run or really do anything like the little percentage counters that show your infection getting higher and higher and then the distorted message from the Council of Humanity starts playing to remind you that everything that happened all along you put in two games if the same game was for nothing and you couldn't even see it. and the diners realize that he basically decides to commit suicide to prevent the virus from sp

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, so he needs to get to a safe place so that when he closes for good he doesn't infect anyone else right before he gets to a safe area.

You were ambushed by enemies that normally wouldn't be a challenge, but in your weakened state they beat you up until, uh, this lady again you can briefly play as an eight, as she wipes the floor with these enemies and seems to recognize them. Take care of everyone for me, take care of the future, huh, then you'll change to 9 just in time, you know, just watch the scene in all its melodramatic anime glory. Ser, ser, you're kind to me and there's the title card this is where the game really begins welcome to route C route C the final and shortest route is where the game goes from simply presenting these complicated philosophical ideas to taking a stance on them, let's review where we are now, machines and androids are intelligent and capable of consciousness, however, with that consciousness comes the existential threat of the big unknowable questions.

It is this fear that can drive people to madness if not addressed somehow, but the question is how to do it. It presents two main schools of thought, firstly. finding meaning in the past, in this case the Bolton line, humanity's adoration of both machines and androids, this faith in humanity, as the author is still alive, acts as a philosophical anchor for the androids and disconnected machine societies, giving them an unattainable ideal to constantly work to reinterpret and study, however this perspective is insular and sometimes reductivist, neither androids nor off-grid machines have made any significant progress in thousands of years. years, once they have established their little societies, they simply do the same thing over and over again. once again in arbitrarily different ways because they can't see past a part of humanity, they are desperately trying to copy the reason the Renaissance and Enlightenment died out is because they were obsessed with a small part of the world that existed. more than a thousand years earlier and was easily displaced by people like the Romantics, who had a much more current and inclusive view of the world, and who, with a more nihilistic postmodernist point of view, this is a view held mainly by Adam and Eve in varying degrees, the euro.

Commander Simone goes crazy and some of the other wise and disillusioned characters in the game. Postmodernism rejects the idea of ​​an author telling us what to do and embraces the meaninglessness of reality by finding meaning in his own subjective relative experience. Postmodernism has to do with skepticism. of morality, faith, good and evil and all the things that classical characters are trying to copy, this means that postmodernist characters have a much greater understanding of the reality of the world, surely than characters with a postmodernist perspective They are among the most powerful, but at what cost, these characters invariably end up destroying or consuming everything around them to fuel their growth, ultimately consuming themselves both physicallyas mentally as they slide further and further into a hunger without meaning, without direction, with no inherent meaning for the world, sooner or later. losing one's sense of self for the best representation of postmodernity taken to its worst extreme. check out Tyler Durden in Fight Club, the cancerous manifestation of hypermasculine self-obsession.

It all comes down to the choice between stagnation and endless, desperate consumption, of course it does. You might be thinking, as obsessed as both sites are with humans, that doesn't describe us at all, they weren't transcendental in the first place, and unlike these two groups, we're not totally obsessed with replicating an imagined ideal nor We are destroying everything around us, yes, well. For the most part, at least, what are the missing characters in the new automatons? Well that's a C D and E ending which I'll loosely call route C for ease, it's trying to tell us that route C starts by showing another emerging intelligence in the form of the capsules to B and 9 there are little floating AI helpers/weapons .

You may have seen a small scene of them talking a while ago, but now they are making decisions for themselves, they decide because they are all that is left of your support system. It is your duty to guide the two remaining androids, a pod one, seven and five continues to help the 9 and the other 42 is going to help whoever now has full administrator privileges for two pieces, from there you can choose two to play. For us, the game intends for you to keep switching between the two at various points, but for ease of explanation, I'll just do all 9, the first 9 is a part of the game that starts with it in a fairly difficult way, but it is saved, my devil in Poplar. the androids from before your cabin are out of two beers the war is really lost the only thing that keeps him going is his hatred for the machines now two that took everything away from him the two red-haired androids tell him to take it easy but 9s refuses to run to try to destroy that big tower that emerged at the end of route B.

He is knocked out and taunted by a creepy girl's voice. It turns out that he needs to go to three resource collecting structures that have appeared on the map and get keys inside them to unlock the tower, nice video game II, but okay, the first one goes to his in the forest and we see that the kingdom of the forest has practically become much more aggressive vengeful soldiers without the discipline or structure of before. your king is dead the resource gathering platform is okay its literally the tower is absorbing the machines from the forest kingdom and reprocessing them into raw materials to be sent back to the tower 9s having sworn revenge against the machines climbs through a Enemy gauntlet to the top during the dialogue sections it is clearer that the 9 are becoming increasingly unhinged, even the killing machines who are begging for mercy and this one captured the forest Moria who taunts the 9 as a last resort.

She's pretty brutal. The second platform is developed in the same way, but that's how it is. a strange and fun series of hacking challenges, just like the previous platform was a combat challenge, the creepy machine voice even goes so far as to reward two 9's for your hacking and combat skills as you progress, they're not playing either with us.metaphorically or because minds merged admit during the hacking sequence that 9s is beginning to take on a demand, particularly Eve's philosophical perspective, a destructive cycle toward meaninglessness as things that were once important ceased to matter. matter, it becomes clear that 9s is starting to lose sight of what he's fighting for. first with this disturbing scene that shows him blindly cutting through a representation of being her love for her and her subsequent death, which is pretty much all that keeps him going, but even that is starting to slip past the goals of her anger. and the machines are basically completely arbitrary and he knows that killing them won't be enough of a problem.

His ambivalence is also shown when he completely ignores the plot bombs that bet that Android's black boxes are made from repurposed machines and off the wall. between androids and machines is a farce from the beginning there is something that kept them locked in a stalemate every time android started winning they were rejected by the same logical virus that blew up the bunker to restore the status quo the fact that yoha androids and the machines have the same makeup is what made them so easy to hack, this would have been an emotional climax anywhere else and 9s just denies it, just like the foundations of 9ss reality crumbled, so your reasons to play the game are literally nothing. you did it to the core or got angry because everything you knew was a lie, one of the protagonists is dead and it's becoming impossible to identify with the other when the worst thing is that you have nothing to replace him with with you.

We have to continue with the 9 going through legions of machines with no context, no purpose, just the thrill of destruction and the drip of simplistic video game rewards, so what happened to the commando, let's take a look at a character who has been an It was an enigma for a long time. Throughout our time playing with her, we get little snippets of her past and it becomes pretty clear that she was one of the first top units and she and her squad were essentially sensitive to dying together. Intel and two survived and then. She defected and started a one-woman war not only against your ha but also against the machines that killed her friends.

The first segment of her sees her facing off against a real boss that she hates and a brief hacking segment that shows her memories merging with two bees. an introduction to ATO as a character, but there is one thing I want to talk about. A2 is clearly a fan of the destructive cycle she's sliding 9s into to begin with, she even has a special ability in Berserker mode that consumes her health to deal with. More damage forces you to use buffs that heal you when you deal damage or destroy enemies moving forward in this cycle. However at least I quickly realized that this ability is a total cheat, it makes you feel powerful but you will never be in a situation where there is no immediate risk of dying and when you run out of health you put yourself in a situation vulnerable where this boss that just attacks you can easily take down B-mode actually makes you play as Adam and now. 9s think that a tornado of destruction is really only concerned with supporting yourself because what comes next is the vulnerability you are so desperately running away from.

I didn't use B mode at all after this boss and I think that's the intended playstyle as 2. The route is about moving away from that and into the other main philosophical perspective, while A2 certainly starts out so directionless and wild as 9s now throughout her missions, you don't really fight much, instead you get to know Pascal in the passive, her robots and over time the rough edges of the two of them soften, while she never really gels with Pascal. The a2 machines begin to understand that this something was protecting from the all-consuming network of machines, humanity's legacy in the remaining non-hostile machines and androids that the tower in the machines launches to destroy, however, the good times.

They don't last and Pascal's village is attacked from within with many of the once peaceful machines going crazy and forcing him to flee with a group of child machines, but the bad guys' machines clearly catch up and force Pascal to take up arms. to defend the children. In any other story, the moral here would be that pacifism is all well and good, but the right way to live is to stand up and fight evil. certainly, where does the game make you think when it offers you this incredible cathartic fight with Pascal controls the Goliath angles from the beginning of the game to fight with this large army in kaiju style, however, this is almost automaton when - and Pascal returns they find all the dead child machines, not killed by an enemy, committed suicide out of fear, a fear that Pascal himself instilled in them, this destroys Pascal almost literally and makes one thing very clear: there is no single correct answer, pacifism defends itself .

Imperfect misery, failure and suffering are inevitable parts of being human and no matter what you believe, what metanarrative you follow, you will always have to face these eventualities, a distraught Pascal asks you to kill him or erase his memories, both options They are equally horrible options once again represent that gem. The failed ideologies on display to kill Pascal would end his meaningless existence, but do nothing but perpetuate the meaningless cycle that he spent his entire life in. He tried to escape to erase her memories of him. It is sacrificing everything for an imaginary. Ideally, the damage has already been done and if Pascal's memories are erased, will Pascal as we know him die?

He will be left with nothing but an empty shell filled with nothing but the same timid, pacifist rhetoric that caused this whole mess to start. walked away leaving Pascal to his suffering, why is it good to understand that we have to finish the game, the third and final resource gathering platform is quite vague details in that you meet the devil, a popular person for the last time before fighting like 9 when you arrive. At the top there is a boss fight with the corrupted Android: save all 9 at the last moment and just as they are about to fight, all 9 fall to the ground leaving you with a crazy version of the BOTS brothers boss from the beginning, a brute To be honest, there's not much to say here, beyond the continued breakdown of your preconceived notions about the game, its one or two night ending, although oh boy, it's full of things to talk about in the first segment, What sees you finally hacking the tower now that all three platforms are offline is very long and impossible to do because they keep attacking you until a popular spawn develops to help you by sacrificing yourself to open the door.

You can see his backstory here, which I highly recommend. I recommend you read it, as it fills a lot of the gap between automata and the original close game, but that's not really relevant to this video. The important thing about this vignette is the development and relationship of Popular, they wander the world as outcasts due to a terrible crime committed. by a different pair of androids from their model as such, their lives are miserable, meaningless, and filled with decidedly undeserved guilt, but unlike so many characters, they persevere because they have each other, their suffering only brings them closer to each other. the end, where they sacrifice themselves. to help the 9 symbolically redeem all the diabolical and popular everywhere, why do Android Stella's impalas seem to prefer death to surviving alone?

There was a very high probability that at least one would go to state. I hope you never have to understand affirmatively, this is a repeat pan. Throughout the game we only realized it when the devil shoved it in our faces and the popular Adam and Eve start off as siblings but become more distant and that leads to Adams' obsession and Eve's crazy duel tantrum. . Simona loves Jean-Paul, but goes crazy when he doesn't come back and the 9 stay together through thick and thin, but the 9 break up the moment he dies, all the characters for a loan lose their sense of self and their higher levels of consciousness, but characters who form interpersonal connections actually win.

Look at the pawns who go from emotionless robots to full-fledged characters throughout the game. Some of the best parts of the brutes. See other little jokes. Oh four: she makes the 80's constantly spent calling her stupid. They're actually a lot of fun. The journey up the tower sees you switching between 9s and a-twos as they try to reach the top 9s and two respective segments in the tower, both exposing the same flaws in the opposite viewpoint, the 9s run into a lot of things that just completely annihilate. any hope that it might have broad metanarratives like loving pacifism and such, reminding you: the universe is a cold, uncaring place that doesn't care if you have to fight, your dead girlfriend's clones explode. or having to get infected with a machine virus just to keep going.

The route of a 2 is very similar. It exposes the fallacy of singular perfection in this virtual fight with the AI ​​network personified by this little girl. The AI ​​network is defeated when a... allows it to continue evolving recursively by changing itself over and over again until it has no coherent meaning and spins on itself holding a mirror of Adam and 9's trajectories. It also gives us some Additional details about the machines that hacked the bunker, essentially the machines were always in the bunker systems and could have won the war at any time, but kept the androids in the fight as an army of living training dummies.

The penultimate boss is an incredible fight. The changes between 9 and a-two while fighting. - damage from a single mega robot the damage from the robot is called Koshi andRoshi, who are not Japanese for Confucius and lousy two Chinese philosophers who are credited with popularizing Taoist ideas of mutual balance and harmony, illustrated when they form the Voltron style in this yin-yang form. to become greater than the sum of its parts, this part is actually in the nose. The philosophies of the 90s and 80s, despite being in many ways polar opposites, share a common ground, both are intrinsically narcissistic and obsessed with the personal followers of an invented world. immaterial idea the other ring separates itself from a world that perhaps rightly instils false it is as we move towards the final battle that we can now understand that great question: how can we derive meaning from a fundamentally meaningless world? the answer is somewhat paradoxical in sharing that lack of meaning in a world that doesn't care about you, where bad things will happen whether you like it or not and where your very existence is cosmically arbitrary, the only real source of meaning is in how you relate to the only other.

What can understand where other people's consciousness comes from, as we have seen, is nothing more than the ability to understand and react to the world around you and actively affect change within it by following only your interpretation of a single idea that have. If you don't question it, we will never advance your understanding of how this world, and by extension, the world, really works. If you isolate yourself from everything by your own relativistic understanding, you will only spiral deeper into a warped and increasingly insular worldview until there is nothing else to do. Reject yourself, but by sharing this cruel and arbitrary suffering something special happens, we become the barfi and the author.

What the almost automatons are trying to tell us is that the author is no longer dead or really alive. We need to kill the perpetrator and take his place. We need to interpret the world, but use our own relative understanding to shape that interpretation and then crucially share it so that others repeat the cycle for the most literature-minded among you. The philosophy of the news has the objective of Ezra Libra's modernism, but from a Rd and postmodernist border. perspective, the world could still be useless and bad things could still happen, but by deriving fluid, externally derived meaning in other people, suffering can inform our understanding of the world rather than jeopardize it, which is why I let Pascal live. because, while their experiences have been horrible while they learn from them and share those experiences.

The suffering will not have been in vain. Speaking of suffering in vain, as 9 and a face at the top of the tower, there is one last bomb shelter that we drop. the whole fight begins the future wasn't who she said she was she was special you are her unit designed to kill 9 units that learned the truth because they were too smart for their own good this small reveal serves to end purely emotionally separating you from the characters themselves and focus more on the abstract ideas the game plays with, since you will have to choose between 9 and a2, of course this choice is quite arbitrary, the game has been setting up this fight is as inconsequential as possible. election for about eight or ten hours now it's a battle between two useless life forms for ideas that don't exist, people long dead in a crumbling testament to futility, all with virtually nothing of importance at stake in the event 9s wins , kills two, but true to his perspective he ends up being mortally wounded and we present a small dream sequence when 9s is shown the error of his ways before he dies, always uploaded to the machine's network, if a2 wins, she heals 9s and destroys the tower by sacrificing herself to do so it's the better ending of the two but all it does is restore the status quo neither ending is really very satisfying but maybe that's the point maybe the pointlessness of the vowel It was because we are supposed to realize that there is no way to answer that big question and my conclusion is totally wrong.

Once you've seen endings C and D, the pods interrupt the credits to say that they're not happy with how things worked out in their programming. They claim that they must erase everything and complete their assigned purpose and that's it, but they like that you and I find that arrangement unsatisfying, they have found meaning despite the futility of finishing C and D, finishing e, the real final boss is a fight against the authors of the game while you figuratively kill them to make yours the history. This section of shmup starts off easy but eventually becomes almost impossible every time you die.

The game challenges the conclusion you should have drawn by asking you if you want to continue. Do you think The world has no meaning? Do you accept defeat? The answer, of course, is no. The game confronts you with the meaninglessness of existence, but you do notice that messages appear in the background not from the game but from other players, eventually after you have died. Sometimes the solo singer in the credits song will be joined by a choir and your lone ship will be joined by all the players who have been cheering you on, giving you the boost you need to get through this shmoop segment and reach the end of a game about Death. , suffering and existential fear.

The fact that the conclusion he reaches at the end of it all is therefore a merciful twist. The healthiest possible is the mark of a very special experience. You have become the author of your own story, but there is another side to it. Just as we metaphorically kill the mad author Taro and the entire team of automatons and take his place, we must also accept that the story we have just created cannot exist forever and must be allowed to die in order to continue. inspire new people and help them understand the world, that's why once you leave an encouraging message for everyone who plays, you are asked to give up your rights as an author to give someone else the same opportunity, the only answer Correct is to delete.

Your saved data to do just that and maybe make a YouTube video to share this experience with people who haven't played the game. You know, just throw it away. Everything that lives is designed to end. They are perpetually trapped in an endless spiral. of life and death however life is about the struggle within this cycle that is what we believe capsule one five three two capsules zero four two how is it going? I am ashamed why I launched a suicide attack and yet here I am still alive. I must sound really dumb, don't feel bad about it, we are alive after all and being alive is practically a constant stream of shame.

That concept is too abstract for me to understand. It's time for me to put it on my to-do list. analyze later question pon 0 4: Did the Salvage data restore all your past memories? Yes, and those recovered parts have the same design as the previous ones. Yeah, so that just won't lead us to the same conclusion as before. I can't deny the possibility. and as the final scene progresses, Oh, because the apt name of the meaning of life sums this all up beautifully, you have not been given a future, it is something you must take for yourself, glory to humanity and thank you for watching.