Phile's place to be Herself

*pops in*

I'm just floating about and waiting for Azores to finally end so I can maybe try joining the new sideplot lol. Outside of that, running around for doctor visits I guess.

Been doing fun stuff off to the side. Might do a side plot here one day, actually...
Been testing some of it's ideas on Captain and Matt...
Other than that, not much.
Can a side plot have a sequel?

Just putting my thoughts down here like usual! So a few of my friends think Yoko Taro is a terrible writer and writes very cliche stories, thus do not like Nier Automata because they think it's predictable but I think they're certainly missing the point of Yoko Taro and his writing.

I mean the original Nier had a cult following even though the gameplay is outdated and wonky with a poor frame rate. Even the drakengard series aswell. So why do the fans follow him so loyally? It's because the narrative and story of his creations. He is not a perfect writer, so it's possible to find plot holes in some of his writing, but that does not remove the intricacy of his stories. I'm going to stick with more so the Nier side of things as I've never gone too deep into Drakengard.

Nier and Automata spoilers below obviously:

So starting with the first Nier even I can be the first to admit the game had issues. Though these issues came not from the story, but the gameplay. If Yoko has any strengths in his writing, it would be he's able to show a character's background, emotions, and story without it being over prevalent and derailing the main narrative. For example: Kaine. A mysterious woman you meant alone in a forest fighting a number of shades for her life. You assist her, but she still wishes to be left alone. She wishes to avenge her grandmother who died to a Shade. Your character is there for another reason. Your daughter (or sister depending on the game) is suffering from a disease caused the black scrawl. There is no such thing as a cure for it, but you're doing everything in your power to save her. You go to the village where they've outcasted the mysterious woman, by the name of Kaine, because of her predicament. She's part Shade, the menace to all humans.

Instead of wishing for revenge towards the humans that shunned her, she still protected the village from the forest alone. And though it was because of her vendetta, she still fought and protected the people who shunned her if she liked it or not. However, keep in mind this was not a focus on the story and was instead revealed as you went through your own journey to save your loved one. This is only one of the moments Yoko's writing has been superb in terms of others. Where an average game would derail the main story and send you on a side quest involving Kaine, he wraps her scenario beautifully into the main narrative and makes you care about the character without making you forget your main objective. This isn't the first time this has happened in the story. Various characters you meant throughout the journey you care for.

When Emil first is turned into his skeleton like form, he cries and tries to cover his face so Nier (the main character) cannot see him. The main character walks up to him, and simply gives him a hug saying he was worried. He never looked at him strange or treated him any different. (9:00 minutes into the video)


Now this loner Kaine, who I spoke of before, begins to travel with you through events. She sacrifices herself later on to save you and Emil, being turned to stone to seal a monster away (P3 anyone?) Well Emil and you go to reclaim a power so you can free her, and in turn Emil transforms into this new being. Its been 5 years, but they return to Kaine and free her of her prison. And this lonely woman who had a smart mouth and cursed at everyone shows how "human" she really is when she's finally freed. (15 minutes into the video above). She notices Emil right away, even with his change in appearance, accepting him for who he is. Which means alot, since no one accepted her for who she was in her village until she met Nier (save for her late Grandmother).

That's just scratching the relationship between these characters and the writing Yoko has done for them. You start to really grow with the characters, which every good story should allow you to grow with the characters within it.

In terms of the actual story, it was not as cut in dry as you'd think.

HUGH NIER SPOILERS BELOW:




Yoko took another route with his story. The people you play with are replicants. Bodies created to be shells for the souls of humans that lost their previous bodies due to a plague. The Shades you fight throughout the story and kill are actually the humans of old, and the black scrawl virus is a side effect of a replicant gaining its own soul and personality, thus causing it to reject its human counterpart. This causes the Shade to go haywire and the replicant to die.

You find out there is a Shadowlord, who is your human duplicate, who has a younger sister (or daughter depending on the version of the game) they are trying to save. The only way to save them is to combine the Shade of their sister with the replicant body (which is your sister). And not only this, but the Shadowlord needs your body aswell to fuse with. But if you fuse, there's no guarantee you will be the same person you were. There are multiple endings in the game, but the canon ending is you defeat the shadowking which in turn causes the gestalt project (the project where shades and replicants fuse) to fail. And though you save your daughter, your life soon ends after when you sacrifice yourself to save Kaine. (You delete your save file this ending and you are erased from existence). However, there is another ending where your memories are stored in a tree and you're revived.

Even this is only scratching the shell of the game, and I haven't even spoke of Devola and Popola. I can't really until we get to the Nier Automata side in risk of spoilers. Same with Emil's fate as he "dies" in Nier. But let me tell you Nier has a bittersweet ending. When the Shades all die, their replicants will all get the black scrawl. Thus, with the death of the Shadowlord and the rest of the Shades, the replicants all died at a later date. Basically you doomed mankind to death, and thus Automata starts and there are only machines and androids left on Earth. Yoko has the talent of giving us a bittersweet ending. Though we saved our sister/daughter and Kaine.. That happiness we had only lasted for so long before everyone died.


SPOILERS FOR AUTOMATA:




Automata starts after the dawn of a machine war. We meet our characters, both being androids, against a machine menace. Lore states aliens came to planet Earth and forced the humans to the moon. However if you played the first Nier you know this to be a lie. Humans were long since dead before the aliens came to Earth. They came to Earth to a barren planet with only one protector which was Emil. Emil, being the last human and weapon, survived all these years alone and fought the aliens by himself. He split himself into multiple copies to battle the aliens to a point where his memories were fragmented and his original self was lost somewhere. The final optional boss in the game is Emil, and you fight his various clones still left on Earth. They decided to destroy the planet. Why? Because why go on living when there is no one to live for? All his friends died one by one, including Nier and Kaine. He fought for Earth alone against the Aliens and for what? He wasn't fighting to protect anyone. He was all alone on that planet with no one with him, and all he loved gone. He protected their memory and that's all he could do. And so he cried, and was broken from despair. The answer his clones came up with was to destroy everything. "Eternity.. It hurts.. It really hurts."


If you stop his suicide attempt, one of the remaining clones slowly dies. As he dies, he remembers his old friends and sees them one last time before his death.

It was a sad finale for Emil and for Nier, but it was one he deserved after so long of being alone.


Now Devola and Popola were in the original game. They are androids and twins created to facilitate the Gestalt Project and make it a success. They were the ones who gave your sister to the Shadowlord, and attempted to force you to merge with him. You fought back, and killed them both. They had no choice though, as it was their programming to do the things they have done. They failed and thus humanity was wiped out. All the other remaining androids on the planet blamed them and thus destroyed all their models save for just two, who you meet in Automata. Instead, they were programmed to feel guilt. Guilt over a failure and crime they didn't even commit themselves. And thus throughout the whole story they're trying to prove their worth as others treat them like garbage. They want to make up for the crimes the previous models in the first game had done, and they do that by sacrificing their lives so 9S can board the Android built arc. Anything to prove they were sorry for what their previous lives had done.

A big factor in Yoko's writing for Automata was just how human the machines and androids were without humans ever being involved. They idolized and studied humanity, but even without that, they were already developing souls and becoming more human themselves. In the case of machines, they disconnected from the network (which is like a hub where are machines get their orders) and thus think on their own. When doing that you see a various amount of machines with different backgrounds. Some live in the desert, others live in peaceful villages, others in the forest as kings. They all have various ways of living and it shows how human they are aswell. That they have souls even if they are just machines. One thing Automata really pushed was evolution. To evolve was to change and unplug. As Androids and as Machines. And to understand each other, and that not all of those from the same tree are as rotten as the last apple. Writing that completely went over people's heads because they think just because 2B is showing her ass there isn't a story.

And even that is just touching the tip of Automata's story. Especially the story revolving around 2B and 9S's story together. And their history. Especially with 2B's history of truly being a 2E unit sent to watch 9S and eliminate him if he becomes too self aware.

But whatever.. I'm tired and work is calling so I'm gonna cut this short.

tl;dr you a Nier and Yoko Taro fan. Gotcha. Never played any of the Nier games, tbh, but their soundtrack's pretty godly. That Yoko Taro guy is pretty funny, so he's good in my book so far despite never playing any of his games yet.

So what have you been up to so far?

As someone who's been on a NieR Automata binge for a while, tbh I can't say if I've ever seen such a heartwrenching story, at least personally. I'm sure there are other games out there that make people feel just as emotional as Automata did for me, but I haven't personally played them or watched them be played myself (due to my PC being utter shit, Automata falls in the latter category). Nevertheless, this one game alone already makes me admire Yoko Taro's writing, which I think the Tweet above perfectly describes. It's one thing to make a robot learn to be human, and it can be done beautifully (Aigis is a decent example, though I don't think she's the best one personally), but it takes real skill to make something that thinks they aren't human come to realize they are, as he did with the androids.

Imo the clash between the androids and Adam and Eve is probably one of my favorite aspects of Automata. Making the focus the rapid adaptation and outright humanization of the machines slowly makes our protagonists realize that they're the ones holding themselves back emotionally. They may be androids, but their minds are just as human as any other; hell, just as human as Adam's and Eve's if you really think about it.

Then there's my favorite character, 9S. Somehow, being forced to lose your memories over and over while being none the wiser speaks to a primal fear in me; if you lost your memories past a certain point and nothing seemed different, how would you be able to tell? What if it already happened? What can guarantee that it hasn't? Once 9S defies this cycle and starts forming memories of 2B, he goes insane trying to protect them when something physically threatens to destroy them, despite the fact that it's happened without his knowledge hundreds, maybe thousands of times before. He clings to the memories he's made... yet in the beginning of the game he willingly gives them up to save 2B's instead.

But hey, what do I know.

The truth is that I'm only one girl.

Hey Hey! How is everyone? How is everything? Anything new in terms of site or personal life?? Just stop by to say I'm still alive~

B0ss has graced us with her presence once again *weeps tears of joy*

A bit's happened. I became a test mod recently and my birthday passed just a few days ago, so things are pretty nice for me. School's starting up again soon though. As for the site as a whole, we've started the new sideplot Junction and Endymion's about to move to its seventh ingame day, so everything's proceeding relatively smoothly.

How have you been lately? Anything interesting happen or just the same old, same old?

Same old same old. Working, paying for my home, and taking it easy in life now. Things were stressful for a time being but things are going up. Now I'm playing Momma to Essay and coaching him on how to make a good first impression to his girlfriend's father haha.

Happy Belated Birthday! Sideplot niceee. And Seventh Day? Did you guys beat up the pesky painter and invidia yet?

Nah, still sixth. Demon Painter is still in the works. Invidia starts on the next. Tell Term we're rooting for him. Good to hear things are faring well on your side. We miss you.

Glad to hear from you again Phi! I'm case I'm on my new(ish) alt account this is Jack btw. Things have been pretty smooth around here. Nothing to worry about. Glad to know things are on the up for you!

Yeah, we're still on the sixth, I just meant seventh was up next. My bad. Probably should have worded that better. Demon Painter's going great so far though. We've had an incredible lucky streak to start out with when it comes to the RNG; we even managed to get a Golden Hand and Jojo killed it on his first turn thanks to a critical hit.

But yeah, it's good to hear things are going alright for you. Hopefully the situation'll continue to improve. If you ever need to vent then we'd be happy to lend an ear.

THE FOUL DEMONS AND HERETICS WILL FEEL MY HOLY WRATH!

hi phile

after how wordy I've been, time to return to the roots

It is good to hear things are going well for you and Term, Phile. I hope that it only gets better from here on out for ya. =) As for self life is better due to some changes and I came back to join the sideplot, so all is good.