Reconsidering My Thoughts On Nier Automata

11 Aug, 2026

I quite like Yoko Taro's works, or at least those I've experienced in some way: I've yet to play Drakengard 3, but the first one has a special place in my mind, and NieR Replicant might be one of my favourite games ever. What about Automata, though?

I didn't love Automata. First of all, I knew it as "the best game ever that's done things no game has ever done before", and that's always a red flag for me. Second, the first two routes explore certain themes in a way that made me think multiple times "I could be reading Asimov", my favourite author of whom I still have to read way too many books¹. It's not that I didn't find it compelling, it's just that I kept thinking "Is that it?" and got increasingly annoyed at the fact that... I really didn't like its protagonists.

Enter YoRHa Boys. I've read the book this year and liked it a lot. I thought I was only invested in the stories of the machines², but these guys really made me yearn for more! I started a reevaluation process that included nagging my friend Laxy repeatedly, since I knew she's a big fan and wanted to know her opinion. She read the book as well, and we ended up watching the stage play, then doing the same with the first YoRHa one, and today marks the end of our watch of the anime series.

I have thoughts.

First of all: the first half (two-thirds?) of the game made me overly harsh. The hacking system made me overly harsh. I don't like shooting, let me punch everything³. I found 2B and 9S the most boring characters of the whole game, including the cute little machines that want you dead. Why am I forced to empathize with these two so much?
The final part of the game is so much more engaging for me than what comes before, and I think 9S is drastically better as a character as well. But I've always had my gripes about how 2B was handled, or how A2 just served as some sort of crutch to develop her (and 9S in a sense) more. Especially after reading the novels (and this became apparent to me only after reading YoRHa Boys), I realized 2B is infinitely more interesting when you can get into her head, and the game... does very little in that regard. Her characterization is very subtle, and I think I didn't catch it until way too late into the story, when I had already settled her in my mind as a boring one. I really liked the range of microexpressions and subtle movements she makes in the anime too, it really felt like a real character to me this time.

And A2! When I played Automata, YoRHa was just a story. The anime did such a wonderful job with it (I quite like the changes it's done to the game canon as well), at the end I was really longing to see A2 happy, at least...

Long story short: much of what I didn't like in Automata was that it's a story that asks what it means to be human (among other things), but 2B and 9S felt like the least human characters in there. Which, at times, is kind of the point. But you have to put in a lot of effort if you want me to care about anyone more than Pascal!

Overall, I'm very happy I gave it another chance in a different medium, and while the game experience is very special (you can't top ending E), the anime really is a great take on it, in my opinion. Though I wish every single additional Automata content that gets released after (except for Reincarnation) didn't boil down to "2B and 9S fight fight fight all the time! Remember ending E? We're so saaaad! Except now we're not! Yayyyy"⁴.