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[Nillo]

My only 2 real gripes with this gam

1. the overworldworld isnt very well designed. not only do the environments look pretty bland, there are a fuckload of invisible walls and lots of places that look like you could get to them but can't. that  mmade it unnecessarily difficult to find my around and the intentionally vague minimap didnt help much. this is less of a problem once u put 40hrs into the game and know where everything is, but its still annoying.

2. the difficulty modes are unbalanced as shit. normal is almost trivially easy and on hard almost everything oneshots you. i ended up playin on normal because i care more about the story than getting stuck on a boss for hours but it'd be nice to have a middle ground there.

Oops I paged your post

[Superb Joe]

My only 2 real gripes with this gam

1. the overworldworld isnt very well designed. not only do the environments look pretty bland, there are a fuckload of invisible walls and lots of places that look like you could get to them but can't. that  mmade it unnecessarily difficult to find my around and the intentionally vague minimap didnt help much. this is less of a problem once u put 40hrs into the game and know where everything is, but its still annoying.

2. the difficulty modes are unbalanced as shit. normal is almost trivially easy and on hard almost everything oneshots you. i ended up playin on normal because i care more about the story than getting stuck on a boss for hours but it'd be nice to have a middle ground there.

Oops I paged your post

the impressive thing to me is there are like 50,000 niggles like this in the game but ultimately none of it bothers me

[s0]

got ending c

i think this might be one of the best stories in a game ever (and i havent even delved into all of it yet). damn.

[Raptor85]

There are invisible walls everywhere, yeah. It bothered me at first but after a while the good overwhelmed it so much I actually completely forgot about it, lol

As for the difficulty, I thought hard wasn't that bad. I play glass cannon anyways so I just really had to learn the fantastic dodge and counter system.

[Superb Joe]

one of my favourite things about this game is that it's incredibly obvious that Transformers: Devastation was made to beta test many of its systems

[s0]

Now all we need is a drakengard 4 by platinum and yoko taro.

Not least bc i wanna see what platinum can do with a musou style game.

[Superb Joe]

given how much of transformers they rammed into this game and how it's selling, you've got to think that scalebound represents an easy opportunity for square to cut some time and money out of developing a drakengard game

[Superb Joe]

so for people who have at least completed ending d the picture books are 9s reading formless golden retrievers adam and eve stories on the ark, right?

[Capntastic]

Re:  Picturebook: I was trying to think of what those were supposed to be, and that is a good idea.  I took it to exist as a sort of flag to signal the disparity between his mindset from Route B to Route C, since he goes from having a childlike but curious view of the machines to just wanting to destroy everything

Rambling, half formed thoughts on Route C/D/Everything, and some Nier: Gestalt spoilers I guess:

So all three of the playable characters are important.  I keep seeing people complain that 2B does not have an arc and A2 doesn't make sense. Arguably, 9S is the "main" character, since they have the most pronounced arc and interact with the setting the most, as well as getting the most Jack's Back goofball screentime.  But 2B's existence is important because of what we learn about her after her death- and her existence continues to matter because of how she has affected people.  A2's important is a bit harder to pin down, but it is important that her endings are sacrificial.  The idea that love and hate are two sides of the same coin are pretty easy to make claims, as far as Yoko Taro's writing goes- made clear by the perspective shifts in both Nier games.  2B seems terse because she feels protective of 9S and also knows she will eventually have to kill him (this whole aspect of their situation is a bit unclear in precisely how many times she has done so and what her specific mission is). A2 kills 2B to save her from being corrupted, and depending on your ending choice, takes care of 9S or kills him.  9S likewise loves and hates 2B and kills A2.  Each of these iterations of hate and love are complicated and a little bit obscure, but they are all intertwined in a big complicated tangle.

But here's the central question Nier asks:  What is a person?  The first Nier game has soulless clones fumbling around as placeholders until humans come back, and disembodied but vaguely tangible souls going insane. It's pretty clumsy about "hmmm are people their bodies or is there more to it".  Nier: Automata goes further.

The game brings up the black boxes early on.  The tutorial NPC tells you they have no idea what the black box really is. A black box, as a term, has two meanings:  The recorded data of a vessel, like a plane, that can be recovered after an accident, as well as an abstraction of a process or a circuit or a formula or algorithm that gets you what you want. 2B kills things.  9S can look inside them. The fact that 2B can't open the locked boxes scattered around Route A isn't just annoying, it's thematically relevant. 9S can look inside them. The meat box, the soul box, and the god box, are all more boxes that 9S looks inside and learns about.  He even learns that the black box at his own core is the same as the machines that he hates. And the resource boxes all have a machine core at their pinnacle. It's not hard to say that the meat box represents physical bodies, the soul box represents memories or "data" or similar intangibles.  The God Box is a bit trickier to pin down, like A2.  That is also where 9S and A2 encounter each other.

Pascal tells us that the machine cores/black boxes are what makes a machine a machine- irreplaceable.  You can give a machine a new body or new memories, but that core is their core.  But 9S and 2B eradicate their black boxes minutes into the game- I can ignore the fast travel system not having a clear way to teleport a black box (it mentions back up bodies being stored at the travel nodes I think?) as a gameplay conceit, but the cinematic with 9S and 2B detonating their cores is fully intentional.  It is meant to tell us something about their sacrifice.  Either detonating their bodies and memories (2B's were backed up, 9S's were lost) and souls means something or it doesn't.  2B's body was destroyed and her memory was corrupted.  But there are backups of those- her body is mass produced and her memories are explicitly stated to be backed up in her sword.  Her core, her black box might have been destroyed- but we have seen it explode already.  So why can't 2B be rebuilt?  What makes her dead "for real"? I think the point is that there is no single box you're going to find a person's humanity in.  It exists outside of the box, if you'll allow me to be a glib piece of trash.  

Pascal's end is unfortunate, yeah. Your options are to destroy their body or destroy their memories, and neither feel right. (Apparently there is a way to leave without doing either, which I'll need to try). If that is true, I feel like A2 leaving Pascal to suffer would be the "correct" choice.  2B would probably have no problem obliterating the robot, and 9S would employ memory hacking with ease.  A2 has a choice, being granted hacking abilities for this task.  This is why A2 is complicated, and I need to re-read the short story of the Pearl Harbor Operation to get a stronger idea of what her actions are.

I think that a lot of the end of Route C/D stuff about "evolutionary pressure" and "actually it turns out that all these enclaves of robots were on the network the whole time" is weak and detracts from the idea that these machines were all asymptotically approaching human-like sentience from different angles.  I'd like to think Pascal is the closest thing to being fully realized, especially if they are forced to deal with their suffering and grow from it.  I dunno.

Videogames

[Superb Joe]

were the weird little enclaves actually "on the network" or just permitted or designed to exist as part of the evolutionary experiment? they pretty clearly don't have the robot ESP to talk to each other on the network and are eventually "tested" and found wanting by being eaten alive. Except for the shut in and Pascal, who ultimately actually was a very efficient killing machine in the end

[Superb Joe]

ha ha ha just thought about the opening monologue your own god is dead, but there is a very real god producing sentient life only to kill it in the network, and you do kill it. Nier: Automata is the story of the pushy former athlete parent, desperate to realise their sporting goals through their children

[s0]

i think at least pascal and his village are disconnected from the network. pascal mentions it it in dialog a few times. that is also probably why they get attacked by the "cannibal" machines. the others could just be the network trying to simulate and thereby study human behaviors. theres a bit of lore somewhere that says the machines keep repeating the same shit and failing in the exact same ways. so the stuff we see in the game is one of many iterations of the same thing.

on another level, the various machine "factions" all represent things people rely on to create meaning in their lives, such as community (pascal's village), family (desert bots), duty (forest bots), pleasure (amusement park bots), religion (factory bots) etc.

[s0]

the opening monologue is so cool and one of many examples of how well this game uses foreshadowing. out of context it just seems like a generic BADASS FAUX PHILOSOPHICAL QUOTE, but it actually "spoils" one of the game's major plot points.

[s0]

finally sat down and got ending E

[Capntastic]

finally sat down and got ending E

I knew you could do it, I never stopped believing in you

But did you believe in someone else?

[Capntastic]

were the weird little enclaves actually "on the network" or just permitted or designed to exist as part of the evolutionary experiment? they pretty clearly don't have the robot ESP to talk to each other on the network and are eventually "tested" and found wanting by being eaten alive. Except for the shut in and Pascal, who ultimately actually was a very efficient killing machine in the end

I think it was implied that "some of them went berserk!" like some of them were still on the network.  I mean, you can thematically take the network as meaning "are our actions determined by some higher force or are we possessed of free will".  Another interesting thing is that Adam explicitly unplugs himself from the network but, according to logs and the ending, his data still gets backed up. It's confusing.

[Superb Joe]

well 2b got the virus too and i don't think she was on the network. it's sort of wishy washy plot device bs that probably has a million different ways to justify it. eve opens "forced connections" so i dunno, a wizard did it.

[Capntastic]

a wizard did it.

Oh yeah for sure, I'm not looking for "how does the scifi tech in the year 11000 work" so much as "what is the meaning of this within the story".  


The androids in Nier can manipulate matter without touching it (the little halos around weapons, etc) and it's not really explained and it doesn't need to be- it's just a thing that androids can do.  Tech like the black boxes and "the network" are more interesting to think about because of what they are supposed to represent.  Like the black box is an individual's soul, not just what makes them "sentient" but what makes them unique. You can have infinite backups of an android with the same bodies and same memories ported in but the game wants us to feel like they would still be unique.

Like "the network" can be the pressure culture or a civilization puts on a person, societal expectation, etc.  But I can also read it as base instinct or human nature or whatever- the machines cut themselves off from mindless instinctual behavior and start forming their own cultures.

Plus the Nietschazee quote Pascal scoffs at before shit goes down in Route C

[omnilith]

Just got Ending E. What a game.

[Raptor85]

well 2b got the virus too and i don't think she was on the network. it's sort of wishy washy plot device bs that probably has a million different ways to justify it. eve opens "forced connections" so i dunno, a wizard did it.

you're mixing two plot points in the game, some of the info from the machines makes it clear that the "network" as the machines call it all machines are supposed to be connected at all times but some disconnect themselves.  The androids are NOT on a network, the machines at one point talk about how that was their advantage, that they always knew exactly what each other were thinking, where the androids have to call each other or talk.  What the androids do is periodically upload backups onto their server (that one you hack into at one point), at the beginning of C route, 9s halts the uplink from the server on himself and 2b, so they didn't get the virus download.  Later when 2b pushes 9s away the other yorha units infect 2b, similar to the close range hacking attacks like 9s and the dancer boss did. Since the bunker is destroyed and the backup server gone, there was no way to recover data at that point, which is why she couldn't be revived.