Nier Automata
Pouring hours of my time into watching Clemp’s YouTube videos summarizing the entire lore behind the Nier and Drakengard series couldn’t prepare me for what awaited me when I finally reached ending E of Nier: Automata. For those of you who don’t know, Ending E has an entire sequence where you fight the names of the staff behind the game in a Galaga-esque shooting mini-game in order to help the YorHa units survive.
Seems feasible, right? Wrong. This bullet hell finale is as tough as Nier: Automata’s best boss fights. But after roughly ten minutes of listening to Keiichi Okabe’s beautiful song, Weight of the World, while dodging a bunch of tiny red enemy blasts, obliterating developer names, multiple deaths, and denying the game’s inquiry over whether this herculean task was pointless, I beat the mini-game. But Nier: Automata had one final ultimatum for me: sacrifice my save data to help another player struggling to defeat Ending E.
While this Yoko Taro-ism isn’t wholly unique, appearing as well in other fourth-wall-breaking meta-narratives from the video game auteur, it still runs laps in my mind years after I finished the game because of how well the choice was presented to me. After countless hours of meeting an untimely end and rushing to retrieve my dead Yorha units to salvage the upgrades I’d painstakingly procured for the sake of a phony in-game mission, I was given the choice to help divvy the weight of someone else’s impending struggle by sacrificing my time or hoarding my save data for a “future run.” The choice was obvious: I gave up my save data.
Nier: Automata is a bizarre RPG littered with sorrow, a dash of existentialism, smooth combat, and a perfect soundtrack. It never pulls its emotional punches and I wouldn’t have it any other way. — Isaiah Colbert
