At the beginning of Automata, pay attention to the worldbuilding/briefings given to the player character as they fly in to the opening battle. It’s a very linear battle which doesn’t feel that way in the moment, a really clever way to keep the player’s mind occupied just to the point that we feel as though our observations of the game’s world are self-motivated, neutral, and factual despite being force-fed exactly the same briefing as our character.

Once you finish the first stage and get to explore the game world more openly, keep on the look out for situations where the game world presents small subversions or inversions of the assumptions the game made you think were your own. The game won’t call direct attention to this and relies on you feeling like something is amiss.

This is probably what’s so “confusing” to some, but it wouldn’t work if the game told you which of your expectations are being subverted, because telling the player what they’re expected to expect would ruin the mind trick it pulled to get all that stuff in your head without you realizing it came from an external source. I love how the fake-self-realization trick puts the player into the same headspace as their on-screen character, but does so in a way that the player can’t realize how much of the game was a shared experience until much later.

It’s such a cool inversion of the very concept of the video game, where the player is nominally in control of the character by pushing the buttons and moving the sticks, but everything the player causes to happen in the game instead compels the player toward introspection of their own existence in order to understand the growing disconnect they feel between the game-world-as-observed and the game-world-as-expected-to-expect.

Just like our character, the player is presented with an “open world” with a limited list of things we can choose to go do. We both get just enough freedom of choice to feel like we’re in control without ever noticing all the ways the world effectively made our decisions for us by defining our limitations before we even got here so we won’t even realize it’s possible to question them. Do you want to smash robots in the desert, or smash robots in the grassland, or smash robots in the flooded city? Do you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a computer programmer? Non-participation is only an option if you turn the game off, and that’s no fun.

So I play the closed-off open world where I could theoretically command my character to go anywhere and do anything if both of us somehow realized we could choose what to choose. Still unknowingly placed in the same headspace as some very attractive computer code, the player can keep thinking about the nagging disconnect between the world as observed and the world as expected, but doing so is frustrating, fruitless, and the bad feeling goes away as long as you can distract yourself from thinking about it. Next mission; kill some evil machine lifeforms.

The visibly robotic “machine lifeforms” are invading earth and threaten the fate of humanity itself. Their glowing angry eye-lamps look out from otherwise-featureless spherical metal heads on cylindrical bodies, stumbling/hopping around awkwardly, shrill agonized cartoon-robot vocoder wails when we smash them, brandishing oversized novelty-industrial weapons. They’re super cute. They’re the biggest threat to our survival.

Earth’s defense force are the androids(/gynoids) taking orders from the moon base refuge of the last living humans. It’s such a noble cause for the androids that they were literally made in mankind’s image, visually indistinguishable from human at their most basic, up to walking talking fighting idealized perfection in the case of the YoRHa androids, especially 2B and her delicious 絶対領域 :d

Over the course of the game, which group seems to be more human, and how? Which group embodies the essence of humanity? (What is the essence of humanity?) Which group are the mass-produced automatons just cycling through the few experiences they’re pre-programmed to live out? (Child. Child. Child.)

That’s about as spoiler-free as I can get. It’s the backdrop for all the individual character storylines which I won’t even touch, but the real storyline IMO is the hidden one every player is unknowingly offered as they’re incentivized to define their own self in order to be able to better define the events of the game.

The story threads weaved in from the original NieR (Replicant/Gestalt) tie it all together in a way that’s… I can’t really describe it. It’s good. I can’t think of any games that affected my perception of my own existence quite as much as these two. The climax for me wasn’t even any of the labeled “endings” as much as the instant realization of the way the two games fit together (and corresponding instant reversal of several assumptions about Automata’s backstory) when I suddenly found myself in the [redacted], instantly separated from the headspace of my on-screen character because I recognized the location but she never could. Then the optional quest line with [redacted] that comes across as joking fanservice at first until you unexpectedly find yourself back in [redacted]’s [redacted] where [redacted] [redacted] in the first game, but it’s too bittersweet because [redacted] doesn’t even [reeeedaaaccctttteeeddd] any more and aw fuck I’m crying again