It is a game constantly being made new.Īnd as Nier: Automata transforms, so do the androids, who try to find a way of living with little guidance from their human creators. Nier: Automata "ends" several times, each finale serving as a chapter break, giving the game a chance to try out a new perspective, a new approach. The game transforms itself to discover itself, as if some mind confined deep within it believes that, by contorting this way and that, it can somehow understand what it's really made of. They will do anything for this goal, and the game will, too. Everyone in this world wants to make sense of their lives within the fixed elements-life, death, more life, an endless war on behalf of masters you've never even met-that keep them trapped. The big picture cyclicality creates, paradoxically, a space for near-infinite experimentation inside of it. Another resembles an old-school fighting game.
One segment is reminiscent of a 2D Castlevania, as you fight and climb through a layered, ruined castle full of machine lifeforms. Later, the game throws hacking minigames at you in the form of twin-stick shooting straight out of Geometry Wars.
Then the android jumps out of that mecha again, you hack and slash for a little while longer, and the camera switches again as you turn a hallway. Then that jet plane transforms into a mecha.
Then, a moment later, the game is a 2D bullet-hell jet-plane shooter. One moment, the game will be precisely what you signed up for: a third-person action game about an android with a blindfold and a big sword. The game pulls this tension off by constantly undercutting and transforming its own play. But it doesn't mean we have to play along nicely. Being alive might mean that we're all trapped. If Nier: Automata wants to highlight the cycles its characters are trapped in, it also wants to highlight the way those cycles can be broken, made sense of, or subverted. How do you live when your life's path is predetermined? How do you possibly make meaning out of your existence within that kind of inevitability? Nier: Automata confronts that question with the somber gravity of tragedy, and the trickster's grin of a game designer in his element.