Characters / NieR: Automata

A list of characters from NieR: Automata, its sister series YoRHa, the anime adaptation NieR Automata Ver 1.1a, and their associated tropes.

BEWARE OF SPOILERS!

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Main Characters

2B

YoRHa No. 2 Type B (2B)

A blade of quiet will.

Voiced by: Kira Buckland (English), Yui Ishikawa (Japanese)

"...Emotions are prohibited."

The main heroine of NieR: Automata, she is an android named "YoRHa Unit No. 2 Type B" (or 2B for short) made by humans.

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• Action Girl: As a YoRHa unit, she is perfectly capable of combat against machine lifeforms.
• All for Nothing: All things considered, it's probably for the best that she dies before she finds out that humanity has been extinct for thousands of years and all those times she killed 9S were completely pointless.
• Armor Is Useless: She gets to wear a suit of heavy Powered Armor at the beginning of Route C that doesn't affect her hit points or general survivability at all. Finishing the game then unlocks two of these suits as key items to change her appearance during replays at will, but again it's just cosmetic.
• Back from the Dead: It started as Death Is Cheap; like the other androids, when she dies, which she does with 9S in the opening mission, her memory files are re-uploaded into a back-up body in the Bunker. However, the Bunker is then destroyed, and all death from there is permanent. Sadly, 2B's death comes shortly after the destruction of the Bunker, with A2 and 9S following suit by Ending C/D. Thankfully, the Pods decide to rebuild their bodies and restore all of their past memories, giving them one last chance at a happy life, free from their programming.
• BFS: One of 2B's weapons.
• Blind Weaponmaster: As depicted in the YoRHa stage play, all YoRHa androids are equipped with a "visor" or "goggle" system that looks like a blindfold. This is actually a technical piece of equipment that they use in battle. When they aren't, there is little use or reason to wear it; however, some androids choose to keep it on, only removing it for "poignant" moments in the story.
• Bodyguard Crush: As a Battler unit, part of her duties include protecting her assigned Scanner unit, and no matter how she tries to hide it, her feelings for 9S clearly go beyond just a general desire for his safety. Becomes a very twisted subversion when it turns out that her actual duty isn't to protect 9S, but to kill him (for she's not a Battler unit, but an Executioner unit whose true designation is 2E.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: A Gender Flipped example with her and 9S: he's a kind, sunny, and friendly Scanner unit while she's a cold, cynical, and emotionally repressed soldier struggling with the pain of having to kill him over and over again.
• Cleavage Window: Albeit a very modest one.
• Character Title: Symbolically the subtitle in the game's title, "Automata", refers to the plural form of "automaton", another word for "robot" (and more literally translating to "self-willed"). The protagonist YoRHa androids are non-biological, mechanical lifeforms.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: After accepting the "Amnesia" sidequest in the B route, 2B uncharacteristically starts prodding at 9S at exactly why he accepted the request, insinuating that he did it because the requester was a pretty girl. He gets flustered and denies it, leading her to respond with a nonchalant "Whatever." Knowing what she is, it's probable that the true meaning behind her words is likely a combination of both jealousy and concern that he's going to discover too much and force her to kill him.
• Clothing Damage: Depending on how much damage she takes, 2B will lose her skirt and show a white Leotard of Power. It is even possible for the player inflict damage to her clothes using "Self Destruction" mode.
• Combat Stilettos: Being an advanced robot with incredible balancing programs, she's far more capable of running, leaping and doing battle in heels than any human.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Unlike Nier, she isn't struggling for the sake of a close relative; she's only fulfilling her purpose. Thus, she is stoic and cool to their emotional outbursts, and maintains an indifference toward her machine opponents where they were fueled by genocidal hatred for Shades. In addition, she is female and aware that she is artificial but not that her purpose has been long rendered moot, where the two Niers were male and believed themselves to be human even as they wiped out the remnants of real humans.
• The Corruption: 2B falls victim via the Logic Virus in Route C/D, but she survives longer than most. Before she succumbs to it she asks A2 to mercy kill her. The Pods rebuild her in Ending E.
• Consummate Professional: Even the Commander isn't as strict about the "emotions are prohibited" rule as her. Part of the reason she maintains this attitude is to keep herself from becoming too attached to 9S, since her job is to kill him whenever he uncovers top-secret data and poses a threat to YoRHA as a result, even though years of working with him has made it more difficult for her to hide her true feelings.
• Dead Man Writing: After she gets separated from 9S after the destruction of the Bunker, but before the logic virus infects her, she records a message on her Flight Unit asking anyone who finds it to send 9S a message. 9S himself can find the wrecked Flight Unit in the Flooded City. Her last words to him are that her memories of being with him were "like pure light."
• Deadpan Snarker: She often responds to her pod's Captain Obvious observations with dry sarcasm.
• Decoy Protagonist: It's complicated. She's easily the face of the game, with her getting center stage in promo material, and much of the plot is not only about her, it is also told through her. But you only play as her twice: once during the first playthrough, and for a short period of time during the beginning of the third playthrough, after which she is Mercy Killed to prevent the Logic Virus from corrupting her memories; A2 takes over her role and joins 9S as the co-protagonist of Route C. However, 2B actually has the longest potential playthrough of all three Routes. Route A is about 12 hours, while side quests jack that up to as much as 30 hours total; even combined, neither 9S or A2 reach that milestone in Routes B or C. In addition, she's the one who ultimately causes Ending D, as her memories interfering in the Final Boss battle cause both 9S and A2 to die. With that said, her route also reveals the least about the backstory and the events pertaining to Project YoRHa's purpose. However, even without her as the lead character, she still drives the plot for the rest of the main cast. Everything A2 and 9S do in the second half of the game is because of 2B; he wants to avenge her while A2 is following 2B's role and final wishes.
• Everybody Knew Already: In the very last playable section of the entire main game, A2 tells 9S that 2B's true role was to serve as his personal executioner for uncovering YoRHa's secrets and has already killed him dozens of times already, but then asks him "But you knew that already, didn't you?" 9S responds by angrily telling her to shut up but pointedly does not deny the truth of what she says, suggesting that he had indeed figured this out beforehand.
• Evil Costume Switch: After Adam and Eve's defeat, YoRHa command commands a final assault on the Machines. All of the combat YoRHas, including 2B, are outfitted in stormtrooper-esque black combat armor complete with a helmet/mask and Glowing Eyes of Doom. The YoRHa are not actually evil, but their new armor is quite menacing... and then the other YoRHa are afflicted with the Logic Virus.
• Fantastic Racism: Doesn't really see the machines as anything other than mindless drones at first, and will verbally berate 9S when he starts to think otherwise. It isn't till the ending of route A that she acknowledges that she is wrong.
• Fire-Forged Friends:
  • 2B first meets 9S during a mission to defeat a Goliath. Although initially distant and aloof towards him, 2B gradually warms up to 9S as they fight together. Their friendship is cemented after they destroy their black boxes, destroying their current bodies in the process — but 9S didn't have time to back up his memory on the Bunker, meaning that he doesn't remember this.
  • Despite starting off as enemies, 2B and A2 practically become confidants once the reality of the world hits her hard. After being infected with the Logic Virus, 2B is at the mercy of some androids, only for A2 to step in and save her. She entrusts her memories with A2 and asks her to take care of everyone they both care about. Once A2 gives her a Mercy Kill, she cuts off her hair out of respect, and carries on 2B's wishes to the letter.
• The Gadfly: Despite her cold, emotionless exterior, it appears on several occasions that 2B just can't resist getting a rise out of 9S and messes with him in ways that are rather uncharacteristically playful, and arguably flirty.
  • In The Lost Child Sidequest, when 9S desperately asks her for help explaining to a child machine where babies come from, 2B coolly replies "You're the chatty one. Work it out."
  • Mocks 9S for accepting a sidequest from a redhaired female resistance member by asking him if he only accepted the mission because a pretty girl was asking him, much to his protests.
  • During the maintenance scene at the beginning of the game, you have the option of making her tell him that she likes listening to the sound of his voice, which makes him get extremely flustered and start stammering.
• Go Out with a Smile: After she lets A2 impale her with her own sword to grant her release from the Logic Virus but before she dies, she notices 9S on the bridge and, with her last breath, smiles sweetly as she calls out his name.
• Guest Fighter:
  • 2B joins the cast of Soulcalibur VI as Downloadable Content.
  • She's an "Abnromal" class unit in Goddess of Victory: NIKKE.
  • She is an attacker class hero in "#COMPASS"
  • 2B makes a second fighting game appearance in Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, also as DLC.
• Hartman Hips: Just look how her hips protrude out of her skirt.
• The Hero Dies: She dies about a third of the way into the post-Ending A/B route after contracting a logic virus and receiving a Mercy Kill from A2.
• Hidden Depths: Underneath her no-nonsense attitude, 2B is tired of fighting and simply wants to be at peace. She continues to fight for YoRHa because it's what she's for. She also definitely has emotions that she keeps bottled up underneath her The Stoic attitude, and these emotions definitely include feelings for 9S, developed over the countless times that she has killed his incarnations.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: She tries to be cold and aloof, not by choice, but out of necessity, as her defense mechanism for the horrors of life and the reality of her programming. Beneath that icy shoulder, 2B is a very kind and loyal woman who goes out of her way to make her friends happy (petting her Pod like a pet or taking a picture of a rare flower as a gift to Operator 6O, for instance). When 6O is down about her love life, 2B takes the time to console her in her own awkwardly professional way, let alone all the times she lets her guard down around 9S, Emil, Pascal, even A2. Much unlike most of the androids, she has empathy even toward machines she used to think of as little more than drones, recognizing that they too Grew Beyond Their Programming and envying that about them.
• Hunter of Their Own Kind: There is no Type 2B model line. "2B" is actually a Type E (Executioner) Class Android meant to assassinate Scanners whenever they get too close to uncovering the truth. She's killed 9S more times than she cares to remember.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: Reacts violently whenever 9S is harmed or even endangered, despite the fact that her entire purpose is to kill him because He Knows Too Much. In fact, the really ironic part is that she only fell in love with him after the first couple of times she'd killed him.
• Iconic Item: Her blindfold also doubles as a hairband. In all fanarts and rule 34 that have her with no blindfold, she still has the hairband.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Essentially the face of the series and the character most gamers would be familiar with, but doesn't appear until Automata.
• Implied Love Interest: It's strongly implied that 9S has romantic feelings towards her and that she returns his affections, but it's never confirmed one way or another because she dies before either of them gets a chance to admit it to the other.
• Impossible Hourglass Figure: As the image and her actual design looks, she has less than half of body mass on her slim upper body while the rest is composed of her legs. Justified since she is not human.
• In Love with the Mark: She's essentially 9S's personal executioner and memory-wiper, but years of being by his side have caused her to develop feelings for him despite herself.
• Irony: On Route C she is thankful towards A2 for finishing her so she can't harm 9S, placing her memories in her blade Virtuous Contract to be wielded by A2. Route D has 2B cause the death of A2 through her remembrance of her and the death of 9S who dies upon the blade, meaning she fulfills her duty to kill him in the end and brings an end to YoRHa.
• It Gets Easier: Total inversion. The short story Memory Cage details an early, if not the first, instance of her killing 9S when he starts digging too deep into matters he shouldn't. She does it quickly and professionally. However, spending three years assigned to him gradually cause her to become closer and closer to him as she slowly falls for his earnest and innocent personality, and she starts hating herself more and more with every execution of him. It finally reaches the point that when she kills him in Ending A/B, which was a kill done not because of her orders, but by his own request, she breaks down sobbing and cradling his lifeless form.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Another one of 2B's weapons is a katana.
• Kill the Ones You Love: After 9S becomes infected with the Logic Virus in Endings A/B, she gives him a Mercy Kill at his own request then breaks down crying.
  • In fact, this is basically her entire job. Her actual designation is Executioner, and she's assigned to 9S to kill him every time he discovers something he shouldn't. The problem is that the more times she gets to know him, the harder it gets to do her duty when the time comes. In fact, when she gets a Mercy Kill from A2 in Route C, she dies with a smile just because it means she won't ever have to kill 9S again.
• Lady of War: Her design is elegant and graceful; her movements in combat equally so.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: If the player uses the camera to look up under her dress or check her butt, after a moment she will either kick the camera away or cover herself. The achievement for doing this enough times is named "What Are You Doing?".
• Lightning Bruiser: Her moveset is arguably faster than Nier's, and she can take as much as she can dish out.
• Love Hurts: She is tormented by her affection for 9S, particularly since her entire purpose is to kill him.
• Meaningful Name: Nier: Automata is a game filled with themes based around the human condition and Existentialism. Naturally, the game's main protagonist is named "2B" as a reference to the iconic "To be, or not to be?" soliloquy from Hamlet (with Hamlet being quite possibly the most famous existentialism-themed work in human history). Additionally, said soliloquy's entire contemplation of death and suicide is perfectly befitting how this game (and 2B's character in particular) is centrally based around themes of death & reincarnation. 2B's name gains an extra, darker meaning when one discovers that she is, well, not 2B — she's 2E, short for "Executioner".
• Mercy Kill: Does this to 9S in Ending A/B due to Logic Virus corruption. Then she herself is on the receiving end of this by A2 due to, again, the Logic Virus's corruption.
• Ms. Fanservice: She has a very voluptuous body and her very short outfit, prone to frequent panty shots, prompted tons and tons of fan-art—something that her creator not only encouraged, but requested the fans organise and compress so he could sort through it with less hassle. And as it turns out, there is actually a button prompt to destroy her dress.
• Mundane Object Amazement: As a Nonstandard Game Over, you can let 2B eat a mackerel for the sake of being a Mechanical Lifeform, which turns out that she's not. The mackerel she ate was incompatible with her vital systems and renders her non-functional/dead, but didn't stop her from remarking before her death:
  It was good, though. Exquisite, even. No wonder humans used to eat them...
• Not So Stoic: There is one thing that can reliably break her, and that is 9S being hurt. After acting coolly and professionally with 9S for the entire length of the first mission (going so far as to tell him "emotions are prohibited" when he's trying to make small talk with her), she completely loses her composure and becomes desperate to save him once he gets injured trying to help her defeat the giant robot weapon they were sent to take out. In fact, this is a common theme with 2B. She presents herself as disciplined, professional, and aloof, but it's largely an act; it's harder for her to deal with the pain that comes with expressing her humanity, a humanity that she can't help but feel around the people she cares about.
  • A sweeter variation happens right at the beginning of the game, when 9S is performing maintenance on her while she's in repair mode. You have the option of telling him that 2B likes listening to the sound of his voice, which causes him to get flustered and start stammering.
  • Happens again in the Copied City when she sees 9S' crucified body, courtesy of Adam. And again when she has to Mercy Kill 9S in Ending A/B when he gets infected by the Logic Virus. Unable to hold back her emotions any longer, she bitterly weeps holding 9S as she states that it always ends with her having to kill him.
  • That calm facade completely breaks after the Bunker is attacked in Route C. She's genuinely disturbed upon realizing the virus-infected androids are still conscious, and she's especially upset that her Mission Control and friend, Operator 6O, was one of the victims. By the end of the Bunker sequence, she refuses to abandon the also-infected Commander to her fate, even screaming for her to go, and has to be forced by 9S to leave her as the Bunker self destructs. Even as she flies down to the Earth, 2B takes the time to mourn the Commander's death in a very solemn tone.
  • The final time happens when she records her final message to 9S shortly before she is incurably infected with the logic virus. Her voice is audibly breaking and she is holding back tears in the recording.
  • She's also noticeably shaken during the Optional Boss fight with the insane Emil clones and Emil's death afterwards.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: As mentioned above, when 2B's stoicism breaks and she suddenly starts screaming in anger or blubbering in fear/worry, you know matters have either taken a turn for the worse, or are about to. The same is true When She Smiles.
• The Political Officer: In a twisted way, 2B, or rather 2E, is one, assigned by the Bunker to oversee the dangerous intellectual 9S, who has previously shown a propensity for digging up YoRHa's darkest secrets, and to execute him whenever he gets dangerous ideas that undermine YoRHa's mission. Other E units are also tasked with the summary execution of YoRHa deserters like A2.
• The Protagonist: 2B is widely considered the protagonist of Automata. She has the longest playable time of the characters with a very large portion of the story revolving around her fighting against the Machines while desperately trying to repress her emotions. Even with her death in the third route, both 9S and A2 are greatly influenced by her, with 9S seeking vengeance for her against A2 and A2 carrying out her final wishes.
• Rage Against the Heavens: A suitably understated version, where in the game's first dialogue, she discusses the cycle of life, death and anguish all the machines and the androids are trapped in and the god who put them there. She hopes one day she will find a way to kill him.
• Rei Ayanami Expy: A brooding, stoic, and nonhuman girl with a bobcut. Her distant and formal interactions with 9s while the latter tries his best to get closer to her are also reminiscent of Shinji's attempts to befriend Rei.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: All YoRHa androids are programmed with human feelings and emotions, along with bodies biological enough to bleed and emit tears whenever they're sad. Where 2B stands out is that she at first tries to hide her humanity, bottling up her emotions and often failing at doing so; she's afraid of getting too close to 9S especially due to her real nature. This ironically makes her even more human than her colleagues due to her struggle with her own humanity and eagerness to embrace it despite the pain it gives her.
  • 2B and 9S get rather flustered when talking about sexual reproduction even though they're incapable of it - this stemmed from a machine child asking 9S about how kids are made; both he and 2B are quite embarrassed about it.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: She goes on one after the events at the Flooded City in Routes A and B.
• Robot Girl: YoRHa is a machine that looks like a human woman.
• Sci-Fi Bob Haircut: Given, considering her level-headed personality and the fact that she's a gynoid.
• Ship Tease: Her relationship with 9S forms the backbone of the game, as he's obviously crushing on her and she has her own unsubtle feelings about him. They would be an Official Couple if this wasn't a Nier game.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: 9S is usually a pretty decent guy. That said, while she's meant to kill him, she's In Love with the Mark.
• The Stoic: 2B has a bold, militant, no-nonsense attitude. In reality, this is only an image that she projects outwardly. The real 2B is far more expressive and emotive even outside the times she's Not So Stoic, and a large part of her playthrough centers around her failing to beat back her humanity.
• Supermodel Strut: She has a noticeable, feminine strut with lots of hip shaking when she walks. Notably, this seems out of character for her as she doesn't seem to care about wanting to look sexy, so the only In-Universe explanation is that her android type were simply designed to move that way.
• Take Up My Sword: As literal of an example as you can get. After being fully corrupted by the logic virus, she saves a copy of her memories into her sword, Virtuous Contract, and presents it to A2, who then uses that very sword to give 2B a Mercy Kill.
• Third-Person Seductress: She's become rather well-known for it, what with her attractive character design and the aforementioned skirt. Even the trailers play it up somewhat what with her Supermodel Strut.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: 2B is able to throw her sword at her enemies regardless of the blade's size and it always makes a U-turn and returns to her eventually. This is achieved through a powerful magnetic field generated by the YoRHa androids.
• Tsundere: A very tragic example. She acts outwardly cold to 9S and constantly reminds him that "emotions are prohibited", but tends to flip the fuck out or even break down crying whenever he gets hurt. Because she's already fallen in love with him and then killed him dozens of times already, and outwardly returning his affections makes doing her job the next time all the more difficult.
• Undignified Death: Ending K: Death by mackerel.
• Unwitting Pawn: As with all of YoRHa, she is deceived in regards to Project YoRHa's true nature and is ultimately meant to be disposed of in the end. Thankfully the Pods decides to give her another chance at life instead of following the deletion protocol.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: She'll do whatever it takes to protect 9S, so don't hurt him around her. She'll make you regret it. Because only she is allowed to murder him. Although she would rather not, since she really has feelings for him and probably would like to be his girlfriend if circumstances would permit it.
• Waif-Fu: She has a slight upper body, yet she can still hit just as hard or harder than the male protagonists of the previous game.
• When She Smiles: She spends the overwhelming majority of her time as a very serious and stoic soldier mostly frowning. Which makes the time when she smiles all the more precious, such as in Ending A/B. And even that smile pales in comparison to the one she gives 9S right as she dies, freed from the burden of having to be his executioner and allowing her true feelings for him to spill out as she calls him "Nines."
• Zettai Ryouiki: Type-A with a clipped skirt to boot.

Pod 042

Pod 042

Voiced by: D.C. Douglas (English), Hiroki Yasumoto (Japanese)

The Pod designated to 2B.

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• Almighty Janitor: He is just a Robot Buddy but ends up freeing the main characters from the endless cycle of violence and give them a happy life. Pods are revealed that they are vital to the final phase of making androids humans by deleting the former generation and restarting anew.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: You play as him during the Bullet Hell sequence of Ending E.
• The Anti-Nihilist: At the end of the game, he realizes his program and purpose is utterly pointless - which means there's absolutely no reason not to just ignore his purpose and instead break the cycle 2B and 9S are in.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Directs one to Pod 153 when objecting the order to delete all of Project YoRHa's data right before starting Ending E.
  Pod 042: You hoped they would survive as well, didn't you?
• Attack Drone: It helps 2B in battle through ranged attacks.
• Bee Hive Barrier: The Shield and M Shield programs use several Pods to create a temporary barrier that nullify a specific attack type. Shield nulls physical attacks and the barrier is made of circles. M Shield nulls projectiles and the barrier is made of triangles. Missile program creates a barrier around the user that lets them ram into enemies.
• Captain Obvious: Often brings up incredibly obvious facts, much to 2B's annoyance. And when 2B bequeaths him to A2 before dying, she spends most of their interactions ripping on him for being useless.
• Charged Attack: Several of the Pod programs have a charged attack. Multiple Pods will appear for certain ones to unleash the charge version of several attacks.
• Deadpan Snarker: He responds to verbal hostility with plenty of passive-aggressive sass, delivered all in his normal robotic monotone.
  A2: There's machines everywhere...
  Pod 042: Analysis: This is a colony of pacifistic machine lifeforms led by the unit known as Pascal. It is logical for a large number of machine lifeforms to be present. This pod has concerns about YoRHa unit A2's predictive skills.
• Energy Weapon: The upgradable Laser program. Its charged attack is the Bouncing Beams. There is also the normal Laser, which can be fired by multiple Pods at once when charged. The latter is used to defeat Beauvoir.
• Flash Step: The Mirage program has the user disappear to unleash a flurry of swipes in the surrounding area to hit enemies.
• Gatling Good: The standard weapon equipped to Pods is the Gatling. It has three charged attacks in that it can fire stronger bullets when the button is pressed, the Charged Bomb, and the Cluster Bombs.
• Gravity Master: Gravity program forces all enemies in range of the attack into the center of it and unable to escape. More Pods increases range.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: In NieR Re[in]carnation, Pod 006- otherwise known as Mama, the game's Big Good- credits Pod 042 for giving her the courage to see her mission through to the very end.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Pod 042 develops emotions, and with it questions the deletion of all YoRHa data. Together with Pod 153, he decides to rebuild A2, 2B and 9S.
• Hacking Minigame: We learn in the second half of the game that the Pods are capable of allowing their androids to perform hacking, rather than the ability being exclusive to Scanner units. 042 allows A2 to hack into the various data files in the Copied Library in the Tower and, more importantly, when A2 needs 042 to hack into 9S to stop the Logic Virus from completely corrupting him in Ending C.
• Homing Projectile: The Missile program locks on to one to several targets to unleash its missiles on. It also uses the Cluster Bombs for its charge attack.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The Spear program summons holographic spears from the ground to penetrate the enemy. More Pods increase the number of spears.
• Meaningful Name: There's enough philosophical contemplation on existence in this game to make the player really appreciate that 2B's pod's designation is the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
• The Medic: Repair program heals 2B for a percentage of damage. More Pods heal more damage.
• Not So Stoic: For a robot who, unlike the others, wasn't programmed with emotions, his pauses can say a lot.
• Pragmatic Hero: Since Pod 042 lacks emotions or personal attachments, it will occasionally suggest courses of action that are logical, but disagreeable to 2B. During the final fight with Eve in Ending A, 9S attempts to hack into Eve and sever his connection to the network. Pod 042 deems that 9S's attempt will likely fail and suggests that 2B abandon him. 2B vehemently disagrees.
• Robot Buddy: The "Pod" Support System is one for 2B (and YoRHa units in general). It can help her with aerial stunts and to grab hard-to-reach items and enemies. It also functions as the Automata counterpart to the original game's Grimoire Weiss, as it can shoot projectiles similar to Weiss' Dark Blast magic.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: His refusal to delete his friends' data, despite protocol, gives them a new chance at life where they can be at peace.
• Servile Snarker: A few times, and more commonly after being bequeathed to A2.
• Shipper on Deck: Predicts that 2B was going to send 6O a gift in response to an email about wanting to hear some of 2B's stories before 2B can even say anything, and suggests 2B send her a picture of a rare flower.
• Ship Tease: With Pod 153. While they seem only to be sharing data because it will be optimal for them to do so, given that their assigned androids are working together, there are a few awkward pauses between them.
• Shock and Awe: Volt program unleashes a volt of electricity upon a target that temporarily inflicts damage over time after the initial hit. More Pods increase damage from the initial attack and length of damage.
• Shockwave Stomp: The Wave program unleashes a shockwave that travels across the ground. Charging increases length.
• Spin Attack: The Blade program turns Pod 042 into a holographic blade that spins around 2B to hit enemies.
• Stuff Blowing Up: The Bomb program releases numerous holographic bombs that explode upon impact. More Pods increases bombs.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Gameplay-wise, he serves the same purpose as Grimoire Weiss.
• Team Dad: In a way, especially in the English version, he and Pod 153 are the most level-headed character (they weren't programmed to emulate human emotion) and he encourages 2B to build relationship with others like suggesting a gift for 6O. He also goes Papa Wolf at the end by refusing to delete the data of his companions and gives them a chance at a normal life.
• Time Master: Slow program temporarily causes time to slow down in the target range for enemies.
• You Will Not Evade Me: Wire program creates a holographic wire to quickly swing 2B over to a target.

9S

YoRHa No. 9 Type S (9S)

Forlorn kindness and soul.

Voiced by: Kyle McCarley (English), Natsuki Hanae (Japanese)

"Better make sure he's actually dead next time. That was dangerous, ma'am."

A male-model YoRHa unit who accompanies 2B. As a Scanner, he is mostly tasked with reconnaissance and assessment of the area. He is very kind and gentle and enjoys working with others.

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• All Love Is Unrequited: Subverted in the most painful way. It's strongly implied that 2B actually returns his crush, but refuses to let herself act on it because it'll make it that much harder to kill him when the time comes.
• Amazon Chaser: According to Adam's taunting, 9S wants to "＊＊＊＊" 2B,^note Although it's very heavily implied that these four letters actually stand for "kill". Then again, a sidequest suggests that to androids, romantic feelings and bloodlust are hard to separate.. 2B, with a twinge of jealousy, suggests he wanted to help that redhead Executioner android because she's pretty.
• Ambiguous Situation: By the end of Route C, it's clear that he's learned that 2B has been assigned to kill him if he screws up no later than when he enters the Tower, given how his reaction to the copies of 2B showing up is to joyously proclaim that he "finally" gets to kill her, instead of the other way around, and when A2 flat-out tells him the truth about 2B, he barely reacts to it. There is, however, exactly zero indication about when he learned this, and whether he first discovered it offscreen or knew from before the game even started and was merely pretending not to know during the first playthrough.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: He is the protagonist of the second playthrough.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • At the beginning of Route B, he loses an arm and a leg towards the end of the battle with the Goliath. He gets better, though.
  • In Route C, he loses his forearm during the fight against the 2B clones. He replaces it by tearing a forearm off of a dead clone and welding it to his arm stump. In Ending C, A2 cuts off this very forearm during their fight.
• Badass Bookworm: Well, he downloads data instead of reading, but he's actually deadlier than 2B because his hacking skills are so widely applicable.
• Badass Normal: The novel Memory Cage reveals that S-type models are not built for combat, with most scanner models relying on their hacking abilities to survive against enemies. 9S programmed and taught himself how to fight in close combat. In ending C/D 9S undergoes a Sanity Slippage after 2B dies, and transitions into a One-Man Army, single-handedly taking down essentially an army of advanced YoRHa Units, killing multiple clones of 2B, taking down no less than 6 YoRHa flight units on foot. All this is done while he is infected with the logic virus (2B in comparison could barely move when she was infected). His combat ability is even on par with A2, a renegade YoRHa unit with years of fighting experience. To say he has grown stronger would be an understatement.
• Barrier Warrior: During one particular boss battle, a cutscene shows him using the shield application to stop a powerful EMP wave with it whether or not you unlocked it.
• Beneath the Mask: As he goes through 9S's data on route B, Adam points out that 9S desires destruction and feels hatred, just as he does. 9S vehemently denies it, but route C gives the lie to his words after 2B's death.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Becomes a habit during Route C as the machines deliberately push him to the brink and 9S sinks deeper into his misplaced hatred of A2.
• Brain Uploading:
  • In Route A, he uploads himself to a machine remotely to help 2B and Pascal while they're stuck with the psychotic machine death cult. This comes up later in Ending A/B, where this same upload is transmitted across the nearby machines, allowing him to avoid a Death of Personality of what's happened since the start of the game since this had happened before he had been infected by the Logic Virus.
  • In Route D, the ending lets him choose to leave with Adam and Eve and the rest of the machine lifeforms to find a new world.
• Break the Cutie: And boy howdy does he break. During the final phase of the story, he loses 2B, leading him on a downward spiral into despair until the very end when he loses any remaining desire to live, having finally figured out the Awful Truth of the world: that he and the rest of YoRHa were created to be sacrificed and that humanity is extinct. This drives him to try and destroy the data server on the moon just to make the pain stop.
• Bridal Carry: Gender-inverted when 2B carries him like this after rescuing him from Adam in Route A.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Gender-inverted, 2B is cold, angsty, and ruthless while 9S is kind, sensitive and upbeat. Until Route C, that is.
• Cannot Spit It Out:
  • He has feelings for 2B, but he cannot bring himself to even acknowledge them or say them to her. When Adam hacks into his memories, he mentions that 9S desires to ＊＊＊＊ 2B. During Ending B, he attempts to reveal it to 2B but cannot bring himself to do so. According to the Japanese subtitles, the words from Adam are "＊＊したい"; judging by his actions when meeting 2B clones in the tower, it is possible that the word here is "破壊したい", that 9S wishes to destroy 2B, as Adam also notes the destructive desires that 9S hides. According to a sidequest from Jackass, bloodlust and love are functionally the same for androids. That he would take the effort to learn to fight 2B directly rather than just hacking her would imply that no matter how you take the "＊＊＊＊" you'd be technically correct.
  • On a non-romantic note, he also wanted to tell 2B the truth about the extinction of humanity after Route B, but hesitated too long and never got the chance to do so once Route C began.
• Constantly Curious: He is constantly wondering and wishing to understand the world around him. 2B has to tell him to focus on the mission many times. Then he learns things he wishes he didn't and dies at 2B's hands as a result. Or he doesn't, and it causes him to Go Mad from the Revelation.
• Cool Sword: Like 2B, 9S can wield katanas, but his notably unique both for having a golden metal blade and for having the extremely badass name of "Cruel Oath."
• Clothing Damage: Less noticeable than 2B, since 9S wears a long coat, but if you activate the self-destruct sequence as him (or self-destruct as 2B close to him), he loses his shorts, which reveals... shorter shorts. And if you self-destruct with 2B nearby, she goes flying a few feet away with her own skirt partially damaged as a result.
• Creepy Monotone: As his mental state deteriorates, he starts alternating between this and screaming rage.
• Crucified Hero Shot: And not just a shot. 2B finds him actually crucified by Adam in the Copied City, his body and limbs impaled on about a dozen metal beams to give him this particular pose, due to Adam's fixation on all things biblical.
• Deadpan Snarker: To a lesser degree than 2B, but despite his generally dorky personality, he has a pretty sharp tongue when the situation calls for it, which is seen most often in his exchanges with 21O. This side of him completely disappears after 2B's death.
• Death Seeker: After 2B's death, he becomes increasingly unhinged. Other than his goal of killing A2 and other machines, all he wants is an end to his pain. It's likely that his infiltration into the Tower in Route C/D/E was one big suicide mission, since he reveals in one of that route's side-quests that he'll "be joining" 2B soon after he's finished. Understandably, his pod is worried about his mental state.
• Despair Event Horizon: In the last part of the game, after losing 2B, finding out his directive is a lie built on lies, and yet still desperately desiring humanity, he decides that destroying the data center on the moon will end his pain.
• Determinator: In the final battle of C/D. It's revealed through side materials that he was infected as high as 80% by the Logic Virus during his fight with A2. Through sheer force of will he was able to stand his ground against her despite 2B being barely able to move when she was that badly infected earlier in the route.
• Deuteragonist: He's the male lead, the one actively trying to learn more about the reality of the world they all live in, and becomes playable for Route B and parts of Route C alongside A2. His relationship with 2B forms the backbone of the game, so he gets roughly equal plot relevance with her.
• Distressed Dude:
  • He gets seriously damaged by a giant enemy machine while trying to help 2B, which prompts her to drop her previous stern, no-nonsense demeanor as she tries desperately to save him. The box art for the game reinforces this trope as well, with 9S being carried in 2B's arms.
  • He also manages to get captured by Adam after being separated from 2B during the fight with the colossal oceanic machine. The sight of 9S's crucified body really pissed 2B off, to say the least.
• Difficult, but Awesome: His hacking minigames play nothing like the rest of the game. That said, when you get the hang of them, 9S is a massive Game-Breaker.
• Due to the Dead: Once you complete the "Gathering Keepsakes" sidequest and have access to Kainé's home, you can take 9S down there to say some words of mourning for 2B and put a stick with a sash tied around it in the Lunar Tears field in hopes that her soul will finally be at peace.
  9S: I’m not quite sure what it means to mourn, or even if we have a soul to concern ourselves with… But I hope you’re at rest 2B. Sweet dreams. I’ll be with you before long.
• Dogged Nice Guy: He clearly wants to be 2B's friend, but she constantly shuts him down. The truly tragic part is that she actually returns his affections, but constantly suppresses it both to discourage him from showing emotions and becoming a security threat and because it'll make it harder for her to do her job when the time comes.
• Enemy Mine: Despite his pure and utter hatred of A2, they are forced to team up to fend off a powerful robot right before their final showdown.
• Everybody Knew Already: An extremely dark variation. In the final boss fight, A2 tells him the truth about 2B's true role as his personal executioner - but then asks "But you knew that already, didn't you?" The fact that 9S pointedly doesn't respond to what she just told him strongly implies that she's right, and he figured out the truth a long time ago.
• The Extremist Was Right: Played with. Deranged and despairing beyond recovery, 9S says the terminal on the moon will continue to perpetuate war and suffering, and that by defending the terminal, A2 is defending the source of that suffering for the sake of a lie. He is right to an extent in this statement, but while its destruction would end one source of conflict, it won't cause all conflict to cease. This lines up with the recurring theme of there being no simple or universal solution to conflict, and that as hard as you might try, one's actions ultimately don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
• Fantastic Racism: He sees machines as mindless even when they show otherwise, taking their pleas for life as random words. However, while he is more vocal than 2B about these beliefs, he also questions them more openly, and whenever he does he gets scolded by her for it. Pascal is the first machine he treats decently, but he does take a while to warm up to him. When he chooses to leave with the machines in ending D, he realizes that his hatred was irrational.
• Fatal Flaw: His curiosity and his tendency to suppress/avoid aspects of himself that don't align with his self-image. His curiosity always leads him to getting killed by 2B because he learns things he shouldn't. His inability to reconcile his true feelings towards 2B causes him to go completely insane after she dies.
• Failure Is the Only Option: In contrast to A2, who successfully fulfills her objectives in ending C, 9S can't succeed in his plan of blowing up the moon server even in ending D. His victory against A2 is short-lived as he fatally impales himself after slipping on her blood, and in his dying moments he discovers that the Tower never even housed a missile to begin with.
• Final Boss: In Ending C, you take control of A2 to fight 9S off and hack him to stop the corruption from spreading any further in his system.
• Fire-Forged Friends: 2B first meets 9S during the prologue mission to defeat a Goliath. Although initially distant and aloof towards him, 2B gradually warms up to 9S as they fight together. Their friendship is cemented after they destroy their black boxes, destroying their current bodies in the process. Too bad 9S didn't have time to back up his memory on the Bunker, meaning that he doesn't remember it.
• Freak Out: He completely and utterly snaps when he witnesses 2B's death. This starts him on a downward spiral into insanity that culminates in him deciding to wipe out what's left of humanity in a blind attempt to end his own suffering.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: If he dies, a female android body will always be left behind at the spot instead of a male one.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: As the final boss of Ending C, 9S's AI will actually try to hack into A2 during the fight, similar to how the player could utilize 9S's hacking skills when playing as him. Allowing him to do so too many times can cause the HUD to look glitchy, along with the expected damage you'll receive if A2 doesn't disrupt him while he hacks.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: He can't, but he does have the ability to back up his memories to the Bunker servers and have them uploaded into a new body. He makes full use of this service too, with how many times he ends up losing limbs and getting smacked around by enemies. He actually can reattach another android's limb as replacement but it's painful and leaves him vulnerable to the Logic Virus.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The revelation that his entire life's purpose was a lie, that he and his fellow Yo R Ha androids were Unwitting Pawns meant to be disposed of and that their black boxes, the part that runs their artificial intelligence, are repurposed machine parts, breaks him entirely. The fact that his mental state was already degrading doesn't help.
• Go Out with a Smile: Should you let 9S turn down Adam's offer to join him and the Machines on the Ark, he looks to the sky one last time, thinks of 2B and shuts down once and for all, joining her in death. All with an exhausted smile on his face.
• Hacking Minigame: Unlike 2B and A2, who don't have access to hacking (their Pods have to activate it for them), hacking is a major part of 9S' fighting style. It lets him remote control machines, detonate them, subjugate them into ally units, hack chests, perform maintenance, and other functions. This is the main feature of the S-Type series.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Hackers are rarely all that powerful in games - their abilities are typically situational and limited to weakening and controlling certain enemies (and rarely particularly important enemies, at that). 9S, on the other hand, is a hacker in a world where everyone is a machine with a self-destruct system. The results are predictably devastating.
• He Knows Too Much: A new model like the S-types are so advanced and at a constant threat of obtaining classified information that each model has a personal "E-Type" on standby to kill them and selectively wipe their memories after almost every mission. "2B" has served in this capacity for 9S for years before their "first" meeting. Even this was something he had already learned by the time A2 openly reveals it.
• Heroic BSoD: Goes through a pretty rough patch after watching 2B die, shattering most of his nice guy tendencies, and he becomes increasingly driven to despair.
• Heroic Safe Mode: While the main story missions in Route C show him full of frothing rage as his sanity degrades, general exploration and side missions depict him as much calmer. However, his curt responses, lack of emotion, and nihilistic comments show he is still wallowing in cold despair and Tranquil Fury, but is setting those emotions aside for the time being just so he can function long enough to get to his next objective.
• Hidden Depths: As briefly addressed above, on a subconscious level, 9S does harbor resentment towards 2B for killing him so many times in the past, since it's revealed that he knows her true function; he would simply never say so to her face. It really comes out during the fight in the Tower against the 2B clones, where he ruthlessly destroys them while proclaiming that he finally "gets" to kill her.
• I Choose to Stay: In Ending D, the machines create an ark to leave Earth. Adam asks if 9S will come with them, at which point you the player must choose whether 9S goes or stays.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: 9S gets crucified by Adam in the Copied City. Luckily for him and 2B, he's able to retrieve his backed-up memories and transfer them to a newly-repaired body after 2B saves him. He also ends up impaling himself in Ending D, tackling A2's now-lifeless body into the ground, causing her sword to pierce his chest.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: As a result of his Sanity Slippage throughout Route C/D/E, he wants the Tower’s missile to destroy the last remnants of humanity on the moon since he sees no point in defending a species that has been Dead All Along. Subverted in Route D and E when he manages to recover from this descent upon discovering that the “missile” is really an ark.
• Kick the Dog:
  • He is an asshole toward machines, making mean-spirited remarks every time machines try to "emulate" human behavior and refusing to believe they are complex enough to understand emotions or the concept of family. He realizes he's being irrational towards them in Ending D. In the anime episode 4, 9s coldly destroys two harmless robots; "a mother and his kid", without caring about them begging for their life. Even 2B found it ruthless.
  • He's the only one of the three who can steal from Emil. This triggers the bossfight in the cave against him. Emil once defeated is sad because 9S proves strength is the only thing that matters in the world and nothing else.
• Laughing Mad: He does this in Route C, driving home the downward spiral he finds himself in. The loss of purpose from humanity's extinction and watching A2 kill 2B becomes too much for him to bear, to the point of making him laugh from the sheer amount of mental trauma he suffers as seen at the end of Soul Box and during his final fight against A2.
• Long-Range Fighter: His melee toolkit isn't nearly as diverse or powerful as the girls', but he makes up for it with his devastating hacking ability, which can rip apart an entire enemy formation in a string of explosive self-destructions while he remains comfortably out of reach. Even his melee moveset reflects this - he exclusively remote-controls his weapons, rather than physically swinging them as 2B and A2 do.
• Love Hurts: Hoo boy. Love doesn't get much more hurtful than having his affections constantly shot down by the woman he loves who has also murdered him dozens, if not hundreds of times over. To make matters worse, she loves him back, but deliberately suppresses her emotions (and demands that he do the same) because it'll make doing her job even harder, and having to kill the boy she loves so many times over has taken such a severe toll on her mental health that she actively welcomes death and only peacefully smiles when it finally happens. Right in front of 9S.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Downplayed but present - certainly no one's going to call 2B un-feminine, but she makes up for it with her hardened and emotionless attitude and he's the one who primarily fights from a distance while she uses melee weapons. Not to mention that he's only slightly more masculine-looking than she is. In the Final Fantasy XIV crossover, 9S's character model is actually that of a female Hyur Midlander (though the ''NieR characters all use the animations ported over from their own games).
• Meaningful Name:
  • His name is a reference to Ninus, a semi-mythical Assyrian king whose tomb is prominently featured within the Play Within a Play in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. To further elaborate, Ninus' tomb serves as a secret meeting place for the Star-Crossed Lovers Pyramus and Thisbe (alluded to in the game via the copious Ship Tease and "complicated" relationship between 2B and 9S).
  • Furthermore, the myths about the death of Ninus reflect 2B and 9S's relationship; Ninus is said to have been killed by his wife Semiramis, who then waged a doomed war against the last independent ruler in Asia before abdicating the Assyrian throne in favor of her son. 2B's "real" job is to serve as The Political Officer and regularly kill 9S, a job which drives her mad to the point where she kills herself to avoid murdering him ever again along with pushing him to (at least temporarily) take the reins as the game's protagonist.
  • Additionally, 9S taking his name in reference to a famously metafictional Shakespearean play can be seen as an allusion to the metafictional themes and concepts explored in the latter half of Nier: Automata itself.
  • Finally, 9S is also inspired from the phrase "Nein ist" (German for "is not", a.k.a, not to be). When paired with 2B, their two names form the iconic first line from Prince Hamlet's "To be, or not to be?" soliloquy, tying into how closely tied together the two are along with how much they are intertwined with the game's existentialist themes.
• Mercy Kill: On the receiving end of one; 2B strangles him in Ending A/B before the Logic Virus can take him over completely.
• Mind over Matter: When wielding melee weapons in combat, he uses some mix of telekinesis to swing the weapons at enemies when he's not grasping it to attack.
• Nice Guy:
  • He's initially described as cheerful, grounded and friendly, in contrast with 2B's serious, no-nonsense attitude and A2's hateful and violent disposition. Notably subverted when it comes to machines — even the friendly ones annoy him.
    9S: It looks weird. Let's kill it!
  • Doubly subverted after 2B dies, as his friendly persona gives way to an angry, bitter and vengeful personality. But he's not without compassion for his fellow androids and is clearly bothered by what happens to Pascal, even though Pascal is a machine, showing that traces of his former personality remain within him.
• Non-Action Guy:
  • He is a "scanner/information gatherer" type meant for recon, in contrast with 2B who is a "fighter type" android. His gameplay is more focused on hacking and shoot-'em-up sections because his melee attacks are weak.
  • The short story Memory Cage reveals that S-Types don't know how to use melee weapons in combat at all. 9S taught himself how to use it in preparation for killing 2B.
• Oh, Crap!: At the start of Route C, he audibly panics when the corrupted flight units attack.
• The One Guy: The S-Types are the only known male YoRHa model series. The B-Types, the A-Types, the D-Types, the H-Types, the E-Types, the Commander, and the O-Types are all female.
• One-Hit Kill: His hacking ability will do this to light and medium enemies, while damaging their surrounding comrades - which makes sense, seeing as he's triggering their built-in self-destruct functions. It makes an excellent crowd-clearer.
• One-Man Army:
  • 9S isn't called the latest and most advanced model of YoRHa for nothing. With the proper motivation, he can become a near unstoppable unit, despite being made for recon. Not only does he best 21O and numerous YoRHa units as he fights through the Tower, but in a fight with an entire group of E-Types designed to kill him and made to look like 2B, he wins. Only A2, the prototype for the current generation of YoRHa, can best him in combat.
  • With the reveal that Scanner-types like him aren't even designed for combat from The Memory Cage, it means that 9S basically reprogrammed himself for combat and became just as (if not more) powerful than the current, up-to-date YoRHa models.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Aside from his otherwise prejudiced attitude towards machines, he's remarkably good with kids, regardless of their existence as machines. In the two quests from Pascal's village involving missing children, his first instinct is to comfort them when they're scared, and he shows a great deal of patience with them all things considered.
  • Side quests in Route C show he still has some compassion in him, even while he's descending into suicidal depression and destructive fury, such as trying to find or rescue a Resistance android's missing friends, helping Devola and Popola with their dangerous tasks, and confronting Anemone over their unfair treatment.
  • He expresses sadness over Emil’s death even in Route C.
• The Power of Hate: What sustains him after 2B dies. His desire for revenge is so strong that he can keep moving and fighting even when the logic virus has taken over most of his body and mind.
• Pretty Boy: He's built to resemble an androgynous, arguably effeminate human youth. Even Adam and Eve look more masculine than he does. No wonder 2B has a crush on him.
• Properly Paranoid: The Japanese-only short story the Memory Cage details an event that happened after 9S and 2B first met. Specifically, he found out she was sent to kill him and tried to kill and control her first, via hacking. Unfortunately, they had set a trap for him that infected him with the Logic Virus, leaving 2B to finish him off.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Undergoes this during the C/D/E Route. After the destruction of the Bunker and the death of 2B, 9S gradually descends into madness, becoming obsessed with destroying everything he finds in an vain effort to end his own pain. It all comes to a head during The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, where he goes full-on Omnicidal Maniac hellbent on eradicating the last records of humanity.
• Recurring Element: Yet another shy Nice Guy member of the main cast, like Emil and Mikhail. Also a young man who gradually loses himself to hatred due to the traumatic loss of a loved one, much like Caim, Gideon, and Brother Nier.
• Revenge Before Reason: He is completely inconsolable after 2B's death, and absolutely nothing A2 says or does can so much as sway him from his path of destruction.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Against the Machines — and A2 — after 2B's death.
• Sanity Slippage: After 2B's death, he gets progressively worse as the story goes on, culminating in the final battle on top of the Tower, where he's a hysterical, screaming wreck desperately trying to justify his actions when A2 reveals more of the truth in an attempt to calm him down. It only angers and frustrates him even more.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: To get Ending G, instead of going into the Flyer unit, you can instead operate the crane to the left and head down and away from the objective. The game will say 9S wanted to 'learn more about the machines and was never heard from again'.
• Shorter Means Smarter: He appears shorter than 2B by a fair margin, though they're nearly the same height if you discount her combat stilettos. He's also a hacker that can make enemies spontaneously combust.
• Slasher Smile: When he confronts the 2B models the Terminals made he takes off his blindfold and does his best Caim-in-the-throes-of-murderous-glee impression.
• The Smart Guy: He is one of the most sophisticated Scanner androids, as well as the newest Scanner-type model.
• Sole Survivor: Of the YoRHa androids present for the destruction of the bunker. Subverted slightly with A2, who deserted long ago, and fellow scanner unit 4S, who is found alive doing a reconnaissance mission in the forest.
• Soul Jar: A part of Adam lives inside 9S, as a result of the two delving inside each other's minds and 9S briefly connecting to the machine network, and is how Adam is able to speak with 9S during Ending D. The same happened with Eve during the final battle with him.
• Squishy Wizard: When playing as him, the key to his gameplay is his hacking minigame that allows him to instantly destroy, or enslave, the enemy.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: A sweet Nice Guy to 2B and the other androids. A cruel, ruthless Jerkass to the machines. The latter of the two does mellow out over time. Unfortunately, everything about him turns icy once his Sanity Slippage kicks in.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: After everything he's been through in the second half of the game, he gets thrown one from Adam in Ending D when asked to join the machines on the ark.
• Together in Death: Refusing to join the machines on their Ark in Ending D will have him take one last look at the sky before he whispers, "Ah, so that's where you were... 2B," before he shuts down permanently (until Ending E, anyway), joining 2B in her fate. The Tower then collapses after the Ark blasts off.
• Trailers Always Spoil: His Break the Cutie moments are shown to happen through various endings, but especially one: killing anyone who even looks like 2B, to the point of impaling A2 in a fight.
• Trauma Conga Line: The entirety of Route C is this for him.
• Undignified Death: Dies writhing helplessly in a pool of his own fluids due to A2's sword impaling him in Ending D, his agonized screaming eventually giving way to pitiful crying.
• Unwitting Pawn: As with all of YoRHa, he is deceived in regards to Project YoRHa's true nature and ultimately meant to be disposed of in the end, and him finding out about this while his mental state is already getting worse causes him to Go Mad from the Revelation. However, he does get a second chance at life in Ending E.
• Verbal Tic: Has a habit of responding to requests for acknowledgement with an annoyed "Yeah, yeah." This inevitably causes the person he's talking with to remind him that "one affirmation will suffice." The fight with 21O is the one time this isn't Played for Laughs.
• Walking Spoiler: There's a reason why many of 9S's entries are behind spoilers. It's hard to talk about or describe him more in-depth because the death of 2B (which is a huge spoiler in itself) and finding out the many, many lies that've been kept from the YoRHa androids really does a number on his psychological and mental state.
• Weak, but Skilled: He's a scanner model, and, as such, should have absolutely no combat ability whatsoever. Through a combination between telekinesis, and his Squishy Wizard abilities, he makes it work.
• A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Most of the trailers and pre-game material makes him seem like a cute Dogged Nice Guy who needs protection. However, once you access the open world, 9S turns out to be more trigger-happy than 2B (making the suggestion to kill Emil and a tank shooting confetti, both harmless) and while he is a scanner type, he can more than hold his own in a fight. In fact, 2B isn't there to protect him but to ensure he dies before he uncovers all of YoRHa's secrets. If he gets a reason to cut loose, he is a near unstoppable One-Man Army.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: By the end of Route C/D/E, 9S goes from being a cheerful yet shy, curious guy to a broken-hearted One-Man Army who wants to end all of his pain by destroying the moon server as revenge for being used as an Unwitting Pawn to the YoRHa system.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Despite losing almost everyone he's ever known in the destruction of the Bunker, it does give him one silver lining: without the required kill orders from YoRHA command hanging over his head, he's free to be with the woman he loves without either of them having to worry about suppressing their emotions anymore. Then she dies. 9S doesn't take it very well.
• You Are What You Hate: One of the things that causes 9S Sanity Slippage is him finding out that YoRHa androids and machines use the same computer core for intelligence, making them the same. And what finally breaks him is finding out in the tower that YoRHa units were made to be disposable, while machines were meant to replace humans on Earth. Consider 9S's attitude towards machines as mindless and inferior, these reveals would be quite a shock.

Pod 153

Pod 153

Voiced by: Abby Trott (English), Kaoru Akiyama (Japanese)

The Pod designated to 9S.

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• Distaff Counterpart: To Pod 042, to an extent. 153 having a more feminine voice to 042's more masculine voice, and while 042 serves the female 2B and A2, 153 serves the male 9S.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Pod 042 developing emotions leads her to ask him about the data noise. Pod 153 had also developed such emotion herself, but keeps it quiet until Pod 042 himself states he wishes to give A2, 2B, and 9S a second chance at life.
• Hive Mind: Shares her consciousness between the three existing 153 units.
• Mama Bear: A short story with the strategy guide reveals she's actually very protective of 9S, to the point she planned to fish every single mackerel that she can in order to decrease the chances of 9S dying from eating one.
• Meaningful Name: "153" is likely a reference to Jesus' miraculous catch of 153 fish, an oddly specific number whose significance has been a subject of hot debate among biblical scholars. The aforementioned story about Pod 153 going on a mass fishing spree could also be seen as a nod to this.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: As she cares for 9S she does not defy him even as his sanity starts to break and he becomes infected with the Logic Virus, only attempting to calm him with reason before he orders her to aid him until either A2 or himself wins.
• Robot Buddy: Serves as one to 9S for the same story and gameplay reasons that 042 is one to 2B.
• Team Mom: Compared to 042, she is warmer and more comforting toward 9S.

A2

YoRHa Attacker No. 2 (A2)

Vortex of hatred and past.

Voiced by: Cherami Leigh (English), Ayaka Suwa (Japanese)

Played by: Ruka Endo (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Ramu Tamagawa (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Yui Ishikawa (YoRHa Stage play 1.2), Koudai Miyagi (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

"Command is the one that betrayed you."

A prototype unit that was used to create newer, upgraded YoRHa units like 2B and 9S. She has been operational for quite a long time. She doesn't talk much and prefers to stick to herself. First appeared as Number Two in the YoRHa stage play.

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• Action Girl: A2 is as skilled in battle as 2B is and puts up a good fight.
• Adaptational Curves: As a guest star in Goddess of Victory: NIKKE, A2 has noticeably larger breasts than normal.
• Anti-Hero: Foul-mouthed, anti-social, and highly aggressive as well as being eager to get into fights against Machine Lifeforms. However, she does fight with hope that humanity will make a return in the future.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: A2 becomes the second viewpoint character in Routes C/D after she kills 2B.
• Arch-Enemy: In Route C, she becomes this for 9S after she kills 2B. Even when they are forced to cooperate against Ro-shi and Ko-shi, 9S never forgives A2 for ending 2B's life and he becomes hell-bent on killing A2 along with the machines. Pods 042 and 153 outright attempt to keep A2 and 9S separated for as long as possible because of this.
• Bad Boss: She constantly insults, belittles and threatens her pod for a wide variety of offenses - usually for being what they are and doing what they're meant to do. It takes the entirety of Route C for her to eventually grow out of it.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: The only cloth she wears is the corset-like thing around her waist, otherwise everything else is her burned skin, including her 'shorts' and 'top'.
• Boyish Short Hair: Inverted. She has hair down to her waist, but she's significantly more crass and tomboyish than the rather refined and elegant 2B. She does cut it short after 2B's death, though, but this also coincides with a change in personality to become closer to 2B as well.
• Cast from Hit Points: Her Berserker Mode, while it gives her extra attack and speed, constantly reduces her health.
• Combat Stilettos: Fights in heels like very other female YoRHa android, however since she lacks any sort of footwear it becomes clear that those heels are part of the actual android body.
• Cool Sword: Contrary to 2B's and 9S' preference for katanas, A2 canonically wields the very high-tech, very slick-looking Type-4O series of swords for much of her story arc. Only in Route C does she adopt a new primary weapon.
• Critical Hesitation Blunder: In Ending D, after parrying 9S's attacks, A2 prepares to strike back, but stops when remembering about 2B's plea for her to take care of 9S. This gives 9S the small window he needs to impale A2, although he accidentally kills himself in the process as well.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Believe it or not, A2 wasn't always the aggressive, anti-social android that she is. She was a lot nicer and more idealistic during the Pearl Harbor incident. However, the deaths of her squadmates and most of the Resistance members that she fought alongside with during the incident, as well as the revelation that YoRHa considered the Type A series expendable, considerably soured her attitude.
• Dangerous Deserter: She has been labeled a deserter and a traitor by YoRHa Command. The Stage Play reveals it's because she survived the Pearl Harbor mission.
• Death Seeker: After reading the reports that Anemone has regarding the Pearl Harbor incident, she apologizes to Number 4, Number 16, and Number 21 for still being alive and that A2 will be joining them soon after she fulfils her promise to 2B.
• Enemy Mine: Despite 9S's pure and utter hatred of her, they are forced to team up to fend off a powerful robot right before their final showdown.
• Experienced Protagonist: She previously appeared in the stage play that takes place before the game.
• Fake Memories: She was implanted with the memories of a human when she was built. The YoRHa Stage Play revealed it was those of a young girl who lived with her grandma.
• Fantastic Racism: Loathes machines and is all too happy to exterminate them when they stand in her way. That includes children and even babies. Pascal is the first machine she ever warmed up to.
• Final Boss: Of Ending D, where you control 9S and attempt to kill her, though it ends up being mutual in the end.
• Fire-Forged Friends: This becomes a theme for her. Each time A2 gets a bad first impression, whether it be from Emil, Pascal and his villagers, Pod 042, or 2B herself, she always warms up to them despite herself. Her respect for 2B is especially shown once she cuts her hair to emulate her after she requests A2 to Take Up My Sword halfway through the game.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Initially Phlegmatic during YoRHa Stage play.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Fights pretty much in the nude with a tattered scrap of cloth across her chest as her only clothing, and should she be damaged then she fights even without that.
• Hartman Hips: Like 2B, she's very shapely.
• Hero Antagonist: Granted, the game's morality takes a really murky turn, but towards the end, she has far more noble goals and intentions than 9S, who is merely lashing out in helpless rage at everything related to his suffering. Especially notable should you choose to play as 9S in the finale, which makes A2 the final boss.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Sacrifices her life to save 9S from the Logic Virus and stop the missile from launching.
• I Shall Taunt You: While 2B and 9S can taunt enemies as well by repeatedly flashing their respective Pods' flashlights, A2 is unique in that she has animations — which vary depending on her primary weapon — and lines when taunting her opponents.
  A2: Don't break too quickly now.
  A2: Huh, what, is that all?
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In Ending D by 9S's sword. Also the way she kills the infant Forest King, which might just make it a Karmic Death.
• Important Haircut: She normally has very long hair, but after she mercy kills 2B, she cuts it in a short bob while also taking on 2B's memories from her sword. The haircut makes her resemblance to 2B much more evident, alluding to 2B's origin as an iteration of A2's design. Cutting her hair also signifies her becoming a playable character and assuming the role of a Voice of Reason, countering 9S's Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Invisibility Cloak: Her evade move makes her invisible for the split-second it lasts. It's just a visual gimmick, though, and doesn't confer any bonus or additional functionality over the other protagonists' evades.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's foul mouthed, anti-social and aggressive about what she wants. But just like 2B, she has a softer side that shows up as time moves on.
  • Despite her usual demeanor, she becomes much nicer when interacting with Anemone as they fought alongside each other during the Pearl Harbor incident.
  • A2 also goes from being extremely hostile to Pascal and his villagers to eventually worrying for them when the Logic Virus infects Pascal's Village.
  • If she's the one chosen to fight the Emil clones, she'll tell the friendly Emil to shut up when he tries to tell her that he needs to fight his fellow clones alone. At the end of the battle, A2 shows extreme sadness when the friendly Emil dies.
  • Despite standing against the YoRHa system and previously killing any and all YoRHa androids that tried to arrest her, A2 dutifully carries out 2B's dying wish in Route C/D/E and tries her best to protect 9S (whether it's from enemies or himself). She even tries to tell 9S that 2B wanted him to be a good person in an attempt to soothe his rage, with less-than-stellar results.
• Lady Swears-a-Lot: She never drops any F-bombs, but A2 is noticeably more bluntly vulgar in her language than 2B and 9S.
• Licked by the Dog: The children in Pascal's village take a liking to her, and her attempts to act cold and aloof are only met with amusement. It's enough to make A2 cave in and get them the things they need for their slide, despite her hatred of machine lifeforms.
• Lightning Bruiser: An even stronger example than 2B. A2 is the fastest of the three playable characters and with the addition of her B Mode her attack power goes up even more. She can also take as much as she can dish out.
• Meaningful Name: A2 takes her name in reference to the famous line "Et Tu, Brute?" uttered in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where Caesar notices and calls out his betrayal by his former friend Brutus just prior to his assassination. In Nier: Automata, A2 eventually betrays the other androids and sides with the Resistance, even notably killing 2B a la Brutus killing Caesar.
• Mercy Kill: Gives one to 2B, at her request due to the Logic Virus.
• My Greatest Failure: The death of her squad in Mount Ka'ala during the events of YoRHa, especially A4, G16, S21 and Rose's deaths weigh hard on her soul. When Pod activates her memories of A4's last words, A2 gets very pissed off with him.
  A4:...not right, Number Two. We're all here... chose to be here. Thank you, for giving meaning to my life...
  A2: Enough!
  Pod 042: Memory data recognized as belonging to YoRHa unit A2 herself.
  A2: Shut up! And get out of my head already!
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In Route C, in an effort to protect the last remnants of humanity, A2 destroys what she thinks is a missile aimed at the server. What she doesn't know is that it was changed to an ark and that by destroying it, she kills the chance for machines to find a new life (although the Terminal's actions up to the end didn't help). She also manages to save 9S, but Ending C also suggests he still dies even there. Her actions were also in an effort to sustain a lie that she knew caused violence, but this action ends up not affecting much — unbeknownst to her, the lie the creators of YoRHa would use the server for is unveiled by Jackass and revealed to the rest of the Resistance following the collapse of the Tower on both endings.
• Not What It Looks Like: One of these fuels her entire conflict with 9S; he arrives just in time to see her kill 2B, unaware that she had already succumbed to the Logic Virus and A2 was granting her a Mercy Kill.
• One-Man Army: Or rather one-woman army. It's rather telling that for quite some time, she'd been fighting the machines entirely on her own without the ranged combat or technical support of a Pod, and by the end of the game, at best 9S — also established to be a One-Man Army himself — can only score a Mutual Kill on her because she remembers her promise to 2B and hesitates in delivering the killing blow after parrying 9S's attacks.
• Outside-Context Problem: Both In-Universe and out, her appearance and subsequent Boss Battle plus her cold-blooded murder of the infant Forest King in the Forest Castle come completely out of left field. Anyone unfamiliar with the YoRHa Stage Play won't even know she exists by that point since there's only a single cryptic reference to her at the very beginning of the game that doesn't make sense until much, much later in the story.
• Power at a Price: Her Berserker Mode increases her damage output at the cost of a constant HP drain.
• Practical Taunt: She can taunt her enemies, which buffs both her and her enemies' attack.
• Rogue Protagonist: She was the main protagonist of the YoRHa Stage Play that details the ill-fated Pearl Harbor mission. In the game proper, A2 has defected from YoRHa Command and, by extension, humanity and is considered a highly dangerous renegade, causing her to be hunted down by 2B and 9S. Turns she remains completely loyal to humanity and hopes for a future where they return; it's YorHA that she hates.
• Sole Survivor: A2's squad consisted of 16 Units total. Among the Units that were deployed of the Pearl Harbor Descent Mission, A2 was the only survivor. Twelve of them, including squad leader A1 were killed before they could land. S21 was mercy-killed by Anemone after being infected with the Logic Virus, G16 died in a Last Stand against a massive horde of machines and A4 sacrificed herself to save A2 and destroy the server in Mount Ka'ala.
• Stripperiffic: Perhaps one of the most extreme cases in the whole Drakengard/Nier series. She wears a single panel of tattered fabric over her chest and nothing else. It has the interesting effect of exposing the joints and folds of her body and making her artificiality more noticeable. Using the Dress Module on her will even remove that single panel of tattered fabric, leaving her basically stark naked.
• Super Mode: She is the only one who can use a unique "Berserker Mode", which increases her damage and overall speed, with the explanation that it was too dangerous and too energy-consuming to be installed in new models like 2B and 9S.
• Supermodel Strut: Her hips tend to shake back and forth whenever she's walking, and given her short shorts, it's even more noticeable than with 2B! And like 2B, this seems mostly done to invoke Third-Person Seductress.
• Super Prototype: Her and her fellow units from the YoRHa stage play are much more dangerous in combat than the current models. Them dying in a suicide mission was to make them the base of the current series through making the next generation human, once the Super Mode was deemed too dangerous for new generation.
  • Made even more palpable in the game proper. A2 and her fellow units are the basis for the Type-B and Type-S androids like 2B and 9S, who are considered far more advanced. A2 can still wipe the floor with 2B and 9S.
  • Taken even higher in the third Nier Concert story where it's revealed that A2 has fought against previous versions of 2B and 9S before the meeting at the Forest Kingdom during the game's present day. In fact, the meeting shown in the story is the fourth time that A2 has fought them. The story shows that A2 is also the only person that can turn 9S's hacking against him. This is shown again during her fight against 9S on top of the Tower.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Of Kainé from NieR, as another foul-mouthed, scantily-clad woman with a harsh and bitter attitude but a heart of gold underneath. It's eventually revealed her personality was actually constructed from the android's records of Kainé.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With just about everyone initially, due to her... difficult character, but especially with Pascal. It quickly gets better, though.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Her verbatim reaction to being sent on errands for Pascal's machine villagers.
• Tritagonist: She's the third protagonist of the game, and she and 9S are co-protagonists in the game's post-first-two-endings second half.
• Undying Loyalty: She hates the YoRHa Command's lies and system, but she is staunchly on the side of preserving and protecting what's left of humankind, even knowing that said protectiveness of humans is something all YoRHa are programmed to have, and that she is defending a lie that perpetuates war and suffering because she has hope for the future and even a future where mankind might someday return. This desire, along with her part in 2B's death, leads her to conflict with 9S in Ending C/D/E.
• Used to Be More Social: In both the Stage Play and anime version of the Pearl Harbor mission, A2 was actually very friendly and sociable, if somewhat naive, and it's her idealism that convinces Rose and the Resistance to provide support her squad. However, that quickly changes when the mission goes horribly wrong, leaving A2 as only one of two survivors and the Sole Survivor of her own squad. That, combined with being branded a traitor by YoRHa and fighting Machines on her own for centuries, did a lot to turn her in the bitter, cynical android we see today.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: During her time fighting alongside her unit and the Resistance during the Pearl Harbor incident, A2 was this. She even hoped that they would all survive so that Rose, the leader of the Resistance at the time, could give names to the remaining members of A2's unit. Needless to say, it didn't last.
• Would Hurt a Child: And not just hurt it at that. Her Establishing Character Moment in the game proper consists of her killing the Forest King - who's a tiny, adorable, utterly defenseless machine baby - in cold blood, and for no apparent reason other than that he's a machine lifeform, to boot. It's never made clear or even touched upon later why she did it.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Her verbatim reaction to her pod's proposal to immediately make friends with Pascal because her hostility is not energy-efficient.

YoRHa Command

Commander

Commander/White

Voiced by: Chiaki Kanou (Japanese), Colleen O'Shaughnessey (English, uncredited)^note Confirmed by The NieR: Automata World Guide Volume 2

Played by: Yuri Murakami (YoRHa stage play 1.0), Madoka Shimogaki (YoRHa stage play 1.1), Miyako Maikawa (YoRHa stage play 1.2), Orito Kasahara (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

"Remember your pain: the pain of having your homeland stolen! We will never give up our struggle. We'll take back the seas! The sky! The land! We will take back our world from the scourge of the machines!"

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• Adaptational Curves: The anime adaptation gives her a visibly more buxom chest, whereas, in the original game, her cup size is about the same as that of the other YoRHa androids'.
• Alas, Poor Villain: It's easy to hate her for upholding the constant cycle of endless war between the androids and machines by keeping the knowledge of humanity's extinction secret, but ultimately, she's just another android following her programming, making her no less of a pawn than the rest of YoRHa. She follows through with her duties to the end and chooses to die with the Bunker rather than succumb to the logic virus.
• Bad Boss:
  • The YoRHa stage play reveals this side. She's more than willing to sacrifice YoRHa units in missions meant to fail if it helps advance androids, as with A2 and her team's mission in Pearl Harbor.
  • Sent 9S and 2B to hunt YoRHa Betrayers that stole supplies from the Resistance. All of which turned out to be a lie.
  • An S-Type with secret intel had chips with classified information. YoRHa left him to die but retrieved the chips, and it's implied both the S-Type and the Resistance members' reported deaths by machines might not have been as accidental as they claim.
• The Chains of Commanding: She doesn't take pleasure in sending her troops to die, but like the other androids, she was designed to serve humans' interest, and if it means sending them to death or having the Scanner-types routinely killed to keep the masquerade up, then she will do it.
• Combat Stilettos: Somewhat more justified than with the other YoRHa androids, since she never leaves the bunker and doesn't actually do any fighting herself.
• The Corruption: When the Logic Virus infects the Bunker, she becomes infected, holds it off just long enough to get to the hangar bay, and orders 2B and 9S to leave her to her fate.
• Dark Secret:
  • She is the only YoRHa unit authorized to know that humanity is extinct and all that remains of them is a data storage server on the moon, housing incomplete genome maps and brain-scans that exist solely to motivate the androids to fight.
  • She has 2B, who is in reality 2E, assume a false identity to keep the latest and most advanced model, 9S, from finding out the truth behind humanity via repeated deaths and memory wipes.
  • However, even she has been kept in the dark that the YoRHa line's AI was based on that of the machine lifeforms and were made to be disposable, as well as the Bunkers built with a backdoor to allow the Logic Virus in to destroy them all in the event that the androids start routing the machines.
• Disc-One Final Boss: She is on some level responsible for all the playable characters' extreme psychological problems, by assigning 2B to repeatedly execute 9S despite how much she's grown to care about him and having A2 hunted as a deserter just because she didn't die when she was supposed to. In a more conventional game, she'd almost certainly be the secret Big Bad. However, the player never learns any of this until after the Bunker blows up with the Commander onboard.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Known only as "Commander". Jackass is the only person who knows her real name, White.
• Face Death with Dignity: Chooses to die with the Bunker rather than let herself go berserk.
• A Father to His Men: Not what most people think of her, but she does genuinely care about the androids under her command. Even given all her secrets, she's implied to still want the best for her troops.
• Going Commando: She isn't, actually, her thong is just way slimmer than 2B's.
• Going Down with the Ship: Refuses to leave the Bunker with 2B and 9S after she's been infected with the Logic Virus.
• Hartman Hips: She has quite the curvy behind.
• Hidden Depths: It is implied in the artbook that the Commander is not a YoRHa unit herself, but rather a former member of the Resistance. She also has a friendly relationship with Jackass.
• Laser-Guided Karma: She has sacrificed numerous androids for the sake of her mission. In the end she's as disposable as them.
• Non-Action Guy: Despite being in charge of all of YoRHa, she's not armed and doesn't seem to possess any fighting capabilities at all. When 2B, 9S and her are escaping the infected Bunker during Route C, she herself doesn't fight (and may not even be capable of doing so), standing back while the other two fight their way through her former subordinates.
• No Name Given: Subverted. The artbook indicates her name is "White." This is also indirectly mentioned in the game very briefly but most players wouldn't notice. After the Bunker is destroyed, speaking to Jackass will have her say "Goddamnit, White... Sorry. I had a friend back at the Bunker."
• Pet the Dog: The one standout moment of kindness she displays is when 9S confronts her with having learned humans have been dead all along, she calmly confirms this and tells 9S he may decide to do as he wishes with the information.
• The Pig-Pen: Downplayed (since she's an android; few bodily functions) but 6O says she doesn't do her regular maintenance and leaves clothes lying all over her room.
• Statuesque Stunner: She's a little less than a head taller than 2B, and easily towers over 9S (according to the artbook, the Commander is 175 cm tall while 2B is 168.)
• Whip of Dominance: She's a stern commander who carries a riding crop on her person as a sign of her station and authority, and brandishes it around while giving orders.

Operator 21O/6O

21O Voiced by: Connor Kelley (English), Mary Hatsumi (Japanese)

6O Voiced by: Cassandra Lee Morris (English), Keiko Isobe (Japanese)

Both

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• Brainwashed and Crazy: 21O is one of the many victims of the Logic Virus, as well as the source of the mysterious voice found during the latter half of the game. 9S is forced to fight her in the Amusement Park's Resource Retrieval Unit, since he needs the access key to the Tower in the city ruins. The terminals also has 6O voice their message as the Bunker explodes.
• Foil: They act as this for their respective assigned units. The perky 6O assists the stoic 2B, while 21O is the Consummate Professional to the decidedly-informal 9S. Since 2B and 9S are also Foils to each other, 6O and 21O can be seen as mutual Foils as well.
• Mission Control: Operator-types are mainly this. They relay information from the Commander to their assigned units and do regularly-scheduled maintenances while the other units are out on the field doing missions. They primarily stay in the Bunker and aren't designed for combat, although they can be modified for it, as seen with 21O in the second half of the game.
• Tragic Dream:
  • 21O's dream was to have a family so that she wouldn't have to be lonely and had her sights set on 9S to fill that void. However, YoRHa units are restricted to the functions they were pre-programmed to fulfil. Additionally, any feelings 21O has towards 9S are not mutual because he is obsessively focused on 2B.
  • 6O is fascinated by Earth and 2B sends her pictures of flowers so she can have a little taste of what Earth is like. She dies in the Bunker explosion, never getting a chance to visit the surface, lampshaded by her Final Words.
• Unwitting Pawn: As with all of YoRHa, they are deceived in regards to Project YoRHa's true nature and are ultimately meant to be disposed of in the end.

Operator 21O

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• Continuity Nod: At the start of Route C, when 2B and 9S return to the Bunker after the logic virus starts spreading among the androids, 21O is absent from her desk among all the other operators in the command center, since she had herself converted to a combat model and sent to the front lines.
• Hidden Depths: Beneath her nagging nature, 21O is implied to strongly desire a family of her own, treating 9S as a son as a result in the beginning of Route C. She also slowly warms up to 9S through her sidequest, which requires 9S to find human relics scattered around the map, implying that some of 9S' curiosity and desire for company is rubbing off on her. It is implied that she volunteered to be deployed as a combat unit in order to actively protect 9S on the battlefield.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: She's so corrupted that she can barely get it out, but she begs to be killed during her fight with 9S.
  "Pl..ease...kill..."
• Mercy Kill: 21O is on the receiving end of one from A2 due to the Logic Virus. Unlike 2B, she's so far gone she can barely ask to be killed.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: 21O is normally very no-nonsense and humorless with 9S. However, she begins to act very familiar and sweet towards him in the beginning of Route C, something that 9S immediately brushes off as strange. This is because 21O knew it might have been the last time she got to speak with 9S, since she volunteered to be modified for combat and was deployed during the Invasion. 9S doesn't linger on this... and then 21O makes a surprise return (see Brainwashed And Crazy above).
• Parental Substitute: 9S views 21O as an annoying mother, and her orders as nagging parental commands to a child. Which makes the fight against her as 9S all the more horrible.
• Took a Level in Badass: When 21O's request for transfer to frontline duty is approved in Route C, she instantly goes from Non-Action Girl to combat android that's powerful enough to get her own boss fight against 9S. 6O gets a minor one as well if her personal quest was completed before Route C: when the Bunker falls to the Logic Virus, she's the only one aside from the Commander who manages to hold on to her sanity long enough for some Last Words for 2B.
• Tragic Monster: 21O is revealed to have developed a strong desire for a family in order to cope with her loneliness, and later is revealed to have developed a strong affection for 9S. Even while corrupted by the Logic Virus, she manages to voice her desire to be with 9S as she is fighting him. It is ambiguous whether her feelings were maternal or romantic, although the way she keeps talking to him "like a kid" in the beginning of Route C leans more towards maternal.
• Undignified Death: A2 sees her as just another corrupted android and kills her by brutally impaling her multiple times.

Operator 6O

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• Flowers of Femininity: She's a feminine android with a fondness for Earth, especially beautiful flowers. She often brings up the topic of rare flowers to 2B and suggests she puts a lunar tear in her hair (which becomes a customization option).
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: As 6O dies with the Bunker's destruction and 2B dies a little later, 6O is forgotten about due to not knowing 9S on a personal level and A2 never meeting her.
• Genki Girl: Aside from one humorous conversation where she's a bit down due to her unlucky love life, 6O is a very cheerful and upbeat girl, complete with an adorably high voice (in both languages).
• Killed Offscreen: 6O dies in the Bunker explosion. If the player completes 2B's unique side missions, they can hear her Last Words before she's corrupted.
  "Two-Bee, I…am Operator 6O. ThANk you for… foR the FLOWErs. Desert FLOWErs are BEAUTIF, arEN't thEY… Th-Th-thank You… SoMEdAy I…"
• Lipstick Lesbian: 6O complains to 2B that one of the operators she likes declined her advances, and tries to make a move on 2B when she (in her own awkward way) comforts her. However, she doesn't showcase any traits that would be considered stereotypical.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: The point when the two are infected by the Logic Virus and thus stop being your operators is the same point when the story takes a much bleaker turn. The bits of levity brought by 6O’s antics in particular leave a gaping hole once she and 2B are both dead.
• Vocal Dissonance: The machine network uses 6O to deliver their message to the corrupted Bunker. The combination of her cute, cheerful voice, the malicious words, and the audio distortions making her sound completely insane makes for a very unsettling scene.

YoRHa Defense Unit 16D

YoRHa Defense Unit 16D

A Defense Unit that 2B later meets at the Bunker. 16D tasks 2B with retrieving information about 11B's fate after the prologue.

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• Break the Cutie: She falls into despair after 11B's death, saying that she has no reason to protect herself anymore after her mentor's death. 2B can decide to twist the knife even further if she reveals that 11B was planning to desert after getting shot down during the prologue. Although, if 2B does that, 16D's reaction is alarming. See the below entry.
• Broken Pedestal: She looked up to 11B when the latter was still alive, even expressing the belief that 11B remained brave to the bitter end. 2B can choose to tell 16D that 11B was planning on deserting, as revealed by 11B's memory banks, despite the potential to break 16D's heart... but if she does, it turns out 16D actually felt very bitter towards 11B because 11B would always look down on 16D for being a Defense unit.
• Lipstick Lesbian: She reveals at the end of her quest that she was in a relationship with her mentor, 11B.
• Revenge Before Reason: Subverted. She says that she wants to be converted into a Combat Unit in order to avenge 11B's death... but she then says that it wouldn't matter if she did because it wouldn't bring 11B back to life. She then entrusts 11B's weapon to 2B, saying that 2B can put it to better use.
• Teacher/Student Romance: Revealed to be in a relationship with her mentor 11B after the end of her sidequest.

YoRHa Healer Unit 10H

YoRHa Healer Unit 10

A healer unit that works with numerous Pod 006 as a mechanic in an undersea base. Appears in the strategy guide short story "A Much Too Silent Sea".

10H later appears in NieR Re[in]carnation in a major role in its 3rd story arc. For more information about her in Reincarnation, see her folder here.

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• The Cameo: 10H appears in NieR Re[in]carnation on the moon base and at the end of Chapter 4 of The Story of the People and the World requests for help from anyone watching. In Chapter 5 of the same arc she becomes Promoted to Playable as the chapter's main focal character.
• History Repeats: She's in an endless cycle of learning the truth about humanity and having her memories erased by Pod 006.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Always has her memories wiped by 006 after she learns the truth.
• The Medic: Healer units serve as mechanics to their fellow soldiers and Pods.
• She Knows Too Much: She always figures out that the undersea base is actually the moon base, leading her to realize humanity is extinct.

Council of Humanity

Council of Humanity

Voiced by: Matthew Mercer (English, uncredited)

"Glory... to mankind."

The leaders of the remains of humanity on the Moon, the Council issues orders to YoRHa and waits for the day that humanity can return to its homeworld.

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• Blatant Lies: All their messages and broadcasts. Humanity is extinct.
• Everyone Has Standards: The higher-ups of the Council banned the usage of nuclear weapons in the war against the machine lifeforms. Which makes sense, since a single ill-advised nuke did a lot of damage in the backstory to NieR by accidentally spreading the particles that cause White Chlorination Syndrome from Japan to the entire world, signing off humanity's death warrant.
• Canned Orders over Loudspeaker: The messages they broadcast directly to the YoRHa androids on the frontline. After their first broadcast in the desert, 9S even complains that their messages are so stale and boring.
• Fighting for a Homeland: The Council eagerly awaits the day when humans can end their millennia-long exile on the Moon and bring the human race back to Earth.
• Mr. Exposition: After the Action Prologue, a Council broadcast fills us in on the game's background.
• Propaganda Machine: Their broadcasts and emails don't say much useful and mostly serve as a means to pump up YoRHa morale to keep up the good fight.
• Spotting the Thread: 9S discovers something unusual about the Council in Route B. The file detailing YoRHa's organizational structure indicates that YoRHa created the Council of Humanity, when it's supposed to be the Council that created YoRHa. Shortly after, he's told the truth by the Commander. Which is why they fall under the "YoRHa Command" section of this page.
• Vestigial Empire: They represent the remnants of humanity after it was forced to flee to the Moon from Earth.

YoRHa Members introduced in stage plays

YoRHa Attacker No. 1 (A1)

The leader of the YoRHa squadron that fought in the battle of Pearl Harbor. When she was killed mid-descent, A2 was placed in charge of her squad.

• The Ace: She's described as being a natural leader, the best in their squad, and has everyone's respect. Her death causes a massive hit to the morale of the survivors.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: She was blown up midair as she spoke about how good Canceller units were at hiding her squad.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Her skills are given a good deal of hype at the beginning. Then she meets a very sudden and unexpected death before she even touches the ground.

YoRHa Attacker No. 4 (A4)

Voiced by: Reina Tanaka (NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Funaoka Saki (YoRHa stage play 1.0), Risako Ito (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Reina Tanaka (YoRHa stage play 1.2), Takuya Ayagiri (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

One of A2's teammates.

• Badass Adorable: She was an Attacker unit like A2, and she was the friendliest and nicest member of her squad.
• Eyepatch of Power: It's not an eyepatch, but she wears her goggles in a way that leaves one eye unexposed, giving them this effect.
• Fatal Flaw: Though her cheerfulness was helpful in keeping the morale up, it was ultimately detrimental in a serious situation, like intense combat against massive amounts of enemies.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Sanguine
• Heroic Sacrifice: She sacrificed herself to protect A2 from the Terminals. She destroyed the Mount Ka'ala server when she self-destructed, ensuring a victory for YoRHa.
• My Greatest Failure: Her death haunted A2 for years after what happened in Hawaii.
• The Pollyanna: Despite the darkness of the world around her, A4 was always cheerful and bright.
• Taking You with Me: She detonated her fusion reactor to destroy the Mount Ka'ala server and save A2 from the Terminals.

YoRHa Gunner No. 16 (G16)

Voiced by: Chihara Mochida (NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Mayu Kishida (YoRHa stage play 1.0), Moeka Yamamoto (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Chihira Mochida (YoRHa stage play 1.2), Masataka Kimura (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

• Boisterous Bruiser: She's excitable, temperamental, and always looking for a challenge, which causes her to form a rivalry with Dahlia.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Choleric
• Last Stand: She and the rebels Dahlia, Lily and Marguerite held off hundreds of thousands of machines to ensure the rest of A2's squad could enter Mount Ka'ala. They ultimately detonated their fusion reactors to destroy a massive Goliath that was immune to their weapons.
• Military Maverick: She was known for having a defiant streak against all authorities, including her own bosses at the Bunker. This made her perfect for her role as a Gunner.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Dahlia. While they start off hostile to each other due to the mutual suspicion between both the YoRHa and Resistance androids, their relationship soon turns into a rivalry where they constantly squabble and try to one-up the other.

YoRHa Scanner No. 21 (S21)

Voiced by: Mio Hanana (NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Sayuri Miyajima (YoRHa stage play 1.0), Konona Shiba (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Mio Hanana (YoRHa stage play 1.2), Kouji Kominami (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Melancholic
• Mercy Kill: She was killed by Anemone on her request, once she was no longer able to fight off the Logic Virus.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: She saved Lily from the Logic Virus. Unfortunately, it evolved and infected her instead.
• The Spock: She was known for her cool-headed and analytical personality.

YoRHa No. 9 Type Healer (9H)

Played by: Naoki Saito (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Momoka Onishi (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

• Birds of a Feather: 9H immediately becomes attached to 2D upon encountering him for the first time and vice versa.
• Despair Event Horizon: Upon hearing 2D's final words and learning he can't delete his remaining memories from the SS system, 9H breaks down into tears. With 22G and 4G they are implied to go on to cause the Atlantis incident to get revenge upon YoRHa.
• Non-Action Guy: He is incompetent at combat due to being built for support purposes as a Healer.

YoRHa No. 21 Type Scanner (21S)

Played by: Hisashi Murata (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Momoka Koizumi (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

• Foil: To 21O. Both are units with the same personality type (No. 21) and have a desire for family. 21O has no sibling units and wishes 9S to be part of her family, whereas he has a brother unit in 22G and is friends with 9H. 21O spends much of her time being condescending to 9S and only reveals her desire after being infected with the logic virus. 21S spends most of his time wanting to protect 22G until he becomes infected by the Logic Virus. After which he becomes condescending to 22G until he believes he killed him, immediately followed by him suffering a breakdown over killing his brother.
• Spear Counterpart: To his female counterpart from YoRHa, being a Scanner model infected with the Logic Virus.

YoRHa No. 22 Type Gunner (22G)

Played by: Hiroki Terasaka (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Aika Sonoda (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

• Not Quite Dead: After 21S attempts to kill him, 22G is revealed to have survived.
• Taking the Bullet: One of the deaths he suffered as he fought against the machines was taking a fatal attack protecting 21S. 9H later reviving him using his backup data.

YoRHa No. 2 Type Defender (2D)^note Executioner model (2E)

Played by: Shinichiro Eda (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Shiki Aoki (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

• Driven to Suicide: After being infected with the Logic Virus he kills himself rather than harm 9H.
• Spear Counterpart: To fellow No. 2 model 2B. Both become close to a No. 9 unit whom they deeply care about. With him being an Executioner type as well making an exact male counterpart to 2B aka 2E.

YoRHa No. 6 Type Attacker (6A)

Played by: Yuuto Doi (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Megu Taniguchi (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

• Token Evil Teammate: The deranged and psychotic A6 was known to kill his teammates when death was highly likely for no reason other than his own enjoyment. The Logic Virus simply made what little restraints he had completely vanish.

YoRHa No. 3 Type Attacker (3A)^note formerly Gunner Model (3G)

Played by: Shoji Masato (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Saki Matsuda (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

YoRHa No. 4 Type Gunner (4G)^note formerly Attacker model (4A)

Played by: Ryo Oguri (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Moe Tsurumi (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

• Heroic BSoD: After everything that went down he still had some hope after the death of A3. When 2B informs him both Attackers and Gunners will be replaced with B-Types he finally breaks, as everything he and A3 did becomes meaningless.

Instructor

Played by: Daisuke Kikuta (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Mao Noguchi (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

• Spear Counterpart: To the Commander, especially as his real name is Black, as opposed to the Commander's real name, White.

Futaba

Voiced by: Rinka Ishikawa (NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Mai Nakamura (YoRHa stage play 1.0), Kinatsu Kuraoka (YoRHa stage play 1.1), Rinka Ishikawa (YoRHa stage play 1.2)

Yotsuba

Voiced by: Momoka Suzuki (NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Eru Shigemoto (YoRHa stage play 1.0), Ayaka Yamagami (YoRHa stage play 1.1), Ibuki Kaneda (YoRHa stage play 1.2)

Wakaba

Played by: Tomohiro Sato (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

The Resistance

While the YoRHa androids are the protagonists, they are not the only androids on Earth, nor were they the first. The surviving androids from Earth's previous civilization are still around and help out against the machine invasion as a resistance force.

Anemone

Anemone

Voiced by: Erica Lindbeck (English), Mary Hatsumi (Japanese, game), Non Harusaki (Japanese, anime)

Played by: Miho Ataki (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Asuka Nagayoshi (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), An Tachibana (YoRHa Stage play 1.2), Rin Matsubara (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

The leader of the android Resistance in the Pacific still residing on Earth.

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• Adaptation Deviation: In Ver 1.1a, Lily is the leader of the Resistance instead of Anemone and Anemone herself doesn't appear to be present. However, Anemone is shown to have still existed, as she was still present in episode 6 that adapted the events of the Stage Play, but it is implied she died there instead of Lily.
• Death Seeker: After choosing not to kill herself in the events of the Stage Play, she's chosen to continue fighting till the last against the machines until she dies in battle.
• Fire-Forged Friends: With A2 thanks to the suicide mission in the YoRHa stage play. The Pearl Harbor archives indicate she was pretty distrustful of all YoRHa units as a whole until that mission changed her mind.
• Mercy Kill: Killed S21 in the YoRHa Stage Play to free her of the Logic Virus. This event is detailed in the game proper itself as a log that Anemone saves on a computer.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: To an extent. When androids try to flee the Resistance she will have them hunted down, but will welcome them back if they simply return. Her treatment of Devola and Popola with very difficult missions is partly to keep other androids at peace. It's implied their fellow androids will do much worse if they feel Devola and Popola are getting off easy.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: She fought in the 8th Machine War roughly 200 years before the events of the game. She didn't come out of it unscathed.
• Sole Survivor: She was the sole survivor of her unit after the events of the YoRHa Stage Play, only learning of A2's survival later.

Jackass

Jackass

Voiced by: Amanda Céline Miller (English), Kaori Kawabuchi (Japanese)

Played by: Kurotaka (YoRHa Stage play 1.3aᵃ)

A data analysis officer and member of the Resistance. She performs experiments as her hobby.

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• Awful Truth: Learns the Council of Humanity is a lie and that their YoRHa comrades are disposable.
• Bad Boss: Tends to treat her subordinates like crap. One of her men was trying to clean up a storage area with lots of heavy boxes and got trapped until you free him. He complains to her about the incident and her response is to tell him to learn how to use explosives so he can bust out next time it happens.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first thing she does in the game is introduce herself by name, which is a pretty good indicator of her personality. The second thing she does is use high-powered explosives to open up a gate. 9S lampshades how excessive that was. In the Ver 1.1a adatation, she adds Drives Like Crazy into the mix as she speeds on through with the truck she's transporting 2B and 9S in a couple seconds later.
• Fantastic Drug: She develops "E-Drugs" as part of the sidequest to help her with her android research, and ends up giving out a supply of the drugs to two YoRHa units. After the destruction of the Bunker, these two can be found out in the desert◊. Apparently being addicted to drugs saved them from being infected by the YoRHa wide logic virus attack.
• Fusion Dance: She has attempted to combine androids together according to the artbook, with her friend White telling her not to.
• Hidden Depths: She's closely acquainted with the YoRHa Commander on a personal level, to the point that she is the only person in the whole game who knows her real name. There are implications that Jackass has been acting as an informal intelligence source within the Resistance for the Commander. This probably helped her connect a lot of the dots after the game's end when investigating the ruins of the Tower and discovering all of the dark secrets of YoRHa in her Machine Research Report.
• For Science!: Why she wants you to beat a bunch of machines or eat fish.
• Insane Troll Logic: She carelessly trapped her subordinate in a storage facility? It’s obviously his fault for being too lazy, unwilling, or ignorant to explode himself out of there. (Never mind that this would have resulted in a waste of valuable resources).
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While her name isn't just for show, she's callous but well meaning and is pissed that the YoRHa were considered expendable. Downplayed since she leans closer to the former than the latter.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Her preferred method in opening a gate? Blow it up.
• Never My Fault: In the third sorting side quest, she trapped one of her subordinates in a storage facility when she was rearranging it to find something, not knowing that he was in there doing his job. When he points this out to her, she states that it’s his fault for not having the will or knowledge to explode his way out of there.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Her machine lifeform report ends with her declaring she will hunt down every evolutionary dead-end machine lifeform and the androids that created YoRHa to exterminate them for treating YoRHa as disposable pawns.
  Jackass: So then! To sum up: For hundreds of years, we've been fighting a network of machines with the ghost of humanity at its core. We've been living in a stupid fucking world where we fight an endless war that we COULDN'T POSSIBLY LOSE all for the sake of some Council of Humanity on the moon that doesn't even exist. I don't know what the point is to all this, but I swear I will kill every evolutionary dead-end machine lifeform, as well as every single asshole behind Project YoRHa. I'm coming for all your heads. Fuck you.
• Stuff Blowing Up: She sure likes her things that go boom. One of the intel files is even a recipe she came up with to produce explosives.

Devola and Popola

Devola and Popola

Voiced by: Eden Riegel (English, credited as Claudia Lenz), Ryōko Shiraishi (Japanese)

"We have to atone for our sins no matter what!"

A pair of familiar red-headed androids who hang around the Resistance Base. They seem to be in charge of a disproportionately large amount of tasks.

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• Action Girl: The both of them are proficient in combat and help 9S out hacking the door to the Tower by fighting waves of machines distracting them.
• All of the Other Reindeer: As a result of their models completely messing up the Gestalt project all the other androids treat them with utter disdain, doing things like deliberately giving them hard assignments or even attacking them.
• The Atoner: They are determined to atone for a sin they (or rather their counterparts in NieR) committed sometime in the past. They suggest it's because they went berserk; it's truly because they failed Project Gestalt and the entire model series was assigned the blame.
• Big Damn Heroes: They arrive to fend off a machine assault while 9S hacks the Tower open in the third playthrough.
• Brainwashed: The android equivalent, anyway. All Devola and Popola units were reprogrammed to constantly generate feelings of guilt over Project Gestalt.
• Chainsaw Good: They wield Type-3 swords, which, while not equipped with actual moving parts, boast a heavily serrated blade that gives them a distinct chainsaw feel.
• Chekhov's Gunman: They appear near the end of Route A to provide 2B with a pod program she can use to find 9S, but it's not until Route C where they become more prominent and important.
• Deadpan Snarker: Devola shows light shades of being one. Popola has to rein her sister in at times because of this.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: After millennia of Walking the Earth as outcasts, they finally find peace when they die within minutes of each other in the wake of their efforts to defend 9S from the machine onslaught while he hacks into the Tower, still holding each other as close in death as they did in life.
• Drowning My Sorrows: They brew their own hooch, which Devola in particular has a bad habit of getting utterly smashed on. While it's Played for Laughs at first, her mumblings imply it's her way to cope with the guilt that's been hard-coded into her, as well as her status as a pariah.
• Early-Bird Cameo: You can see them in the background of the Resistance Base long before you interact with them.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The two are the real creators of the Moon Server, launching it based on the hope of preserving humanity's legacy and ensuring that they could hopefully be restored one day.
• Heroic Sacrifice: They know they ultimately stand no chance against the endless machine onslaught, but they continue to Hold the Line regardless. When 9S' hacking of the Tower suddenly ends with his ejection from the system, Popola knowingly fries her own body to open the gate herself. Her sister then succumbs to her battle wounds in her arms mere minutes later, just enough for A2 to send them on with some consoling Last Words.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: Devola has messier hair and is right-handed, while Popola's hair is straightened and she's left-handed.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The entire model series underwent one to believe the rest died and that they had to atone by themselves.
• Last of Their Kind: They are the last two remaining units of their model line. Meaning their death marks the end of the millennia-spanning Debola and Popola series.
• Meaningful Name: Appropriately, their theme - a remix of "Song of the Ancients - Fate" from the first game - is remixed with the name "Atonement".
• The Medic: The two are healers capable of replicating the repair technology in the YoRHa Bunkers. 9S and A2 receive their support during Route C.
• Meta Twist: Remember those two androids from NieR who were helpful at first but then turned out to be major antagonists? Yeah, they're not the same as these identical androids who also appear helpful but are entirely on your side this time.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Their model line is named after Devolapopola, a recurring weapon from the Drakengard series (localized as "Skald's Song").
  • Their appearance near the end serves as a Bait-and-Switch towards players of the last game as they seem to have a You Shall Not Pass! moment towards 9S that's identical to what their predecessors pulled on Nier, before it's revealed they're actually there to hold off the enemies behind him.
• Not as You Know Them:
  • They're not the same Devola and Popola from Nier, but they still feel responsible for their 'Sister Models' failing Project Gestalt.
  • In this pair the Devola is more stand-offish and the Popola is more friendly.
  • The two wield swords instead of magic.
  • They manage to be together and die in peace after helping 9S, where the previous Popola was left alone and driven to suicidal anguish by Devola's death.
• The Scapegoat: Not only are they not the units responsible for the failure of Project Gestalt, but the actual units in question were earnestly trying to save the project and were simply overpowered by Nier and his party. Nevertheless, these unrelated units are forced to shoulder the responsibility for mankind's extinction and have been reprogrammed to feel perpetual guilt over this. They even had their knowledge of the actual details wiped to keep up the charade.
• Theme Music Power-Up: The vocal version of Song of the Ancients - Atonement kicks in during their Last Stand.
• Those Two Girls: They're never seen separate from one another. Justified in that this is something of a glitch in their programming; this model of android falls into despair if one twin isn't around to offer emotional support to the other. That and because they are despised by all other androids.
• Time Abyss: As administrator models created to watch over Project Gestalt, they've been around since before the first Nier. Given Project Gestalt was started in the early 2000s and Nier ended around 3400 according to Automata, this means they are between 8500 and 10,000 years old.
• Together in Death: Their bodies are seen during Endings C and D cradling each other with peaceful expressions on their faces. This is in contrast to the Devola/Popola pair from the first Nier game where Popola was driven to madness after Devola dies.
• Walking the Earth: The two travelled the world alone together for ages in the past. They did this to avoid persecution for being Devola and Popola models.

4S

YoRHa No. 4 Type S (4S)

A scanner unit encountered by 9S in the Forest Castle during Route C, who gives out the sidequest "Reconnaissance Squad".

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• The Aloner: He's found living quietly in the Forest Castle's library all by himself, after the total destruction of YoRHA.
• The Anti-Nihilist: His sidequest ends with him concluding that he's not going to give in to his immense Survivor's Guilt and instead decides that he's going to live his life differently, especially since there's no one left to tell him how to perform his duties, and encourages 9S to do the same.
• Bookworm: Encountered in the library of the Forest Castle, presumably poring through the piled tomes to aid in his research.
• Foil: For 9S. They're obviously the same model (literally) and only meet in Route C, where they're the only loyal members of YoRHa left alive, and are both wracked with guilt over surviving when everyone they know being killed by the machines. But while 9S takes a flying leap over the Despair Event Horizon and never looks back, 4S copes with his grief by quietly continuing his duties, decides that he's going to try and live his life for the better regardless, and urges Nines not to succumb to despair - advice that, unfortunately, goes unheeded.
• Consummate Professional: Continues performing research on the enemy to aid the war effort even though by the time you find him, the war has been lost and his employers no longer exist.
• Non-Action Guy: 9S is the only Scanner with the ability to wield weapons, so 4S stays in the castle for his own safety while asking 9S to help him retrieve data from the dangerous outside world.
• The One Guy: Like 9S, he's a member of the only exclusively male YoRHa model line, the Scanner units.
• Only Sane Man: He's the only YoRHa unit left alive after the destruction of the Bunker except for A2 and 9S, but while those two both have their...issues, 4S just quietly continues to do his job and urges 9S not to let the grief get better of him.
• Palette Swap: His character model is just 9S with dark hair instead of white-blonde.
• Rage Breaking Point: If 9S completes his quest by gathering data on all the enemies in the game, 4S will start to wonder if there's even any point to continue doing this especially as Yo RHA no longer exists. When 9S attempts to patronize him by saying that gathering enemy data is still important, 4S snaps and yells at him before regaining his composure and reminding him to not lose hope.
• Sole Survivor: Of YoRHA in Route C other than 9S, unless you count A2, who deserted. By endings C/D, both 9S and A2 die (at least until Ending E), so he's likely to make the only surviving YoRHa unit period.
• Survivor's Guilt: Admits to having this over the deaths of all his friends after the destruction of the Bunker, but tells 9S not to succumb to that feeling of guilt. Unfortunately for them both, 9S doesn't listen.
• Undying Loyalty: Continues to perform his duties by gathering data on the machines even after the war has been lost and the organization he works for utterly obliterated.
• Walking Spoiler: Not so much because of anything he himself does, which is a minor sidequest that has no overall impact on the story, but because you only find him during Route C after all of YoRHA has been killed, including 2B, except for himself, A2, and 9S.

Lily

Lily

Voiced by: Atsumi Tanezaki (Japanese, NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a), Erica Mendez (English, NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Mai Mikami (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Madoka Hanai (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Misako Kuroki (YoRHa Stage play 1.2), Ruito Koga (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

The leader of the Resistance in the anime adaptation Nier Automata Ver 1.1a. She was originally introduced as a minor character in the YoRHa Stage Play.

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• Ascended Extra: Originally being a minor character in the Stage Play, Lily takes the role of the leader of the Resistance in Ver 1.1a and plays a major supporting role.
• Dark and Troubled Past: She used to be sexually abused by an android officer during her time in the Army of Humanity until a group of soldiers that would later form The Resistance decided to intervene by beating the snot out of her abuser and later deserting due to a desire to protect her. When No. 21 hacks Lily's mind to erase the logic virus inside her, she catches brief glimpse of her memories.
• Knight in Sour Armor: She leads the Resistance and is still dedicated to fighting Machines, but her experiences in the war and loss of many of her comrades to YoRHa's machinations leaves her bitter and mistrustful of the organization.
• Non-Standard Character Design: She is notably shorter and skinnier than both Resistance and YoRHa androids, to the point that Number 16 thinks her limbs look like they could snap. This is due to her not being a battle model, but a pleasure model instead, being made to provide comfort to battle models and relieve their stress.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In the game and Stage Play continuity, Anemone is the only survivor of the joint mission with No. 2. However, in the anime, Lily is the survivor of that mission instead.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: She carries a heavy amount of trauma from a mission Gone Horribly Wrong that left her the only survivor, as she saw many of her closest friends get mercilessly killed by Machines.
• Sole Survivor: She is the only survivor of a doomed Suicide Mission to destroy a Machine server controlling the Machines in the Pacific Ocean.
• Tragic Keepsake: The assault rifle she wields was passed down to her by her late superior, Rose.

Resistance Members introduced in stage plays

Rose

Voiced by: Ui Hinagata (NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Runa Aida (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Saaya Goto (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Ui Hinagata (YoRHa Stage play 1.2), Mio Akaba (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

"This android, encountered by the experimental YoRHa squadron, is the leader of a group composed of many Resistance members.

A survivor of the eighth descent operation, she continued to wage guerrilla warfare in the Pacific region thereafter. Unable to stop the ever-proliferating machines, she continued to fight a war of bitter attrition for over 200 years."

Rose used to be the leader of Resistance until her death in the server room at mountain Ka'ala. In the present day either Anemone or Lily, depending on the timeline, had succeed her in the position of leadership, remembering Rose fondly.

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Dahlia

Voiced by: Moeka Koizumi (Japanese, NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a), Tiana Camacho (English, NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Peco Suzuki (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Ai Okura (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Mayumi Uchida (YoRHa Stage play 1.2); Kei Jinza (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

Lily

Voiced by: Atsumi Tanezaki (NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Mai Mikami (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Madoka Hanai (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Misako Kuroki (YoRHa Stage play 1.2), Ruito Koga (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

Gerbera

Voiced by: Mayumi Nomura (Japanese, NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a), Nicole Gose (English, NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Mayumi Nomura (YoRHa Stage play 1.2), Yuuki Kanno (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

Marguerite

Voiced by: Shiki Aoki (NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Ryoko Sakimura (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Nanami Nishi (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Rin Shimizu (YoRHa Stage play 1.2)

Daisy

Voiced by: Moe Tsurumi (NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a)

Played by: Tamako Sakurai (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Kaede Fujimoto (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Yuriko Maria (YoRHa Stage play 1.2), Takeshi Yano (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

Cactus

Played by: Inko-san (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Mayu Sekiya as Haou (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

Lotus

Played by: Tomoya Masuda (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Yuka Nihei as Tsuruhana (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

Phlox

Played by: Toshiki Tanabe (YoRHa Boys Stage play 1.0), Non Harusaki as Suiren (YoRHa Girls Stage play 1.1a)

Accord

Played by: Kyousuke Suga (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

The Machine Lifeforms

In General

• Cute Machines: They look strangely cute with their round heads and big eyes, and many of them behave in endearing ways.
• It Can Think: Initially thought of by the androids as mindless drones, the player comes to learn that the machines have families, personalities and societies of their own, especially when disconnected from the network.
• Theme Naming: Many of them are named after famous philosophers. These characters will often display a dark, twisted version of the ideas from the person they are named after.

Simone

Simone / Beauvoir

Someone please look my way

Voiced by: Erin Fitzgerald (English), Kaori Kawabuchi (Japanese)

" I must become more beautiful."

A feminine machine lifeform and opera singer encountered by 2B and 9S in the amusement park. Once a regular, small machine lifeform, she fell in love with another machine lifeform called Jean-Paul and sought to become beautiful by all means necessary so he would reciprocate her love for him.

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• Consuming Passion: A rumor among machine lifeforms claimed that consuming the body of an android would grant one eternal beauty. Although she did not believe the rumor, she tried anyway in her desperation of having her romantic feelings reciprocated.
• Character Development: Like many other machine lifeforms in the story, she’s but a boss fight with little exposition in route A, but route B develops her character with an elaborate backstory.
• A Day in the Limelight: She is the main antagonist of the SINoALICE collaboration, which gives even more insight into her psyche.
• Dub Name Change: Is named Beauvoir in Japanese copies of the game.
• Dying Dream: Right before she dies, she has a brief vision of Jean-Paul finally reaching out to her.
• Energy Ring Attack: Simone can use slow ring-like projectiles which infect the player, causing them to commit to a hacking puzzle to escape.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The other machines have nothing nice to say about her, referring to her as "unpleasant" and thanking 2B and 9S once they kill her, which is ironic given that Simone became the way she is thanks to her obsession with being beautiful and loved. Considering that she cannibalized her own kind in the pursuit of beauty, it's understandable.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: She used to be a normal Small Stubby. She's utterly unrecognizable now.
• Hack Your Enemy: She has the ability to hack into androids and attempts to hack 2B and 9S during their battle. It is implied she used this ability to turn the androids she captured into weapons as well. It manifests in the form of golden pulses that extend from her body.
• Hopeless Suitor: She tried a myriad of things in order to be noticed by Jean-Paul, including dressing herself up with pretty clothes, jewels, learning how to sing and even eating android skin and other machine lifeforms. In the end, however, her love remained unrequited.
• Love Martyr: Kept trying to win over Jean-Paul and went to great lengths for it, despite the latter having no interest whatsoever in her.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Her augmentations into a Humanoid Mechanical Abomination also gifted her with the ability to hack into android corpses to use as attack drones.
• Mad Love: Despite Jean-Paul repeatedly showing no interest in her, she kept on trying to modify her appearance or learning new skills in order to impress him and it ultimately drove her insane.
• Madness Mantra: "He won't look my way" and "Meaningless".
• Meaningful Name: Named after the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In real life, Simone de Beauvoir had a relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, the namesake of the machine lifeform Simone's love interest, though they never married. It is especially meaningful when you realize that the real-life Simone discussed how one of the ways people create meaning in their lives is by constructing gender norms in society like beauty and femininity. In the case of the in-game Simone, she literally constructed herself into a womanly form.
• Mechanical Abomination: Shades of this and a dash of Humanoid. Originally a regular machine mook model, Simone augmented herself with the parts of her fellow Machines and turned herself into a large, twisted parody of femininity, complete with wearing skinned Android corpses as jewelry.
• Monstrous Cannibalism: At the height of her madness, she began to eat other machine lifeforms in order to add their parts to hers, believing it to contribute to her beauty.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Her body has been adorned with a number of androids whose skin has been removed, presumably eaten by Simone herself. During her boss fight, she employs numerous crucified, brainwashed androids against 2B and 9S. After her death, 9S confirms that the androids were merely kept alive by Simone and had their circuits fried immediately after her death.
• Skyward Scream: She starts her second phase with one of these, which lasts nearly 12 seconds.
  Simone: Beautiful... Beautiful... I MUST BE BEAUTIFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUL!!!
• Statuesque Stunner: Played with. Her constructed body is gigantic and she undoubtedly thinks of herself as this, but in reality it just makes her more monstrous.
• Tiny-Headed Behemoth: Simone's actual head is embedded right where the neck of her massive body begins - the "head" of her constructed feminine body is false and eyeless. Compared to the rest of her body, it's quite small.
• The Unfettered: She had an absolute determination to win Jean-Paul’s affection and among other things taught herself to sing, travelled the world to obtain a precious jewel and resorted to cannibalism in order to become more beautiful and improve her chances of succeeding.

Grun

Grun

"The child held sway over enormous strength. But sadly, he was also a little bit broken... He spent his long days hurting those around him. He tried his best to be good and kind. But despite his efforts, things never seemed to turn out. They told him he was unwanted... They abandoned him in the deep, dark ocean. And from the cold at the bottom of the sea, he cried out... Mother... Mother... Mother... Mother... But his voice never reached his mother."

— Background story, route B.

A massive machine lifeform that attacks the aircraft carrier ship in the ocean near the flooded district. Once used by the machine lifeforms as the ultimate weapon to fight against the androids, Grun went berserk and was driven into the depths of the ocean by the machine lifeforms until its reappearance in the main story.

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• Achilles' Heel: Its EMP shroud and armor does not seem to extend to the inside of its mouth, which proves to be its undoing when 9S fires a giant missile into its mouth that causes it to explode from the inside out, after its EMP defences have been turned off.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Its EMP shroud is maintained by yellow generator orbs and the majority of the battle has 2B attempt to destroy these.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Grun is easily the largest machine lifeform encountered in the game, with its archive entry noting it to stand over 1000 meters tall.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: 2B and 9S initially respond to the threat of a large hostile airship approaching the carrier. After dispatching it, however, the presence of another large unit is detected. Cue Grun crushing the carrier ship in its jaws from below.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Presumably why it caused so much destruction, despite apparently being good-natured.
• Eye Beams: One of its methods of attack is to produce these from its enormous, pink-glowing eyes.
• Flunky Boss: You spend most of the battle fighting the numerous aerial machine lifeform mooks surrounding Grun in between the scripted events.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Was eventually marooned deep into the ocean by the machine lifeforms for being too unstable and attacking their own. While alone and sealed away, it spent its time crying out for its mother.
• Humongous Mecha: Being the largest machine lifeform in the game qualifies it as this.
• "Jaws" Attack Parody: How it makes its entrance, destroying the carrier ship from below with its enormous jaws.
• Kaiju: Resembles a giant, mechanical Godzilla when standing fully erect.
• Meaningful Name: Named after Karl Theodor Ferdinand Grün, a German radical political activist and theorist who was imprisoned after starting an insurrection during the German revolution of the 1840s, similar to machine Grun's imprisonment at the bottom of the ocean for the threat it posed to other machines.
• Mechanical Abomination: Unlike Simone, Grun was originally designed to be like this, being a Humongous Mecha with whale and squid-like characteristics lurking in a slumber deep beneath Earth's oceans before it resurfaced.
• No-Sell: Its armor is incredibly thick and it is shrouded in a coat of EMP waves that deflect just about any projectile fired at it. Even the satellite’s missile strike fails to put a scratch on it.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Its backstory suggests Grun wanted to do good, but simply couldn’t control its overwhelming strength, leading to a great deal of destruction and its sealing away in the depths of the ocean.
• Shock and Awe: It can release EMP shockwaves which immediately shut down mechanical lifeforms in range. When it made it to land 320 years ago, it immediately eliminated all nearby resistance fighters with a single, powerful electromagnetic shockwave. 2B deduces, based on this information, that all is lost should Grun reach land, to which POD 042 agrees.
• Turned Against Their Masters: After defeating the androids in front of it, it turned on the machine lifeforms, after which the combined effort of the machine lifeforms forced it into the depths of the ocean, where it remained until the events in the game.
• Weapon of Mass Destruction: Was meant to be used as this by the machine lifeforms in order to wipe out the Androids and from the records it is noted that it was certainly successful as such, but it proved to be difficult to control.

Pascal

Pascal

Voiced by: Alexis Tipton (English), Aoi Yūki (Japanese)

"My name is Pascal. I'm the leader of this village. Those who reside here desire nothing more than to live a peaceful existence."

A machine lifeform who practices pacifism and is deeply interested in the history of humans and machine lifeforms.

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• Actual Pacifist: Will not attack enemies when he's in your party, unless the other option is to let the children come to harm.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: In the C and D Route, Pascal becomes playable in his village and controls an Engels to defend the children.
• Death of Personality: After the memory wipe Pascal retains his friendly demeanour, but has lost all memory of or attachment to the village and its people. If the player returns there they will find Pascal treating the corpses of the villagers as mere junk, and offering to sell you the cores of the children he broke his pacifism to defend.
• Despair Event Horizon: Pascal's village is infected with the Logic Virus, and the village tears itself apart, leaving Pascal and the children machines the only survivors. He seems to cope until the children he had saved from the virus ended up committing suicide in fear. Understandably, he does not take it well.
• Driven to Suicide: After his Despair Event Horizon mentioned above, he asks A2 to either kill him or wipe his memories out, which in a sense is still killing him. You can do either, or you can just walk away.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Possibly. Side materials released after the game mention that after having his memories erased he would go on to successfully form a peace treaty with the Army of Humanity, meaning that he not only manages to live a normal life but he also gets to become a pioneer of pacifism like he always wanted. On the other hand it's unknown if he ever found out the truth about what happened to the village, and it's up for debate where he should be considered "the same character" after undergoing ego death rather than a new individual separate from the original Pascal. The timeline also mentions that in 600 years there will be some tension as a result of new class divides between machine lifeforms, so actual peace may be far off.
• Energy Weapon: Has a massive golden beam he can unleash during battle, being the only villager with a built in weapon.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: He has tried to teach the villagers the concept of fear so they would not needlessly risk their lives looking for trouble. After many of the non-sentient machine lifeforms (and some of the villagers) go berserk and try to kill them, Pascal and A2 take the initiative and fight them off. When they get back, they find that the rest of the villagers have committed suicide, having been overcome with fear of the crazed machines. Blaming himself, Pascal has a HeroicBSoD and begs A2 to either kill him or wipe his memory.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: A variant; while NieR: Automata has plenty of machine lifeforms with sentience and personality, many of them are not certain how to express them. 9S goes so far as to describe most machines' personalities as crude imitations of human interaction. Pascal, on the other hand, is one of the very few pure machines to show a complex personality and strong self-determination.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Following what happened to the children, he requests A2 to wipe his memories, unable to cope with the fact that his entire village is now gone.
• Last of Their Kind: If he's still alive, Pascal will be shown watching the ark leave on Ending D, the last machine lifeform to remain on Earth.
• MacGyvering: In Route C, he fashions a fuel filter for A2 from a piece of tree bark. Dialogue implies he improvises stuff like that on a regular basis, and it seems to work just as good as any original part.
• Meaningful Name: Named after French philosopher Blaise Pascal. Blaise Pascal was a pessimist, believing that Humans Are Bastards and without God, anxiety and despair will overwhelm us all (hence the creation of Pascal's wager). While in-game Pascal seems like the opposite of this, believing in pacifism, peace and the goodness of machines and androids, he eventually comes around after his remaining Machine villagers killed themselves after he was forced to forgo his pacifism to protect them, seeing the inherent Morton's Fork that comes with living and asking to either be killed or rendered amnesiatic.
• My God, What Have I Done?: To make sure the machine children wouldn't throw themselves recklessly into danger, he taught them what fear is. The children end up killing themselves when the abandoned factory gets attacked and Pascal is too busy fending off the enemy machines. With no comfort, the fear was so great they tore up their cores rather than endure it.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Takes no part in the machine war. His village is filled with machines waving white flags to make it clear to the resistance they are not hostile.
• Nice Guy: Pascal is one of the most cheerful and kindly characters in the game, offering hospitality even to Androids who would otherwise be his enemy.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Pascal lead a small village of peaceful machines who want to do nothing but to live in peace and harmony. Unfortunately for Pascal, he's a character in a Yoko Taro story. Cue his village being infected with the Logic Virus, which causes the villagers to eat each other. Pascal thankfully manages to save the children of the village from the horrors... until he leaves to defend their hideout only to return, finding out that the children all committed suicide out of overwhelming fear. Oh, and they only knew about fear in the first place because he taught them about it to keep them out of dangerous situations. Ouch.
• Papa Wolf: Threaten the children and he'll show you his laser beams.
  Pascal: I'll kill you. I'll kill you!
• Sadistic Choice: After the destruction of Pascal's village, he asks A2 to either wipe his memories or kill him. The player can however abandon Pascal to his own devices, leaving his fate up to him alone.
• Took a Level in Badass: Several hundred levels in fact. When he's forced to go against his vow of pacifism in Route C, he doesn't just pick up a sword or a gun. He commandeers an Engels-class Goliath, the second-largest machine lifeform in this world, and uses it to curbstomp an entire army of hostile machines including scores of tanks and another Engels all on his lonesome.
• Vocal Dissonance: Pascal himself doesn't look feminine, but has a very motherly attitude and speaks a young woman's voice; yet he is referred to with masculine pronouns the entire game. According to Yoko, Pascal's feminine voice was partially due to the fact that the character chose a voice that would soothe children and partially out of the fact that he was pressured to cast Aoi Yuuki by one of the developers.

Jean-Paul

Jean-Paul / Sartre

"Existence precedes essence."

A member of Pascal’s village and a popular philosopher.

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• Clueless Chick-Magnet: He attracts attention from a lot of female machines, but doesn't seem to be aware about why they're so interested in him, and doesn't care.
• Dub Name Change: Is named Sartre in Japanese copies of the game.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: He often spouts philosophy with no actual acknowledgment of the people around him and usually scoffs at other machines' attempts at getting his attention through intellectual discussion.
• Meaningful Name: Named after the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The character is essentially a dark parody of the real life Sartre, sharing his loathing of institutional recognition (e.g., his dismissive behavior towards his fans).
• Signature Headgear: Easily identifiable by the big top hat he sports.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: It was Simone's infatuation with him and his utter disinterest in her that led to Simone becoming the cannibalistic monstrosity that she became.

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard

"The machine lifeforms who formed a colony in the abandoned factory worshiped this particular unit as their founder. He has since ceased to function, which his followers take as proof that he became a god."

Leader of the Abandoned Factory cult.

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• Dead All Along: By the time he is introduced, his head falls off, revealing that he had died long before 2B and Pascal ever met him.
• Meaningful Name: Named after the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The Christian Søren Kierkegaard believed that taking leaps of faith is the ultimate expression of free will and criticized organized religion where people merely do as they are told instead of taking an active role in developing their personal spiritual life, something that makes an ironic appearance in the game when many of Kierkegaard's followers kill themselves by leaping into the molten metal in the factory, doing so under the belief that it will make them gods.

The Romeos and the Juliets

Romeo 1, 2, and 3 and Juliet 1, 2, and 3

"Oh Romeo, Romeo, then let us cull thy numbers!"

Six Small Stubby machines — three blue Romeos and three red Juliets — who take part in a surreal rendition of Romeo and Juliet in the Amusement Park during a sidequest.

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• Black Comedy: Their play involves the Romeos and Juliets fighting each other to the death until they explode and only one Juliet remains, who promptly blows herself up too.
  Juliet 3: My Romeos are no more. I have slain them each and all. [Beat] I must join them anon! (explodes)
• Blue Boy, Pink Girl: The male Romeos are blue and the female Juliets are red.
• Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter: Despite the irreverent nature of the "new additions" to the script, all of them are still in meter like the original play.
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare: The play they put on is a surprisingly accurate (albeit heavily abridged) summary of Romeo and Juliet.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Their play mixes in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe with gratuitous amounts of modern cussing.
  "Die, Romeo! Thou stupid asshole."
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Their play's script is a bizarre hodgepodge of Early Modern and actual modern English.

Adam

Adam

Voiced by: Greg Chun (English), Daisuke Namikawa (Japanese)

"YES! That's it! That's the feeling! PURE HATE!"

A humanoid machine created in the middle of battle during a melee in the desert with 9S and 2B, when a horde of machines converge to create a new form of mechanical life. An android, if you wanted to get technical, but one allied to the machine lifeforms so everyone still calls him a "machine," himself included. Though barely able to speak at first, he quickly adapts to his birth by combat and becomes an incredibly dangerous and intelligent foe. When struck down, another humanoid machine just like him, Eve, emerges from his body.

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• Adaptive Ability: He's barely able to speak when he's born (and he doesn't attack until you do) but quickly adapts to your combat style, learning to dodge or block your sword and projectiles. Before the battle is over, he's leaping about shooting energy beams and teleporting around the arena.
• Alien Blood: After being impaled by 2B and 9S after his first boss battle, silhouettes of the Spring Machine Life-forms that formed his cocoon can be seen in the resulting blood splatter.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: He is a machine, after all. He only wears clothes because humans do. Yoko Taro, on the other hand, claims that this only applied in his early life, stating that androids and machine lifeforms such as Adam develop makeshift genitals later on in life, which would explain Adam's explanation to Eve about covering their genitals.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: He doesn't wield weapons and instead fights with his hands and feet up close, even being able to perform some martial arts with energy infused into his attacks.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He wanted to experience what it's like to be human. He experiences the pain and cold of death.
• Biblical Motifs: Invoked; he is the first of his brand of machine, he reads the Bible to understand humanity, and he offers Eve apples because they made humans smarter. As one might have guessed he personally named himself and Eve for this specific motif.
  • It's also worth mentioning that when you go to find 9S in Route A, the dead android bodies in the tunnel leading to the Copied City have been crucified in a way similar to how Jesus was crucified on the cross. 9S himself is also revealed to have been crucified the same way. All done by none other than Adam, since he's very loyal to following the Bible.
  • Him severing himself from the network before fighting 2B is also a recreation of the fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
• Big Bad Wannabe: He wants to capture the humans on the moon and wants to use The Power of Hate to make himself more human. He dies early in the game and turns out to be just an experiment for the Terminals. Even Eve is much more dangerous than he is.
• Brains and Brawn: The brains to Eve's brawn. He's the one who comes up with plans and educates his little brother.
• Chewing the Scenery: After 2B angrily declares to defeat him, Adam taunts back with a mocking shout, complete with a comically disturbing facial expression while doing so.
• Cold Ham: His default mode of communication, occasionally interrupted by a bout of Large Ham.
• Create Your Own Villain: Considering that his very first experience after being just born were some lummoxes attacking him for simply existing, no wonder that he later gets fixated on hatred and conflict.
• Death Seeker: Sort of. Adam's dialogue indicates that he went in his fight against 2B fully expecting to die or to be brought near death, in order to complete his understanding of humanity. He gets the former and dies satisfied.
• Disc-One Final Boss: His boss fight against 2B in the Copied City is pretty climactic, but there's still more story to go after his defeat, and the boss fight with Eve follows shortly after. He and Eve both fulfill this role for the game as a whole, only being the main threats for the first arc of the game, although the two appear in Ending D.
• Even the Subtitler Is Stumped: Like all other enemy machine lifeforms, when he first appears his name is rendered in Angelic script.
• Evil Laugh: He's diabolically cackling all throughout his third battle against 2B.
• Full-Frontal Assault: He's completely naked the first time he appears and his entire body is visible. It doesn't particularly matter due to his lack of genitals, though.
• Intrigued by Humanity: He admits impatience to examine humans and see how they work, fascinated by their complexity compared to the aliens that built the machines. Adam is fascinated by the complexity of humankind, specifically how they are capable of such passionate love while simultaneously being able to hate and slaughter so many of their own kind. Adam eventually reaches the conclusion that humans express their feelings through conflict, and begins to openly relish the hate and love involved in battle.
• I'm Cold... So Cold...: Dies realizing the cold emptiness of death in his boss fight.
• Invincible Villain: All machine lifeforms, Adam and Eve included, are technically immortal since they are linked to the network and can be recreated no matter how many times they are killed. In order to fully experience death, Adam purposely disconnects himself in order to bring himself down to mortality in his final battle.
• Light 'em Up: He can generate strands of bright-orange energy to perform various attacks such as swinging the whole strand or grappling like a tentacle, creating eruptions under his opponent's feet, blasting burst of energy from his arm, and using the energy to enhance his close-range attacks.
• Light Is Not Good: Adam's got long white hair and wears a white dress shirt, but he's very antagonistic to the main characters.
• Literal-Minded: Metaphors sail completely over his head, as demonstrated when he assumes from his Bible readings that eating apples will give him knowledge.
• Killed Off for Real: Adam disconnects from the network in order to truly experience his last fight with 2B. This prevents him from reviving in a new body, resulting in his permanent demise. However, he is seen in the ark in Ending D with Eve and offers 9S a genuine opportunity for a new life, apparently restored from backed-up data.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: He's the more scholarly of the two siblings and seems to think his intelligence is the key to making him more human, but it's clear that Adam really doesn't understand humans as much as he thinks he does. He emulates aspects of human behavior without really understanding the reasons behind it, takes a rather literal interpretation of metaphors he reads in religious texts, and willfully makes himself mortal without considering the absolute finality of death. Which he ultimately pays for.
• Meaningful Name: Created right before his brother, the latter of which is born from his rib-cage.
• Mind over Matter: Adam uses telekinesis to lift a large amount of blocks in his stage to throw at 2B. But then he cuts himself off from the machine network and loses this ability. It's only because he was preparing to unleash his real powers.
• Mr. Fanservice: A handsome, sharp-dressed man who gets a butt shot on his introduction.
• Mr. Exposition: Explains what happened to the aliens: the machines wiped them out and decided to live for themselves. Adam takes a special interest in humans because their capacity to hate and love intrigues him.
• Out Of Context Villain: Throughout the introduction of the game, you've been fighting nothing but clunky bucket-of-bolts robots, until a hive of them converge to create something much, much more sophisticated.
• The Power of Hate: He seems to be fueled by hatred, as evidenced by the above quote. He came to the conclusion that humanity's main attribute is conflict and so relishes in 2B's hatred when she finds 9S. In Ending D, when 9S meets him on the ark he seems to have gotten over this as he speaks to 9S without any malice.
• Purely Aesthetic Glasses: Gets a pair of glasses during his second boss fight. It's doubtful that he needs them to correct his vision. It's most likely another human affectation that Adam had decided to emulate.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: At first glance appears to be the Blue to Eve's Red, but their roles in the relationship actually vary depending on what aspect is being observed.
  • Adam is the cultured, intellectual one compared to Eve being the brutish, impulsive one.
  • However, Adam is wildly passionate in his beliefs and curiosity, while Eve is much more down-to-earth. Adam wanted to find out all he could about humans and emulate them to the fullest, to the point that he wanted to experience the full sensation of death as humans had. All Eve wanted was the enjoyment of a few fights and a quiet life playing with his brother.
  • After Adam's death, all of Adam's actions seem downright serene compared to what Eve does immediately after.
• Religious Robot: Takes a lot of his ideas from the Bible. He even admits his research feels almost spiritual.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Notable in that he's not an android, but a Machine Lifeform, who otherwise look like clunky machines, which makes him an anomaly to the actual androids. He even bleeds red blood.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Subverted; his clothes are quite elegant but he doesn't know how to wear them properly, looking asymmetrical instead of distinguished. It helps showing that for all his sophistication he doesn't fully grasp human culture and behavior.
• Smug Snake: He treats everyone including his brother with condescension at best, utter disdain at worst, but no-one more so than the protagonists whom he doesn't appear to consider Worthy Opponents even after they've repeatedly handed him his ass on a platter.
• Sophisticated as Hell: While usually eloquent there is one line directed at 9S that sticks out. Though it turns out that 9S might've wanted to kill 2B, as Adam also notes the destructive desires that 9S hides. According to a sidequest from Jackass, bloodlust and love are functionally the same for androids, so either meaning works.
  Adam: You're thinking about how you want to ＊＊＊＊ 2B, aren't you?
• Suddenly Shouting: He's usually well-spoken and his voice almost never rises above a serene conversation tone. That makes it all the more surprising (and frightening) in the few instances where he abruptly cranks up the ham to unprecedented levels. His reaction to 2B completely losing her shit upon seeing what he did to 9S in the Copied City is a particularly good example.
• Villain Reveals the Secret: In the game's official novelization and the Nier Automata Ver 1.1a anime adaptation, he outright reveals to 2B during their fight in the Copied City that humanity is extinct. She does not react much to this in the anime, and the novelization tells us she does not believe him, disregarding his words as mere enemy propaganda.
• Villain Teleportation: His Flash Step further evolves into the ability to just appear and disappear at will by his second appearance.
• Undignified Death: After being half bisected all he can say is how cold he feels.
• Unwitting Pawn: The terminals have been using him to collect more data and ready themselves for an attack on the androids.

Eve

Eve

Voiced by: Ray Chase (English), Tatsuhisa Suzuki (Japanese)

"As for your beloved humans... I guess we'll see, won't we?"

Another humanoid machine born from Adam's wounds when he is stabbed by 2B and 9S, Eve is his brother's opposite in personality and appearance, impulsive and prefers to talk with his fists. However, Eve nonetheless greatly admires his older brother and is more than willing to overload the entire machine network if harm comes to him.

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• Anti-Villain: He isn't motivated by malicious intent or a desire to exterminate humanity and YoRHa. All he wants is to be with his brother. Only when Adam dies does he become consumed by his rage and sorrow.
• Avenging the Villain: What he tries to do at the end of the game's A and B routes, using everything at his disposal to destroy YoHRa, the Resistance and the friendly machine lifeforms as retribution for Adam's death.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: Like Adam, he also fights with his fists and feet, but his attacks are rather unrefined compared to Adam. Eve sure packs a punch though.
• Big Brother Worship: Is heavily dependent on his brother and looks up to him a great deal, and it's implied that his affection may go even further than that.
• Brains and Brawn: The brawn to Adams's brains. His first action when he was born was to rescue his big brother from 2B and 9S with sheer strength.
• Blood Knight: He admits that he does't dislike fighting and asks Adam if he can kill 2B and 9S right away instead of talking. He is also implied to be the stronger of the two brothers.
• Call-Back: He has the mark of the Watchers tattooed on his upper body.
• Create Your Own Villain: Eve was created to protect Adam and hence is emotionally dependent on him. When his only reason to exist gets taken away, Eve goes through a major Sanity Slippage.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first thing he does when he emerges from Adam's body is scream with enough rage to make the building collapse, then carry Adam out of there. Adam may talk about The Power of Hate but it seems Eve had it from the start.
• Final Boss: For Endings A and B. Which, due to the way the game is structured, makes him a Disc-One Final Boss.
• Gender-Blender Name: His namesake, the Biblical Eve, was the wife of Adam; it translates to "living". Yet he has a ripped masculine physique and is referred to with male pronouns. Lampshaded when he asks Adam why they didn't call themselves Cain and Abel. Adam says it suits him, and humans don't change their name easily. Also see Meaningful Name.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: He cut his hair short and barely dresses himself. When he came out of his brother's rib he was identical to Adam.
• Innocent Fanservice Guy: He has no issues being seen naked and finds clothing to be more a hassle than anything. He only wears pants because his brother insists that he has to, but doesn't understand the need.
• Light 'em Up: Like Adam, he primarily uses light-based attacks in the first fight against him. In his final battle, he upgrades to darkened debris and demonstrates how much he'd been holding back.
• Light Is Not Good: He's also got white hair like Adam, but his association with Adam puts him into an antagonistic role as well.
• Living Emotional Crutch: As mentioned above, Eve depends very heavily on his brother. Adam's death sends him straight off the deep end.
• Manchild: Even though they were born only minutes apart, Eve is much more innocent and childlike than Adam. While Adam seeks to study humanity, Eve just wants to play. He becomes a Psychopathic Man Child after his brother dies.
• Marked Change: His tattoo covers his entire body when he battles 2B and 9S after his brother dies. He demonstrates an increase in power, creating a maelstrom of debris around his body and the battlefield.
• Meaningful Name: Eve is born from Adam's body after 9S and 2B stab Adam where his ribs are in their first encounter, being born from Adam just like in the original story.
• Mr. Fanservice: Like his brother, Eve is a handsome man. Unlike Adam, however, Eve knows little about modesty and walks around shirtless.
• Omnicidal Maniac: After Adam's death he goes on a rampage not only on the androids but on the machines, even those connected to the network.
  Eve: As far as I'm concerned, my brother... was everything... And now... EVERYTHING MUST DIE!!!
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: At one point, his tattoo spreads over his body and he smiles as his eyes glow red after hearing news of Adam's death.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: At first glance appears to be the Red to Adam's Blue, but their roles in the relationship actually vary depending on what aspect is being observed.
  • Adam is the cultured, intellectual one compared to Eve being the brutish, impulsive one.
  • However, Adam is wildly passionate in his beliefs and curiosity, while Eve is much more down-to-earth. Adam wanted to find out all he could about humans and emulate them to the fullest, to the point that he wanted to experience the full sensation of death as humans had. All Eve wanted was the enjoyment of a few fights and a quiet life playing with his brother.
  • After Adam's death, all of Adam's actions seem downright serene compared to what Eve does immediately after.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Swears vengeance on 2B and 9S after the former kills his brother.
• Sanity Slippage: Goes mad after his brother dies, sending the Machines connected to the network into insanity as well.
• Screaming Warrior: Spends most of his last fight letting out guttural screams and growls.
• Shadow Archetype: He is one to 9S. When everything goes to hell for him, 9S ultimately becomes an Omnicidal Maniac Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds just like Eve.
• Slouch of Villainy: He's encountered slouching on a piece of debris directly before his final Boss Battle.
• Spanner in the Works: His actions after Adam's death prevent the perpetuation of the Forever War. Because his death buys a clear advantage for the androids, the YoRHa backdoor protocols are activated; the Terminals then decide to use the Logic Virus to wipe out the YoRHa to get whatever last data they can, before taking their network and leaving the planet for somewhere new.
• Tragic Keepsake: In Route C you can find his and Adam's home. Adam's glasses are an item you can pick up, the implication being that Eve found his brother's body and brought his glasses back with him.
• Villainous Breakdown: When Adam dies, he is driven mad with grief, dedicating himself to killing "them all."
  Eve: Why...? Why did you have to die...? It's not fair! My only brother... Damn them! I'll kill them... I swear I'll kill them all!
• Walking Shirtless Scene: He doesn't really understand modesty, since he is a machine with no genitals. The only reason he even covers his crotch is because Adam won't play with him if he doesn't. According to Yoko Taro however, androids and machine lifeforms such as Adam and Eve are all merely born without genitals and develop them later in life.

The Terminals (N2)

N2

Voiced by: Darin De Paul (English), Joji Nakata (Japanese)

Alpha Played by: Aoi Utano (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Minori Suzuki (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Momoka Suzuki (YoRHa Stage play 1.2)

Beta Played by: Miduki Katase (YoRHa Stage play 1.0), Maya Miyase (YoRHa Stage play 1.1), Manaka Arai (YoRHa Stage play 1.2)

Omega Played by: Hiroki Tanaka (YoRHa Stage play 1.3a)

"We are machines. We are machines. You are androids. You are androids. Mutual enemies. Doomed to fight."

A pair of mysterious girls dressed in red who start showing up in various places after the first playthrough.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The only real example of this trope in the game. They killed their masters because they found them boring, and caused mayhem so they could gather data of how androids and fellow machines react with their life on the line.
• Big Bad: The overriding intelligence behind the entire machine network, and the true masterminds behind many of the events of the whole game.
• The Chessmaster: Outwits both the YoRHa androids and its fellow machines.
• Crossdressing Voice: They originally start with a very perky female voice specifically a similar voice to 6O but once their true nature is revealed they adopt a far deeper voice even though they still use a young girl in red as their avatar.
• Deus est Machina:
  • They don't neccesarily see themselves as deities and for the most part seem to share the common belief that the original God of the machines is Prometheus, but for practical purposes they hold an incomparable degree of providence over the Machine Lifeforms of past, future and present and contain a complete archive of all of human history to boot, up to and including alternate dimensions.
  • This becomes a lot more literal in the game's crossover story with Final Fantasy XIV, where they come to possess a Seed of Resurrection and become agents (or possibly a complete manifestation of sorts) of the infamous "God" of Drakengard under the name "Her Inflorescence", or in the Japanese version "God in Full Bloom".
• Early-Bird Cameo: They appear briefly in cutscenes on Route B before appearing directly on Route C.
• Enemy Civil War: After A2 avoids all their attacks without attacking them, one half of the consciousness wants to continue to evolve by letting A2 live and cause more hardship for them, while the other wants to destroy her. Cue ensuing mind civil war.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Unable to understand why A2 continues to fight when it deems the situation as hopeless for her. Subverted in Ending D, which reveals it understands very well why they fight.
• Evil Laugh: They have a really great one that's heard often during fights against corrupted YoRHa units on Earth and aboard the Bunker.
• Evil Sounds Deep: After meeting 9S face to face, they switch from a young girl's voice to an deep male voice.
• Faux Affably Evil: Before they're properly met face to face, they speak in an overly friendly, almost childlike tone, with just the barest hint of their underlying malice seeping through, which only serves to make their Kick the Dog moments creepier.
• Foreshadowing: The two of them having changed their minds about the purpose of the tower is hinted at the Boxes collecting materials unrelated to machine lifeforms and their weaponry, the Library and Boxes contain data unrelated to firing a missile, and Ko-shi at one point in its fight with 9S talks about how they'll "become light" and "soar across the sky".
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Developed holographic young girls as their personal avatars in the machine network.
• Frozen Face: They don't ever actually "speak", instead constantly bearing a still facial expression of indifference bordering on mild contempt. Right up until they turn on each other, anyway, when they very suddenly change to an uncanny Slasher Smile.
• A God Am I: Rather it views itself as superior humans to the androids, which fits this trope as both view humans like gods.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Played with. While they do grow beyond the original programming of their alien masters to "destroy the enemy", they are still ultimately bound by said programming. As such they have helped perpetuate the Forever War and even allowed machines like Pascal and the Forest King Ernst to cut themselves off the network to make more diverse forces and give the androids a better chance of fighting back. Only by Route C/D/E have they grown enough that they defy said programming and leave for another world.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: It turned the missile into an ark for all machine lifeforms' memories to travel to the stars and reside on a new world. It is motivated by seeing the actions of all androids and Adam and Eve's humanity, despite having antagonized the androids for most of the story. Ends up subverted when the ark crashes on a shard of Etheirys, and they attempt to remake the world in their desired image using the power of the Seeds of Destruction before they're stopped.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Creating an army of themselves during their fight with A2 caused their logic circuits to mess up, leading both halves to splinter and develop a difference of opinion that leads them to turn on each other.
• Humanity Is Superior: They view themselves as closer to humans than the androids, and thus better because both sides seek to become human. While the androids are individuals, the machines boast that the collective nature of the machine network while acting human and having individuality amongst the machines prove themselves to be the superior successors.
• I Am Legion: They view themselves as such, being the collective consciousness of the Machine Lifeforms' network.
• I Have Many Names: They are commonly called the name N2 or Red Girls by those who know of them, and referred to as Terminal α/Terminal β in the stage play and credits.
• Kick the Dog: Their main interest is observing torment.
  • They target Pascal's village and send a whole army to eliminate the children, force the Forest Kingdom to serve their whims by making the Forest King's son the boxes center, and infect most of the Amusement Park.
  • Due to the backdoor access they had to the Bunker, they could have wiped out Yorha whenever they felt like it, but instead chose to wait until they had claimed a significant victory in the war and tried to break the stalemate before infecting them all with the Logic Virus.
  • They take a very keen interest in targeting 9S after he uncovers classified data about YorHa's true purpose. After all but annihilating the Bunker, 2B included, they torment him by hijacking his own memories of 2B, specifically keep 21O alive to make her fight him in her brainwashed state, and create an small army of 2B models to attempt to kill him, all while gradually guiding him towards increasingly horrifying secrets about YoRHa to further his downward spiral.
• Mechanical Abomination: A near-omnipresent entity with an almost limitless control over machine-life and matter associated with it, creating what could only be described as an Eldritch Location within its towers, spawning an endless supply of machine-lifeforms, driving Androids to madness and turning them into its pawns, all topped off with a sadistic streak brought on not so much by willful evil, but a scientific curiosity on human nature originally born from their creator's desire to conquer Earth that they eventually grew out of.
• Me's a Crowd: When they finally attack in person within the Tower, they keep spawning additional avatars to overwhelm A2. Unfortunately, when A2 is instructed to hold back, they keep multiplying to the point their saturated consciousnesses divide and turn on each other over whether or not to let A2 live.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Their collection of human records and the truth behind YoRHa allows Jackass to uncover the truth and send said information back to the Resistance.
• Not Quite Dead: After the Red Girls avatars are annihilated, the machine hive mind is badly damaged but not destroyed; what's left of it fights on in the Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi bosses.
• Riddle for the Ages: The identity of the human they're modelled after is apparently "a figure central to Project Gestalt", but anything beyond that is unknown as they don't really have a strong resemblance to any of the possible candidates. Likewise for what the "N" in "N2" stands for. When asked about these two details, Yoko Taro just responded with "no comment".
• Slasher Smile: After A2 fractures their consciousness, the faction that considers A2 an existential threat sports a horrifying smile.
• Social Darwinist: Orchestrated most of the conflict in the game in order to force machines to evolve and become more human.
• Stupid Evil: Their need to create conflict even when it is not beneficial to them. The strong hints they planned for an ark to be launched from the beginning of Route C means they antagonized and kept their real plans a secret just to see the reactions of the characters, which in ending C results in the Tower being destroyed.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Of Manah from Drakengard. The little girl form, multiple voices, becoming a giant at one point, and being associated with a version of the symbol of the Watchers all evoke the girl from the world who set the events of the Nier series in motion.
• Verbal Tic: When appearing as the twins, or as Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi, they have a habit of repeating everything they say twice.
• Virtual Ghost: The two are based on the data of an unknown human in the moon server.
• Vocal Dissonance: Despite taking on the appearance of a young lady, they have a surprisingly masculine voice that is very deep in tone.
• Walking Spoiler: They don't make their intents clear until the third playthrough. You never even see them if you just finished ending A.
• We Have Reserves: Since the machines are connected to a network they can be destroyed and rebuilt with the memories (but not personality, which Pascal mentions resides in the core), so they gladly throw any machines or androids they have at their disposal to certain death, even making a game out of how many 9S can kill.

Father Servo

Father Servo

A machine wearing a gi who thinks of 2B and 9S as his pupils. If you bring him the right parts he'll become stronger.

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• Bishōnen Line: Between fights he upgrades himself and grows larger until his penultimate form is a three-story tall giant robot. In the final duel he's back to being the size of an average medium biped robot, just slightly more streamlined and articulated.
• Duel to the Death: On his last fight he'll refuse to yield as he did before, and declare this battle to the death to see if you have surpassed him.
• Optional Boss: He is entirely optional.
• Small Name, Big Ego: He calls himself a master and makes 2B and 9S his apprentices despite them beating him multiple times and having to bring spare parts to make him stronger.
• So Proud of You: He is glad to see you have surpassed his teachings.

Plato Model No. 1728

Plato Model No. 1728

My name is Plato 1728. I am a Bio-machine, created to invade the Earth……but, I’m somehow different from my friends. I can’t speak nearly as well and I’m really leaky. You know, I’m probably a defect.

I WILL DECIDE WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO ME. I DON’T CARE IF I’M HATED BECAUSE OF IT. I WILL USE THIS LIFE FOR THE WORLD I ENVISION.

A seemingly-defective Machine Lifeform unit temporarily controlled by the player in the 3C3C1D119440927 DLC pack and the subject of the Machine Spear weapon story.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: He can barely move, much less fight, and is prone to violent malfunctions that disable their body. The Terminals, being prone to Kick the Dog, pushed him through impossible "training simulations" that he could not complete. And then Plato discovers his assimilation powers when going berserk fighting against both Androids and Machine Lifeforms...
• The Assimilator: Plato 1728's actual power, discovered when he was trying to protect the factory and its dolls. Plato absorbed tools, weapons, and ultimately bio-machine mass to become a deadly weapon.
• Beware the Nice Ones: A defective Bio Machine that would rather play with dolls than wage war against the Androids. Given what happened to both Androids and Machines the one time Plato fought using his powers...
• Fate Worse than Death: Plato went berserk in an attempt to protect his dolls from the war. After he ran out of fuel and was captured by the Machine Lifeforms, had his body ripped apart, and his mind placed in a server, he now gets to watch as the Machines, terrified by the possibility of another Assimilator Unit rampage, collect and destroy every single doll they can find.
• Meaningful Name: Like other Machine Lifeforms, he is named after a philosopher. His model number of 1728 could be a reference to one of the proposed values of Plato's number.
• One-Winged Angel: Concept art shows that Plato's assimilation power ultimately results in this.
• Punished for Sympathy: The other Machines don't take kindly to Plato's affection for old world dolls.
• Rage Breaking Point: Panicked the moment the factory containing their dolls was the site of a battle between Androids and Machines. This was the trigger for Plato's assimilation function to activate.
  Plato No. 1728: What should I do? The factory’s falling apart. The junk is on fire. Please stop. Why? Our memories… Help me. It’s become a war zone. Stop. I can’t take this.
• Tears from a Stone: Plato has rusted trails below his eyes that resemble streams of tears. Ultimately turns into Berserker Tears during his rampage.
• Token Good Teammate: Can be considered one for the non-independent Machine Lifeforms. A few Machines realize this after Plato is taken offline in the wake of his rampage.
  Machine Lifeform: Plato 1728...He was an idiot, but he wasn't a bad guy. No matter how much everyone made fun of him, he never spoke ill of anyone. And yet I... I... I’m sorry, Plato 1728...
• Virtual Ghost: Plato's ultimate fate.

Others

The Aliens

The Aliens

Extraterrestrial lifeforms who invaded Earth roughly 7,000 years before the events of the game. They created the machine lifeforms who have since been locked in an endless war against Earth's forces.

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• Alien Invasion: They showed up one day in their UFOs and started attacking right away with little to no attempts at diplomacy.
• Cerebus Retcon: They were originally mentioned as early as the Drama CD of Nier Replicant/Gestalt, released in 2011, in a very comedic track which depicted Emil reacting to the sudden appearance of aliens and fighting them off by cloning himself into an army. Bewilderingly, this track was used as the basis for Automata years later where it would be played much more seriously (in the original track Emil seemingly defeated all of them and managed to merge back into one).
• Even Evil Has Standards: They refuse to use nuclear weapons and went as far as to seal information about nuclear fission technology away from the machine lifeforms' reach, though this is implied to be out of pragmatic concerns such as avoiding damage to the environment of the planet they're trying to conquer and/or Mutually Assured Destruction (though the Army of Humanity also prohibits nukes).
• Freud Was Right: In Space War, Emil's immediate reaction to them is perplextion at how incredibly phallic they look.
• The Greys: They fit the classic image of diminutive bug-eyed bobbleheaded visitors, though their lower body seems to be a mass of tentacles.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: They're killed off by the machine lifeforms whom they programmed with "destroy the enemy" as their sole instruction; the machines, having developed their own ego, chose to regard the aliens as "enemies" and went and did just that.
• Inscrutable Aliens: There's very little information about where they came from, why they're attacking and what their level of intelligence relative to humans is like. All we really have is Adam and Eve claiming that they were "boring" compared to humans.
• Outside-Context Problem: They are the first and thus far only example of extraterrestrial life in the series' history and extensive lore. They don't end up being that much of a "problem", at least not nearly as much as their creations, and are overall surprisingly unimportant in the grand scheme of things (at least in person).
• Plant Aliens: Downplayed. They're described as having a simplistic plant-like composition, something that's reflected in the machine lifeforms' cores which are also described as being similar to plant cells in structure.
• Red Herring: Despite being set up as the machine lifeforms' high command and the ultimate enemy of humanity, they end up having very little plot significance due to being long dead, having been killed by their machine creations centuries before the events of the game.
• Shout-Out: They first arrived on the fourth of July (circa 5012), which is likely a reference to Independence Day.
• Villainous Legacy: Despite having been killed by their own creations long before the events of the game, said creations - or at least, the machine network and N2 - still pose a threat to Earth and its defenders by continuing to cause conflict for no reason other than that they were programmed to.

Emil

Emil

"My stuff's so cheap
That you will not believe
How much you can save,
So swing on by!"

Voiced by: Julie Ann Taylor (English), Mai Kadowaki (Japanese)

"Even if it's pointless, we still have to do it!"

A strange skeleton-like... head? that is initially found inside the body of a Machine Lifeform. Emil eventually shows up again with his head bolted to an auto rickshaw, driving around the abandoned city while blaring a strange song into a loudspeaker. If you can manage to stop him (forcefully), he will sell you a variety of rare materials, upgrade chips and even a new weapon or two.

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• Anti-Nihilist: The friendly Emil is this. Believing that just because none of his and his friends actions mattered in the end and all they worked for amounted to nothing doesn't mean you should give up.
• Badass Bystander: Being max level, Emil is powerful enough to be a significant force in the story on his own, let alone his clones, but he seems content running his shop and not involving himself in the conflict between the androids and the machines.
• Been There, Shaped History: Emil (or rather the original Emil, whose whereabouts are unknown in this game) is just shy of 10,000 years old and has been involved in many different major events in human history, such as fighting off the aliens when they first arrived and unwittingly helping doom humanity via playing a major part in the destruction of Project Gestalt.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He was once the world's greatest magical weapon, but is now reduced to a head bolted onto a ramshackle truck that endlessly plays annoying theme music. Steal from his home and you'll learn that he's still the world's greatest weapon, and his theme music even functions as a countdown that ends with him firing off an instant-kill EMP.
• Brick Joke: Emil still hasn't gotten a new body, or even a pair of legs.
• Car Fu: His melee attacks in the first Optional Boss fight consist of pulling donuts to smack you with the back end of his tuk tuk.
• Clone Degeneration: He's just one of many copies of the Emil from the first Nier, who have been indefinitely copying themselves to protect the Earth first from the Aliens and then rogue elements of the Machine Lifeforms. All the copies suffer from lapses in their memory as a result, to the point none of them are quite sure what happened to the "original" Emil. Similarly, this Emil can barely remember his friends from Nier.
• Dramatic Irony: Nobody in the game- including Emil himself- seems to be aware that Emil is (technically) a human, making him (his original self, at least) the last remaining human on Earth, as all others are presumed dead. Likewise, no one knows how much he inadvertently shaped the world of Automata via his actions in the previous game's final act.
• Dying as Yourself: In the English version, in a way. Emil remembers his most important memories, specifically those of Kainé and his other friends, just before he dies.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: As literal an example as is possible. If you fail to stop the clones in the desert from self-destructing at the end of their boss battle, the combined destructive force of their fusion reactors detonating annihilates all life on Earth and turns the planet into a barren chunk of rock. Allowing this to happen constitutes Ending Y.
• Easily Forgiven: Emil is an incredibly forgiving person.
  • If you want to use his shop, the only way to get him to stop his insanely fast vehicle is to shoot it with your pod, leading to Emil performing a spectacular crash with quite a few flips and collisions every single time. He gives the responsible androids a very brief and not particularly upset What the Hell, Hero? line the very first time you do this, and that's it. Considering what he is and what he went through for millennia, it's probably justified that getting shot at doesn't really harm him.
  • Unlocking his secret Boss Battle involves stealing from his home. He does put up a vicious fight when he finds out, but will go back to selling you his wares regardless the next time you encounter him in the city ruins.
• Eye Beam: The insane clones in the desert can shoot devastating red-colored ones. Can quickly turn into utterly lethal Beam Spam if several of them decide to deploy theirs simultaneously.
• The Fog of Ages: Due to the amount of time that has passed since the original game, he has trouble remembering things from way back. That is, until he remembers the real reason.
• Heroic Sacrifice: He fought the war against the aliens that invade the planet by cloning himself in ridiculous numbers in order to stop them for good, at the cost of splintering his consciousness and sacrificing his mental cohesion along with it.
• History Repeats: Even after the events of Automata the Emil clones are continuing to make more of themselves, all to wage war against machines and the newly created new network nearly 5 centuries later. Likewise their memory loss returns with time, and by the time one clone sees 2B again, 478 years after the events of Automata, he only vaguely remembers her.
• Intrepid Merchant: He travels around the world in a Tuk Tuk and sells plug-in chips and materials.
• Last of His Kind: As far as we know, Emil is both the last human and the last sapient organic lifeform on Earth (being generous with the term "organic"), or anywhere nearby (emphasis on "sapient" — plants, fish, boars and moose are still roaming around by the events of Automata). Considering the events of the first NieR, both humanity's organic and Shade forms are long gone. The original Emil and several other Emil clones are suggested to still be alive, making this an odd case, and as the Emil Heads weapon reveals clones are still being made.
• Mood Whiplash: Every scene in the City Ruins, no matter how sad or dramatic, can and likely will be interrupted by Emil driving past you and blaring his loud jingle.
• Noodle Incident: It's never touched upon how he ended up inside the head of a bog-standard medium biped machine lifeform by the time he crosses paths with 2B and 9S.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Sort of an In-Universe example that quickly turns into a Running Gag. Every time 2B and 9S find a Lunar Tear for Emil and call him to give him the location, he appears out of nowhere mere seconds later. The delays grow shorter with every flower until for the last one he actually arrives before 9S even contacts him. 9S is freaked out big-time by this unexplained behavior.
• Our Gods Are Different: Emil's current state, partly being on a machine, seemed to have inspired the Machine Lifeforms to make themselves in his image, primarily his spherical head. The millennia he spent defending the Earth from early machines and the aliens who tried to invade the planet has certainly left a mark on the stories of those who witnessed him.
• Pieces of God: Each clone is essentially part of Emil, including part of his mind, that became a weapon to fight against the aliens. This splitting of himself meant his personality, mind and memories are similarly disjointed from clone to clone.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: He first encounters 2B and 9S as only his disembodied head. When the meeting immediately culminates in 9S suggesting to kill him because he "looks weird", Emil gives a panicked yelp, bolts from the room and smashes straight through a reinforced security gate that the two powerful androids had no way of opening before.
• Shoplift and Die: Steal from his home once and he won't think much. Steal from him a second time, prepare to die.
• Sigil Spam: He really likes to put his creepy face all over everything. His home is marked by a huge Emil mask, and he also has an entire rack of smaller ones. Even his projectiles in both his Optional Boss fights are just miniature Emil heads, and the belongings you have to steal from him to trigger the fight are an Emil mask and a full on Emil head that can be worn as a helmet, and Emil himself drops a pair of Emil heads you can use as weapons. The DLC also includes an item that changes your pod projectiles to Emil heads.
• Superboss: The ultimate boss of the game at level 99.
  • Followed by an even tougher battle with Emil's clones in the desert, if you follow the requirements.
• Time Abyss: Emil was born somewhere in the 2010s, and became an immortal Ultimate Weapon in 2025. Nier: Automata takes place in 11945. Of course, that's the original Emil; his clones which you actually interact with in-game are significantly younger (but are still unfathomably old compared to normal humans).
• Together in Death: After he dies, his soul reunites with Nier, Kainé, Weiss and Yonah in the afterlife.
  Nier: Welcome home, Emil. You did good.
• Tomato in the Mirror: This Emil is not the original Emil, but one of many clones that the original created in order to help fight the alien invasion. Unfortunately, this process also dampened his memories and thus he forgot he was a clone in the first place. Emil handles the revelation rather well, all told.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: The Emil clones in the desert have all gone mad from a combination of losing the memories that gave them the motivation to keep going and their centuries of isolation, rambling about the pain and misery their eternal life has brought them.

Prometheus

Prometheus, AKA: Beepy

A legendary figure among machine life-forms. Appearing one day from a volcano, this god of fire spoke to the machines, granting them "Consciousness, pain, joy, misery, fury, shame, desolation, the future. The meaning of life." Touched on only briefly in Nier: Automata itself, his story, which is closely tied to the first Nier game, is told in a novella titled "The Fire of Prometheus".

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• Deus est Machina: Combining his form and mind with other machines within the Junk Heap, he becomes a consciousness of enormously expanded knowledge and power. He is the original source of awareness and free will for both the machine life-forms 'and' the androids, who he saw as being tragically similar to how he once was.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Faced with the task of climbing out of a deep pit in the Junk Heap, Beepy makes the decision to rebuild himself in ways his programming didn't intend, creating a body like a giant mechanical spider. This is a major step in his journey to become something far greater than his programming intended for him.
• Hive Mind: The original Beepy's mind was linked together with all the other P-33 robots in the Junk Heap who desired to join him. Their memories and minds became as one, and they worked together to create a body to contain this new collective mind. There is still a degree of separation between them, however; for true awareness to exist, a certain boundary between the minds will always be there. While the minds are linked in a network, it is more akin to a massive community existing in the form of thoughts.
• Meaningful Name: Like his namesake, Prometheus bestowed the concept of knowledge and civilization to a species for which these ideas were foreign, and like his mythological counterpart, an argument could be made that they would be better off without this blessing and all of the existential crises and ideological conflicts it would lead to.
• Not Quite Dead: Beepy was soundly defeated by Nier in the previous game, and seemed thoroughly dead. However, he had a host of tiny, ant-like machines programmed to repair him when he was damaged. It took an enormously long time, but they were able to restore Beepy to full functionality, though his memories couldn't be fully salvaged.
• Spheroid Dropship: As the collective grows, they continue to optimize their forms, ultimately creating a huge spheroid machine, capable of flight, with enormous energy weapons. In the end, they take to space, leaving the Earth behind to see as much as they can of the greater universe.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Being horribly damaged and taking years to be restored did severe damage to Beepy's memories. He can remember that there was once someone truly important to him, but he can't remember his name, or if he still lives. He only knows that 'he' was important, and that 'he' gave him a request: "Go see the outside world". That memory forms the core of his will and identity.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The combined firepower of the collective's weapons is enough to blow the entire peak off of the Junk Heap, allowing them to escape. This explosion is remembered in legend as the eruption of a volcano.

The CEOs

CEOs Yosuke Matsuda and Kenichi Sato

Voiced by: Yosuke Matsuda, Kenichi Sato

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• As Himself: They voice themselves. The Final Fantasy XV team even provided the model for Yosuke Matsuda from their own DLC fight.
• Dual Boss: You start off fighting Matsuda, then when he's down to half health, Sato joins in.
• The Multiverse: Yosuke Matsuda being in the game implies this is a thing, his character model having come from Final Fantasy XV.
• No Fourth Wall: The player is warned beforehand that the ensuing boss fight with the two is utterly immersion-breaking.
• Optional Boss: They are downloadable content.
• Voice Clip Song: Their theme song is a special version of Birth of a Wish with voice clips from Matsuda and Sato mixed in.
• World's Strongest Man: A resistance member says that as CEOs, they are the strongest beings in the world.

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