What’s Left When Meaning Breaks: A Look at Nier Automata

During the raid beta test for Mists of Pandaria Classic, I found myself standing in the Heart of Fear, watching Imperial Vizier Zor'lok fill the room with swirling patterns of orbs. On the hardest difficulty, multiple overlapping spirals traveled at different speeds, and the personal mandate was simple: dodge, or die. I was struck by a nagging sense that I'd seen this before – and not because I remembered the fight from Mists’ original launch in 2012.

Oh, I thought. This is a bullet hell fight.

Bullet hell – or danmaku, the Japanese term, meaning roughly "bullet curtain" – is a subgenre of shoot-'em-ups where the player faces such overwhelming volumes of projectiles that survival becomes an exercise in pure spatial reading. Our first significant crossover from Japan was Ikaruga in 2001, critically admired and commercially catastrophic: under seven thousand copies sold in its first week in the US, barely thirty-three thousand total across all platforms including Japan. The numbers were bad enough that the genre seemed to have answered its own question about Western appetite. The only way another bullet hell game was going to get made was if a developer decided the market's preferences were, essentially, someone else's problem.

Enter Yoko Taro.

Taro is the director of Nier: Automata, and he is – there is no more precise way to say this – an odd duck. He wears a creepy moon-headed mask in interviews. He insists he's just there for the paycheck. He is probably lying. The original Nier, released in 2010, was the kind of game that critics didn't quite know what to do with and almost no one bought – a weird, genre-bending, emotionally devastating mess with a stunning soundtrack, wildly ambitious storytelling, and combat that was, charitably, kind of janky. A beautiful failure. Beloved by the few who played it.

A sequel seemed unlikely. It happened anyway. This time, Taro handed the combat to PlatinumGames – the studio behind Bayonetta, slick stylish action as a matter of house philosophy – while he retained the writing, the directing, and the metaphysical trauma. What came out the other side wasn't an improvement so much as a reinvention. Nier: Automata released in 2017 to critical and commercial success. It sold millions. It won awards. It launched anime, novels, crossovers. It was unexpected, and it was unqualified.

The premise sounds straightforward enough. Thousands of years from now, humans have fled to the moon, Earth overrun by alien-built machines. The only ones still fighting are YoRHa androids – purpose-built humanoids, sleek and tactical. You play as 2B, a combat android who looks like a fetish model (blindfolded, thigh-high leather boots, black miniskirt with a slit up to the waist, a katana that is frankly unreasonable in scale), accompanied by 9S, a scanner android who looks like a prepubescent schoolboy (also blindfolded, shorts, an odd double-breasted coat, a much smaller katana). Your mission: exterminate the machines, win the war for your human masters.

You start doing exactly that.

And then the anomalies begin. Some machines are peaceful. Some have formed small villages, primitive societies. A few have begun worshipping gods of their own invention. They're the minority – most machines are still hostile – but the more time you spend among them, the more the line between android and machine begins to blur. The question the game plants early and never stops pressing: who is the real enemy? And underneath that, the sense that you've been here before – that you're moving through a story that has happened, that is happening, that will happen again.

That sensation is intentional. N:A structures itself as Routes. Finish Route A and you might assume you're done. You're not. Route B shifts your perspective, fills in context you didn't know was missing. Route C collapses the structure entirely. Routes D and E reframe your role as a player in ways I won't describe here, because the discovery is the point. The same story beats return each time, but viewed from a new angle, with new knowledge – what you thought was one thing reveals itself to be something else, and then something else again. Most games' plots are a fixed sequence of events, like a script: you follow them to the end, credits roll, done. Play N:A that way and you'll see less than a quarter of it.

The music works the same way. It was the City Ruins theme that made me understand what the soundtrack was actually doing. Walking through the ruins, you hear the standard version – haunting, melodic, immediately distinctive. Step inside a building and it becomes muted, echoed, intimate. Enter combat and it gains urgency, the tempo alive with threat. Hack into an enemy and it fragments into glitchy chiptune. Through every shift, the melody stays the same, and the playback position stays the same, so the transitions feel not like track changes but like recontextualizations – the game running parallel versions of every song simultaneously, ready to swap instantly without breaking emotional continuity. The music isn't atmosphere. It's architecture. It is the first soundtrack that made me rethink what a video game soundtrack is capable of doing.

The philosophy of the game is harder to summarize without spoiling it, and I'm deliberately not going to try. What I'll say is this: 2B's stoicism isn't coldness, it's armor, forged by a repetition the game reveals slowly. 9S is driven by a desire for truth and understanding, and finds that the more he learns, the less anything means. The questions accumulate in sequence. First: what does it all mean? Then: how do I know what's real? Finally: what's the point of it all? The game blends existentialism with nihilism and sets the whole thing in a world that doesn't reward goodness – not because it's cruel, but because it's indifferent. Which somehow hurts more. It's not philosophical because it name-drops Kierkegaard, or because the main character's name is literally a reference to a core existential question. It's philosophical because it makes you feel those ideas. There's a meaningful difference.

I don't have a clean ending here. That's fine. N:A didn't have one either.

The game's finale deploys bullet hell as metaphor made literal. As the credits roll – set to one of the best songs in the entire soundtrack – you play as the small spaceship you've been piloting during hacking minigames throughout the game. The bullet curtain grows progressively denser, more overwhelming. By the end, it doesn't matter how skillful you are. You cannot win. The screen fills. You die.

The game asks if you want to give up. You say no.

You try again. You fail. You try again. You fail. You try again. You fail. And at the lowest point, something changes. You hear a voice. Then another. The music opens into a chorus. And the little cursor spaceships of other players – the ghost data of everyone who made the same choice you're making now – begin to fly beside you. They intercept bullets. They shield you. They save you.

You make it through.

The credits end. The game offers one last choice: are you willing to delete your save data to help a stranger complete this moment? You will lose everything. But someone, somewhere, will be saved.

You are prompted to write a small message. You do. And then your story ends, so that someone you will never know, someone you will never meet, can have what you just had.

It has been eight years since I played it. I finished all the Routes and haven't touched it since, and I think I know why: I'm afraid of diluting it. Of returning to something that hit with that kind of force and finding it smaller than I remembered. Some things you only get to discover once.

What it gave me was questions. Memories. The haunting sense that meaning isn't found – it's built, and sometimes it breaks, and what you do in that breaking is the only answer the game is willing to offer.

This game isn't about winning.

It's about who you are when winning is no longer possible.