Nier: Automata’s Anime Is a Perfect Companion Piece To The Game

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 4, 2024 | 10:30am

Photo courtesy of Crunchyroll

Anime Features NieR: Automata

Nier: Automata’s Anime Is a Perfect Companion Piece To The Game

Nier: Automata is one of those games where, if it lands for you, it’s likely to become an annoyingly large part of your personality. Part ambitious sci-fi fable, part critique of state-sanctioned violence, part degenerate weeb nonsense, it helped transform Yoko Taro’s cult classic Drakengard series into something more approaching a household name, a transgressive and thoroughly weird object whose massive thematic swings help it stand apart from most other AA-AAA games.

Considering the amount of love for Automata, there was a combination of excitement and slight confusion when it was announced it would receive an anime adaptation from A-1 Pictures. It was promising that a new audience would get a taste of this idiosyncratic story and that Yoko Taro, the game’s director and lead writer, was handling the screenplay. But, considering how deeply Automata utilizes interactivity to tell its story, many wondered if its events could translate to a passive medium—could this narrative work without player involvement?

At least through Nier: Automata Ver1.1a ‘s first episode, it didn’t seem like it. The premiere directly pulled from the game’s cold open intro in a way that didn’t add anything new, and between some awkward 3DCGI and its failure to draw audiences in, things didn’t look particularly promising. However, after this somewhat lackluster initial episode, this adaptation rapidly improved, eventually not only matching but, in some cases, improving on the original story.

Just like the source material, the TV series follows 2B and 9S, combat androids in the militarized organization YoRHa. Fighting on behalf of humanity (who are living on the moon), these soldiers battle in a never-ending proxy war against “machine lifeforms” deployed by invading aliens. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot going on, and things only become more complicated as 2B, 9S, and eventually, the revenge-fueled A2 discover secrets that shatter their beliefs about this cyclical conflict.

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If there’s a single most obvious place where the TV series meaningfully improves on the game, it’s with this third character, A2, who wasn’t given enough room to breathe in the original telling. Nier: Automata is structured fairly unusually in that you play as three different protagonists. The first two, 2B and 9S, are partners for most of the runtime before a traumatic event leaves you playing as A2 for the backstretch.

Unlike 2B and 9S, A2 has gone AWOL from YoRHa, and while her distance from this regime would seemingly endear us to her, she lives her days in a similarly blind state of violence as she vengefully lashes out at YoRHa and machine lifeforms alike. Although she’s the protagonist of the most compelling stretch of the game, there’s one big issue: her backstory, which is entirely essential for understanding her perspective and motivations, is hidden behind an optional text log.

In this side story, we learn how A2’s unit was betrayed by YoRHa and subsequently wiped out by machines, explaining why she hates both groups. This backstab defines her: the name A2 is derived from the first two words of “Et tu, Brute” from Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar. After her team is killed, she is consumed by a combination of survivor’s guilt and hatred towards both her former organization and their enemy. Although the text log which details these events is an engaging read and Keichi Okabe’s otherworldly score helps set the stage, this essential material being tucked away in a missable corner of the Resistance base is a relatively strange choice. Furthermore, it feels like a missed opportunity that this dramatic sequence didn’t receive the full playable treatment, something which sums up how this heroine is relatively shortchanged and stuffed into the game’s back section—most of the runtime is focused on 2B and 9S, which makes A2 come across as a bit of a third wheel.

But while the game doesn’t fully capitalize on A2, the anime entirely rights this wrong, so much so that she ends up the definitive protagonist of this rendition. Pivotally, we finally see her backstory in motion in the series’ best episode, “[L]one wolf,” which is based on Taro’s spin-off manga YoRHa: Pearl Harbor Descent Record. Here, she’s deployed in a prototype YoRHa unit tasked with an impossible mission as she forms irreplaceable bonds with her comrades. Structured like a war epic and directed by Toshimasa Ishii, who helmed the adaptation of the similarly harrowing anime 86, the episode uses evocative visual language and abrupt bursts of brutality to pull us into this failed operation. We’re quickly endeared to these fighters before they meet their demise, and YoRHa’s callousness is laid bare as A2’s friends die for nothing. It’s as good a treatment of this storyline as you could possibly hope for, and while it’s largely centered around Lily, who becomes the Resistance leader in the anime, it introduces us to A2’s motivations while setting the stage for a later episode that retells these events from her perspective.

Another boon to this adaptation is that much less of A2’s screen time is spent frantically moving the plot forward, which allows more room for her to grow as a character. We see her desire for revenge slowly melt away as she spends time in Pascal’s village of pacifist machines, as she pretends to be much more disaffected than she actually is. All these little moments lead to a powerful finale, where despite all the horrible things she’s endured, she doesn’t give in to nihilistic despair. Unlike the game, it feels like she fully adopts the mantle of the protagonist, culminating in a barnburner denouement as she fights for a better world to pay forward the kindness she’s been shown.

However, while the anime addresses the game’s biggest flaw while introducing plenty of other small changes that keep things fresh for those who played the source material, it doesn’t feel like it “replaces” the game, but more that it adds to it. Because at the end of the day, Nier: Automata uses its interactive elements in ways that are impossible to fully adapt.

The most commonly cited example of this weaponized interactivity is the game’s climax, which makes the player choose if they want to make a tangible sacrifice to help another real person see the conclusion—it’s the type of inspired twist that’s only possible in this medium and perfectly ties into the overarching themes about breaking out of cycles of violence through rendering aid. There are plenty of other examples of this interactivity enhancing the narrative, like how being in control gives the player some degree of complicity in all this horrible carnage. Stabbing, shooting, and killing are classic videogame verbs, but Taro actually interrogates these actions in his games, reflecting a fascination with what makes people commit these kinds of acts in the real world. In the case of Automata, we’re forced to carry out uncomfortable crimes while being increasingly confronted with the futility and immorality of these actions.

And beyond this, the game simply has more stuff in it due to being a twenty to thirty-hour experience. There are a plethora of sidequests that flesh out the grim realities of this backdrop, and as you explore this setting over repeated playthroughs, you form a connection to this world, giving each subsequent change an added impact. Along the way, you discover this place’s secrets by reading through confidential data logs, conveying the act of being deprogrammed from fascist propaganda. And perhaps most pointedly, when a certain protagonist leaves the story, there is a ludic component at work as you no longer play as a character you’ve spent hours with. Ver1.1a may be an excellent adaptation that addresses some of the original story’s pitfalls, but because the game takes such good advantage of its medium, there are aspects of this tale that are simply impossible to mimic.

While it’s sort of obvious to say that non-games can’t replicate play, I’d argue interactivity is more essential to Automata’s storytelling than in many other games, making it uniquely tough to translate. For instance, Fallout and Arcane are great TV shows, but they mostly use their source material as a jumping-off point to tell different stories.

HBO’s The Last of Us makes for an interesting comparison to Ver1.1a in some ways because it’s also a more direct adaptation of a narrative-focused game, was similarly worked on by one of the game’s key creatives, and also adds some interesting narrative additions. But even still, I feel like HBO viewers who only watch the show and never play the game won’t be missing nearly as much as with Automata. I’m sure some will disagree with me because you could argue The Last of Us games also trap you in violence through gameplay. However, these attempts to pull us into the story through combat, like The Last of Us Part II’s lackluster attempts to make you feel bad for nameless goons you murder by having them call each other’s names, often fell flat for me. The Last of Us wanted to be a prestige TV show in the first place, so it didn’t feel like much was lost in translation when it finally became one.

I say all this less as a criticism of Ver1.1a and more to acknowledge how watching this great TV show made me appreciate even more how the game makes use of its medium. Because both tellings are successful on their own terms: the game constantly utilizes its interactivity in big and small ways to drive home its themes, while the show fixes some of its predecessor’s narrative issues by fleshing out both A2 and its side characters as it reinterprets certain playable sections. For instance, the anime cleverly reimagines the player’s final choice as a sacrifice made by in-universe characters.

I also like that the series doesn’t try to exhaustively adapt every little plot point from the game because its creators understand that what matters is to hit on the story’s core anti-fascist themes and capture these character arcs—a good adaptation isn’t necessarily a blindly faithful one. Some of this certainly comes from Taro’s direct involvement in both, and while I don’t want to diminish the many creatives involved in both projects, it’s quite apparent that the same person wrote both.

All that said, if there’s one glaring issue across both versions, but especially the anime, it’s that their otaku culture-inspired elements limit their appeal, namely, that they constantly sexualize their female protagonists. While you could try to make an argument that these sexualized designs are meant to reflect how these women are objectified by YoRHa, the show’s leering camera makes this an even harder sell. These choices are particularly unfortunate because they likely drive away many who would be receptive to the underlying ideas here.

Still, though, if you can get past these elements, Automata and its anime are a fascinating pairing that made me appreciate the strengths of both versions. They can be enjoyed separately but bolster each other, each making use of their medium as they convey similar ideas from different angles. Adapting videogames is hard, and that’s doubly true for one that makes such great use of its interactive storytelling. But despite that, Nier: Automata Ver1.1a made an unforgettable sci-fi odyssey even more strange and compelling, and that’s no small feat.

Elijah Gonzalez writes about games and anime. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon series. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.