Main Points
• Nier: Automata is a masterpiece of storytelling–or it’s just effective at emotionally bullying people into thinking it’s great.
• Perspective changing (from other characters or rapid switching) effectively makes us care about people.
• Sympathetic villains provide a greater emotional response.
• Every major and important character needs an arc.
• Switching up ‘gameplay’ (or the types of chapters we’re using) keeps readers engaged.
• Powerful themes stay powerfully. Everything should explore different facets of the themes.
• Humor helps lighten up with oppressively dark stories and makes us care more.
• To make readers care about characters, spend time with them.
• Emotional impact may be the most important thing you do as a storyteller. It can hide a multitude of writing sins.
• Consider backward outlining–start at the emotional climax/scene then work backward to the beginning. All plotting should be to create an emotional response.

Introduction
Nier: Automata is one of the best video games I’ve ever played. The emotion, storytelling, visuals, music, philosophy, and gameplay add up to create one of the most stunning experiences I’ve been through. Adding more to that are all the analyses people have created on YouTube, further highlighting the depth of this masterpiece.

I’ve spoken about lessons from video games before and their relevance to writing (here  here and here), but Nier: Automata is unique in a number of ways. So without further ado, here are the relevant lessons I picked up about storytelling from Nier: Automata.

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

Perspective Changing—Nier: Automata is a unique game in that to truly play it, you have to go through it three times. The first time, the story is straightforward: you play as 2B, a female combat android created by humans to fight against machine robots, the creations of evil aliens who’ve invaded earth. The only remaining humans have fled to the moon but are striving to retake earth. Both humans and aliens sides are fighting through robotic proxies: machines (alien creations who are simplistic looking) versus androids (human created almost perfect replicas). 2B is joined by a male scanner android named 9S. Together, they fight a bunch of machine lifeforms, discover a new threat, make some sacrifices and ultimately deal a massive blow to the aliens. Cut and dry, nice and simple.

The second playthrough gets into 9S’s perspective of the events from the first playthrough. You also start getting more insight into the machine lifeforms: we see them gaining limited consciousness and self-determination, we see them attempting to build societies; we see them struggle with existential questions like fate and death; they create ‘families’ including parents and children. We even get to play as some of the machine lifeforms to see this new perspective.

The third playthrough is all new material that takes place after the events of runs 1 and 2. We spend more time with A2, a renegade android who was betrayed by her leaders. The story quickly devolves into one of utter loss, suffering, and emotional devastation. It brutalizes the emotions, killing off characters you’ve come to love and subjecting those that remain to awful torment. The climax is an epic battle between the last androids who’ve both suffered heavily throughout.

One of the most striking things in this battle is the quick perspective switching between the two combatants, sometimes mid-strike. I’ve seen this done effectively before, but never like this. It creates a feeling of urgency and epic-ness beyond the usual norm.

The lesson here is that perspective switching is an effective storytelling tool: both to create tension and to make us care about characters (even enemies). One key take away from this is to question whether you’re telling the story from the best perspective. Brandon Sanderson did this effectively (though somewhat crazily) in his book, The Way of Kings. In the beginning, we get four different POVs: an epic prologue of gods, an assassin whose actions throw a kingdom into chaos, a young soldier who eventually dies watching the main character fight, and finally into the actual main character. It’s four chapters of unique perspectives, and while Sanderson has said this wouldn’t go well for non-established authors, it still shows that multiple perspectives can be powerful. So think about changing perspectives if you want the reader to care about someone. Or for some epic-ness, switch it up a lot.

Sympathetic Villains–Having sympathetic villains adds depth to your book, causing more emotional engagement for both the villains and the heroes. As quoted by many, many authors, villains are the heroes of their own story. Nier does this beautifully. At first, we think the machine lifeforms are just dull and evil alien machines. But then we get to see them have their own lives, goals, dreams, suffering, and joy. Even the most evil machines are seen in a sympathetic light. While this doesn’t justify their actions, it triggers more of an emotional response when the hero defeats them and they die. We learn why they do what they do. And it makes us care all the more even when we don’t agree with their actions.

Character Arcs–All major characters in Nier have character arcs (as they should) along with many side characters. 2B starts as a tough combat android with no time for emotions. She changes into a caring individual whose attachment to 9S almost overshadows her strict sense of duty. She also opens up to questioning what she’s been taught about the evil machine lifeforms and begins to care for them. 9S goes from a happy-go-lucky, innocent/curious kid to one consumed with rage and an unwavering thirst for revenge to the point that he blinds himself to get what he wants. 2A changes from a bitter, resentful, betrayed android bent on destroying all machine lifeforms to a woman of compassion, caring, and understanding. Pascal, a side character machine lifeform, goes from a caring, tender, robot who oversees his village of pacifist machines to one utterly devastated by the consequences of war. Each character’s journey is punctuated with events and stories to help them along their way. Similarly, we should have arcs for all of our main characters and important side characters. It can be as simple as starting at point A and ending up at point B.

Switch up Gameplay—Nier: Automata has an incredible amount of gameplay diversity: at one moment, you’re playing a sword hack and slash game; then the camera perspective changes into a 2-D crawler; then you’re suddenly playing a jet fighter bullet-hell game; then you transition into hacking mini-games. There’s even a small portion that’s entirely text-based. It’s highly effective to keep the gamer engaged by switching things up like this–some of the most emotional moments were reading through a text-game after a stressful battle. It’s kind of like beating exercise plateaus by mixing up your gym routine. This can easily translate into writing (though not 1:1): we can have extreme action scenes followed by calm moments or relate them through different perspectives; we can add flavors from other genres, using tropes from mystery, western, or horror tropes into whatever you’re writing. We can add dreams, secret journals, impending visions, meaningful side quests, types of chapters or segments that are different from the main narrative. Brandon Sanderson did this beautifully with his first Mistborn book, blending heist and fantasy tropes and peppering ancient journal entries at the start of some chapters. We can do more with our books, making sure we have mixtures of ‘gameplay’ throughout.

The Power of Theme(s)—Nier‘s main themes are existential in nature (what’s the purpose of life? Is creating a meaning meaningful? What’s the nature of consciousness and self-determinism? What counts as being alive? How do you deal with Sisyphean tasks without any inherent meaning?) It also asks questions of tolerance (are enemies all evil? Can enemies turn into friends? Can aggressively different societies live together in peace?). These are explored through the main characters, but also through tiny side ones. We see social commentary on Japanese ganbatte (“do your best”) culture, perfectionism, characters who mirror Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and others. We explore religion, suicide, radicalism, and nihilism. These themes are repeatedly shown to the gamer, the repetition driving home the emotional weight, creating powerful connections each time we experience another facet of the theme. The ultimate impact is people remember playing the game, thanks in part to the emphasis on theme. In our writing, do we have powerful themes that are explored from multiple angles/perspectives/characters that’ll stick with us beyond the pages? Do our characters and situations tie into these themes? (as a bonus, here’s a great video exploring the themes “Nier: Automata’s Uplifting Existentialism (Story Discussion)”)

The Importance of Humor—Nier deals with some incredibly dark aspects: we witness the aftermath of a group of robot children killing themselves to avoid getting murdered; the main characters realize they were built to die for a ‘greater’ cause; one character is designed to continually kill her friends and those she grows close to; machines kill themselves to become gods. Yet despite all this suffering, Nier doesn’t descend into utter hopelessness. It’s actually one of the most uplifting games I’ve ever played and has a whole segment devoted to teaching empathy for real-life people. Part of the reason it strikes such a good balance between despair and hope, is its humor. Sometimes scenes are bizarre enough to feel out of place, but more often than not, they’re heart-warming and give the player a nice breather from all the suffering. A lot of the pain is portrayed through cute robots who you can’t help but look on with compassion and tenderness. Their simplicity and child-like innocence not only makes us empathize with them but also makes us laugh along with their joy. Some of the pacifist machine lifeforms dress up as carnival jesters, turn weapons into confetti shooters, do anti-violence marches. They have silly and cute problems like romantic squabbles as they try to figure out love; they have younger siblings who get lost in the desert (who awkwardly/humorously asks questions like “Where do children come from?”). The androids also make humorous comments on the little they understand of humanity, wondering about shopping malls and dolls. All this serves to further build empathy, gain more emotional connection, and make the devastating scenes worse. If everything is suffering, it just tends to blend together and we grow apathetic. If the suffering is punctuated with tender or funny moments, it’ll serve to highlight the rest.

Spending Time with Characters–Video games are notorious for side quests and Nier: Automata is no exception. Many of them involved the dreaded fetch quest (finding some item for someone and bringing it back to them). The difference with Nier, however, is all the side quests play into building an emotional response. Doing stupid and cutesy tasks for minor characters, makes us care about them more. There’s a scene in the latter part of the game where all the pacifist machines who’ve been helping you suddenly get infected with a zombie virus and start eating each other. During my first playthrough, I hardly did any of these characters’ side quests. My second time, I did as many as I could. During the zombie scene, I found the dead body of the machine who pretended to be dumb so people wouldn’t judge him; I found the corpse of a big machine who had a tender heart and didn’t want to fight; I saw siblings I’d helped before embracing each other before they died. The emotional impact during this run was much stronger because I knew each of these poor machines before they went crazy. The same is true in our own writing. To make readers care about our characters, we need to spend time with them, engaging in different kinds of activities. The more time we spend, the more we’ll care.

Emotional Impact Hides a Multitude of Sins–This is probably the greatest single lesson I learned from Nier: Automata. If you haven’t noticed, most of the previous lessons here are all designed to one end: elicit a powerful emotional response, and Nier does a phenomenal job of this (more on that in a bit). But when I step back and look at the story as a whole, a lot of it doesn’t make sense. It can be obtuse, difficult to follow, and doesn’t fit as well as I’d like. Plus, there are loads of plot holes that only partially get filled in through outside sources (such as music concerts only done in Japan). Regardless of this, the game feels like a magnificent story, all because it gets the emotions right. Because I became so tied to the characters, it didn’t matter to me that there were plot holes. The point is, if you get your emotion right, it’ll make up for a lot of other mistakes. If you can get your readers to care about your characters or have emotional ties, it’ll solve almost everything else.

This can be somewhat problematic, however. Some gamers have accused Yoko Taro (the game’s director/writer) of not being a good storyteller only a manipulator of emotions (“Yoko Taro can’t write, he can only emotionally manipulate”). They might be right. After reflecting on the game, I came to the realization I might have been emotionally bullied into thinking Nier: Automata is a masterpiece, that simply by overexposure to the themes, music, scenarios, and characters, I believe it’s great storytelling.

Whether or not this is true is somewhat beyond the point. I can’t say if Yoko Taro is a good storyteller, but he’s certainly an effective one and one worth learning lessons from. He gets the emotions right, and that may be all that matters. The same issue plays out with books like Twilight and The Da Vinci Code: the emotions are spot on (romance for Twilight and thrilling pacing for The Da Vinci Code). While both these books have flaws, they’re generally overlooked because the emotional impact was profound, meaning most readers will leave feeling it was a great book even if they thought the writing was weak. For most, emotional impact will stay much longer with a reader than anything else. Hence, if we as writers can get that right, we can leave our readers satisfied.

Backward Outlining (back to emotions)–This also comes from Yoko Taro (a man who regularly wears a Majora style mask in public). He begins outlining by starting at the ending, visualizing the climax and the kind of emotional response he wants to create, then he plots backward from there. What has to happen in order to get to that point? How do we have to care about the character to elicit that kind of a response? He goes through this process until he gets to the beginning, having developed everything toward the ultimate emotional climax. During a panel discussion, he related the following:

Story and gameplay are the not the most important things when building a game that can be considered eccentric. Moving players’ emotions is the most important thing.

“I have one goal when it comes to making games,” Yoko said. “[Story and gameplay] are no more than means or steps, and all I care about is heading for the goal.
(summary from “Drakengard, Nier director discusses methods for telling powerful, strange stories”; or for the actual video “Nier’s Taro Yoko ‘Making Weird Games For Weird People”)

That’s a bold statement that ‘story and gameplay are no more than means or steps.’ But is that true? We’ve already seen the power of an emotional response. Could it be that Taro is correct? I think he might be, or at least is onto to something. And this is something I’d like to try more. I often envision the climax before I create the beginning, but I’ve never built a story all for the purpose of getting that emotional response I want. As seen with Nier, however, this kind of planning is an effective way to both outline and get the emotional goal you’re seeking. That’ll lead to more memorable stories that stay with us. Again, it might be problematic in terms of manipulation (see above), but it can an incredible way to plot.

Conclusion
As I stated above, I’m not sure if Nier: Automata is great storytelling. What I am sure of, however, is that it’s a masterpiece of effective storytelling. It’s an incredible case study of great execution to create profound and lasting emotional impacts, with plenty of lessons for storytellers like us to implement.

But what do you think about these lessons? Important? Not-important? Can a book/game/movie emotionally bully consumers into thinking its good? Is that a bad thing? Is it something we should adopt? Let me know below!