ItWasMeantToBe19
Banned
To be clear, there are more than two plot twists and far more amazing story elements in this game, but I just want to focus on two twists that while maybe not the most shocking ever, were the best executed twists I've seen in a video game in a long time.
Plot twist #1: The lives of the main characters have no meaning.
Nier is about what existence and life means but it starts out in a way that is confusing to many players that played the original. In the original game, you accidentally cause the future extinction of the human race. In this game, some of the human race still survives on the moon as stated constantly in game. It's odd and it seems like an unmentioned retcon or something at first because there aren't really whispers to the contrary IIRC.
And then it turns out that humanity did go extinct.
This particular part of the twist is amazing in its execution because the game just doesn't need to drop hints that humanity is extinct due to the prior game stating that humanity will be extinct! You just go along thinking that there's a retcon or humans somehow managed to survive due to tech breakthroughs, but then the game says no, that was just a lie. It feels so obvious in retrospect, but it's surprising in the moment, which is a perfect twist.
In Nier 1, there were androids left behind who were supposed to help restore humanity, but they failed. After a while, humans went extinct while androids stayed behind. Some of these androids who discovered the truth of human extinction were demoralized and lost since they were without "purpose" with humanity dead. They supposed to help humanity and now humanity was gone. Much later, aliens invaded the earth and sent thousands of robots to attack Emil (the superweapon character from the original game) and anything left on earth. This gave one android (in universe not named or mentioned at all as of now) the idea that androids could have purpose again if they were they were fighting against the aliens to help humanity retake the earth. To do this, he/she created a special military unit of androids in space with some of these androids setting up a server on the moon that could send signals pretending to be from humanity to androids on earth.
But this military unit was designed to only be temporary and they (some certain group(s) or android(s) unclear as of now I believe) set up security weaknesses in the military unit so that it could be destroyed by viruses created by the aliens' robots. Then, the secret of humanity being extinct could be kept. On the other side of the conflict, the aliens were killed off by their robot creations long ago.
This twist sets up your characters as androids whose purpose is to propagate a lie (unknowingly on your end) and be killed to complete the lie. The purpose of the attempted lie is to achieve endless war that serves literally no point as both sides (aliens and humans) have been dead for thousands of years. It's so bleak and so dark and fits the themes of the game so well. In the game, it's implicitly asked if the androids' lives have any meaning if their "purpose" is to fight in a war that has no point. It's an examination of the absurd lengths we will go to pretend our lives have specific purposes and what it means when those purposes turn out to be lies. Considering how many us look for a purpose in life, I found this reveal just so cutting.
Also perfect is that this twist is revealed on your second playthrough. The end boss of the first and second playthrough has this line of dialog.
"I know you two feel the same. That this world...is utterly meaningless."
This line just feels like an expression of the villain's pain on the first playthrough. On the second playthrough, the line manages to take on a more dramatic tone because one of your characters does feel the same, having just found out that this world does have essentially no meaning from some perspectives. It's pretty staggering to see a line take on so much extra meaning (lol, meaning) the second time around in a video game.
Plot twist 2: Not 2B
2B is the first playable character in Nier Automata and her name is a pun on "To be or not to be" because the game itself also deals with the question of existence. One of the very last plot twists is that... The character is not 2B.
To clarify this, things like "2B" "9S" or "2E" refer to production types with Type B androids being supposedly elite fights while Type E androids were built to execute other androids. 2B is a Type E android and is actually 2E (I will call her 2B from now on for convenience though)
While this play on "To be or not to be?" alone is incredible, the twist is great in that it manages to completely justify the strangest behaviors from 2B and other characters earlier in the game.
You see, 9S is 2B's partner and the Type S units are hacker types. These types were really important for learning info on the robot army, but their skills were so advanced that they might be able to hack into the main military base and find out the truth about the androids having no meaning or purpose. To stop this from happening, whenever a hacker android would learn the truth, they would have an execution android go and kill him/her. For 9S... This executioner is 2B. After the execution, the hackers would have their memories reset (androids have memories stored in data banks back on base) so they didn't remember their executioner or the truth and the cycle would start again.
9S found out the truth a lot so 2B executed him... a lot. These constant executions of 9S caused a huge amount of emotional trauma to 2B and this context manages to explain all of the weirdest emotional scenes in the game.
At the end of the first and second playthroughs, 9S is infected with a bad virus and asks 2B to kill this version of him. For 9S and the player, this seems pretty reasonable as 9S will just lose like a day of memories. 2B freaks out instead and talks about how 9S will be losing the him that exists in this very moment. After a while, 2B relents and strangles 9S and then cries out "it always ends like this."
Without the context, 2B looks a little dramatic and the line "it always ends like this" is somewhat vague and seems like it could refer to other failed missions or dead partners. With the context, it's devastating. 2B has erased years of 9S's life and destroyed many versions of 9S as a person. It's hard for 2B to believe she's not killing 9S because so many of her prior executions of 9S left him missing so many memories that the old 9S might as well be dead.
Another odd scene comes when 9S finds the truth and confronts the commander about it. The commander... Doesn't get that upset and just confirms the story. The commander makes no attempt to apprehend 9S or anything. It feels strange because the secret getting out is what the commander wants least in the entire world.
But then in the context of the twist, you know that the commander thinks 2B will just kill 9S soon so it doesn't matter. It makes the scene so different...
This plot-twist is heavily foreshadowed with two disturbing sidequests. In one, an android's friend has been killed and she wants to know who did it. Later on, it turns out that she was the one who was doing the killing as she was an execution class android. She had gone mad from the guilt and had gone so far as to bury/erase her own memories to get over the guilt.
Another side quest is more masterful. In it, there's an android couple that look like they just want to be free of this war. It turns into a long con that ends with the female android pleading for them to reset their memories. After you reset the male android's memories... The female android thanks you and tells you that she had really been wanting to make modifications to his personality and that was the main goal of this whole con. The female android has no concerns with spending so much time with an android that she has essentially killed several times over. It's disgusting and gives you a visceral reaction when you complete the quest... It's also basically the relationship with 2B and 9S. It allows you to feel the visceral hate 2B feels for herself without the potential of empathy for 2B interfering. It's incredible.
The twist also puts 2B's detachness to 9S in a new perspective and puts a great line in a new perspective. As 9S, you get hacked into by a powerful machine that starts a text chat (sort of) with you. After a while, a kind of wow/wham line appears with "I know you want to **** 2B." It comes as this funny and kind of shocking (just for being so blunt) line when you see it. However, it turns out that 9S still has some extremely vague recollection of how many times 2B has killed him. Once you know this, instead of "you want to fuck 2B" you start thinking about "you want to kill 2B."
Anyway, I hope I've explained what I think these twists are so insanely well put together in the context of the game and why they impacted me a lot. The game is far more than twists (as every game should be) and there's tons more to talk about.with regards to this game, but I hope I put out a decent case for these two specific parts of the game.
Plot twist #1: The lives of the main characters have no meaning.
Nier is about what existence and life means but it starts out in a way that is confusing to many players that played the original. In the original game, you accidentally cause the future extinction of the human race. In this game, some of the human race still survives on the moon as stated constantly in game. It's odd and it seems like an unmentioned retcon or something at first because there aren't really whispers to the contrary IIRC.
And then it turns out that humanity did go extinct.
This particular part of the twist is amazing in its execution because the game just doesn't need to drop hints that humanity is extinct due to the prior game stating that humanity will be extinct! You just go along thinking that there's a retcon or humans somehow managed to survive due to tech breakthroughs, but then the game says no, that was just a lie. It feels so obvious in retrospect, but it's surprising in the moment, which is a perfect twist.
In Nier 1, there were androids left behind who were supposed to help restore humanity, but they failed. After a while, humans went extinct while androids stayed behind. Some of these androids who discovered the truth of human extinction were demoralized and lost since they were without "purpose" with humanity dead. They supposed to help humanity and now humanity was gone. Much later, aliens invaded the earth and sent thousands of robots to attack Emil (the superweapon character from the original game) and anything left on earth. This gave one android (in universe not named or mentioned at all as of now) the idea that androids could have purpose again if they were they were fighting against the aliens to help humanity retake the earth. To do this, he/she created a special military unit of androids in space with some of these androids setting up a server on the moon that could send signals pretending to be from humanity to androids on earth.
But this military unit was designed to only be temporary and they (some certain group(s) or android(s) unclear as of now I believe) set up security weaknesses in the military unit so that it could be destroyed by viruses created by the aliens' robots. Then, the secret of humanity being extinct could be kept. On the other side of the conflict, the aliens were killed off by their robot creations long ago.
This twist sets up your characters as androids whose purpose is to propagate a lie (unknowingly on your end) and be killed to complete the lie. The purpose of the attempted lie is to achieve endless war that serves literally no point as both sides (aliens and humans) have been dead for thousands of years. It's so bleak and so dark and fits the themes of the game so well. In the game, it's implicitly asked if the androids' lives have any meaning if their "purpose" is to fight in a war that has no point. It's an examination of the absurd lengths we will go to pretend our lives have specific purposes and what it means when those purposes turn out to be lies. Considering how many us look for a purpose in life, I found this reveal just so cutting.
Also perfect is that this twist is revealed on your second playthrough. The end boss of the first and second playthrough has this line of dialog.
"I know you two feel the same. That this world...is utterly meaningless."
This line just feels like an expression of the villain's pain on the first playthrough. On the second playthrough, the line manages to take on a more dramatic tone because one of your characters does feel the same, having just found out that this world does have essentially no meaning from some perspectives. It's pretty staggering to see a line take on so much extra meaning (lol, meaning) the second time around in a video game.
Plot twist 2: Not 2B
2B is the first playable character in Nier Automata and her name is a pun on "To be or not to be" because the game itself also deals with the question of existence. One of the very last plot twists is that... The character is not 2B.
To clarify this, things like "2B" "9S" or "2E" refer to production types with Type B androids being supposedly elite fights while Type E androids were built to execute other androids. 2B is a Type E android and is actually 2E (I will call her 2B from now on for convenience though)
While this play on "To be or not to be?" alone is incredible, the twist is great in that it manages to completely justify the strangest behaviors from 2B and other characters earlier in the game.
You see, 9S is 2B's partner and the Type S units are hacker types. These types were really important for learning info on the robot army, but their skills were so advanced that they might be able to hack into the main military base and find out the truth about the androids having no meaning or purpose. To stop this from happening, whenever a hacker android would learn the truth, they would have an execution android go and kill him/her. For 9S... This executioner is 2B. After the execution, the hackers would have their memories reset (androids have memories stored in data banks back on base) so they didn't remember their executioner or the truth and the cycle would start again.
9S found out the truth a lot so 2B executed him... a lot. These constant executions of 9S caused a huge amount of emotional trauma to 2B and this context manages to explain all of the weirdest emotional scenes in the game.
At the end of the first and second playthroughs, 9S is infected with a bad virus and asks 2B to kill this version of him. For 9S and the player, this seems pretty reasonable as 9S will just lose like a day of memories. 2B freaks out instead and talks about how 9S will be losing the him that exists in this very moment. After a while, 2B relents and strangles 9S and then cries out "it always ends like this."
Without the context, 2B looks a little dramatic and the line "it always ends like this" is somewhat vague and seems like it could refer to other failed missions or dead partners. With the context, it's devastating. 2B has erased years of 9S's life and destroyed many versions of 9S as a person. It's hard for 2B to believe she's not killing 9S because so many of her prior executions of 9S left him missing so many memories that the old 9S might as well be dead.
Another odd scene comes when 9S finds the truth and confronts the commander about it. The commander... Doesn't get that upset and just confirms the story. The commander makes no attempt to apprehend 9S or anything. It feels strange because the secret getting out is what the commander wants least in the entire world.
But then in the context of the twist, you know that the commander thinks 2B will just kill 9S soon so it doesn't matter. It makes the scene so different...
This plot-twist is heavily foreshadowed with two disturbing sidequests. In one, an android's friend has been killed and she wants to know who did it. Later on, it turns out that she was the one who was doing the killing as she was an execution class android. She had gone mad from the guilt and had gone so far as to bury/erase her own memories to get over the guilt.
Another side quest is more masterful. In it, there's an android couple that look like they just want to be free of this war. It turns into a long con that ends with the female android pleading for them to reset their memories. After you reset the male android's memories... The female android thanks you and tells you that she had really been wanting to make modifications to his personality and that was the main goal of this whole con. The female android has no concerns with spending so much time with an android that she has essentially killed several times over. It's disgusting and gives you a visceral reaction when you complete the quest... It's also basically the relationship with 2B and 9S. It allows you to feel the visceral hate 2B feels for herself without the potential of empathy for 2B interfering. It's incredible.
The twist also puts 2B's detachness to 9S in a new perspective and puts a great line in a new perspective. As 9S, you get hacked into by a powerful machine that starts a text chat (sort of) with you. After a while, a kind of wow/wham line appears with "I know you want to **** 2B." It comes as this funny and kind of shocking (just for being so blunt) line when you see it. However, it turns out that 9S still has some extremely vague recollection of how many times 2B has killed him. Once you know this, instead of "you want to fuck 2B" you start thinking about "you want to kill 2B."
Anyway, I hope I've explained what I think these twists are so insanely well put together in the context of the game and why they impacted me a lot. The game is far more than twists (as every game should be) and there's tons more to talk about.with regards to this game, but I hope I put out a decent case for these two specific parts of the game.