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Monomythian posted:Dunno if this is suppose to be a hint about the Red Girls control over the machines or if its some meta commentary about the human condition but it's a nice touch. I took it as the machines missing the point of what being human entails, much like the androids. The whole scenario reminds me a lot of Dark City: just as the Strangers inject people with various archetypical personalities (the hooker with a heart of gold, the hardboiled detective, the serial killer, etc.), the machines create different communities representative of different aspects of humanity, and the androids manufacture different models who fulfill different tasks in combat, all under the assumption that it's the "features" of a human being - the easily explained surface elements and quirks of personality - that make someone human. In Automata, what makes someone human is being connected to another in a deep, meaningful way. Pascal is the closest thing the machines manage to make to being human, because it's patently obvious that he's not playing house: his devastation is real, and it's the fault of the Terminals that they don't realize how profound the creation of an entity like Pascal is. Tarezax posted:I see A2 as a version of 2B who took a different path when faced with the loss of loved ones. A2 throws herself into killing machines and cuts off all contact with others, while 2B is clearly tormented by her love of 9S and her duty to kill him but holds onto that love regardless. We follow A2 as she learns mentally and physically to be more like 2B. She reconnects with Anemone, and forms a bond with Pascal. The old A2 would have just killed 9S in the final fight, but instead she either sacrifices herself to save him or hesitates on the killing blow due to 2B's final wish. She serves as a very important foil to 9S, which is probably why she was included. This is made especially obvious during the entire Tower sequence, as the entire design of the tower is "upside down": 9S has become an unhinged killer, and A2 has becoming a loving saint. Vermain fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Mar 25, 2017 |
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Mar 25, 2017 03:51
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Snak posted:Edit: ^ I'm not sure the the red girls were directly having machines do thise things. The archives I read said they just increased entropy in the machines learning so they would learn about more stuff that wasn't applicable to combat. So that they would be less efficient fighters, so that they wouldn't win. According to Jackass's report, the "deficiencies" in the network that led to the creation of Pascal and the Forest King happened before the Terminals appeared, although the deficiencies were still initiated intentionally.
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Mar 25, 2017 04:04
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Mordiceius posted:Maybe it's because it is still so fresh for me, but Weight of the World is easily one of my favorite video game tracks ever. It's a genuinely great piece of music on its own merits.
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Mar 25, 2017 05:56
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idiotmeat posted:While it is forgiving from a timelimit perspective, mechanics wise it isnt. Randomly losing the ability to dodge is the pits. The game provides you with a huge number of opportunities to mentally map the City Ruins by the time you get to the infection section. I died once because I was an idiot and tried running straight through the center, and then carefully thought about it and took the ramp just to the left of the sewers entrance. There's only a few bullet-shooting enemies (whose attacks are still easily avoided) who you can quickly outrun once the temporary command lock (which happens on a predictable timer) goes away, and then a small leap over a ridge before it's completely smooth sailing to the Commercial Center.
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Mar 26, 2017 01:28
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InnercityGriot posted:I just beat ending C, was an absolutely wonderful experience all the way through. The ending sequence with A2 giving that line about the beauty of the world was really well done, the voice actress sold the poo poo out of that. That's my favorite scene of the entire game, probably.
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Mar 26, 2017 03:14
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a kitten posted:Not reading the spoiled text, but i'm in route C and it is so good, i absolutely love the way A2 and the Pod interact, not to mention her attitude towards doing the machine village's quests. The contrast between (later route C spoilers) A2's cold, dismissive attitude towards the quests and the absolutely wonderful music that plays after you complete the slide was fantastic. I almost didn't want to keep going after that point and just sit there and listen to the song forever.
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Mar 26, 2017 03:28
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You can make that specific jump by climbing up on top of the building to the left of it, jumping onto the rusted-out transformer (?) at the top, and then use a combination of a double jump, a dash, 3-4 Virtuous Contract light attacks and your Pod's slowfall.
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Mar 26, 2017 03:35
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Instant Grat posted:Spin kicks, yo. They're the absolute best way to get horizontal distance. Light attacks look cooler. 
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Mar 26, 2017 03:36
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I had a single crash on my first trip to the Bunker, and no problems since then. My computer is approximately six years out of date.
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Mar 26, 2017 06:13
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No Wave posted:But the people who posted above you didn't have any issues. Correct.
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Mar 26, 2017 06:21
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Square-Enix has a really hit-or-miss history with console ports. FFXIII-2 was one of the jankiest piles of poo poo I've ever played on a PC. Getting a smooth framerate without hitching required me to do a ludicrous series of maneuvers: plug in a controller, start up the game, close the game, unplug the controller, start up the game again, and then plug in the controller while the game was running - and this still only worked some of the time. Conversely, FFXIII-3 may as well have been developed for PC with how smoothly it ran.
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Mar 26, 2017 16:52
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Tae posted:Well that sucks. I finished ending A a day ago but if it gets suckier, I guess I can shelve it. Comparatively, I thought the dialogue served its purposes well, and the situations the characters found themselves in made me care about their predicament. I think this is one of those areas where it's simply a matter of taste, so I encourage you to play the game as much as you can enjoy it. Cymbal Monkey posted:Ending A is terrible, for all my criticism at this point you might as well power through to ending E, which doesn't take as long as you think it will. Route A is probably the weakest part of the game, since it's essentially only there to set the table for route B and its perspective flip. I think it's an incredibly necessary table setting, but I can understand people getting frustrated with it.
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Mar 27, 2017 00:41
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You can probably get through the entire main story in something like 15-20 hours, maybe less.
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Mar 27, 2017 00:44
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Cymbal Monkey posted:I'm curious, did anyone have any boss fights that they got really into/rate highly? I can't really think of any super memorable fights. I don't know why, but Hegel really stuck in my mind. I enjoyed the constant, frantic dodging and the switch between ground and air-based gameplay, and it's also got a really nice soundtrack. The tandem battle in the Tower was also highly memorable.
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Mar 27, 2017 05:27
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Fangz posted:Hmm, what is the significance of the starting narration, from 2B? Does this essentially suggest she knows the truth? Think of it logically: how can she know when she's supposed to execute 9S if she doesn't know at least some of what 9S is never supposed to find out?
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Mar 27, 2017 16:31
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RoadCrewWorker posted:Whats the theory source of 2B being there just to murder 9S over and over again? The text adventure of ending D literally has the line, from 9S' lips, "I guess [2B] didn't want to be attached to someone she had to kill again and again and again.
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Mar 27, 2017 17:02
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No Wave posted:It's pretty short so it didn't seem so bad, but I also had that route memorized after the stupid scanner mission post-Grun didn't create an objective marker and i durdled back and forth like a dumbass Yeah, it's extremely short. If you have a general idea of the optimal route (which you should after running through the City Ruins 50,000 times), it's maybe 5-8 minutes of playtime.
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Mar 29, 2017 00:26
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No Wave posted:Route B/C spoilers: The picture books you see in route B mention the "treasures", which appear to refer to some of the important robots (Forest King, Simone, and Grun) - the ones shown have icons, and one of the icons is a plant and the most prominent one is a cut-out heart like at the amusement park. The one compelling theory I've seen is that the "treasures" represent the different ways in which the various robot communities splintered in their attempts to become more human: the desert represents Love, Pascal's village represents Peace, etc.
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Mar 29, 2017 04:45
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Section 9 posted:Route E: Who are the 5th and 6th pods? There's 042 and 153, and the 2 other pods you can find during the game. But in the E ending there is a mention of "the 6 of us" and I think the ending scenes show 6 pods carrying stuff. Pod 042, Pod 153, A2, 9S, 2B... and you, the player. Six people.
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Mar 29, 2017 06:32
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You can wait until after route C is done to do completionist stuff.
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Mar 29, 2017 14:58
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Nina posted:To be fair A2 is like that since she's been on the run for years without a chance for maintenance. In the stage play she wears about the same getup as anyone on YoRHa More importantly, her character arc is about her becoming something other than a murderer. When we're first introduced to her, almost all of the sex appeal of her outfit has been worn down to tatters, a clear link between how she's almost fully abandoned the human concept of love on favor of embracing hatred. SHISHKABOB posted:Is ito the "this is my hole" guy? Is he also the author of the one where fish grow weird legs and a guy gets a shark in his house. That one was loving absurdly delightful. He's the mangaka behind The Enigma of Amigara Fault, yes. I recommend checking out the rest of his work some time; Hellstar Ramina is a masterpiece of surreal horror.
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Mar 31, 2017 21:06
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ThisIsACoolGuy posted:Is it a romantic situation or more family? It is a romantic tragedy. I know I keep going back to it, but watch ending A/B very carefully: 2B bobs her hips while she's strangling 9S to death. It's a gently caress pose; they're in love, but neither one wants to admit it because of the circumstances they find themselves caught in. Opposing Farce posted:Taro kind of has this conflation of sex and violence theme going on in his work, not in the skeevy sexualized violence way but in a way that, like, he seems to consider both of them base, impulsive things humans do because we're flawed, foolish beings. It's not just Taro. Sex and violence are fundamentally linked in a weird, uneasy way in the human psyche. To quote an anecdote from Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit: quote:On my right was mounted a heavy machine gun. The gunner (normally the cook) was firing away with what I can only describe as a beatific smile on his face. He was exhilerated by the squeezing of the trigger, the hammering of the gun, and the flight of his tracers rushing out into the dark shore. It struck me then (and was confirmed by him and many others later) that squeezing the trigger - releasing a hail of bullets - gives enormous pleasure and satisfaction. These are the pleasures of combat, not in terms of the intellectual planning - of the tactical and strategic chess game - but of the primal aggression, the release, and the orgasmic discharge. This intimate link is frequently used (think of characters like Bloodrayne, old Lara Croft, or even James Bond), but rarely commented upon directly. Automata takes the step of simply confirming this link openly and visibly. It does this in a number of ways:
The reason for all of this beyond mere shock factor will probably vary depending on a person's reading of the game as a whole. My reading is that Automata is a game about the question of, "What attributes make something human?", and its given answer is, "A human is someone who makes connections to others." Neither the androids who control YoRHa nor the Terminals that control the machines really understand this through most of the game's runtime: both sides think that human beings are defined both by their love and their hate, but they only take the physical element of those two things (sex and violence) into consideration. The emotional reason - the connections that people have - isn't considered. In a war, a person commits violence for their country because they believe in its ideals, or because they want to protect their family, or because they think the other side is a bunch of bastards, or any other number of reasons - but it's because of their connections that they choose to fight. The YoRHa androids fight because they were built to fight and are quickly killed if they dare do anything other than fight (or indirectly facilitate in fighting, such as with the Observer models). The machines, driven by their implanted directives, are in the same boat, save for a small few splinter groups who were (briefly) allowed to break apart from the collective in an attempt to further accelerate their evolution. What this all comes down to is that the bulk of the game's violence is totally meaningless, both from a diegetic (that is, the narrative context of the game) and an extradiegetic (the actual mechanics of the game as a video game) perspective. A lot of the fighting you do in this game is simply because robots appear onscreen and start attacking you, so you attack them back, mirroring the absurdity of the Forever War the two sides are locked in, both fighting for masters who no longer even exist. Consequently, given the aforementioned link between the two, the bulk of the game's sexual element is also meaningless: the only reason 2B wears a clipped dress and thigh-highs is because she's mandated to wear them, because the overseers of YoRHa think that imitating the physical aspects of humankind (wearing sexually attractive clothing and killing) is what will bring androids closer to becoming human. The sex and the violence in the game only gains any kind of purchase when it's infused with an underlying stream of emotional love/hate. Consider the choking scene of route A/B: this was a game where the cinematic director had ample opportunities for gratuitous panty shots, but the only time the cinematic camera gets a glimpse under 2B's skirt is after it's been nearly blown off, right before the moment where her sexuality actually is meaningful (her intimate moment with 9S). Similarly, the actual choking of 9S is one of the few moments of violence in the game that feels appropriately raw and powerful. It's not just a woman swinging a sword around and blowing up robots for no reason beyond them being there: it's two lovers, caught in an awful situation, where one has to commit a terrible act because of their affection for the other. This is mainly why I lean on, "A human is someone who makes connections to others," as the game's ultimate "answer" to the question of what it means to be human: the game repeatedly contrasts contextless violence and sexual elements (blowing up robots while 2B's skirt flaps around) with moments of intensely meaningful violence and sexual elements (the ending of route A/B), which are only made meaningful through the connections that you, the player, have made with the various characters of the game. Vermain fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 06:42
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Hikaki posted:I don't think the point of that part was that 9S is so far gone that he'd still kill 2B if she were walking and talking in front of him. It's a role reversal. This is correct. Remember, the essential design of the Tower is a world where everything has been turned upside down.
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Apr 3, 2017 02:50
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Cephas posted:Also I think it's interesting that Yoko Taro is getting so many interviews and videos lately. Was it like this for the original Nier, or for Drakengard 3? I'm wondering if Square-Enix is trying to build him some name recognition like Kojima or Suda51, etc. I think it's both Square-Enix realizing that he's a surprisingly photogenic man and the fact that this is his first real hit. NieR 1's become a bit of a cult classic, but Automata - a console port - hitting the top of the Steam charts tells me that the game did smashingly well.
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Apr 3, 2017 03:36
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:Imagine my surprise when I click the sticks and accidentally initiate it. Imagine my further surprise when I find out it literally blows your pants off for both 2B and 9S They don't call it la petite mort for nothing!
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Apr 4, 2017 02:29
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Maxwell Adams posted:Does anyone know why there are so many player corpses in Pascal's village? I've played all the way through the game and I don't get why so many people would die there. They're all high-level, too. They give you stuff like +6 chip effects and a bunch of G. Early on, I actually farmed a useful amount of G off those bodies. The machine snakes are pretty much a one or two-hit kill on Hard and above.
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Apr 9, 2017 04:59
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Games like Drakengard are practically the reason for LPs to exist: a game that's absolutely weird as poo poo but is about as fun to play as sticking your tongue to a flagpole.
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Apr 10, 2017 05:40
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Romes128 posted:there's literally an evade button though? is there not a keyboard binding for it? Nope. I was genuinely dumbfounded that there wasn't even an option to bind it; it's double tap or bust. The game fortunately plays just great using a controller, but geeze what a weird decision.
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Apr 10, 2017 06:13
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Libluini posted:Now is there a way to skip cut scenes and dialog? Because seeing as I can't save in the intro, and have to replay it a lot, that would help, too. Most cutscenes can be skipped by holding down one of the buttons, depending on your controller. My XBox 360 controller has it set to B. If you're using a different controller, just hit buttons at random and it should show you a prompt telling you what button to hold.
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Apr 11, 2017 19:09
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OneDeadman posted:Thematically this is why it owns. Yeah. I actually like Hegel quite a bit, because it marks the point in the story where A2's return to humanity begins. She thinks the best way to deal with Hegel is to go berserk and be a one-woman army, losing herself in battle. The optimal strategy, however, is to chip away with the Pod while Hegel is flying, and then spend most of your time running around and evading. It's a boss that requires teamwork to beat.
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Apr 13, 2017 03:42
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GANDHITRON posted:I finished Ending B and I'm past a very important part in Route C and I have a question. Spoilers for up to maybe two hours into Route C: Why does 2B get upset about killing 9S after the fight with Eve? Isn't all of his consciousness and personality (up until that fight) sitting on a server in the Bunker somewhere, ready to enter another android body? Imagine that you are with someone that you love very dearly. Imagine that some intense event occurs that deeply furthers the bond the two of you share. Now, imagine that, the next day, that person has no recollection of the event. They don't know it happened, and even if they did know, it's like someone telling them a story instead of them having truly experienced it. How does this make you feel?
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Apr 18, 2017 15:26
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It has to be some kind of generational divide. I grew up in the era of floppy disks and DOS; manually saving at every possible opportunity is second nature to me, even in the day and age of autosaves.
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Apr 18, 2017 15:31
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8-Bit Scholar posted:Is Soma good? I keep meaning to check it out SOMA is a good story packed into a really mediocre game. I think Frictional fell victim to what I'm going to call It's Not A Walking Sim-itis, where they wanted it to avoid being labeled interactive fiction for marketing purposes, so they gave it the standard Frictional treatment where there's scary monsters and logic puzzles you have to solve to progress, both of which feel (with a single exception) incredibly at odds with the core themes of the story. If it's on sale, I'd buy it.
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Apr 19, 2017 23:52
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Heroic Yoshimitsu posted:It's funny to see people compare SOMA to Nier Automata. Despite liking both games, I don't see their stories having very much in common. There's some similarities, but they ultimately take two irreconcilable approaches to the issue of mind-body duality.
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Apr 20, 2017 04:52
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Cuntellectual posted:A copy is a copy. It can emulate the feelings and past experiences, but it is not the same thing. What SOMA is getting at is that there isn't a functional difference between an "original" (mind A) and a "copy" (mind B). Both mind A and mind B are the "original," because a "person" at its barest level is merely a collection of data. If you can replicate that data perfectly, how can you tell who's the "real" one after the fork appears? Automata, by comparison, sees a level of dualist continuity in its protagonists, which is fine for its storytelling purposes.
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Apr 20, 2017 05:38
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Cuntellectual posted:It can be as good as the original, but it is, by definition, not. What functional difference is there between the "original" and the "copy"?
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Apr 20, 2017 05:48
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Cuntellectual posted:The copy is not the original. As you yourself said, there isn't a functional difference. Therefore, why does the category of "original" matter? What makes it a meaningful distinction to have?
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Apr 20, 2017 06:24
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veni veni veni posted:How do I find 9s after the fight in the flooded city? I found the yorha units so I have him on my map but I have no idea how to get there. He's located underground. You should return to the cavern you were in before (where you found the alien spaceship) and look around some more.
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Apr 23, 2017 06:03
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Mr E posted:I need to activate B-mode! *dies instantly* This is fully intentional. Remember, A2's whole quest is about her regaining her humanity and learning to trust and rely on others again. Berserker Mode is what she activates when she wants to become a one woman army, because she's scared of forming a bond with others again, only to lose them. 042 explicitly tells her several times at the start of the fight, "You shouldn't activate Berserker Mode. Let's work together to defeat Hegel instead," which she tries to furiously brush off - but 042 is correct, which is the lead in to her slowly emerging from her self-imposed isolation.
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May 16, 2017 17:35
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Mr E posted:I agree but that doesn't make the fight any less poo poo even without Berserker mode. I think the fight could've been improved if only a few of the balls dropped down at a time. As it stands, it's too hard to really do anything except slam the dodge button to avoid the massive amount of beam spam that covers your screen.
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May 16, 2017 17:39
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