NieR:Automata Ver1.1a Part 2

As the machine war progresses, YoRHa Command and the Resistance prepare for a final decisive assault against the "Machine Lifeforms," the militarized robots who roam the earth's surface. While preparations are underway, YoRHa 9-gou S-gata "9S" and YoRHa 2-gou B-gata "2B" continue their advanced scouting mission. However, 9S and 2B struggle with their respective roles, their loyalty to each other, and their loyalty toward Command.

Although the nefarious Adam and Eve have been defeated, it appears the machines are not down for the count. An ominous presence in the form of the "Red Girl" continues to observe the androids from afar, waiting for the perfect opportunity to attack them.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

YoRHa 2-gou B-gata Main

Ishikawa, Yui Japanese

YoRHa 9-gou S-gata Main

Hanae, Natsuki Japanese

YoRHa A-gata 2-gou Main

Suwa, Ayaka Japanese

Emil Supporting

Kadowaki, Mai Japanese

Pascal Supporting

Yuuki, Aoi Japanese

Devola Supporting

Shiraishi, Ryouko Japanese

Commander White Supporting

Kanou, Chiaki Japanese

Pod 042 Supporting

Yasumoto, Hiroki Japanese

Popola Supporting

Shiraishi, Ryouko Japanese

Adam Supporting

Namikawa, Daisuke Japanese

Matsumoto, Miho Producer

Masuyama, Ryouji Director, Series Composition

Nagasaki, Yukio Sound Director

Ishiguri, Kazuya Episode Director

Reviews

Sep 27, 2024

Marinate1016

Recommended

Nier Automata was once thought to be unadaptable as an anime. “It relies too much on video game mechanics.” “The story is too confusing to work as an anime”they said. Well, A-1 pictures proved everyone wrong. It might have gone through a few delays, but fans of the game and anime-onlies alike will be satisfied with how Nier Automata turned out. They took one of the most complicated and confusing stories in gaming and adapted it perfectly as an anime, even improving on many aspects of the already tremendous story. This was truly a masterclass in the love and attention to detail needed to bring ... a video game to this medium, and one of the best shows this year hands down.

I was already impressed with the job they did with the first cour, but part 2 blows all of that out of the water. For one, the story of Nier Automata naturally picks up in the second half and secondly, A-1’s direction, pacing and awesome animation helped bring things to a new level. Automata is naturally a game that’s confusing at first since it’s a sequel to Replicant and a spin-off of Drakengard so there’s a lot of concepts thrown at the player or viewer in this case, that aren’t explained until this cour. Those reveals are done so well here, it’s a perfect mix of lore while not overwhelming the casual viewer. While some things are naturally omitted, I felt they more than captured the essence of all the important story beats. There’s also the original stuff they added to the show to connect the dots and flesh the world out, particularly in the case of Lily and the resistance. They were kind of just NPCs in the game, while the anime really brings them to life and makes us emotionally invested. It makes certain events that much more profound and frankly painful. This was really an amazing story choice because it made A2’s story a lot more personal as well. I was already a massive A2 stan, but after watching this I feel like I gained a totally new perspective on her and understand her way of thinking and feelings a lot more than in the game.

This season sort of acts as a juxtaposition between A2’s ascent back to the light and opening her “heart” up to the world again, and 9s’ gradual descent into darkness and shutting himself off from everyone after some events occur. In the second half, most of the episodes follow this split storytelling method which I really enjoyed because I was able to notice things that I didn’t in the game. When you’re worried with surviving boss fights or doing side tasks, you can actually miss out on certain details that in animation are revealed. I also believe there’s just a really good human connection as it were that’s established between the viewer and both characters as time goes on. You understand 9s’ pain and quest for vengeance, but pity him for his misunderstandings. While you also understand A2’s desire to shut herself off from everyone. Both paths are kind of valid given the circumstances and ultimately it shows you how human the Yorha really are. The desire to love and be loved, to seek retribution for perceived wrongs and to know where we come from. These are some of the most human emotions possible.

The production quality on this one is absurd. A-1 had a lot of the same staff who worked on 86 working on this one and it shows. It looks amazing from beginning to end with amazing fights, beautiful animation and some lovely character designs. I have to give A-1 credit for handling some very difficult fights, such as the Titan machine fights with so much quality. Like it would be so easy for them to just shoddily put some CGI together, but nope, a great blend of 2D and 3D is what we got and it looked amazing. There’s also got to be a mention of the phenomenal job by the seiyuus. 9s and A2’s seiyuu’s put in two of the best performances you’ll ever hear, especially 9s who preferably encapsulates the pain the character is in throughout this season. It’s like his voice comes through the screen and grips you. Really bravo to both of them for an incredible job.

I think most people who watched this cour will feel that it’s a pretty big upgrade in every sense, but those who haven’t seen it because you like to wait for stuff to end, rest assured this is amazing. A-1 took a very difficult story and one of my favourite games ever and brought it to the anime medium nearly flawlessly. Truly a masterclass in adaptation.

Nier Automata Cour 2 gets a very easy 10, out of 10.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Sep 27, 2024

GG-Evie

Recommended

While I quite enjoyed season 1, I must say this was a massive improvement in every single area. I never finished the game myself but I still thoroughly enjoyed every moment of this, if you enjoyed the first season to any degree then I cannot recommend this enough.

The art continues to be great, and while in the first season the animation could look a bit stiff at times, here it was much more consistently well done, with especially the final few episodes having incredibly well animated scenes.

The writing was always interesting but here I became fully hooked, at times I felt somewhat lost as to ... the overarching plot but through the twists and reveals that happen you start to put it together, and on the whole the plot felt a lot more complete than the first season.

The characters were so great, I was so invested in each and every one of them and their arcs, I never thought I would get so emotionally attached to them all, even the pods.

The ending was absolutely beautiful and felt like a perfect culmination of all the strange and esoteric moments of this incredible story, definitely give it a watch.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Oct 10, 2024

Balsamina

Mixed Feelings

Funny

NieR: Automata.

The anime.

I refrained from reviewing Part 1 as the story and presentation of the title was literally unfinished there.

Part 2... I am beginning to see why people who know nothing about philosophy and think little to nothing about most things are impressed with this title. This is the same segment of the audience who will surely click "confusing" to this review, by the way. Even so, I intend to express a different reflection of this title's quality to express than simple awe.

To begin, I make sure to state: this is a review of the ANIME -- ignoring any exclusively source-material merits, as ... an anime should stand on its own, at most relying on its prequels. Even if I have source material knowledge, I will deliberately not factor them in. No, I will not watch 3 or 5 hours long of fan-made explanation or head-canon videos and if someone needs to in order to have any points of dissatisfaction addressed, that's not a work standing on its own, now is it?

Moreover, given we are in 2024 and the sound and visuals are nothing impressive for this year, I'll get it over with and say: there's no bonus points to my rating added from merely meeting industry standards. No, I have no complaints about the female designs, in case anyone asks if that's why I'm not giving bonus points. I'm not about to complain about sexy female designs; in fact, I enjoy them, though they never get a bonus point on just this alone; see my criteria for grading anime for more details.

Here we go:

For those watching this anime as it's being released, a huge impact that hurts this anime is timing -- Part 1 was quite a while ago... but Part 2 took too long to release, which numbed a great deal of any emotional anticipation. Yes, this is common in today's animescape, but that does not diminish the effect. Animators, PLEASE! Just release an anime you WANT people to feel is deep or epic in one go. And not 12 episodes; that's hardly screentime to tell a truly good tale; however many episodes it takes, please! Thankfully, this point is not relevant if you aren't watching as it's coming out. In my case, as a reviewer, it gives me a more unbiased and clear-minded approach to analyze the story when any emotional workup is disrupted and neutralized so I can dissect straight into the meat of the story.

Now for the actual story -- even as someone who rarely touches videogames anymore, I heard the praises sung about this title, the game and source material that is. There's all that about how it's deep, PROFOUND! How it explores nihilism, how it explores existentialism...

As an actual living nihilist, this should excite me. Not so much in an elevation of value in the work, but as something simply stimulating for the mind on a purely biological, neurological and psychological level. After all, even people who live by active nihilism, those who actively deny objective meaning and value to keep their gaze upon the world unclouded, are still motivated by the same hormones in our carbon-based data processors called "brains".

Yet, one fundamental problem is, this story is like a college essay that throws a lot of big words and names around, but fails to show true comprehension and ability to explore them, often just falling into pessimistic bias in representation and "FeeEeeeLz".

>>Human emotions are somehow forbidden... for... robots.

Read that last sentence again. Yes. Um... Why not program and make bots to not have them? Why not just program them to be a literal goal-oriented and efficiency-driven protocol? Especially combat units.

GPT can explain why it does not have feelings. It might take a little thinking about why an entity can outwardly behave similar to a human or perform otherwise intellect-necessary actions without feelings. It involves knowing and understanding statistics, probability and linear (tensor) algebra to begin. But, it's quite possible. We only did it this entire time in human history. No, the electronic device you hold in your hand does not have feelings, thankfully. Imagine if your smartphone could cry in pain every time you drop it by accident. Or if it had existential angst when you decided it was time for an upgrade to a new iphone or samsung for better memory or features. Who ever would invent such a feature...

Yet the logic behind machines having feelings is never explained in the show. Were YoRHa making imitation family members and substitute friends/lovers for buy or were they manufacturing combat units to decimate invading alien forces? Same question for the tin cans that YoRHa fights against.

>>Philosophers' names are used. Concepts get brought up.

Yet, all coverage of this is shallow.

A robot is named Pascal but does not touch on "The Wager" (which was about believing in or not believing in god and the associated consequences to believe or to not believe) that Blaise Pascal was famous for. The concept of a "Wager", by the way... involves betting something of value at the risk of something else of value. Nihilism... is about the world lacking inherent meaning and value. Right so, put the last two sentences together. Go on.

"2B" teases the line "To be or not to be" as a nice nod to Shakespeare's Hamlet's famous soliloquy about if to live in suffering, or to defy in death. The show certainly tries to show a lot of "suffering"; I mean, there have only been so many times where a robot was RPing as though it was in great grief, but sadly when humanity coined the concept of suffering, it meant only carbon-based lifeforms, not ChatGPT when it gets bombarded with insults for misunderstanding a user's poorly phrased run-on sentence or that poor baseball you keep swinging a bat at when you play baseball with your friends... But yeah, as there are no carbon-based lifeform sentients, suffering-RP is honestly about it.

Religion, cults, beauty and femininity, perception of reality. Ideas like these get a mere 20 minutes with even less of the episode on some allegories that reference the most superficial layer of these ideas. There is no tie-in to how it even should be connected to the supposed central theme of nihilism and there is no dive into any of these topics at length or any direction of where to go with this. It's much like how someone throws ideas around and hope something is seen as relevant, meanwhile nothing new is added to the literature surrounding nihilism; no new ideas regarding nihilism is being added.

Maybe I should write a book or draw a manga where I name every character after a philosopher with barely any relevance to the philosophy they are known for -- like... all the female characters could be named after a feminist, and all leadership role characters could be named after a thinker from the enlightenment. Will I get seen as a DeEp and PrOfOuNd WriTeR too...? EZ ticket to fame and fortune?

>>9S

Much of the juice and bulk of what makes this story "profound" (and that takes the bulk of the episode count of the anime's part 2) is in 9S's portrayal in that ending where he experiences "existential despair". The "not 2 B" ending where 9S is the main character of it, to euphemistically refer to the gist of that ending versus the first episode of Part 2.

...Here's the problem: in terms of psychological realism, which is what actually makes characters in stories interesting and thus, in most people's eyes, worth it to experience, this... is not how most nihilists come to realize that nihilism is very much real and undeniable. And, for most people, the reaction is first, denial. When someone tells you nothing matters in the objective, you deny it because subjectively, you have painted the illusion of value and meaning all over your own eyes. It's like covering your eyes with your hands and pretending the sky does not exist. Of course, some people will deny the truth until they die; gazing into the void isn't something every homo sapiens sapiens has the mental strength and intellectual rigor to brave. Others come to a mature realization that it's the truth. That it's all constructs that construct the world in our minds and thus are just the illusions we painted into our vision. An intangible thought paradigm that was once advantageous for survival but in lieu of imminent danger, serves as nothing more than a constricting relic of thought. An intellectual enlightenment. Then a decision of what to do with that plot twist of life occurs, often calmly.

That's the usual reaction.

Melodramatic despair when you lose your only "purpose"... is really not that relatable or realistic when discussing nihilism or the realization of it, which is often coined the term "existential crisis". Reality is just not very often that angsty.

Don't mistake the above though.

Yes, you will suffer and despair if the person you love the most dies. There is not a single person, nihilist or otherwise, who does not suffer. This is because, even for the most extreme of nihilists who actively deny objective meaning and value, the body still excretes dopamine and oxytocin which is what the "feel" of attachment and love are based on, physically speaking. Even if you actively know none of it matters, that none of it will objectively have intrinsic meaning or value and thus nothing was truly lost in the grand scale, your eyes will still shed tears because cortisol and prolactin are still secreted by your body to make you cry. How you proceed consciously, intellectually speaking, is what differs between a nihilist and someone who isn't one. A normal person will probably mourn, perhaps hold a funeral, perhaps go over good and bad memories and tell themselves what this meant to them. A nihilist may take a much more pragmatic approach. Some might be existentialists or absurdists who try to be passionate anyway, under the cling of subjective value. Some might take a much more mundane approach. Yet importantly, the reason this does not work when portraying 9S... is because he is supposed to be a robot per the very premise of the show. He doesn't secrete dopamine or oxytocin or any other hormone, and I have no reason to believe the combat androids are the bodies humanity were supposed to transfer into and thus need these functions. So then, why is he acting like someone who is governed by hormonal cycles and systems that form the physical foundation of human emotion? Was he a role-play AI who is supposed to generate emotional character text instead? Maybe RPing enemies to "death" was a combat tactic here?

The same thing applies for discovering that what you were doing the whole time did not matter. Biologically and psychologically speaking, there will be a reaction. It will be tailored to what that specific situation is. But again, 9S is a robot. And for an android designed to fight, even in a scout role, I cannot see the advantage of having it secrete and be affected by dopamine, oxytocin or any other hormone let alone engage in what can be observed as role-play behavior when you talk to AI that are programmed and trained to act like fictional characters. The narrative logic here simply does not compute for why combat units need emotion.

This is why 9S's portrayal when he is the focus and in grief is problematic because it is pure theatrical, emo angst. There is no exploration of a realistic realization of nihilism that would be typical of a normal human being who is undergoing an intellectual enlightenment of their view of the world or an exploration of the psychology of loss, even if we ignore the narrative flaw that a robot somehow has the hormone secretion and effect cycle called "emotion" as if he was just a naive boy until the big despair happens.

"Nothing matters" and emo screaming with tears, the trope.

...And that's all there is to it.

So, how does this impact the story?

Well, once you stripped all the "profound" down, this anime boils down to, two robots who take orders from a super powerful organization, they do missions, and then in various ways, things went poof.

This isn't profound.

My reaction to the entire thing was blasé.

9S's emo and angsty portrayal had me laughing at the attempt at illustrating a philosophy I know as well as the taste of bread. The stereotype that "nihilism is despair", is too old and so poorly represents the rare individuals who are truly nihilists in life. I for one find it quite liberating to not be fettered by the prescribed meanings and values of the world around me, by the way. And, I'd choose no other way of life than to abandon definitions and paradigms meant to have me submit.

To its credit,

At least this anime is not another isekai or reverse isekai where the main character, male or female, is effectively god, or the avatar of popularity. It's at least trying to do the thing I loved about some older anime: having a theme, something to think about.

Unfortunately, the lack of depth and the stereotyped portrayal of nihilism as despair, coupled with the fact that the characters themselves are just robots with unrealistic melodramatic reactions to stuff that occurs and say stereotypically emotional lines, the experience of watching this anime is truly closer as an experience of reading to a shallow forum post. It’s akin to an ENTP or INTP debater on a forum who writes the first sentence of every point he wants to make but fails to complete the paragraph for any of the points and then goes on a rant in the middle, ending up with a shallow, scattered post that then loses the debate altogether because it lacks the actual focus and incisiveness their INTJ debate partner can muster. Or, maybe I should consider this public domain philosophy texts, the commercial -- with 2B as the marketting waifu to entice those who would otherwise be too bored to study philosophy.

4/10

Note: There was no reason for me to write this review, nor a reason to not write it. If there is a term you don't know here, look it up by yourself. Oh and, feel free to copypasta this over to Chat GPT and ask for an "unbiased psychological analysis of if or not the writer is truly nihilistic" if you doubt my claim.

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Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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