NieR:Automata Ver 1.1a

Episode 5

“Mave[R]ick” is one of those episodes that captures a strength of the games that I feared would not translate well into animation: Their vibes. Specifically, the way that their vibes can propel you through their stories when the paths of their plot and character arcs are still taking shape. The lovely art direction of the NieR setting and it's world-class sound design and music are key components of those vibes, to be sure, and the anime has done a solid job of capturing those elements in its own medium, but it is a much more difficult task to capture the feeling of wandering around the ruins of a dying world and exploring its nooks and crannies while the characters wax philosophic about the nature of “humanity” and whatnot. That can be ridiculously fun to experience as a game, but it doesn't exactly make for riveting television, you know?

In that regard, NieR:Automata Ver1.1a is making a lot of smart decisions as an adaptation, in that it manages to uphold the sometimes more ambient and low-key atmosphere of the narrative experience when it only has twenty minutes and change to work with, instead of hours upon hours. One of the keys to this success, I think, is that it has a wealth of very interesting characters to work with; so you can spend a half-hour getting to know, say, a pacifist robot that has created his own community of conscientious objectors who are trying to emulate all of the good things about human society and communal living, even when it means having to contend with the negative conflicts that are inevitable whenever “people” try to live together. Sure, you don't get all of the added world-building and character-developing benefits of doing a dozen little side quests for all of the adorable robot villagers, but scenes like Pascal's tragic flashback or the robo-kids tussling over the music box are good microcosms of those “vibes” that I was talking about earlier, a kind of Greatest Hits collection that gives newcomers a solid sampler of the kinds of short stories they'd be exploring in the full game.

Thematically, “Maver[R]ick” does a good job of continuing to develop the show's main ongoing story thread, which sees 2B and 9S investigating the strange behavior of the machines on Earth and trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. Last time, we concluded with the defeat of Simone and 9S' shockingly ruthless murder of the machine family that was begging for its life. Here in the machine village, though, there is no pretense of battle or hostility to allow 9S to indulge in whatever hangups he's got going on about letting robots live, and it's becoming even harder to deny that the robots aren't simply mimicking random phrases and actions; they're just as “alive” as the Androids are.

All of that waxing philosophic that I mentioned before isn't necessarily groundbreaking or even all that deep. Even though Adam and Eve spend their two short scenes this week pattering over the works of Sartre and the Marquis de Sade, NieR isn't necessarily interested in exploring the actual theories and arguments that such philosophers are working through. Rather, the thematic and emotional core of NieR:Automata is much more rooted in the (relatively) simple stakes of its premise: In a world absent of humans, how would artificial beings like Androids and Machines make sense of the lives we tried to live, and the ways we attempted to make meaning out of the chaos of existence. Well, as Pascal and the Beefy Boy Twins demonstrate, you'd probably have to start by reading. Then you would have to think. And then you'd read some more. What you really need, though, is someone else to talk to, another mind through which to frame all of those ideas and cast them into a system that makes some kind of sense. Like 2B points out to 9S, if your intent is to truly live, you cannot do it alone. You must stand in contrast to at least one other mind if the workings of your own heart are to have any kind of substance.

Pascal is the kind of symbolic figure that works perfectly as the centerpiece of an episode like this, because he's an obviously good “person” that is simply trying to help other people find the value in living a life outside of the paradigm of war that all of our characters were designed for. For perhaps the first time, our Android protagonists are being forced to try and look at the world that way too. When they explore the rubble of an old shopping mall, the first question that comes to mind is what any of this stuff was all for, and what use Androids like them could possibly get out of “t-shirts” and “shopping”. When 9S points out that it wasn't the clothes themselves that mattered so much as the experience of discovering new things with a friend, 2B begins to understand. There can be life outside of all this fighting and killing, for Androids and Machines alike. Will going shopping and sharing music boxes and learning to live in a community that exists only to support itself give any of our heroes true peace? It's hard to say at this point, but to even ask the question is a major step all the same.

Rating:

• This week's puppet show is a masterpiece if only because it leans so heavily into how much thirst the NieR fandom has for both of our Android protagonists, and the fact that said thirst can (and probably will) lead to the total annihilation of the planet. It's what we deserve, as a species, for flooding Yokō Tarō's timeline with all of those 2B booty pics.

This is where you'll find my more spoilery observations, so you might want to avoid these bits unless you're already familiar with the NieR games!

• KAINE! YONAH! BABY NIER! …ahem. My apologies, but Yokō Tarō and these cruel freaks at A-1 Pictures knew exactly what they were doing when they provided those lovely flashback stills of the events of the original NieR: Replicant, and I will never forgive them for teasing even the possibility of a Replicant anime if they do not intend to follow through and give us a whole damned series. I swear to God, if Zero and Mikhail from Drakengard 3 somehow show up, I'm throwing a rock straight through my TV.

• Also, the way Ver1.1a is handling “Emil's” presence in the story is very different from the game, but I suppose that was inevitable, since almost every aspect of Emil's story was completely tangential to the main plot of the game. I wonder if this glorious cameo is the most we'll see of our favorite abominable skull prince? At least the show managed to integrate Emil's presence into Pascal's backstory; that was a fun little twist.

• I'm not sure yet if this is supposed to be just a 12-episode run or a two cour series, but one thing that I'd love to see before too long is some screentime for A2. Her somewhat rushed development in the original game's story is one of its few major flaws, in my opinion, and I'd love to get the chance to see her side of things earlier in this version of events.

NieR:Automata Ver 1.1a is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.