Trivia / NieR: Automata

• All There in the Manual: Continuing the tradition of Taro Yoko games having odd forms of side material, a large part of the backstory to Automata comes from the YoRHa stage play which tells the full story of A2, and more expanded story is being told at the Nier music concerts, of all places. The main English voice cast performed it on Youtube (with Kira Buckland cosplaying as 2B, no less!). And it was a cold reading. The group wanted to experience the same amount of shock in regards to the revelations in the script that the people watching did, so they didn't read any of the script until the actual reading.
• Approval of God: Yoko Taro complained on Twitter about the outrageous amount of pornographic fanart of 2B - because combing through all of it on his own time was such a hassle, so he requested the fans compile the best pictures into a zip file and send it to him. After some fans did so, he responded "The Internet is amazing."
• Breakthrough Hit: While Yoko Taro's games had enjoyed reasonable success in Japan prior to Automata, they had only really amassed a small cult following in the west thanks to their mediocre reviews, lack of publicity, low production values and various gameplay and technical issues. Automata has been the first game he's worked on to be critically acclaimed and a financial success outside of Japan, and really brought him into the mainstream limelight as someone to be on the lookout for when it comes to the Japanese videogame landscape.
• Colbert Bump: The original Nier and the Drakengard games were merely Cult Classics in the West; Automata eventually did this for them due to its commercial success, to the point that Nier received an Updated Re Release for eight-gen consoles.
• Directed by Cast Member: Greg Chun (who voices Adam) directed the English dub for episodes 9-12 of the anime after its return from the production hiatus.
• Dueling Works:
  • It was meant to be this with Scalebound, both being console exclusive (Xbox One in Scalebound's case versus PS4 for Automata) PlatinumGames titles with PC releases. Unfortunately, Scalebound was cancelled.
  • In reality, it is with Mass Effect: Andromeda, both being AAA Action RPGs of opposing action genres (Hack and Slash Vs. Third-Person Shooter) developed on opposite sides of the world, and released close to each other in the same month.
  • It was also one with Horizon Zero Dawn, as both games are open world action/adventure games about a Robot War that takes place in the far future featuring the extinction of humanity and what happened afterward, and in a mysterious setting and a story filled with shocking plot twists. Both games have a score of 89 on Metacritic, but there was a brief period when Automata was outscoring Horizon by 1 or 2 points, leading to some heated exchanges from the Horizon fandom. The two games were also released within one week of each other. Ironically, Yoko Taro himself is a big fan of said game.
  • A lesser example, but there were shades of this with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, what with being released within one week of each other, and also both games being post-apocalyptic open world action/adventures with lots of hostile robots.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: A "Black Box Edition" is available for this game. Along with the game and some in-game bonuses, it comes with a figure of 2B, an art book, a soundtrack sampler with music from the first Nier and Automata, and a steelbook case.
• Newbie Boom: The game was many people's first introduction to the larger Drakengard series, selling far more units and earning a much better critical reception than any other game in the franchise to date. This is due to a combination of factors, including the involvement of PlatinumGames (whose games typically don't sell exceptionally well either, but tend to be very well-regarded), good marketing from Square-Enix, Akihiko Yoshida's eye-catching character designs (leading to a swath of fanart), among others.
• No Export for You: For reasons unknown, the PC version is region-locked for SEA, leaving players in that region unable to purchase it. As of May, it was finally opened, with the game accessible to all region uncut, however PC players had to deal with other kind of problems...
• Playing Against Type:
  • Kira Buckland is typecast as, in her own words, "hyper, young girls." 2B is much more stoic and deep than the characters she usually plays (and needless to say, most feel she hits the role right out of the park).
  • Similarly, A2 is just about as far outside of the usual wheelhouse of Cherami Leigh as you can get. Her typical roles consist of strong, determined young women who stop at nothing to fight for their ideals and loved ones, often with a hidden cute and soft side to them. A2 is a very bitter, cynical, and tired deserter who is just out for herself and vengeance, yet once again delivers a killer performance. Cherami would later use a similar voice for her performance as the female version of V in Cyberpunk 2077.
• Production Posse: This is the third Yoko Taro game to be scored by Keichii Okabe and his team at Monaca.
• Promoted Fanboy: The lead designer of Automata, Yasuhisa Taura, is a fan of the original Nier, and in his free time he would think about what a Nier sequel would be like. When Square Enix approached PlatinumGames in hopes of working on a project together, PlatinumGames had a pitch for a Nier sequel ready.
• Role Reprise:
  • Julie Ann Taylor (English) and Mai Kadowaki (Japanese) return to voice Emil from Nier.
  • Likewise, Eden Riegel (English) and Ryōko Shiraishi reprise their shared role as Devola and Popola.
  • The anime brings back the Japanese and English voice actors from the game to reprise their roles.
• Rule 34 – Creator Reactions: Yoko Taro's comment on porn of 2B, roughly paraphrased, is "please make a zip folder of all the pictures for me to share".
• Schedule Slip: The anime was hit by this twice due to production issues blamed on Covid:
  • The first delay came with episode 4 being put on hold from its release on January 28 only for it to resume airing on February 18.
  • The second and much larger delay came after episode 8 in March and with episodes 9-12 on hold indefinitely, until they finally aired altogether on July 23. Adding onto that, the English dub for eps 9-12 would end up streaming 4 months later on November 18.
• Sequel Gap: Released 7 years after the first game. Its very existence, revealed in 2015, came as a shock to everyone.
• Sleeper Hit: In a year of several highly anticipated video games being released, very few expected the spin-off of a video game series largely unknown to western audiences to gain much fanfare. However, the polished gameplay, positive word-of-mouth, and (arguably) the void left by the disappointment of Mass Effect: Andromeda led Automata to becoming one of the better received video games of 2017 with over one million copies of the game being sold worldwide within a month of its western release, with the 1.5 million mark being crossed by the start of June with little sign of slowing. By May of 2019, over two years past the original release date, it had sold over 4 million copies across all platforms. And in November 2022, five and a half years since the original release, it reached 7 million copies sold. It helps a lot the game doesn't suffer the same crippling problems of censorship and cultural changes that some previous games of the franchise suffered in the past when translated and adapted to English.
• Star-Making Role: Automata raised the profiles of Kira Buckland and Kyle McCarley enormously, particularly in the video game community (though Buckland already had some traction thanks to her indie voice acting work on Newgrounds) — McCarley in particular benefited greatly from the success of the game, since he was still fairly new to voicework in early 2017; his fame would be solidified by Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia later in the year. It was also part of a trifecta of roles that Cherami Leigh got in early-mid 2017 that showed she had range far beyond what she often found herself pigeonholed into.
  • The game also ended up raising Yui Ishikawa's profile among a Western audience, who prior to this had really only known her as the voice of Mikasa Ackerman and helped to raise awareness of her outside of that single anime series.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: In the mid 2022's, someone posted a video of them in a secret church area that's been supposedly undiscovered until now. The video spread like wildfire with many others trying to replicate the video to get to this area and it eventually gone into Memetic Mutation. People involved in the game, including Yoko Taro himself commenting on the original video added to this. It was revealed in a Twitch livestream that it was a mod.
• Word of Saint Paul: During a series of livestreams of the game with Kira Buckland, Kyle McCarley mentioned that the voice actor for the Council of Humanity's broadcasts was Matthew Mercer. This is the only confirmation of the Council's voice, as it is otherwise uncredited (although Mercer is credited under "Additional Voices", and his voice isn't exactly unrecogniseable). On the other hand, in response to the stream chat begging to know who the Commander's English voice actress was, both he and Buckland refused to divulge her identity, citing legal issues involved with keeping her VA uncredited.
  • According to The NieR: Automata World Guide Volume 2 released in 2020, the Commander's voice actress was Colleen Villard.

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