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"Known for his surrealist films, he has developed a unique cinematic style. The surreal and, in many cases, violent elements contained within his films have been known to 'disturb, offend or mystify' audiences" is how the Wikipedia entry for David Lynch begins. I think you can basically swap out "films" for "video games" and get a good summary of Taro Yoko's style. Continuing this analogy, imagine a David Lynch who got stuck making nothing but Dune movies, and that's not far from what Drakengard is like for Taro Yoko--projects that are messy and unsuccessful at being action games, but the sheer weirdness and darkness are compelling in a way that makes you wish he had a better studio to work with. Enter Nier Automata.
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Dec 29, 2016 22:21
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I think I played this game for like 10 hours today, which is something I've basically never done before. It's super captivating and exciting. Surprisingly likable characters + interesting plot + really unsettling sad robots + fun gameplay with a lot of twists + stellar music Seriously, this game's music. Best video game soundtrack since... Well, Nier.
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Mar 13, 2017 07:14
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I'm looking forward to when I complete this game and can finally read 90% of this thread (unironically, I'm really excited to see what other people's thoughts are on this cool and experimental game)
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Mar 15, 2017 00:20
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Just started Route C. This is the best video game. I've never been this legitimately excited about seeing what happens next in a video game before.
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Mar 16, 2017 06:06
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I beat the game. It was awesome. Around the time 9S is despairing and going insane, I started fearing that the game was going to spiral a bit too far into surreal negativity and suffering. You really end up in that familiar place where it seems like not playing the game is the only way to prevent further suffering for the characters. But then the end credits game flips that on its head by turning "keep playing!" into a way to counteract all the negativity that happens in the story. More or less... When you play Nier:Automata, the act of playing just propels the characters into deeper despair and nihilism, but when you, the player, are compelled to keep playing the final game section, it's framed as an affirmation that life has meaning and that people all over the planet can communicate and help one another. It's almost like... Moralizing, in a way, like it's explaining what you should take away from the story. It's weird, because in just about any other piece of writing, telling you the moral of the story would be such a really stupid, hammy way to end things, but in this game it really works. I think part of it is that the game isn't explaining these virtues to you, but is rather having you experience them firsthand--and even gives you a chance to back out if you don't agree. And I think another thing is that it connects to a basic sense of compassion for the characters--"If I can do this to help them have a happy ending, it's worth it." In a way, you're providing the compassion that the characters never received in the story. The fact that you have to defeat the game designers to get the happy ending is really awesome. Basically, I guess I'm really surprised. For as crazy as the plot gets, and how bizarre and surreal many of the sequences in the game are, it seems like it's actually a really refreshing and frank game about the importance of doing right by people and trying to understand those around you. And not even in a sappy platitude way, but in a way that feels very genuine and real. Like "please don't make the mistakes in judgment that these characters make. Please value the lives of other people and act in a way that supports that." I pretty much feel like I've been playing video games for my whole life and this is the one that I've been waiting all this time for.
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Mar 18, 2017 10:24
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Now that I've seen all the endings can someone tell me what the two YoRHa units in the desert: oil field area are doing there, and what the room of monitors stacked on top of each other at the bottom of the Opera Singer boss's stage are for?
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Mar 18, 2017 18:52
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I like 2B. Just remember, if you see any art of her that would make for a nice avatar please share it with me.
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Mar 18, 2017 20:28
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I replayed the last few hours so my roommate could see how the game ends, and then putzed around a bit in a section of the early game. Man it's really easy to forget how conducting robot genocide in a desert ghetto can seem downright quaint and homey compared to the nonstop utter despair of Route C.
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Mar 19, 2017 06:42
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really queer Christmas posted:Gotta say, I'm amazed at what a small difference like controlling 9S instead of 2B does to change my perception of characters. Route B: One of the things I thought was really clever was how playing as 9S with 2B following you around makes you realize how little 2B actually talks. Most of the game is 9S sarcastically commenting on things with absolutely no response from 2B. She'll occasionally say things like "What's this?" but rarely even to him. So most of Route B you're playing 9S basically just talking to himself. But even then, 9S is still like "Hanging out with 2B is so much nicer than working alone!  "
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Mar 20, 2017 14:58
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RanKizama posted:Oh, good deal. Thanks for clarifying! You'll understand when you get to that point. It's not required, but it has a reason.
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Mar 20, 2017 18:06
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Vermain posted:This is a very, very existentialist story. The central question of this game - what it's all really concerned with - is, "What is a human being?" A game where people bitterly shout things like "Your existence is meaningless!" at each other, but when the protagonists literally meet Jean-Paul Sartre they ignore everything he says. 
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Mar 20, 2017 23:24
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Ending E chat:  The three of them being alive and free from YoRHa is way better than any combination of them being dead. They aren't part of an oppressive regime any more, and the networked robots flew off to another planet, so they aren't stuck in an eternal war anymore. 9S is no longer alone, 2B no longer has to execute anyone, and A2 got a chance to realize that she's actually a pretty kindhearted person who cares about other people. 9S definitely needs to be rehabilitated, but if anything, he and 2B can share their suffering together. He's had to kill copies of her so much, but now he knows almost exactly what it must have been like for her too. There's already been a bit of healing for him, even in some of the darkest parts of the game, in ending C--when he realizes that he doesn't hold any malice against the machines any more, and that he honestly never had a reason to in the first place. The three of them are good kids and will make it through ok. Also they have friendly Pods who will look after them.
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Mar 21, 2017 16:01
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Nina posted:Yet simultaneously androids still haven't been able to truly free themselves of being chained by their programmed obsession on humanity and whatever authority truly engineered Project YoRHa is still out there. I can't help but feel like SE is really going to want another sequel. The androids' obsession about humanity is something that I think is pretty interesting. The androids were designed to have a certain base instinct to obsess over humans. This is something that clearly differentiates them from real life humans, if only by virtue of: We know that humans made androids, but we don't know what made humans. So when we look at androids, we can see that their creators (their gods, in a sense) were self-centered and bit narcissistic, to have created a new life form only in service of themselves. In a way, that marks a bit of a separation between the player and the characters in the game: they *are* different from us because they're supposed to be something humans created, so when we witness their suffering in the story, instead of fully identifying with them, we can see them as almost like our hypothetical children. It's like if the game were saying, "if humans ever do get the power to create artificial life, please take this story as a warning to create them humanely rather than selfishly" or even in a more mundane way, "if you have kids, don't instill them with self-destructive tendencies." If you look at the androids that way, it seems rather tragic that they'd be stuck in a world where their gods are literally all dead, but they fundamentally can't help but obsess over them. On the other hand, N:A is a game that's all about base instincts like sex/violence/all that good stuff, and we know that androids aren't unique in their obsession with violence, warfare, and sex. Their obsession with finding something to cling to for meaning is pretty human. Humans are probably just as obsessed with the thing that created us--it's just that we don't know for a fact what that thing is, so we conjecture about gods, evolution, ancient aliens, etc. and base the way we're supposed to live off of the creation story we choose to believe in. Pascal literally starts reading some Nietzsche in the middle of the game, so we know that "God is dead," a human idea, is at the heart of the story. Basically if you read the androids one way, it can be a cautionary tale for humans to create things responsibly. If you read them another way, there's absolutely nothing different about them compared to humans, and humans, despite their existentialist dilemmas about their mysterious and seemingly unreachable creators, still manage to scrape by. It's just something you have to deal with. Also, who knows--9S can seemingly hack just about anything in the world, maybe he could hack into androids and delete their obsession with humans.
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Mar 21, 2017 17:35
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I thought the dub did a really good job at showing that 2B and 9S's dialogue is often hiding their real, repressed feelings. The different ways 9S says "nothing the machines do has any meaning" over the course of the game are all inflected in subtly different ways and it's pretty cool and well done On the other hand, I ran through the prologue sequence in Japanese after beating the game in English, and there are definitely a few tonal things they changed with localization. In Japanese, 9S calls her "2B-san," and she quickly insists that he can just call her "2B," which means she's easily letting him get familiar with him. In English though, when 9S calls her "ma'am," she tells him to just call her "2B," but it almost comes across as aloofness, like if she were saying "Stop calling me ma'am. 2B is my designated name for this mission." Augus posted:Noticing early on that 2B and 9S seem to swap personalities on a regular basis. One moment she's the one who's unnerved by the implications of what's going on while he's just duty-minded saying "Don't think about it, Morty", the next it's the other way around and 9S is unnerved while 2B is single-minded and saying "Don't think about it, Morty". It's weird. I just took this as them both being reeeeaaally deep in repression. Instead of it being like, 2B is just following orders and not thinking about it while 9S is actively questioning, it seems more like they're both questioning what's going on around them but neither of them is willing to actually acknowledge it. 2B definitely takes the "I'm a soldier, I'm supposed to bury my feelings" approach, but consider that 9S sees all sorts of weird poo poo when the two of them are out on their mission together, but he never once thinks to bring it up to 2B.
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Mar 21, 2017 17:47
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Nina posted:I do have to wonder if the YoRHa are meant as at least a partial allegory to a religious war since NieR was so rooted in real life inspiration Ending E: "I am embarrassed. I launched a suicide attack, and yet, here I am, still alive. I must look very silly."
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Mar 21, 2017 18:07
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<---- I found a cute picture of 2B that I liked!Nina posted:More ending E thoughts Totally agreed. I think that's probably also what Yoko Taro had in mind, considering the line about a future not being something that's given to you. I just hope that 2B/9S/A2/the Pods are also able to get happy endings because that lowers the chances of them making similar mistakes as their predecessors.
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Mar 21, 2017 18:41
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if you have gauntlets as your heavy weapon and a katana as your light weapon, one of your attacks is hitting the gauntlet with your katana like you're playing baseball but for some reason i'm really bad at it and 2B just misses her swing. :X
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Mar 23, 2017 18:32
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Nina posted:Fun fact: It used to always hit during development but Taro told them to change it to miss most of the time. This is what I thought was probably the case, and it's something I'm completely okay with. I guess androids are bad at baseball.
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Mar 23, 2017 23:11
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:my wife and I were laughing about the fact that female yorha look like they do but male yorha are apparently restricted to 14-year-olds I think it's pretty funny how everyone is like gosh 2B's quite revealing isn't she, but nobody ever mentions that 9S is wearing like a blindfold and a sex collar
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Mar 27, 2017 22:49
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Josuke Higashikata posted:Another interview with Taro too That weird feeling when you realize that the auteur who makes exceedingly dark, morbid works might actually be a good person
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Mar 30, 2017 20:10
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Mindblast posted:So... all those horror authors out there... you suspect them all utterly hosed and beyond redemption or what. lol No, I don't think that. I think there are some artists out there who create very dark and dreary works, and sometimes it makes me wonder how they actually feel. Like if you look at someone like David Lynch. In Ebert's review for Blue Velvet, he has some clear disgust toward David Lynch for, in Ebert's point of view, putting his actresses in such demeaning roles. And his movies are pretty gruesome, and there's not always a happy ending or a whole lot of hope. But Lynch in person seems to be a pretty complicated person. He has this quaint manner to him and is very open and unpretentious, and he spends a lot of time and effort on things like transcendental meditation with the intention of bringing positivity to the world. You still get this kind of uncomfortable vibe from him. You get the impression that he's someone who sees a lot of darkness in humanity and wants to capture it, but that for all that darkness he's interested in, he's not actually that bitter or resigned. On the other hand, you can have somebody like David Foster Wallace, who talks a lot about being made of starstuff, about empathizing and connecting with the people around you, and about not giving in to detached irony as a mode of existence. But when you read a lot of his creative works, they tend to be pretty anxious and pessimistic and have this feeling of resignation about them. When I see works that are especially dark, where characters seem to be giving in to their lesser qualities and bringing about ruin because of it, it makes me wonder how the author actually feels. Sometimes, I think, the author is writing the story that way as a cautionary tale about their reckless characters. Sometimes they might not know how their characters, in the situations they're in, could actually achieve a happy ending, so they give them the only ending they can imagine. Sometimes they make me think, "oh, is this downer, hopeless perspective how the author feels about the world? Like, well, people suck and life is poo poo, that's my story?" So I think it's pretty interesting to see how the creator of Drakengard, which from what I can tell is one of those hopelessly bleak and dark stories without much redemption in it, is actually really invested in creating a game (this one) that is socially aware and is interested in being progressive with his use of the medium.
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Mar 30, 2017 22:33
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SHISHKABOB posted:Nier Automata is a dark story with a heart of gold. It's really, really cool and good, I love it and hope Yoko Taro keeps making amazing games. I was sad that he didn't respond to my twitter praise lol
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Mar 30, 2017 22:39
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Re: mangaka chat, if you like dark stories like Nier, check out Inio Asano. Dead Dead Demons De DeDeDeDestruction is an alien invasion story about propaganda and lopsided power dynamics. Also has pretty sweet title drops like Nier: Automata does, and Asano openly said that he put cute girls as the main characters to trick people into reading it. It's probably his least dark story but that's because all his other ones are really crushingly bleak. Rather than an action or thriller story, it's kind of a story about daily life in an alien-invaded Tokyo, but there are some things in Nier: Automata that really reminded me of this manga (can't say without spoiling it). 
Cephas fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 00:59
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It's kind of interesting to play Breath of the Wild after this game. It's a lot harder to accept the casual slaughter of goblins who are just sitting around by a fire, or sleeping, or dancing--especially because they can come back to life, just for Link to kill them again and again. There's also a tooltip that says something like "if you perform a perfect dodge in combat, you are rewarded with a chance to unleash a flurry of attacks," and that choice of calling it a reward just made me think of Yoko Taro describing killing games. 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.
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Apr 3, 2017 03:26
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I was wondering why I found the music in Pascal's village so familiar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ODgYi4ff6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdXTqxTWxcM I forgot where I read it but I remember seeing Yoko Taro say that he has a good enough relationship with Okabe that he likes to point him toward music and say "make a track like this one." Between that and Drakengard 3's character designs lifting from Madoka wholesale I really wouldn't be surprised lol.
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Apr 13, 2017 05:30
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This game is so good and even though I started playing BotW and Persona 5, I feel like my heart is still dwelling with Nier: Automata. The soundtrack and the directing in the game go so well together that listening to a lot of the tracks, I still have this strong impression of the emotions from the scenes they were used in. I know some people aren't crazy about the ending, but I feel like it gives the story enough breathing room to stay alive in my imagination. I just think this game is swell.
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Apr 14, 2017 04:37
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SatansBestBuddy posted:So. personally I think the japanese version of the song is really cute and adorable while the english one is manic in kind of a scary way I'm not sure which one suits Emil better edit: maybe that's just because it's playing from the equivalent of a megaphone in-game so it always sounds unintelligible. the soundtrack ver. is pretty cute too 
Cephas fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Apr 15, 2017 |
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Apr 15, 2017 05:42
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CJacobs posted:Am I the only person who said "oh gently caress" out loud when (endgame-ish spoilers) you're staggering around while 2B is getting corrupted and she just fuckin' explodes and the screen goes to static for a bit? Like, yeah, it doesn't actually hurt you, but man I jumped in my seat when it happened. That poo poo was like when you die in The Last of Us or something. That entire section made me feel real bad. Like, in a game full of feeling bad about what's going on, I really did not like seeing 2B die a slow, agonizing, malfunctioning death. Compared to the microwave hall in MGS4, it was way more horrible for me. I think it being such a long, protracted sequence, being actively unpleasant for the player, and the fact that her entire hardware and software were failing on her really did it. Having your CPU overheat and combust inside your head sounds so horrific. 
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Apr 15, 2017 07:30
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I thought this was kind of interesting. Part of the Drakengard 3 soundtrack attributes some of its tracks to "YoRHa" I guess they had that name floating around their team for a while.
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Apr 15, 2017 07:57
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:And then following it up with 9S having the exact same issue and you having just enough time to say "oh, gently caress" and your pod is like "just hack yourself back into working condition, dumbass" The worst thing about that is if 2B hadn't knocked 9S out of the mecha fight to keep him from getting infected, they would have been together while they got infected and he could have just hacked and cured her right away. But she was acting in his best interests with the information she had available at the time.
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Apr 15, 2017 16:44
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How playable is Drakengard 3 compared to (the original) Nier? If it's roughly comparable to Nier I might check it out. Or should I just read the let's play of it instead?
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Apr 17, 2017 01:03
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I'll make sure not to let The Dark Id's suffering go to waste and just read the LP then, thanks. (Why isn't there an Emil smilie?)
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Apr 17, 2017 02:26
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Momomo posted:So I'm on the second playthrough as 9S and I have like 15 machine cores. Am I going to need them for anything, or can I just sell them? The later you are into the game, the more money they sell for. They're just for money.
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Apr 17, 2017 04:12
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 A2 looks kind of dreamy in brother Nier's getup
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Apr 17, 2017 13:42
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Writing little death poems for each time you die is really awesome though.
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Apr 19, 2017 06:30
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I think people hate on 9S because they don't like seeing emotionally fragile boys. Like you see so much hate for Shinji Ikari too and it's just weird. Maybe it frustrates people to not see them "man up" and take control of the situation idk.
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Apr 20, 2017 04:45
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For the sake of YoRHa androids, I think there's a case to make for the plentiful copies of their bodies being a downside. The game opens with 2B monologuing about how everyone is trapped in a spiral of death and rebirth. That is to say, YoRHa androids are pretty literally trapped in a cycle of samsara, dying and being reborn ceaselessly without gaining any greater insight into their situations. YoRHa has a monopoly on what Foucault would call a biopower, or “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations." By instilling in their field units the belief that death is not permanent, that bodies are not valuable, that consciousness does not exist at any one place in particular, and that some memory data may be lost due to bandwidth issues but that it's just a hiccup in the system, YoRHa can control where and when their units are at all times. This gives them the ability to mobilize a lot of control over what their units see and even what they remember. Maybe you could say that for YoRHa androids, whichever version exists at the present moment is effectively an "original," a self-conscious entity capable of discovering new revelations for itself. When it defers to uploading itself to a copy upon death, however, it willingly gives up control of its location, time, and potentially memories to a greater political entity that is as far from interested in its own good as possible. Being a copy isn't really any different from being an original, but the act of "copying" itself brings its fair share of problems, if for no other reason than being a process controlled by an information-withholding organization.
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Apr 20, 2017 07:27
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il serpente cosmico posted:How the hell did 2B's memories get in her sword? How long until we get a Virtuous Contract USB stick?
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May 3, 2017 01:47
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Yeah, I think they wanted to strike a balance of "the shmups are an actual core part of the game" and "this is a major production game, 80% of our audience will be terrible at shmups" I think between the sidescrolling shooting, the twin-stick sections, and the hacking sections, the shooter elements are robust enough. The hacking sections have some really memorable sequences, and hacking is integrated into the game in interesting ways. I think the mecha sections feel like palate cleansers more than anything though, especially once you start to get healing chips that make them trivially easy to complete. There's never that "aha!" moment where the mecha combat comes together in a narrative or thematic way, the way it does with hacking.
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May 11, 2017 15:30
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RoadCrewWorker posted:imo its a videogame and who cares what other people do for their entertainment Dᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ᴛʜɪɴᴋ ɢᴀᴍᴇs ᴀʀᴇ sɪʟʟʏ ʟɪᴛᴛʟᴇ ᴛʜɪɴɢs?
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Jun 24, 2017 08:14
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