Nier: Automata — The Game That Needs All Its Endings

There is a moment, somewhere around twelve hours into Nier: Automata, where the credits roll, the game thanks you, and then it hands you a fresh save slot and expects you to start again. Most games treat that screen as the exit. This one treats it as a chapter break. PlatinumGames and Square Enix shipped it in Japan on 23 February 2017 and in the West a fortnight later, and the thing that made it a word-of-mouth monster was the same thing that should have killed it: it asks for your time twice, then a third time, then once more.

Asking a stranger to play your game four times is an enormous imposition. I take that seriously. A 40-hour commitment is 40 hours of somebody’s actual life, and the medium is full of designers who spend it like it’s free. Director Yoko Taro has been running this trick since Drakengard in 2003 and the first Nier in 2010, and both times the structure was the part people forgave rather than the part they praised. Automata is where it finally works, and the reason it works is mechanical rather than literary.

The chip system is the argument

Start with the thing nobody puts on the box. 2B’s abilities live on plug-in chips slotted into a storage grid with a fixed capacity. You spend that capacity on the things you’d expect: auto-heal, ranged attack buffs, drop-rate boosts, melee damage. You also spend it on your HUD. The health bar is a chip. The minimap is a chip. Damage numbers, the XP display, the enemy targeting overlay — all chips, all occupying slots, all removable.

Pull them out and you get more room for combat upgrades. You also lose the ability to see how close you are to dying. The game turns interface into an economy, and the exchange rate is brutal and honest: legibility costs power. I have never seen the trade stated so plainly. Every game has a HUD budget — art directors argue about it, players mod it away — and Automata is the only one I can think of that put the argument in your hands and made you pay for the answer.

It goes one step further. One of those chips runs the operating system. Remove it and 2B dies on the spot, and the game files the death as one of its endings rather than a bug. That is a joke with a design thesis inside it. The interface is diegetic; the android is running software; the software includes the bit that draws your health bar. Once you understand that, the ending structure stops looking like an art-house imposition and starts looking like the same idea at a larger scale.

Why the second pass earns its keep

The pitch is that you play Route A as 2B, then Route B covers the same events as 9S. If that were a straight replay with a new hat, the game would deserve every complaint it gets. It isn’t a replay. 9S is a scanner model, and his combat kit is built around hacking, which drops you into a twin-stick shooter played inside the enemy’s head. Same fights, different verbs. The bullet-hell overlay that runs on top of the third-person action — machines firing lattices of white spheres while you’re mid-combo — is Platinum showing off, and it’s also the connective tissue that lets the game slide between genres without a loading screen.

More to the point, 9S can read the machines. Route B gives you access to information 2B didn’t have, so the same scene plays with a different amount of knowledge in your head. That is the whole engine. The repetition isn’t padding because your comprehension is the variable being upgraded, and comprehension is the only stat in this game that can’t be farmed.

Route C is new content outright, and by the time you reach it the game has stopped explaining its structure and started using it. The endings past the fifth are largely jokes — walk away from a mission, eat the wrong fish, quit at the wrong prompt — and they exist to teach you that the ending list is a systems menu rather than a narrative achievement board.

Where it fights itself

I’m not going to pretend the seams aren’t visible. The open world between set-pieces is thin, the city ruins and the desert and the amusement park are connected by a lot of running, and the sidequests range from genuinely wounding to fetch-quest filler that Platinum clearly built to a schedule. The PC port shipped in March 2017 in a state that took a fan patch — FAR, by Kaldaien — to make presentable, and Square Enix only patched the resolution and window handling years later, in July 2021. That’s four years of the definitive version of an acclaimed game being a community project. Worth remembering when a publisher tells you the platform matters.

The combat, too, is Platinum on cruise control. It’s fluid, it’s readable, it has the dodge- cancel rhythm you’d expect from the Bayonetta lineage, and it has nothing like the depth of Bayonetta. Difficulty on Normal will not test you; the auto-chips will literally play the fights for you if you let them, which is a design statement in itself and also an admission that the fighting is a delivery mechanism. Play it on Hard, where one hit is catastrophic and the HUD chips suddenly feel like life support you can’t afford to unplug.

The ancestor

Everyone reaches for Chrono Trigger and New Game+ here, and the shape is right — multiple endings, a replay that recontextualises — but the real ancestor is closer to the adventure games that built a full run around a single missing fact. The structure that Automata actually inherits is the one where the game withholds a perspective rather than a key, and you can’t buy your way past it.

For the modern version of the same idea, look at Inscryption, which does its frame-breaking in a single sitting and pays for the compression with a weaker back half. Or Hades, which solved narrative repetition by making the story respond to the loop instead of sitting behind it — the cleanest answer anyone has given to this problem, and a useful contrast, because Supergiant made repetition voluntary and Yoko Taro made it compulsory. And if you want the piece that took Automata’s melancholy and its multi-ending structure somewhere tighter and considerably nastier, that’s Signalis.

The verdict, argued

Nier: Automata is a game with mediocre traversal, decent combat, an ugly launch on PC and a script that lurches between undergraduate philosophy and genuine grief, sometimes in the same conversation. It is also the most structurally intelligent big-budget game of its decade, because it found a way to make the player’s time investment into the medium of the work rather than the price of it. The chip grid is the thesis in miniature: everything you see costs something, and the game will let you sell your own eyes for damage.

The four-route ask is real and it’s the honest thing to warn people about. Route A alone is a competent Platinum action game with a strange tone. Stopping there is the equivalent of reading the first act and filing a review. If you don’t have the hours, that’s a legitimate reason to skip it entirely; the game does not have a short version and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours. If you do have the hours, it repays them at a rate almost nothing else manages.

It’s on PS4, Xbox One, PC and Switch, and the Switch version — The End of YoRHa Edition, October 2022 — is the one that finally treats the structure as a feature to be supported rather than an obstacle. Play it on Hard. Strip the HUD when you’re feeling brave. Put it back when you aren’t.

Play next: Hades for the friendly version of the same problem, or Signalis for the version with worse dreams.

Spoilers below

The reason the structure earns its reputation is Ending E, and Ending E only works because of everything above.

After the fourth route resolves — after A2 and 9S have had their argument with a sword — the credits roll for the last time, and the game turns them into a shoot-’em-up. You fly a small ship at the names of the people who made it, and the names shoot back. It is unwinnable. The difficulty scales past any reasonable input, you die, you retry, you die, and the game asks whether you’d like help.

Say yes and rescue messages appear: real sentences written by real players who finished before you, floating in the bullet field as encouragement. They join your formation. They take hits for you. Dozens of them, wrapped around your ship like a shell, and every one of them is somebody who beat this sequence and then agreed to a bargain the game explains only at the end — to leave a message and offer help, you delete your save file. All of it. The chips, the routes, the hours.

The prompt is unambiguous about what it’s taking. And the game has spent four routes teaching you that data is what an android is — that 2B and 9S are backed up, restored, replaced, and that the horror of YoRHa is precisely the persistence of the file. Then it asks you to give yours away so a stranger you’ll never meet can get through a credits sequence.

I know exactly what it is. It’s a magic trick with a permanence lever, engineered for maximum effect, and the emotional physics are shameless. It also works, and it works because it’s mechanical. Nobody tells you sacrifice is meaningful. The game charges you for it, in the one currency it has spent forty hours teaching you to value, and takes the payment without ceremony.

That’s the whole desk’s argument in one screen: the mechanic makes you feel it, and the mechanic is the only thing that could have.