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“Everything that lives is designed to end. We are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. Is this a curse? Or some kind of punishment? I often think about the god who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle… and wonder if we’ll ever get the chance to kill him.”
If you’ve played the first five minutes of NieR: Automata, you heard this quote. In fact, you likely heard this quote over and over again because if you die before finishing the prologue, you have to do the whole level all over again.
But what is it about that quote? What about that line that 2B said? What does it all mean? If you already finished the game, I think you have an idea, but I’m sure that a lot of people are still confused about what the hell this game is trying to say.
To figure it out, let’s unpack the endings of NieR: Automata and get a refresher on what happened with each Route you can play. Then we can talk about the philosophy and the hidden details that are really what make this game a masterpiece of unique storytelling.
Because we’ll be analyzing the endings, there will be a lot of spoilers ahead. If you haven’t finished the game yet and don’t want to ruin the surprise, stop reading and bookmark this article for when you’re finished with the game.
Routes & Endings Explained
If you’re still here and haven’t played or finished the game, well, prepare to get the game ruined for you.
Route A – Ending A
Everything in Route A is just your normal video game stuff. You beat some missions, help out good guys, and defeat bad guys. You discover that the aliens who made the machines are already dead, and you finally defeat the two powerful machines named Adam and Eve. All is good so far, right?
By the time you get to the end of Route A, you’re left with more questions than answers. Ending A shows 9S getting infected by a virus after defeating Eve and ends with 2B killing him after 9S begs to be killed. That’s basically it. Well, besides 9S getting resurrected as a machine.
Route B – Ending B
With Route B, you’ll essentially face the same enemies and bosses that you faced in Route A. This time, though, you’ll be hacking into the enemies to beat them. When you defeat some of the enemies, like Simone, you see their inner thoughts.
That’s when you realize that the machines you killed are actually sentient and have really sad backstories. That’s also when you start to realize why this game and Yoko Taro are kind of messed up and why there are some pretty disturbing moments in NieR.
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Later on, you’ll get to explore a lot of information on the YoRHa servers, and you might even get some background lore about the Gestalts and Replicants. And who can forget the big moment with the Commander telling 9S that the humans they’re supposed to fight for actually went extinct way before the aliens and machines arrived? You find out that YoRHa exists for the sole purpose of maintaining the lie that humans are still alive on the moon, just to give androids the will to fight.
This ending is basically the same as ending A, but it does feel different now that you viewed the situation from a different perspective: that of the bosses’ thoughts. Ending B also shows us our first glimpse of the Red Girls, the real main enemy of the game.
Route C – Ending C and D
The start of Route C is pretty exciting; you go on a mission back down to Earth and fight some of the most challenging machines in the game. After that, the YoRHa Bunker will explode, leaving only 2B, 9S, and A2, along with their corrupted comrades, as the only surviving androids.
Right after surviving the bunker’s destruction, 2B gets infected with a virus, and she begs A2 to kill her to prevent it from spreading.So now 2B is out.
The only functioning YoRHa members left are 9S and A2 because the game is EVIL, AND THEY DON’T CARE IF THEY SUDDENLY KILL MY FAVORITE CHARACTER!
Yeah, there’s still a lot of pain there.
The hopelessness and dread will soon start to creep in with 9S and his failing mental state. This is where he becomes a hardcore nihilist, an android seeing that nothing matters anymore and only has the desire to destroy. We’ve seen this before with Eve in Ending A and B.
More secrets are revealed, and the androids are basically left with nothing to believe in, so yeah, dread starts pouring in.
Whether you get Ending C or D depends on whether you choose 9S or A2 in the final battle. Either way, they both die in the end, so choosing is effectively meaningless aside from the different information you gather from the different endings.
Ending C will show you how A2 “saves” 9S from the virus by killing him. Ending D will show you how the Red Girls are stockpiling the data from machines in an Ark to send them to another world. It seems they had a change of mind and now want to leave Earth for good instead of destroying the human server on the moon.
Ending E
You can achieve Ending E when you finished endings A through D. This will show you what happens in the aftermath of 9S and A2’s fight. The only ones alive this time are the Pods that have now gained sentience. They’re trying to preserve the memories of our main androids and YoRHa despite being programmed to destroy every bit of data.
At the very end, to reach Ending E, you have to agree to erase all your saved files and data.
If you want to watch every ending, here’s a video compilation:
What Does It All Mean?
The True Ending
If you’re like me, once you finished the game, there are still some questions to answer. To this day, four years after the game was released, players are still unpacking what it means.
Let’s start with Ending E.
Do you remember 2B’s quote from the beginning of the game? The one about how we’re all stuck in a never-ending spiral of life and death. Keep that in mind.
People on Reddit often debate whether Ending E shows us that 2B, 9S, and A2 are being resurrected or whether there’s even a possibility of them being alive again.
I don’t think any of that matters. I think Ending E is the true ending. Nothing comes after that. And that’s probably for the best. 2B’s opening speech is telling us about the cycle of life and death being some sort of curse or punishment. By that logic, staying dead and finally breaking the cycle is the best-case scenario here.
Nihilist or Not?
There are a lot of articles, forum posts, and videos that point out all the nihilistic themes of the game. Nihilism, in the simplest terms, is the belief that there is no purpose to life or the universe. Existence is ultimately meaningless, and there is no such thing as absolute truth or knowledge. Everything we think we know and everything we think gives life meaning is made up.
We can see this nihilistic perspective all throughout the game. The most noticeable examples are when 9S and Eve start spiraling into nihilistic ideas once they lose the ones they loved. The world in NieR: Automata is a world without the gods. It’s a world without anything to believe in. Everything that the Androids once believed in is revealed to be based entirely on lies.
Even with all that, the game is not strictly nihilistic. Instead, it’s better defined as absurdist.
An extension of nihilism, absurdists argue that we should embrace the inherent contradiction of existence: That humans desire meaning and that meaning does not exist. Rather than see the inherent meaninglessness of life as proof that existence is pointless (as nihilists often do), absurdists argue that we should embrace it. Make your own meaning instead of searching for it.
Our main android characters, 2B and 9S, knew the humans were extinct the whole time, and in spite of that, they still seek to find meaning within their meaningless and repetitive lives. They’re more like Sisyphus if anything.
A2 also expresses absurdist ideas. A2 loses her life purpose when she’s betrayed by YoRHa and when 9S tells her the humans were extinct. Even though her life has no purpose, she still decides to make it meaningful by destroying every machine she sees.
Absurdism is about rebelling against the despair of nihilism. To do that, you must have something or someone to make meaning in your life. For Sisyphus, it’s his boulder. For Eve, it’s Adam.
For 9S, it’s 2B. If they lose the one they care about, that’s when things turn ugly. That’s when they seek to destroy everything. That urge to destroy is somewhat normal when your source of meaning is ripped from you.
The credits level also points to NieR: Automata’s message being more rooted in absurdism than nihilism. Once you finish the game, you’re prompted to fight the credits scene, and it’s impossible to beat. The game asks you over and over again to give up with these prompts:
- “Do you admit defeat?”
- “Is it all pointless?”
- “Do you think games are silly little things?”
- “Do you admit there is no meaning to this world?”
If you refuse to give up, you’ll eventually get help from others to beat it. With that help, this level becomes extremely easy.
Until then, though, the level is long, and all the while, you’re listening to a song about carrying the weight of the world. After the 5 to 20 minutes you spend on the credit level, you’ll surely be hearing that song in your sleep.
After realizing that your 15- to 25-hour playthrough doesn’t make actual sense with the story, and after losing most characters in the game, you might have some nihilist views for a bit. But after the credits level, if you do play it through to the end, the game forces you to find meaning or value in this otherwise meaningless game.
Plus, the game tells you to sacrifice your save file so that they can use your data to help other players get through the game, and that in itself is absurd. THE WHOLE GAME IS ABSURDLY GOOD!
NieR: Automata doesn’t make you a nihilist; it makes you realize the absurdity of life and how we must push through it against all odds. With that, hopefully, you became A Little Bit Human.
Conclusion
I know that this game is four years old at this point, but man, the philosophy you explore while playing it is just too good not to at least attempt to share. Who would have thought that a game about androids dressed as French maids would hide a message like that?
If you read the article until the end, a huge thanks to you! What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
For now, I would like to leave you with this hilarious comment that summarizes the vibe of NieR:Automata:
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