I finished Nier: Automata’s Ending E this past week, at which point the game instantly became one of my favorites of all time. I can’t be sure, but the entire game suddenly seemed structured, brilliantly, around the player’s choice in this segment, which completely justified the problems I’d had with the story up to that point. Here’s a very brief piece I wrote about it, which I thought was worth sharing:
The first 2 playthroughs of Nier: Automata set up a world with meaningfulness everywhere. Machines talk about their interests/hobbies, what keeps them going in life, and who they care about.
Then the 3rd playthrough serves to tear that all down in one fell swoop. Every “meaningful” thing you might have cared about is killed or driven to madness (I.E. the two main characters). In the end, nothing mattered and everyone dies. And if it had really ended there, it would have been outright nihilistic. But it doesn’t end there. Everything actually hinges on Ending E.
After being presented with so much definitive evidence in Routes C/D that things were meaningless, the game literally asks you if you care enough about what you’ve seen to fight anyway. Because ultimately, caring about things and fighting for them is the meaning of life. As long as we have each other, and we care enough about each other to make sacrifices for each other, then the hardships of the world are worth attempting to conquer, even knowing that they will never be conquered. That’s proven by the poetic savior of other players, who literally had to sacrifice something they cared about deeply, their invested playtime, in order to save strangers going through the same existensial crisis. It’s one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game, the only one that’s ever made me cry, and it’s a fucking minimalist shmup segment.