Video Game / NieR: Automata

Glory to mankind.

"Everything that lives is designed to end.
We are perpetually trapped... in a never-ending spiral of life and death.
Is this a curse?
Or some kind of punishment?
I often think about the god who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle... and wonder if we'll ever have a chance to kill him."

— 2B's Opening Monologue

NieR: Automata is a stylish action role-playing game developed by PlatinumGames and published by Square Enix for the PlayStation 4 and Steam, and later Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. It is set in the same universe as the Drakengard spinoff NieR, but Automata is set in its distant future and the original game is not required viewing.

The year is 11945 A.D. For thousands of years, mankind has been locked in a seemingly endless war against an Alien Invasion and their armies of "machine lifeforms". The last few remnants of humanity have been forced to take shelter on the Moon, from which they deploy intelligent android troops to liberate Earth in their stead.

To break this stalemate, humanity creates a new organisation called YoRHA, comprising their most advanced android models and military technology to date. Stationed upon an orbital base called the Bunker, the YoRHA-model androids work tirelessly as the new frontline against the machine lifeforms occupying Earth. 2B ("Number 2, Type-B") is an enigmatic but dedicated YoRHA combat model who is assigned to a plucky intelligence operative named 9S ("Number 9, Type-S"). Together they are sent to the ruined surface of Earth to investigate the strange activities of the machine lifeforms, some of whom appear to be mimicking aspects of human civilisation.

Series creator Yoko Taro, producer Yosuke Saito (Dragon Quest X, Drakengard) , and composer Keiichi Okabe (Drakengard, NieR) return in the same roles. Atsushi Inaba (Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Bayonetta 2) is acting as co-producer for PlatinumGames, while regular Square Enix artist Akihiko Yoshida (Final Fantasy XIV) designed the main characters. Also, the lead game designer is Takahisa Taura. The goal was to make a new NieR game true to the spirit of the original with better gameplay. The games also have a series of side story plays known as YoRHa, serving as both predecessors (in its initial installments) and prequels (in later installments) to the main story.

Trailers: Announcement trailer - Gameplay Trailer - Second Gameplay Trailer

The PS4 version was released in 2017 on February 23 in Japan, March 7 in the USA, and March 10 in Europe, while the PC version was released on March 17. Following this it was made available digitally on the Xbox One platform as the NieR: Automata BECOME AS GODS Edition on June 26, 2018. A Nintendo Switch version titled The End of YoRHa Edition was released on October 6, 2022.

An anime adaptation was announced on the game's 5th anniversary. At Aniplex Online Fest on September 24, 2022, the studio was announced to be A-1 Pictures and to begin airing in January 2023 with a full title of NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a. It will be split into two cours, with the second half announced to be currently in production.

Beware of spoilers, both marked and unmarked.

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Provides examples of:

A - F

• Abominable Auditorium: The game features an… "amusement" park invested by robots who clumsily try to imitate the long gone humans, which includes an old theater. Said theater became the den of a machine called Simone who went berserk and started to kill both machines and androids to incorporate their parts and become "beautiful". After you defeat her in a boss fight, the theater becomes used for an extremely weird (and hilarious) rendition of Romeo and Juliet by small machines.
• Aborted Arc: One occurs almost immediately after the prologue: The Commander tasks 2B and 9S to head down to Earth to meet up with the Resistance and find an informant who has gone missing. However, once they touch down and meet Anemone, the informant is never mentioned and the whole mission is forgotten by everyone. The Ver 1.1a anime adaptation addresses this in its third episode, with the missing informant turning out to be one of the YorHa corpses found in the desert apartment region shortly before 2B and 9S have their first encounter with Adam.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Every android weapon with a cutting edge must have at least one, considering how they're used to cut apart legions of armored robots day in, day out. 2B's late-game boss fight in the Abandoned Factory provides a particularly good example that plays out in a cool Diagonal Cut cutscene.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: One of the many areas the YoRHa squad can explore are a network of sewers that are big enough for them to stand up inside with room to spare.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Levels, inventory, money, weapons, and chips are shared between all characters, even though they acquire them separately and should have their own individual resources. While it may not make a whole lot of sense story-wise, it does make for smoother gameplay in Route C where you routinely switch between 9S and A2, cuts down on grind, and ensures there will be no useless items.
• Achievements in Ignorance: One sidequest has you funding the exploits of a hare-brained scientist. After you give him $100,000, he "fails" sending a rocket to the moon because he sent it to Mars. You can even buy a facehugger from him to act as a mask.
• Achievement Mockery: The game gives you the "What Are You Doing?" achievement for looking up 2B's dress.
• Action Bomb: The machine lifeforms field various types of suicide bomber units, with some of them being little more than explosive barrels on legs. Destroying them before they can blow themselves up yields a nice XP reward and, if timed right, can wipe out entire enemy squads in the ensuing explosion.
• Action Girl: All of the combat oriented YoRHa are female, and all of them can put up quite a fight, but of course 2B and A2 are the primary examples.
• Actionized Sequel: While the first game was action-themed already, Cavia gave it really simplistic controls due to their inexperience. This game gives the action the PlatinumGames treatment.
• Actor Allusion: Alexis Tipton once again voices an innocent villager that is forced to escape their village once it’s under attack and loses numerous loved ones in the process. ^note Amusingly, in Japanese, Pascal is voiced by Aoi Yūki, who does the main instigator of Shiki’s plot, Sunako Kirishiki. A2’s voice actor Cherami Leigh does Sunako in English.
• After the End: Takes place even further after the catastrophe that seemingly destroyed humanity in the first NieR, now focusing on the YoRHa combat androids as they fight against the machine lifeforms commanded by the aliens who invaded the planet.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • The machine lifeforms killed their own masters, and their new leaders (by the merit of being able to corrupt the simpler machines into doing their bidding) relish in conflict as it brings forth evolution. That said, the aliens' incompetence is also a major factor, as they programmed the machines to "destroy the enemy" without making it clear what the enemy was.
  • When Grün - a gigantic machine lifeform from the early years of the Machine War that was created specifically to destroy androids - can't find any more androids to kill in the vicinity, it massacres its machine buddies instead. Unable to stop the rampaging Omnicidal Maniac, they banish it to the depths of the Pacific, where it remains for many millennia.
• Alien Invasion: The machine lifeforms were brought to earth by an alien race.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The Emil-centric Space War, the Fires of Prometheus short story, and the YoRHa Stage Play all detail major parts of the backstory of Automata, including the events of the Alien Invasion that brought the Machine Lifeforms, the initial spark that drove both sides' seemingly endless fascination with humanity of the past, and A2's full backstory. Some of these details are given in the game itself, but from various Unreliable Narrators who lack the full context or details the other works provide.
  • The novella The Memory Cage tells us why 9S, an android who wasn't built for physical combat, is capable of fighting in the first place. It also contains a battle between 2B and 9S that will serve as the foundation of their relationship, since it's implied that this is the first time 2B had to kill 9S due to her true function as an Executioner-type.
  • The soundtrack came with a coded message about 9S' memories: The memories of what the Ark is like inside (from one of the two Ending D outcomes), where he reveals it's similar to the Garden of Eden and free of original sin. He fears that a person like himself is unworthy of being in such a paradise.
  • An official timeline from the strategy guide explains what happened after the death of the final Gestalt: a small number of androids become "Independists" and leave for Australia after choosing to abandon their attachment to humanity; the aliens take over South and North America; a "Dragon" weapon is created to fight the aliens and machines; Beepy ascends towards space after altering the Machines and numerous androids; and the Command leads both the Resistance and The Army of Humanity, and YoRHa oversees Project Gestalt, punishing all Devola and Popola models. Other points in the timeline also detail events following the game's Endings C/D/E, which include two unknown events (2B and 9S reawakening respectively) shortly after the ending of the game, an armistice between Humanity and the Machines with Pascal as the Machines' leader, and a civil war that eventually breaks out between Machine Lifeforms following Emil's sighting of presumably-2B 400 years later.
  • The Nier Concert event details short story events spoken from the perspective of the characters and details numerous events from the well-meaning creator of YoRHa, Zinnia, and the descent into madness by 9S prototype Number 9, 2B learning that both 9S and A2 will likely never wake up following the events of Ending C/D, 9S asking 2B to continue to kill him as long as it means they'll meet each other again, and the story of how A2 encountered 2B and 9S multiple times and killed them in each encounter, and that she learned how to fight back against S-Type hacking.
    • Post Ending E story about 9S not waking up was actually a troll by Yoko Taro, included in the script sold before the concert to avoid spoilers leaking out. He wakes up during the actual concert. A2 isn't mentioned in the play at all aside from one sentence about her memories, and when Taro was asked about her he said that it's up to the player to decide if she woke up or not.
  • The Strategy Guide contains other numerous details which include the Timeline mentioned above, and how Adam hacking into 9S and 9S hacking into Eve caused parts of their data to merge with his own, which is why his memories of 2B fight like Eve on Route C.
  • YoRHa Boys explains why YoRHa is such a Lady Land, which is never brought up in the games.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • Eve assaults the Resistance camp near the end of Routes A and B, and attempts to destroy Pascal's village as well.
  • The Logic Virus hits the Bunker's upload server, infecting all of the androids there minus 2B and 9S (the latter having recently deferred their data backup after finding suspicious activity in the server). The Bunker ends up getting destroyed in the chaos.
  • In Routes C/D, Pascal's village is assaulted again by Logic Virus-infected machines. This time, it doesn't survive the assault and the survivors flee elsewhere.
• Almost Kiss: In Ending A/B, 2B and 9S stare deeply into each other's eyes and she leans in close like she's going to kiss him - before, at his own request, she places her hands on his throat and squeezes instead.
• Alternate Personality Punishment: The twin androids Popola and Devola are not the same units responsible for the demise of humanity in NieR, but all androids are hard-coded to shun and dislike them as punishment for the sins of their forebears.
• And I Must Scream: The story for the Fang of the Twins weapon. Twins were sacrificed and their souls put into the blade. At first they are happy to be united for eternity, but eventually begin to go mad.
  "We are together. We are one. Life or death. Even if we kill our foes. Even if we kill each other. Our two bodies will be as one for all time. Someone separate us. Oh god please someone help m"^note It ends cut off like this. It's not clear if this was intentional or a typo.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Finishing Route C unlocks several purely cosmetic items for the protagonists, like two suits of Powered Armor for 2B, a "camouflage visor" that's so stealthy it completely removes her black blindfold, or a wig for A2 that restores her long hair. Others can be acquired through various sidequests, like ribbons or a Lunar Tear flower that can be worn in a character's hair. Last but not least, the 3C3C1D119440927 DLC introduces another bunch of cosmetic items that can be unlocked by completing quests or competing in arena battles. Some of them even confer actual gameplay bonuses, and one of the 3C segments of the DLC's name explicitly stands for "3 Costumes".
• Another Side, Another Story: Route B is basically the first playthrough from 9S' perspective, while Routes C/D (where the other main endings are) takes place after Routes A/B, and you play as 9S and A2.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Just about any fetch quest you accept will cause your Pod to detect and mark a place where the game spawns enemies that are guaranteed to drop the items you need. Not only is the area usually not far off from the quest-giver, this also means that you won't have to waste some of the rarer resources in your possession.
  • After the Bunker becomes inaccessible in Route C/D/E, if you die as A2 or 9S, you don't have to worry about losing and retrieving your chips and dead body. You do, however, need to remember to save often since you're forced to reload a save file if that happens so it evens itself out.
  • Easy Mode and its various Auto-Attack/etc. chips are this. The Auto-Evade chip alone makes the active character virtually impossible to kill because they automatically and successfully dodge almost all incoming attacks. It's made even easier by the lack of any difficulty-related achievements/trophies. The only instance you'll have to beat without their support is, unfortunately, the Nintendo Hard Bullet Hell segment to unlock Ending E.
  • Once a couple of good Drop Rate Up chips are installed (capping at +90 percent), enemies start dropping insane amounts of loot that becomes a real chore to pick up individually. Popping in an Auto-Collect chip removes this headache quite nicely.
  • During the final battle of Ending E, if you die 50 times, you will receive a damage buff. You'll receive a second damage buff if you die another 50 times after that, but the small targets will become invincible.
  • Beating the game the first time will get the player a message from Square Enix explaining that everything up to that point was only Route A, and that there are multiple Routes to explore, for newcomers wondering why the game is so short and why the Final Boss was only level 30.
• The Anti-Nihilist: Ending E pushes the player into this role during the Nintendo Hard Bullet Hell sequence: every time you die, you are asked questions like "GIVE UP HERE?", "IS IT ALL POINTLESS?", "DO YOU THINK GAMES ARE SILLY LITTLE THINGS?", "DO YOU ADMIT THERE IS NO MEANING TO THIS WORLD?", and when you answer "NO" to continue, messages left from other players tell you that You Are Not Alone and to not give up.
• Anyone Can Die: And in fact, just about everyone does die, including all three playable characters. The only main characters who are confirmed to survive the entire story are Anemone, Jackass, and the Pods. You're not required to kill Pascal or delete his memories (which basically amounts to the same thing in the long run), but what happens to him is so unbelievably depressing that it's arguably crueler to let him live. Fortunately, the narrative takes pity on the protagonists if you complete Ending E, where the Pods rebuild 2B, 9S, and A2 to give them a new life free of YoRHa's control.
• Apocalypse How: Caused by an invasion of aliens who created the machine lifeforms to do their dirty work, forcing the remaining humans to flee to the Moon. Considering it's a continuation of the first Nier, humanity was wiped out by the White Chlorination Syndrome and the survivors became Shades, whose corporeal forms were eventually destroyed by the death of the Shadowlord. As of Automata, the only remains of humanity exist as DNA information and memories on the moon.
• Arc Number: In the "Deserving of Life" music video, the numbers 1728 crop up quite frequently and are associated with emotions.
• Arc Words:
  • "Glory to mankind."
  • "This cannot continue."
  • "We must die & become as gods!"
• Are You Sure You Want to Do That?: Upon achieving Ending E, you are given the choice to send help to another player struggling with the final Bullet Hell sequence. Beforehand, however, you are warned that consenting to send aid would mean erasing all of your save data, including access to Chapter Select and Debug Mode until you unlock them again in a subsequent playthrough. You also have no input over who receives your aid; the player you help is chosen at random, and you are warned that it may even be someone you don't even like. You are asked multiple times if you wish to go through with this sacrifice to help others.
• Artifact Title: Despite taking place in the same world as NieR, Nier himself is long dead. None of the characters from said game appear in this one, aside from Emil (who might be a clone), and Devola and Popola (who definitely aren't the originals). Since the last living Replicant passes in the year 4198, it's clear that the definition of what is considered "human" is in question. Ultimately, many of the events of the story are the product of Nier's actions in the previous game, with the alien invasion being the exception.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • Despite it being stated with relatively little significance, the sun apparently never sets. This would rapidly render the sun-exposed portion of the planet inhospitable, to say the least. This is also a Call-Back to the first game, where the Earth had been tidal-locked this way for thousand of years.
  • The human constructs you can see everywhere, while in ruins, are in far better shape than they have any right to be considering they were abandoned thousands of years ago. You can even find objects like a toothbrush or a lipstick in a recognizable state in the mall, even though they should have degraded entirely by now.
• At Least I Admit It: A key difference between the YoRHa Androids and the Machine Network. While both crave to be like humans, only the Machine Network actually understands how far apart they are from humanity and that, in order to truly emulate them, they need more than just their appearance, they need emotions. So the Machines try everything they can to be more human, contrasting YoRHa, who disdain the Machines for this effort, that assumes they are the servants of humanity, and remain in that position until the end of the game. The game further shows this contrast by having the Machines be practically human in behavior by the start of the game whereas it takes YoRHa the entirety of Nier: Automata to have multiple androids that are indistinguishable from humanity.
• Attack Its Weakpoint:
  • Grün, far and away the largest enemy in the game, has armor and shielding so strong that not even a direct hit from a YoRHa Kill Sat deals it any damage. Its only weak points are the EMP generators on its back that create its anti-laser shields, and its gaping maw. 2B and 9S make good use of all of them, to spectacular effect.
  • Most regular enemies and even most bosses largely avert this trope, with the exception of Goliath Bipeds that take significantly more damage from hits to the torso than to the limbs, and the large flying snake machines with their big, glowing middle segment. The Killer Rabbit at the amusement park is extremely vulnerable to 9S' hacking (but only after it's been awakened), but that is true for any machine lifeform, so it doesn't really count.
• Auto-Revive: With a Reset chip equipped, you have a chance to revive when you run out of HP.
• Award-Bait Song: "Weight of the World", which plays over the end credits. It starts off low-key, gets more uplifting as it goes on, and covers a broad theme of a person shouldering the burden of many. The End of YoRHa version from Ending E manages to add in vibes of a Charity Motivation Song, but unlike most, it actually manages to work.
• Awful Truth: Quite a few actually, and all of which can be found under The Reveal. As the one to learn all these truths, 9S is the one who ends up broken by the knowledge, combined with his other traumatic situations on Route C/D/E.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • The amnesiac Resistance member is revealed to be a YoRHa E-Type unit, who has deleted her memories due to being unable to deal with her guilt. When she remembers, she reveals her original self has gone insane from years of killing friends and lovers, taking pleasure in murder.
  • As 9S's sanity breaks down further every time more truths are revealed to him, the more noticeable his psychological state deteriorates. Even Pod 153 expresses severe concern over his mental state. By the time he faces off against A2, he has the same tell-tale red eyes of madness as hostile machines due to being infected by the Logic Virus (again).
• Backstory: The events of the YoRHa stage play happens before the events of Automata and goes into the suicide mission undertaken by A2 and her companions. It reveals several key elements of the story that aren't revealed in-game until much later.
• Badass Normal: Exaggerated by 9S. 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.
• Bag of Sharing: All three protagonists share the same inventory across time and space. It doesn't matter where they are, whom they're with, if they're currently enemies or not, or if they're reliving previous parts of their adventure (via chapter select) - their inventory only improves, never resets.
• Bag of Spilling: A very minor example is 2B losing one of her swords, Virtuous Treaty, after the prologue mission. It's so minor because recovering it is so easy: it's basically around the corner from where she and 9S make planetfall again, at the Abandoned Factory where the Boss Battle destroyed the bridge.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy:
  • Despite what that one tweet showed, 2B does not have a perfectly rendered butthole.
  • Additionally, after Adam's birth, he is shown fully naked and with no features on either side.
  • Side materials confirm that Androids not built with genitalia. The android can later ask for it to be built in.
• Batter Up!: Unusual example. The player can combo the sword with the knuckles and use the blade as a giant bat to send one of the knuckles flying at an enemy.
• Beat: When 9S becomes more unstable after discovering YoRHa androids' Black Boxes are made from machine cores, Pod 042 and 153 discuss doing something about that...then take a silent moment before saying they're not really sure how to fix that aside from having him get some simple rest and repairs.
• Becoming the Mask: The machines created machine fish to wipe out aquatic life. Eventually these machines began acting like living fish until they became incorporated into schools. Machine fish can also be caught while fishing.
• Beehive Barrier: Seen in use by both the androids and the machine lifeforms:
  • The access points scattered around the map have these initially, to protect themselves against machine lifeform attack. It is interesting to note that they are capable of bringing the shield back online if you lure a machine lifeform within its range again, preventing you from saving or fast-traveling away until it is dealt with.
  • When attacked with Pod fire, both Adam and Eve momentarily use one before reflecting the shots.
  • 9S deploys a geodesic version in anticipation of Grün's EMP attack.
• Behemoth Battle: It doesn't get much more behemothy than two 500-foot Engels-class Goliaths smashing each other apart in close combat.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Happens rather tragically with the child machines in Pascal's care. Faced with the prospect of horrible death by way of cannibal machines, they destroy their own cores out of fear that Pascal and A2 may not be able to protect them.
• BFG:
  • When Grün attacks, the huge android aircraft carrier it destroys can be seen toting gigantic twin-barrelled weapon emplacements on its upper deck. Unfortunately, it never gets to use them. 9S then utilizes a building-sized coastal gun he calls a mortar (actually a flat trajectory artillery piece more akin to a howitzer) in an attempt to take down Grün by aiming for its gaping maw.
  • The YoRHa flight units' mounted guns are larger than their pilots, and almost as long as the flyer itself.
  • Most guns used by machine lifeforms are vastly oversized for the frames that wield them. On units like small stubbies and small spheres, they make up half or more of their total size, and both of them should constantly fall over due to the gross imbalance of their design.
  • The guns of medium bipeds are a more subdued example compared to the above, but still almost as large as any of the protagonists.
• BFS:
  • The "Large Sword" category is entirely about titanic blades, from odachi to greatswords to axes. Of note is the surfboard-sized franchise favorite Iron Will, now completely rusted over and blunt after millennia, although its blade is significantly shorter than its previous incarnation.
  • The tail of any YoRHa flight unit is actually a giant sword that can be deployed against airborne threats to devastating effect, even in mid-flight at high speed.
• Biblical Motifs: Adam and Eve. The machine's greatest creations are Adam and Eve, who misinterpret the Bible into thinking they can gain intelligence from eating apples. Eve also points out that Eve is a woman's name, and leads to the him saying "Shouldn't we be called Cain and Abel or something instead?"
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • The final battle of Ending A/B when 9S crashes his flight unit into the Boku-shi enemy.
  • During Ending E you eventually reach a point where your singular ship can't break through the enemy bullets. When you are destroyed, messages from other players begin to appear, and you are offered help from another player. If you accept, other ships fly in to surround you and massively increase your firepower. Upon completion, you can make your own data available to help someone else in the same position.
  • Subverted a bit more than midway through the game. 2B, struggling to resist the Logic Virus, comes under attack just as she reaches the mall where she might be able to quarantine herself. A2 appears out of nowhere and helps dispatch the enemies singlehandedly... but it's too late. 2B has almost completely succumbed to the Virus, and the most A2 can offer is a Mercy Kill just as 9S arrives on the scene..
• Bilingual Bonus: The name of the joke Ending K, "Aji wo [K]utta", has a double meaning of sorts: as the android dies from eating the mackerel, they also comment how they like the taste and understand why humans ate them. The phrase in question can be read both as "I ate a mackerel" as well as "I experienced a flavor" in Japanese.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • The female member of the Wandering Couple has had her boyfriend reformatted and reprogramed to suit her whims multiple times, all the while using the situations they find them in to convince him to do it.
  • 11B's Mementos reveals 16D is this. If 2B chooses to reveal 11B's failed plan to desert her post at YoRHa, 16D ends up laughing at how 11B died in pain and completely alone, seeing it as karma for all the abuse she heaped on 16D due to her status as a non-combat YoRHa-type model.
• Bittersweet Ending: Ending E. Unfortunately the world is still in ruins, and the Bunker, along with most of the YoRHa units, was destroyed. Further, the android leadership may decide to create another generation of potentially disposible androids, and there is a chance another antagonistic Machine Lifeform network will emerge based on the Emil Heads weapon story, though both sides show the capability to Grow Beyond Their Programming by the end of the game. On the positive side, 2B, 9S, and A2 are rebuilt with their memories intact and are finally free from the machinations of both the Bunker and the Terminals. In addition, while Pod-153 worries that history might repeat itself because of the fact that the three have all of their memories and experiences intact, Pod-042 admits that while he cannot deny that scenario could possibly happen, he still expresses hope that the three protagonists have the capacity to defy repeating their mistakes and forge their own future.
• The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: This happens to 2B's large sword - Virtuous Treaty - after it gets lost during her Hopeless Boss Fight in the prologue.
• Blind Weaponmaster: As depicted in the YoRHa stage play, all YoRHa androids are equipped with a "visor" or "goggle" system that appears like a blindfold. This is actually a technical piece of equipment that they use in battle. When they are not engaged in battle, there is little use or purpose to wear it; however, some androids choose to keep it on, only removing it for poignant moments in the story.
• Block Puzzle: The "Sorting Trouble" series of quests have you moving boxes around in order to reach the requested boxes.
• Book Ends:
  • "Everything that lives is designed to end. We are trapped in a never-ending cycle of life and death." First said by 2B at the beginning of the game, and then by Pod 153 in Ending E, the 'last' main ending.
  • During the prologue, 2B rips out a Goliath-class' left arm with her flight unit, before using it against the machine. Late into Route C/D, 9S rips out the left arm from one of the 2B androids to replace the one he lost during the previous fight.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Laser pod program, due to being a hitscan attack with long range and punch-through capability. The fact that the Mana system from the original NieR is replaced with a cooldown timer helps a lot too, meaning there is no reason whatsoever to not keep firing it in combat.
  • 9S's hacking ability gets boring real fast due to how easy and how damn good it is. Combat in the entire playthrough becomes utterly trivial if you're decent at twin-stick Shoot 'Em Up.
  • Pod C is made of this. It fires small missiles that automatically home in on targets. All you have to do is point your camera in the general direction of the enemies and hold down the fire button. Its one drawback is that you must stand far enough away that the vertically-launched missiles can arc down and hit their targets, meaning it can't be reliably used against targets within melee distance.
  • 2B's starting weapons — Virtuous Contract and Virtuous Treaty — are just as powerful as almost any other example of their respective categories (some have higher raw damage, but most of those pay for it with lower combo counts). Their special abilities are also quite useful.
  • Throwing your spear with charge attack hits just as hard as normal attacks, which allows you to cheese most fights from a distance without having to deal with Pod weapons' inaccurate Cherry Tapping.
• Bottomless Magazines: Ranged weapons in this game need neither reloading nor ammo in the first place.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • If you die in combat during gameplay, you can leave a personalized message for any players that stumble upon your corpse.
  • In Route D, hacking into A2 enough times results in 9S hacking into her Main Menu, the same one players use regularly throughout the game.
  • In Ending E, the pods take turns addressing the player, first to ask if you want to send a message to others who may be struggling during the credits fight, then to ask if you want to help a random player in exchange for deleting all your save data, and finally (if you chose to sacrifice your data) to thank you for playing.
  • The player is warned beforehand that the DLC boss fight against the CEOs of Square Enix and PlatinumGames, Yosuke Matsuda and Kenichi Sato, is immersion breaking since they're based off of real, actual people. They're still more than capable of kicking ass however.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Achieving Ending E allows the player to purchase achievements for a hefty amount of G.
• Brick Joke:
  • When you meet Emil for the first time, he is without a body. Later revealed to be a quirk all Emil clones share.
  • Ending B's title, "Or not to [B]e", as well as 2B's name itself, later reveals itself to be a bad pun, as 2B is not, in fact, 2B, but actually 2E.
  • There's one that you'll likely inflict on yourself if you're feeling like a smartass. Near the beginning, when 9S is walking 2B through her rebooting sequence, the whole routine is recorded for posterity, and you're free to screw around with 9S if you feel so inclined and for as long as you want^note Though it will end if you exceed ten minutes. In Route B, you'll go through this again from 9S's point of view, and everything you had 2B say and do in the previous playthrough will be repeated. Not only will you have to sit through the whole thing, but you'll be privy to 9S's thoughts as he potentially grows more exasperated and embarrassed through the whole ordeal.
• Bullet Hell: The danmaku elements from the first game make a return in this game. Bosses and larger enemies use all kinds of complex patterns as part of their attacks.
• Bullet Time: With an Overclock chip equipped, time drastically slows down for 0.8 to 5.5 seconds (the duration is governed by the chip's rank) when you execute a perfect dodge.
  • The Evasion System chip also significantly slows down time when you're in the proximity of projectiles, making it easier to dodge them.
• But Thou Must!: In terms of "you must listen to what the game wants you to hear in full no matter what". You're free to attack bosses like Adam and Eve with everything you have the moment their respective battle begins, but no matter how over-levelled your character is, you can't kill them until they've finished their lengthy Evil Gloating or Expo Speak. Every time you bring their health down to near zero, they'll just teleport away and come at you again with their health bar refilled. Alternatively, they'll just become invincible until the conditions to proceed are met. Other enemies are completely unkillable by default to ensure cutscenes play out as intended regardless of player skills or auto-chip usage.
• Call-Back:
  • The tattoo on Eve's arm is the symbol of the Cult of the Watchers.
  • The Gestalt report documents sum up the consequences of the previous game (even adding the info only normally available in Grimoire Nier and becomes a plot point behind Popola and Devola's Heroic Sacrifice in the late game.
  • When accessing the Tower at the end of the game, Devola and Popola confront you, weapons at the ready, stating that they have been expecting you. But this time, they're not trying to stop the protagonist from entering, they're buying him time so he can go ahead. They even get a final reprise of their theme song, "Song of the Ancients - Atonement".
  • The Lunar Tear, the flower that can grant all wishes, returns. Finding the Lunar Tears scattered across the land will help Emil restore his memories.
  • When entering the Tower's data storage facility, it is constructed as a perfect —if pure-white— replica of Popola's Library, right down to the placement of the ladders. Popola's office includes replicas of her houseplants, and the Trophy Room across the stairs displays effigies of all the bosses you've defeated. The boss Ro-Shi even crashes through the ceiling the same way the Knave of Hearts did during that battle.
• Camera Abuse: If you try to tilt the camera to get a look up her skirt, 2B will push the camera away. There's even a trophy that requires the player to do this to her ten times in a row.
• Canon Immigrant: A2, Anemone, and the Terminals originate from the YoRHa stage play, which was also written by Taro Yoko.
• Cap: There's a limit to how much certain attributes can be boosted. For example, your movement speed can only be increased by 20%, and your drop rate 90%. Character level for friend and foe alike is capped at 99, as is the amount of items of any given kind that the protagonists can carry. Plug-in chips can't be fused past level 8.
  • The 3C3C1D119440927 DLC breaks the level cap for a specific bonus battle that fields level 130+ enemies. 21 waves of them. With all the game's bosses thrown in for good measure.
• Cast Full of Gay: It's implied that some of the female YoRHa androids are in relationships with each other. This makes a bit of sense given that male YoRHa androids are a relatively recent development. Not so much for the Resistance, though, as the male/female ratio among them is more balanced. This is due to androids not really viewing gender the way humans do, favoring compatible personalities over gender.
• Censor Box: A largely humorous example. Every time the Dress Module is used to remove/re-add parts of a protagonist's clothes, their pod summons a black curtain out of nowhere and holds it so that its master's changing can't be observed.
• Central Theme: The game repeatedly explores concepts of Existentialism. Specifically, the game questions how one should live in an uncaring, random world where those one cares about, the current meaning found in one's life, and even one's perceived identity can be taken at any moment. Can life still have meaning when all meaning is seemingly lost?
  • Multiple side quests involve showing Machine Lifeforms who believe they exist to be the best at something (such as the greatest martial artist or fastest alive), that you are in fact better than them. Realizing they will never accomplish the task they devoted their life to, many decide to self-destruct, or force you to kill them, as their life is now seemingly meaningless.
  • The Songstress, unable to earn the affections of the one she loved, decided to double down her purpose in life to become beautiful, even though it would never earn her the love she sought. This eventually leaves her an insane, mass-murdering monstrosity.
  • The Forest Kingdom, who found purpose in serving their king, are unable to move past their given purpose after their King sacrifices himself for them, pointlessly serving a new "baby" king that will never grow or help them to change.
  • A2's backstory involves her finding out that she and all her friends were intentional prototypes designed to be replaced with "better" production models, and are sent on a Suicide Mission. She ends up being the only survivor, and spends decades unsure what her purpose should be beyond killing more machines.
  • The androids and machines are both revealed to no longer be able carry out their original purposes as the humans and aliens they were each supposed to serve are long dead.
  • The natures of individuality and identity. Both the machine lifeforms and YorHa androids have almost nothing physically distinguishing them from others of the same kind, and establishing one's individuality begins from internal psychological processes. Related to the above theme of purpose, many machines assign roles to themselves and paint markings on their shells to denote this, with names like "Mother Machine" and "Scientist Machine", even forming seemingly arbitrarily family groups. The connection between memory and identity is also explored with several instances where some part of an android's memory is erased or restored, and how this changes one's personality. During the plot, both the androids and machines lose their respective networks that connect all their minds together, thus pushing them further towards individuality, until the machines create a new network several hundred years later.
  • Route C has the majority of the characters you've come to know killed in the opening act. You also learn that this was by design of the android superiors, to cover up a ruse to attempt to give new meaning to androids. The YoRHa androids' Black Boxes are later revealed to be repackaged Machine Lifeform cores, meaning there is no inherent difference between YoRHa and its enemies.
  • Ending E has you, after losing all meaningful goals, nearly everyone whose stories you followed through the game, and all the truths you had once believed, essentially embark on an impossible Suicide Mission to at least bring back the main characters (even though you'll likely never succeed on your own). However, you are given messages from other players to not give up, and, after you have refused to accept the seeming nihilism of the situation for long enough, other players (who have sacrificed all their saved progress in the game) come to help you succeed at last.
  • Much like Nier Gestalt/Replicant, the game also explores the nature of mankind and what it means to be human. This is best expressed through the Machine Lifeforms, who mimic human experiences such as sex and religion. Even the androids aren't immune to these behaviors, whether they realize it or not.
• Chainsaw Good:
  • The Type-3 line of swords sports viciously serrated blades that make them look like YoRHa's take on the ever-popular chainsword.
  • A handful of machine lifeforms are equipped with circular saws or other weapons/attacks that produce the same effect, chief among them the Engels Goliaths that use rotary excavators as melee weapons.
• Charged Attack:
  • Holding down a weapon attack button usually gives off a different attack.
  • You can charge up pod programs to increase their effectiveness after finding more Pods.
  • The Pod's regular attack gains a charge mode when upgraded to Level 2.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The three Goliath-class Engels units that emerge at the end of the prologue mission. Two more of them show up in the City Ruins midway through Routes A/B, and the second's destruction leaves a crater that leads to the crashed alien mothership. Two more Engels appear in Routes C/D during the siege at the Abandoned Factory: Pascal takes control of one and uses it to fight off the machine army as well as the second Engels.
  • The backdoor in the Bunker's system that 9S discovers in Route B. During Route C, 9S uses it to upload his and 2B's data to the Bunker. It also allows the logic virus to infect all of the androids in the Bunker and it's later revealed that this backdoor was added in on purpose, with the intention of allowing the logic virus to destroy the Bunker when Project YoRHa had outlived its usefulness.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • The little brother machine pouring liquid on his big brother machine appears at the beginning of Route B and during the intro of Route C. After 9S defeats 21O, the two machines reappear as a boss fight for A2: Friedrich (the little brother) and Auguste (the big brother).
  • Devola and Popola can be spotted in the background of the Resistance Camp long before their actual involvement in the plot.
  • The Terminals make several brief Freeze-Frame Bonus appearances during Route B. Only much later, far into Route C, are their identity and purpose finally revealed.
• Chicken Walker: The aptly-named Reverse-Jointed Goliaths, 12-foot tall machine lifeforms that actually look like oversized metal chickens with BFGs for wings.
• Classic Cheat Code: The game hides a special cheat that's so incredibly obscure Word of God dubbed it the game's "last hidden secret" and went undiscovered for almost four years, with Yoko Taro himself acknowledging its discovery. As demonstrated by the person who found it, immediately walking backwards to a pair of oil drums after killing Marx at the start of Route A then holding R2/RT and inputting Up, Down, Up, Right, Square/X, O/B, Triangle/Y, X/A ^note A very similar cheat to the one previously used in Bayonetta 2 to unlock the game's hidden shops while standing between them immediately triggers Ending E and unlocks all of the game's bonus modes.
• Clockwork Creature: While it's never explained exactly how the machine lifeforms' inner systems work, a great many of their unit types look like adorable wind-up toys straight out of some Clock Punk setting. All that's missing is the Wind-Up Key protruding their back (which can be found as items after defeating some of them).
• Clothing Damage: Depending on how much damage she takes, 2B loses her skirt and shows a white Leotard of Power underneath. Similarly, 9S loses his cargo pants and ends up wearing shorts under his jacket. It is possible for the player to deliberately do this to them using the "Self Destruct" command, as well as purchasing an expansion that, when equipped, prevents any sort of damage to their clothing...or alternately, takes it off at will.
• Clown Species: The Machine Lifeforms at the Amusement Park have disconnected from the Machine Network and adopted a culture of festivity and revelry, including clown clothing and make-up, and spending their time partying with balloons and confetti. Even when the Logic Virus reduces them to zombies, they are considerably more pacifistic than other infected machines.
• Clownification: When 2B and 9S first discover that the machine lifeforms (their usual enemies) occupying the Amusement Park modify their hulls to look like carnival clowns, they assume this to be some kind of virus or ploy. They soon confirm, however, that most of the "clown" machines are true pacifists who have abandoned their war with the androids to pursue spreading fun as their raison d'être. The actual infection comes much later in the plot when a logic virus turns all Amusement Park inhabitants into violent zombie robot clowns.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: Jean-Paul/Sartre has a lot of fangirls even if he is too busy rambling about existentialism to care about any of them. This turns out to have dire consequences as Simone/Beauvoir goes crazy for him and is Driven to Madness before she realizes Sartre is simply not into romance.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The eyes of the machine lifeforms have different colors depending on their disposition. Red is hostile, Yellow is passive unless attacked, and Green is friendly.
• Commonplace Rare: You need twenty Simple Gadgets to upgrade Pods A and C. Between them and the higher-tier Elaborate Gadgets and Complex Gadgets, Simple Gadgets are actually the most difficult to acquire. Some of those can be found in the open world as hidden items that need to be tracked down in unmarked, often out-of-the-way locations with the Scanner pod program. Most of the rest are either exceedingly rare random drops at fixed spots or side quest rewards.
• Constantly Curious: The Little Sister Machine spends every free moment of her escort mission asking you questions about how the world works.
• Contemplate Our Navels: The Wise Machines are found in high locations contemplating the meaning of their existences, which in turn causes 9S to contemplate his own existence after find out their thoughts.
• Content Warnings: Before you fight the superboss included in the arena DLC, you are warned that the fight's humorous nature may ruin your Willing Suspension of Disbelief and you are given a prompt that allows you to decline (the fighting consists of you vs the CEOs of Square Enix and Platinum).
• Continuing is Painful:
  • If you die, all of your equipped chips are left at your corpse and you have to retrieve them. If you die again before you get your chips back, they're gone for good.
  • The game stresses a few times that there are no auto-saves. This is especially important in the second part, when the Bunker is destroyed. Die any time after that and your options are to load a save file or return to the title screen.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Emil first appears in the game as just a head, which is the state he was left in at the end of NieR.
  • Most of the weapons are inherited directly from Automata's predecessor, even if Iron Will itself has lost a significant part of its original length.
  • Popola and Devola return, or to be more exact, different models of the Popola and Devola line of androids, and they're perfectly aware of the actions of the Popola and Devola from Nier's village.
  • The Desert Zone is what remains of Facade. You can even find artifacts from that civilization, and the machine lifeforms dwelling there have styled their attire after the Masked King's particular mask and robe.
  • Emil has moved Kaine's home to a perfectly preserved sanctuary filled with Lunar Tears, from her austere bed to her childhood painting of her grandmother. The BGM for this place is "Kaine - Salvation".
• Controllable Helplessness: 2B's final playable segment begins with her infected by the Logic Virus. Her systems continually break down as the virus spreads (meaning you lose the ability to fight back or even dodge attacks with progressively worsening Interface Screw), and all you can do is limp from the Flooded City all the way to the mall.
• Cool Sword: The bread-and-butter weapon of all protagonists, about two dozen of them in all sizes and flavors. Their base damage within their respective classes is fairly similar overall, but they differ in their special abilities that unlock at weapon levels 2 and 4.
• The Corruption: The Logic Virus turns YoRHa androids and machine lifeforms into frenzied killing robots.
• Counter-Attack: You can counter enemy attacks by attacking following a perfect dodge- depending on which attack button is used, it can be either a melee attack or an explosive launched from your Pod. The Counter chip gives you the ability to counter enemy attacks without having to perfect dodge by moving towards an enemy as their attack is about to land, dealing a percentage of their attack's damage back to them based on chip level.
• Cosmetic Award: At the end of Route E, after having received support from previous online players to complete the otherwise nigh-impossible final section, you're given the option to provide the same support to some other random player, but only at the cost of sacrificing your save data. If you choose do that, your only concrete reward is a special title screen the game will have afterwards. Though obviously the real reward is the knowledge of having helped another player just like you were helped.
• Covers Always Lie: The cover shows 2B holding 9S as he dies in her arms, while A2 acts as lookout. While 9S does die in 2B's arms at the end of Route A, the context and resolution is very different, and A2 isn't present.
  • It could, however, be forshadowing the end of Route E, where 2B and A2 are confirmed to have survived, while 9S either hasn't come back online yet, or he's transferred his mind to the Ark.
• Creative Closing Credits: The credits are actually the game's Final Boss in a Shoot 'Em Up segment required to get the final story ending, with another variation of the Weight of the World song playing throughout- it starts with 8-bit notes followed by alternating English, Japanese and Chaos versions, and the development studio's staff all singing a chorus.
  • The joke endings' credits are sped up to almost-illegible speeds before fading to the title and the ending-specific subtitle.
• Crossover: This entry in the franchise is quite popular and has spawn a few crossovers. Notable is Soul Calibur VI, with 2B as a DLC character, and Final Fantasy XIV, with the "YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse" raid questline which stars 2B and 9S.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • It's neither difficult nor time-consuming to grind your characters' level all the way up to the cap of 99; the first half of Route B provides everything that's required to pull it off. The catch is that all enemies scale their level by region and Route (A, B, or C) instead of levelling with the player. Since even the Final Boss of Route C tops out at level 45 and even a few levels more or less make quite a difference in combat, any level 99 player with a basic grasp of the combat mechanics who isn't playing on the highest difficulty setting can easily steamroll through the game without encountering any mentionable opposition. Only the top-tier superbosses and special arena battles can still pose a challenge.
  • Easy Mode turns the entire game into one long Curb-Stomp Battle from the opening scenes to the final battle.
• Cult: The machines at the Factory after Adam's death start off as a normal religion that is worshiping God. Eventually a majority of its members go insane and believe that in death they shall "Become as Gods". Naturally most of them plan to kill everyone around them before they kill themselves.
• Cute Machines: The smaller machine lifeforms look downright adorable, what with their huge spherical heads, plump bodies and stubby limbs. Chief among them are the machine babies, which are little more than metal eggs the size of a child's torso with two yellow eyes and a big screw for a pacifier.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The 5th story of the Nier Concert recital confirms Ending D, followed by Ending E, over Ending C as canonical. Makes logical sense considering Ending E states that every single YoRHa unit has died, which is cleanly accounted for in Ending D where 9S kills A2 but accidentally falls on her sword in the process, killing himself as well, while in Ending C, A2 definitely dies, but 9S's status is unknown and probably alive since A2 gave her life to save him.
• Cycle of Revenge: A major theme, as the Forever War has left both androids and machines with plenty of dead friends and vengeful feelings. One particular sidequest has the player helping a Resistance member look for a missing comrade, only to find them dead at the hands of a particularly vengeful machine lifeform. Even after killing said enemy, if you tell the Resistance member the truth about what happened to her friend, she'll disappear from the camp, weapon-in-hand, presumably in search of further revenge.
• Damage-Sponge Boss:
  • There are three encounters with gold variants of normal enemies in certain spots. They have the same abilities as their regular variants, except they take scratch damage from all attacks. This is especially pronounced with their leader, which is the weakest form of enemy yet takes twice as long to kill as the minions it commands.
  • The hidden boss of the amusement park, the Golden Bunny, telegraphs all its attacks and is easy to avoid. However, since it is at level 80, killing it takes forever and a day for underleveled players. It yields a five-digit amount of experience when hacked/killed, making it well worth the effort. And it's repeatable.
• Darkest Hour: Routes C/D in general. The Bunker is destroyed, nearly all the surviving YoRHa units have been infected and turned by the Logic Virus, and 2B is Mercy Killed by A2 (while 9S watches) before she can be turned as well. The fate of the world now rests on an incredibly-jaded and bitter A2, and 9S, who's slowly becoming insane, violent and suicidal with grief. For most of the remainder of the game, it doesn't get much better, with the genocide of Pascal's village (and Pascal himself falling over the Despair Event Horizon) and what's left of 9S' sanity finally breaking under the machine network's psychological torture and the revelation that YoRHa was created to be disposable.
  • The player faces this while trying to save 2B, 9S and A2 in Ending E during a Bullet Hell sequence with impossible odds.
• Dark Is Not Evil: YoRHa android outfits are almost exclusively black, be it Powered Armor or the protagonists' goth-vibe clothes. Their blindfold-like combat visors add another layer of sinisterness on top, yet none of them can honestly be called evil. They're merciless Killer Robots chock-full of Fantastic Racism, yes, but that's quite understandable after millennia of ceaseless warfare against an equally merciless foe, and, regardless of their means, they're still fighting for nothing but humanity's survival and eventual return to Earth.
• Dead All Along: The human race, and the invading alien race, are already dead, humanity by the events of the first game, the aliens by their own machines. However, the human genome and their collected memories are stored on a data center on the moon.
• Death as Game Mechanic: The fact that you play robotic androids is driven home early in the game by its death mechanics:
  • As you explore the game world, you encounter save points (disguised as derelict vending machines) where you can store a backup copy of your character's software components (like XP and weaponry)... but not the hardware (chips) installed on the current mobile platform (body). When you die, your physical body goes offline, and the last save point you accessed produces a spare body of the same model and installs your backed-up software onto it, allowing you to continue the game — however, if you want your chips back, you will actually have to retrieve your old body.
  • If you play with online connectivity enabled, you will regularly encounter other players' discarded bodies scattered where their characters died (which can accidentally spoil the locations of major boss battles later in the story). If you interact with them, you can choose between having the body fight for you as a mindless combat drone for a short while, or just getting a temporary stat bonus based on what chips they had installed when they died. This is justified in-story by the fact that the androids are fighting a war against machine lifeforms, and you are encouraged to retrieve fallen androids' frames in order to preserve resources for the war effort.
  • Finally, when the androids' HQ, the Bunker, is destroyed in Route C and the androids lose access to the spare body production line, every death from that point on simply dumps you into the main menu, like in any other game.
• Death Is Cheap:
  • Since 2B is an android, she has a practically infinite amount of spare replacement models waiting on the Bunker. Should the model she's currently using be destroyed, her memory and skills get transferred to a different model that gets sent back down to Earth. However, she loses equipment and plug-in chips that she had on her old model; if she wants to get them back, she has to find her old body where she died.
  • Averted during the second half of the game, where the Bunker becomes inaccessible due to the Logic Virus. If you die as 9S or A2 during those times, you have to reload a save file.
• Deconstruction: The game deconstructs the Humanity Is Infectious trope. Normally when a non-human entity picks up human traits, they're positive ones, but the game shows that there's plenty of ugliness to inherit as well: Hate, bigotry, jealousy, obsession, fear, self-importance, despair, insanity, cruelty, and existential dread. The concept of "humanity" is also ambiguous enough for multiple sides to claim for some reason or another that they're clearly the most human. This becomes a Decon-Recon Switch during the final ending. The Pods end up picking up good human traits, most notably sympathy, and decide to give the protagonists another chance at life after realizing they deserve it.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Whenever the player is at the Bunker. This extends even to cutscenes such as the Commander's speech to the androids about how they will launch a full-scale assault against the machines in order to finally retake Earth during the beginning of Route C. This color scheme also highlights events such as the Alien warning system, which flashes bright red on the black-and-white Command screens.
• Despair Speech: During the final battle, 9S gives a small one. Notably, he only gives it if you control him; if you control A2, neither character says anything.
• Developer's Foresight: 9S will briefly question 2B should the player purposefully avoid fighting a Tank Goliath in the Amusement Park the first time.
  • 2B will notice when the camera is aimed up her skirt, and will push it to another position after a few seconds.
• Diegetic Interface: Everything the player sees, including the pause menu, are explicitly stated to be things the androids see. Going off of that, android functionalities are dependent on plug-in chips. This includes elements of the HUD, which are labeled "System Chips": removing the "HUD HP Gauge" chip will remove the life meter from your screen, for instance. You can remove and re-apply System Chips as much as you want, but it is advised that you do not touch the OS Chip.
  • In the final boss battle, if you're playing as 9S against A2, hacking into A2 enough times will see 9S hack her menu screens, in essence hacking directly into her operating system. Succeeding in hacking here is an Instant-Win Condition.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Manually aiming your pod is, for obvious reasons, much more difficult than using the lock-on ability (on top of the fact that, in this game built for a controller, you'll be aiming with controls that are nowhere near as precise as the likes of a mouse). That said, shots fire in a straight line when manually aiming (as opposed to the bullet spread at higher distances that's caused by shooting while locked on), and it's the only way to aim your shots on higher difficulties.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Routes A/B and C/D each have their own:
  • Adam and Eve serve as this for the game as a whole while being the main antagonists for the A and B Routes. Their defeat unlocks the second half of the story as well as the reveal of the game's true villains, Terminal α and Terminal β. Between Adam and Eve, the former is treated as the de facto leader of the two, with the latter acting as The Dragon. Adam's death leads to a distraught Eve going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • In the C/D Route, the Terminals reveal themselves to be the game's true Big Bad. With that said, they are defeated midway through The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, leaving a deranged, vengeful 9S as the game's Final Boss (unless you choose to play as him against A2).
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: Played with. The ending of Route A features, rather than a dungeon, a full on War Sequence against the machine lifeforms under Eve's control. The preceding factory dungeon, while technically being the final dungeon of Route A, is more of a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment than an attempt to fight through the antagonist's defenses. defense
• Disposable Woman: While the Stage Play portrays YoRHa androids as all-female, and the game stating only the newest and most advanced models of the S-Type are male, the entire YoRHa series was designed to be expendable.
• Domestic Abuse: The female half of the Wandering Couple tricks both the protagonists and her partner into reformatting his memories so she can reprogram him as she sees fit - character and abilities included. She even nonchalantly tells 2B and 9S that she's done it another six times before without him having any recollection of any of it.
• Double Jump: 2B et al can do double jumps, just like Nier in the original game. By catching the Pod to glide, then pressing Jump + Light Attack, they can boost themselves up a third time with a small Pod-guided spin kick.
• Downer Beginning: The prologue ends with 2B and 9S self-destructing to take down a trio of fresh Goliath-class machine lifeforms after barely managing to defeat a previous one. The first one only went down after 9S was placed in critical condition, 2B was exhausted, the rest of the squadron was destroyed just getting to the combat area, and their only remaining flight unit was lost in 2B's final attack. Granted, they simply get put into new bodies to show that destroying their bodies is largely inconsequential. 9S, however, wasn't able to back up his data in time and has to reintroduce himself to 2B.
  • The beginning of the second half of the game is this big time. The machines utilize the backdoor in the Bunker and infect all the YoRHa androids with the Logic Virus, including 2B and 9S. Soon after, the Bunker (along with the Commander and all the androids in the Bunker that haven't been killed by 2B and 9S on the way to the hangar) is destroyed. And of course, the real cherry on top is 2B on the receiving side of a Mercy Kill from A2—with 9S as a witness. It gets worse from there.
• Downer Ending:
  • Each weapon and combat bracer has a little four-part story or legend you can unlock as you power it up. Almost all of them have a sad or Cruel Twist Ending.
  • While the game's story as a whole can avoid this, a great many side quests tend to end on this note.
• Do Androids Dream?: One of the game's central themes, there is a lot of emphasis placed on what exactly defines "real" and "imitations" of humans.
• Dramatic Irony: The androids scoff at the machine lifeforms trying to imitate humans when it's revealed all YoRHa units are repurposed from the black boxes of the machines.
• Driven to Suicide: Machine lifeforms have a disturbing tendency to suffer this fate.
  • The Wise Machine doesn't like its philosophical pondering's conclusions and jumps off a high tower.
  • The Speed Machine self-destructs at the end of its quest line.
  • The Lord of the Valley chooses the Suicide by Cop method to go out in one last blaze of glory.
  • A veritable army of machine nutjobs eventually forms an Apocalypse Cult that quickly ends up self-destructing when the majority of its members kill themselves in droves for religious reasons.
  • Pascal's machine children commit suicide by the dozen out of overwhelming fear, which in turn results in Pascal himself begging A2 to either memory-wipe or kill him. How that pans out is up to the player.
• Dual Wielding: A few machine lifeform types do this, most notably the Engels with their rotary excavators and the small machines with axes. 2B and A2 can get in on the fun by rapidly chaining light and heavy melee attacks together.
• Dub Name Change: A couple of characters had to get their names altered from the Japanese version to the English version because of copyright issues, most notably Sartre and Beauvoir, who got their names changed to Jean-Paul and Simone to keep the theme of their names in place.
• Dub Text: During the infamous "robot orgy" scene, some of the phrases were mistranslated, namely "embrace me" became "carry me" and "love breasts" got turned into "feed me", thanks to which the English version's scene now features robot age play kink in addition to simple attempts at emulating sex.
• Dueling Player Characters: Early on in Route A/B, you fight A2, who becomes a player character in the later parts. The final battle of the game has you controlling either A2 or 9S as they square off against each other, with your ending depending on who you choose.
• Duel to the Death:
  • The final battle of Routes C and D is a duel between 9S and A2. The winner is determined by which one you choose to control.
  • After Father Servo gets fully upgraded, he asks you to fight him to the death, as a final test of who's truly strongest.
• Dutch Angle: In the cutscene where the religious robots realize how to "become as gods", the camera turns sideways and even upside down to highlight their growing madness.
• Dysfunction Junction: Both androids and machines are starting to feel emotions that they weren't built to feel in the first place, and their increasing self-awareness leads to them trying to cope with their places in the world and an obsession with becoming human.
• Early Game Hell: If you play on Hard mode this trope is especially prevalent in the opening chapter. Because the damage values are so inflated, the bosses of the area can wipe you out in two hits at most, and it doesn't help that the opening section doesn't have any save spots or checkpoints, meaning that if you fail it will take you all the way back to the beginning of the game.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Players must play from Ending A through to Ending E to get the best, true ending. This involves playing through two viewpoints of Ending A, both sides in the Final Battle for Endings C and D, and a Nintendo Hard hacking section against the credits of the game, which constantly taunts the player to just give up. Also, over the course of the story, a majority of the main cast has been killed, including all three of the main protagonists. And, with YoRHa dead, the pods are programmed to mark the YoRHa project complete and erase all of their records. However, if you do all of the above, the main protagonist's pods are inspired by their experiences over the course of the game and go against their programming. Instead, they rebuild 2B, 9S and A2, bringing the three back for a second chance at life in a world where the machine threat is over for several hundred years and the proxy war is finished. And while the world is still in ruins, the main cast are now free to embrace their emotions and find their own meanings in life.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: What happens to the voices of androids that are infected by the logic virus, most notably with 21O and 6O before their deaths. The terminal's voice also always repeats twice.
  21O: "A f-family...to be with... pl..ease...kill..."
• 11th-Hour Superpower: During the final sequence before the best ending, if you decide to persevere despite the odds, eventually, options surround you, representing the sacrificed saves of other players, and make you more powerful, and basically invincible, while you finish the fight against the game's credits.
• Elite Mook: There are red-and-black painted enemies that are stronger than their standard counterparts, designated "Enhanced Machines", and on top of that golden versions that have absurd amounts of health, even at low levels. The gold machines are also the only machines that will drop certain parts needed to upgrade the Pods with, so if players want to utilize the Pods' capabilities fully, they'll need to take these machines down.
  • This is also what YoRHa is supposed to be, the most advanced soldiers in the android forces. Except not, YoRHa are expendable test beds, meant to be disposed of once they've served their purpose.
• EMP: For all their incredibly advanced robotics and AI technology, YoRHa androids are still extremely vulnerable to EMPs. It bites them in the ass a couple times throughout the story.
• The Ending Changes Everything: Boy does it ever. Specifically, almost every bit of dialogue and interaction between 2B and 9S from the beginning of the game to the end has to be re-evaluated with new context.
• Equipment Upgrade:
  • You can improve your weapons using items dropped from fallen enemies and found in locations around the world.
  • You can use very rare items to upgrade your Pods, which increases their damage output and unlocks their normal Charged Attack during regular firing.
  • You can fuse like chips together to enhance their effect (i.e. fusing four Melee Defense [2% damage reduction] chips into two Melee Defense +1 [4%] chips, then into a single +2 [8%] chip). The new chip's memory allocation cost is dependent on the cost of the source chips. It is never explained in-game, but chips dropped by enemies have can have different allocation costs, with the most beneficial ones (i.e. conferring a bonus while occupying minimal memory allocation) having a diamond after their name. This allows for more-efficient chips to be made that confer the same bonus as multiple smaller ones, while saving space for other plug-in chips.
• Escape from the Crazy Place:
  • The "Twisted Religion" mission, when 2B and Pascal find themselves trapped in the Abandoned Factory with an insane machine Apocalypse Cult and have to fight their way out, with some assistance from 9S's hacking.
  • Happens again in Route C when the Bunker is infected with the Logic Virus, all YoRHa units go insane, and 2B, 9S, and the Commander have to get to the Hangar to escape. The Commander doesn't make it.
• Escort Mission: The Parade Escort sidequest. Surprisingly, the people being escorted don't act too stupid beyond the initial premise about having a parade promoting pacifism in the middle of a war zone. The real difficulty comes from the fact that the mission fails automatically if 2B and 9S get too far away from the parade — even if all immediate threats are removed and the player wants to deal with another group further ahead before they can attack the parade. Fortunately, the attackers give good experience and can drop level 3 weapon upgrade parts, so the mission is useful for grinding even if the repeated attempts needed to succeed can be frustrating.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Invoked and Discussed regarding the game's final ending, in which the pods state that in spite of the second chance all the protagonists get, they might waste it and repeat their mistakes. They still consider it an acceptable risk, believing that having the chance is better than not having gotten it at all.
• Exact Words: The Engels-class Goliath actually directly drops a massive spoiler in dialogue long before you actually learn that in the story, but it's quite likely that the player, like 2B and 9S, will completely miss the implications of.
  9S: Don't you remember chasing humans out of the city?
  Engels: Humans were already gone at the time of my manufacture.
• Expressive Health Bar: The health bars are configurable parts of the robotic Player Characters' combat interface. Whenever said characters get hacked, the first thing to change is usually their health bar being stretched beyond the screen boundary, rendering it effectively useless.
• Eye Beam: A fairly common and equally dangerous weapon among particularly large or powerful enemies like Engels, Grün and the Emil clones.
• Eye Lights Out: In the rare case of a machine lifeform not exploding upon death, this will most likely happen instead, with a much higher chance of occurrence in cutscenes. Adam and Eve are a notable exception due to their bodies' utter lack of mechanical features.
• Eye Scream: The Engels in the prologue mission finally dies when 2B drives her sword into its eye.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Or, should we say, heads do not belong there. The taller humanoid machine lifeforms have multiple heads: one on top (as per usual), two on the arms or legs (they can reconfigure so their armored limbs serve either purpose; one head on each armored limb), and one in the crotch. This is because they're actually colonies of smaller machine lifeforms working together to control a larger body.
• Evolutionary Levels: The machines have adapted over the generations and evolved beyond their initial state by fighting the androids, which the Terminals intended, while also making sure they couldn't defeat their enemy in spite of their evolution. Likewise, the YoRHa androids are the most advanced series to date, made with the data gathered through conflict with the machines. The S-Types, 9S specifically, stand as the pinnacle of current android technology, with Adam and Eve as the machines' physical equivalent and the Terminals as the conceptual pinnacle.
• Experience Booster: EXP Gain Up chips increase the experience you gain by a certain percentage, capping at 100%.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The entire war is this. The backdoor into the Bunker mainframe makes it impossible for YoRHa to win, as, if they ever get the upper hand, the Terminals can use it to upload the Logic Virus and destroy them. At the same time, the Terminals carefully balance the war so that it's impossible for the androids to lose, as the continuing conflict is necessary to spur both sides' technological advancement towards a state of "humanity".
• Family-Unfriendly Death: A disturbing number of major characters get hit with this hard.
  • 2B's and 9S' first fight against Adam ends with both of them running him through with their swords in fountains of blood, accompanied by lots of screaming and gasping.
  • Adam's second boss battle results in 2B impaling him through the stomach (again) before ripping her sword sideways until it exits from his flank and he collapses to bleed out on the floor.
  • Eve is killed by 2B ramming her shattered katana through his head from above while he's kneeling before her.
  • 2B herself and A2 get relatively clean and painless deaths, which just serves to make 9S' agonizing demise in Ending D shortly afterwards all the more horrifying.
  • Before it comes to this, we get to witness 9S viciously eviscerating a hostile (and already dead) 2B android in blind fury, and then A2 doing largely the same to Operator 21O.
  • Pascal's machine children commit suicide in numbers by running themselves through with crude swords larger than themselves.
• Fantastic Caste System: Invoked and played with. YoRHa models are officially split into a number of different models, each orientated towards a specific military niche. Officially, however, the models aren't supposed to be explicitly superior or inferior to each; they all fulfill vital niches. In practice, it's implied that tension often exists between combat and non-combat model types. See the interactions between 11B and 16D, where the combat-focused B-type would abuse and degrade the non-combatant D-type for her model type. The specific array of model types consists of the following:
  • Type A: Attack Type. A combat model android specialized in melee combat, resulting in its outfitting with enhanced dashing abilities for better mobility and the experimental "B-Mode", an artificial berserker rage. Officially Obsolete and discontinued.
  • Type B: Battle Type. The latest generation combat model android, utilizing data acquired from the Type A and Type G models to create an effective all-rounder combatant, equally adept at both close and long-ranged fighting. These are the most common YoRHa androids, by logical presumption.
  • Type D: Defender Type. A non-combat/secondary combatant model android, which serves to provide defensive support to a combat model via the use of defensive shield projection and anti-viral software.
  • Type E: Executioner Type. A secret model officially disguised as a Type B, created for the purpose of covering up YoRHa's secrets by executing any non-Type E androids that uncover classified information, especially Type S models. This execution involves not only destroying the corrupted android's body, but deleting all of their memory data and resetting them to their base data.
  • Type G: Gunner Type. A combat model android specialized in the use of projectile weaponry and long-range combat. Officially Obsolete and discontinued.
  • Type H: Healer Type. A non-combat model android outfitted with specialized hardware and software for repairing physical damage, dealing with data corruption, and countering electronic warfare.
  • Type O: Operator Type. A non-combat model android designed to handle logistics, collect and compile command-level data, and provide intel and operations for field units. A single Type O is assigned to each combat team, and focuses on them exclusively. They have no capability for combat, and are thusly never permitted to leave YoRHa bases.
  • Type S: Scanner Type. A non-combat/secondary combat model android that is outfitted with advanced data-gathering and electronic warfare equipment, intended to serve as a scout, hacker and intelligence operative. Unique in that they are the only YoRHa android type with a male chassis currently produced, although female Type S models did exist.
• Fantastic Drug: E-Drugs, which some NPC androids are addicted to and which exists as useable item that causes a number of video and audio glitches, like tinting the entire screen various colors or giving it a wavy underwater filter, giving it a low bitrate filter, squashing the screen dimensions so that it resembles an old CRT TV, showing constant flickering garbage at the edges of the screen, changing the music to its 8-bit renditions and distorting the sound effects. It apparently also happens to spare the NPCs doped on it from Logic Virus infection.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • 9S considers the machines to be just that, constantly and loudly insisting that any display of cognizance their targets display is just them parroting human recordings without understanding.
  • After the Popola and Devola of the first game accidentally doomed humanity to extinction when their master plan failed, other androids on Earth began shunning all similar models, even though the originals were uniquely flawed and no other models did anything wrong. Eventually, Twin Models were completely removed from the system.
  • The YoRHa model line was created in part using code and designs made by the aliens for their machine lifeforms, both for a practical reason of advancing android technology through data obtained from their Black Boxes (which contain the machine components) and that it was more "humane" to use non-human tech in the cyclical wars they helped to perpetuate to become more like their dead creators. This ends up being averted by androids in general, who didn't know YoRHa was made by their fellow androids to be sacrifices.
• Fartillery: A strange, non-gaseous machine example. Biped Goliaths have a wide variety of attacks, one of which consists of the huge machine squatting down and farting either a fat red Death Ray or a dense Bullet Hell cloud at its target.
• Feminist Fantasy: It's subtle but undeniably present. YoRHa is overwhelmingly dominated by women who serve at all levels of combat, from the front lines to the highest leadership - in fact, the only male models are the Scanners, who are all Non-Action Guys - who wear clothing that emphasizes than downplays their femininity, and their gender is never treated as noteworthy, or even brought up at all. There are only three male characters of significance in the whole game, 9S and Adam & Eve (four if you count Pascal, and five if you count Emil, whose sidequest is entirely optional) and the machine brothers are removed from the story relatively quickly. Additionally, the entire back half of the game revolves around the playable female character undergoing immense Character Development as she lets go of her hatred of machines while the playable male character descends completely into insanity after the loss of the woman he loved and has to be stopped for his own good.
• Final Boss Preview: Midway through Routes A and B, you fight A2 after she kills the Forest King. Said character becomes the Final Boss of Route D.
• Final-Exam Boss: The penultimate bosses of endings C and D, Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi, involve you using melee combat as A2, flying a Flight Unit as 9S (and hacking it, if you so desire), and ends in A2 and 9S temporarily teaming up to duke it out with them (with the game periodically switching you between the two).
• Fling a Light into the Future:
  • Devola and Popola are the ones who sent humanity's data to the server on the Moon to be stored in the hopes that it could be used to revive the extinct race, one day.
  • The machine network fired an Ark into the vastness of space, carrying the memories of machine lifeforms as well as their own ghost consciousness based on humanity. Whether they ever reach a destination or travel for eternity is not an issue for them. If he chooses to, 9S can accompany them.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: Charging an enemy while riding a galloping moose deals a tremendous amount of damage to the target and hurls all but the largest machines a considerable distance, usually into the closest obstacle behind them, with explosive results.
• Forever War: Androids and machine lifeforms have been fighting for several thousand years, and by the time of the game the 14th War has been waging for some time. This is intentional on both the androids' and machines' part; when humanity went extinct, the androids were left without the creators they love; so when the aliens arrived, defeated Emil's forces, and tried to claim the Earth, the androids convinced the rest of their kind that humans had merely fled to the moon and then began launching raids on the aliens as their new cause. The androids even went so far as to create the YoRHa models to help prop up the "mankind is alive" lie, with data-gathering and combat missions (and executioner models for anyone who found out too much), and finally a security backdoor and self-destruct protocol in the YoRHa base so they themselves could be eliminated when the lie was complete. As far as either side was concerned, all that mattered was using combat data from previous generations to make more advanced ones, all in order to become "human". The machine network has known about it from day one and happily played the part so both sides would advance.
• Foreshadowing:
  • A2 finds records of animal, plant, human, and other such data in the Library. The first clue that the Terminals are building an ark. After all, why would a Tower that will fall apart after firing have such important data if it's just going to destroy the moon's server?
  • A small one during Route A. When you first enter the tunnel that leads to the elevator that'll take you to the Copied City, if you look closely at the dead android bodies, it seems they've all been crucified. A hint that a fight with Adam is coming up, although the player may not know it's him because they don't learn about how closely Adam follows the Bible until Route B. It's also a hint to the state 2B will find 9S in during her fight with Adam.
  • The name of both 2B and 9S's first swords are rather darkly befitting in hindsight. 2B's sword, Virtuous Contract, likely refers to her unwavering devotion to YoRHa and her conviction that what she's doing is right and noble and in serve to humanity even when it asks her to execute the boy she loves over and over again. And the name of 9S's katana, Cruel Oath, needs no explanation, but is likely a reference to the fact that he swore to fight for an organization that has not only executed him dozens of times over for being too good at his job but is lying even to his executioner about the reason he has to do die.
  • One of the sidequests has you helping a redhead find her friend's killer, and it involves 2B jealously suggesting that 9S might have a thing for her. If she's right, 9S might be an Amazon Chaser that has a thing for Executioner-class YoRHa (considering both that redhead, and 2B herself, are Executioner-class).
  • The hacking minigame interface for machine lifeforms and androids is exactly the same. It hints at what 9S discovers in the Soul Box during Route C: YoRHa androids' Black Boxes are made from repurposing machine lifeforms' cores.
  • Early on in Route A, when entering the residential area in the desert, some of the machines will chant "Everyone dead. You are false." Fast forward to later in the game when 9S learns the truth about humanity and the purpose of YoRHa.
  • After the boss fight in the desert with the centipede-like Machine, A2 receives a chunk of 2B's memories in hacking space, where the Commander tells her that "normally you'd be known as...(static interference), but from now on we'll be calling you 2B. This is the first direct clue the game gives you that 2B isn't her original designation.
  • The machines' performance of Romeo and Juliet that, er...loosely adapts the original text, by having three of each character who declare their love for each other per the original play and then violently murder each other. That's basically 2B and 9S' relationship in a nutshell - two people in love who will have, by the end of the game, both murdered the other one several times over.
  • The machines in the desert that end up creating Adam and Eve repeatedly chant "This cannot continue." Later on it is revealed that "this" refers to the Forever War that the androids and machines have been fighting for thousands of years for no good reason. By creating Adam and Eve the machines have taken the first step towards breaking the stalemate.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The Red Girls appear for a few scant seconds as ghostly afterimages in Route B, once at the end of the first Adam and Eve bossfight and one right before 9S boards his flight unit to come to 2B's aid, before they're officially fully visible onscreen as 2B is strangling 9S.
• Friendly Fireproof: Varies from scene to scene.
  • When 2B and 9S fight side-by-side, their attacks just pass harmlessly through each other. It's explicitly a plot point that YoRHa androids' programming prevents them from harming other YoRHa androids. When the rest of YoRHa gets infected with a Logic Virus, 9S has to hack 2B's programming to allow her to attack her former comrades.
  • When Pascal accompanies 2B on a few missions, he's also immune to her attacks, without any in-story justification.
  • Averted with the civilians in certain missions, like the robot apocalypse cult and the attack on Pascal's village. Hostile and non-hostile machines are all equally vulnerable, and they're mixed together to make it easier for you to accidentally kill the non-hostiles.
• From Bad to Worse: The full-scale assault on the machines is an ever-increasingly horrific situation for 2B and 9S: the ground soldiers get infected with a Logic Virus. Then everyone on the Bunker gets infected. Then 2B gets infected. Then 2B dies, triggering 9S's downward spiral.
• Full-Boar Action: Fish aside, there seems to be exactly two species of animals left in this world: moose, and boars. They're usually docile and can even be used as mounts, but they will defend themselves if provoked; some may also attack just for the hell of it. That's actually more dangerous than it sounds because moose and boars are the only (potential) enemies in the game that level with the protagonists, which in turn means a lone boar can easily wreck frontline battle androids that just curbstomped a 500-foot Humongous Mecha.
• Full Health Bonus: The four "Virtuous" weapons — the Virtuous Contract small sword, Virtuous Treaty large sword, Virtuous Dignity spear and Virtuous Grief combat bracers — all get the "Holy Blessing" improvement when upgraded to the maximum level, which gives a 15-20% attack boost when HP is full.
• Future Imperfect:
  • Machines in the amusement park perform their version of a Shakespeare play: Romeos and Juliets, which ends with three duplicates of Romeo and Juliet fighting to the death, and the last survivor self-destructing.
  • Adam reads the Biblical story of Adam and Eve for inspiration, and comes away convinced that humans used to eat fruit to increase their intelligence.

G - P

• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Dying isn't too much of a hassle since 2B and 9S can just upload their memories to the Bunker and reactivate in a new body, and this is reflected in gameplay where you can still continue your game, find your old body, and retrieve the equipment you left behind if you do die. This ability is gone in Route C when the Bunker is destroyed, and any deaths in Route C are an instant game over.
  • In the first boss fight against Adam, as a newborn, he continuously levels up from level 1 throughout the fight, reflecting that he gradually learns more and more about his surroundings.
  • The game's HUD is justified as a bunch of chips that can be inserted, and removed, as needed. Heck, if you don't mind less information, you can remove parts of the HUD to make space for more power-ups.
  • In Route C, when 2B is infected with the Logic Virus and her Pod mentions that her visual sensors are damaged, the game actually looks distorted so you can have a taste of what's happening to her.
  • When 9S helps 2B reboot after the prologue mission, he does so by adjusting various settings in the player's actual game menu, saying in the process that it's being recorded for posterity. Later on, when playing from the other's perspective, it is shown that the game saved your input during the process and the scene literally replays itself (unless skipped).
    • When 9S eventually fights A2 in Route C, hacking into her results in him hacking her main menu as well.
  • Route B is explained as being Route A but from 9S's perspective. However, the enemies' levels are significantly higher than when playing as 2B. This is due to 9S not being a combat model; he has to work much harder to fight the same enemies in melee combat.
  • When 9S and 2B are together, the other uses the weapons that you equipped them with the last time you played as that character.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Despite death and respawns having in-universe explanations as noted above, cutscenes and story events reset upon your death, so if you died during a boss fight, you'll have to do the whole thing over again anyway.
  • 9S explains that access points allow you to travel back to the Bunker by electronically transmitting your consciousness to a temporary copy body there. In spite of this, drawbacks of travel-via-mind-transfer (such as losing items you're carrying, or not being able to travel somewhere if there isn't a body to spare) never crop up, so the fast travel functions more like regular teleportation.
  • On the way to the Resistance base, 9S comments on how the machine lifeforms in the area aren't hostile and will only attack when attacked themselves. The exact same lines are repeated in Route B, when said enemies are decidedly more hostile and will attack on sight. In fact, 9S's playthrough has huge numbers of advanced enemies scattered everywhere that 2B's doesn't, despite ostensibly being the same story.
  • Some post-boss-battle cutscenes show your character battered and bruised, as if you barely defeated an overwhelming foe—even if you never took any damage during actual gameplay. Similarly, the characters in the cutscenes always wear their default clothes and have white hair, even if you've changed their clothes and accessories and dyed their hair.
  • The playable android characters have access to all the weapons, skill chips, Pod programs, and items you've gathered even when they've been separated from each other. And if the player character dies, while you do need to go back to their old body to reclaim the skill chips they had, the same doesn't apply to weapons and other items they were holding, as those are automatically available for the new body.
• Gameplay Roulette: Just from the beginning the game shifts from top scrolling to side scrolling to forward scrolling shooter and when the game goes to on-foot action proper it switches between third person, top down, and side scrolling. All with the controls adjusted accordingly.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: The aliens don't have any purpose other than building the machine lifeforms and giving the androids something to do after the Gestalt project's failure. Side materials reveal the aliens had the banal goal of colonizing earth as their objective.
• Genre Shift: While the previous Drakengard games and NieR had a fantasy setting, this game is a science fiction piece set in the distant future.
• Giant Flyer: The first boss A2 has to fight in the desert is a flying Goliath-class enemy that consists of about a dozen huge spheres forming a centipede-like entity. Its general makeup and combat style show up again later in the battle against the Emil clones, only much, much more dangerous. There are also smaller, yet still pretty huge Goliath-class flyers that make sporadic appearances during flight unit sequences.
• Goal-Oriented Evolution: It isn't by luck the machines and androids Grew Beyond Their Programming: they share data of their experience, and, as long as their core and Black Boxes are intact, they can even come back from death with what they learned. Both groups choose humanity as their end goal, and so produce machines or androids that carry the emotions and complexity codes.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The amnesiac Resistance member investigating the murder of her friend in the "Amnesia" sidequest eventually discovers that not only did she murder them, but she's a YoRHA Executioner-class unit built to covertly eliminate traitors and deserters, but the guilt of executing her friend led to her erasing her memories. And this wasn't even the first time she'd executed a friend. The whole revelation completely breaks her and turns her Laughing Mad.
  • Towards the end of Route C/D, 9S learns that YoRHA androids were made to be disposable, just to perpetuate the Forever War and perpetuate the lie that humanity was still alive. He does not take it well at all.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: Red and dark red are associated with villainous machines' eyes, bullets, and energy beam attacks. Green is used to indicate good machines, and gold is used for androids' and subjugated machines' bullets and energy beam attacks. It's played with in the case of Adam and Eve, as they also have gold energy-based attacks like the androids but have red eyes. Eve then trades most of the light themed attacks for black and red as the final boss of Routes A/B.
• The Good King: The Forest King was this. The machines in the Forest area are ready to charge at you in large numbers to protect him. He built his kingdom like a familial home, giving out his own parts and circuitry to his subjects to help them achieve sentience. When this resulted in his body deteriorating and finally stopping, he was so loved that his subjects put his data in a robot baby to raise anew. Of course, being a robot, the baby never grew or was even able to talk but they still kept him as their king because he was cute to look at.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: It's entirely possible for 2B and her allies to forgo weapons altogether and beat up the machines with just their bare hands.
• Gradual Regeneration: With an Auto-Heal chip equipped, your HP recovers when you haven't been damaged for six seconds, the rate dependent on the rank and/or number of chips you have equipped. A single level 6 version can regenerate your entire health bar in about ten seconds, making it one of the most powerful chips available on any difficulty except Very Hard.
• Grand Theft Me: 9S can hack into enemies, and if they haven't noticed him first, he can choose to detonate them, turn them to his side, or outright control them. It the last option, the player controls the machine (9S simply disappears) until they choose to self-destruct or it is destroyed via combat or falling. You have access to all their abilities, but flight-capable machines can only be made to ascend very slowly before losing altitude. While controlling a machine, all other machines are friendly unless attacked, and you can hack into them from the machine you're controlling, allowing you to leapfrog from machine to machine as long as you please. This also serves to add the hacked machine to the usable roster of the Underground Coliseum DLC, allowing you to use more powerful machines for the later fights.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The unknown leaders of the Army of Humanity / the androids in space / what was once Hamelin Organization / the former administrators of Project Gestalt, are never met on screen, but have caused a ton of horrible things, such as continuously sending disposable android troops to the Earth to fight the Machines, including Anenome's generation, Jackass's, A2's, and 2B / 9S's. All we know is that they outrank the Commander, that the Terminals approved of their plans, and that Jackass swore vengeance against them.
  • 9S's long-dead prototype, Prototype No. 9, also gets some blame, as he's the one who set up the plan to eventually have all of YoRHA killed by a Logic Virus, and then murdered the more well-meaning android who had outright dismissed using such means (yet still viewed the YoRHA as disposable soldiers), to cover up any evidence the Council of Humanity was a lie and create an unassailable "God" Androids would always be able to believe in.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Several machine lifeforms throughout the game have abandoned their battle stations to study and imitate human philosophy and culture, to various degrees of success. This is the goal of both factions. Machines seek to evolve and become humans after a machine god (Beepy after his resurrection in the Fires of Prometheus story) taught them of humanity and gave them sentience. The conspirator androids are using the conflict to advance androids beyond the YoRHa series to become more human in spirit.
• Guide Dang It!: The game isn't particularly forthcoming about a whole bunch of things.
  • It's next to impossible to witness all 26 endings by accident. Many of them require actions that lie somewhere between "counterintuitive" and "downright stupid" to unlock (like pulling out your OS chip), so good luck finding them all on your own.
  • Certain areas can only be reached by performing extremely long jumps, way farther than the basic double jump can get your character. There are a couple of techniques available to accomplish this, none of which are ever mentioned in a menu or tutorial.
  • Finding Pods B and C either happens through sheer dumb luck, a serious case of OCD, or after consulting a guide.
  • The game gives no warning whatsoever that many sidequests become unavailable or impossible to complete beyond specific points in the main story. This can be profoundly annoying for completionists because, firstly, failing to do those quests in Route A naturally blocks their follow-ups in later Routes, and, secondly, some of them reward weapons or unique upgrade materials, both of which are required for unlocking achievements and newer quests. However, if you beat the game and unlock the chapter select, it will tell you which chapters have incomplete quests and with which characters, though the "Shared Quests" statistic is still obnoxiously vague.
  • Emil's shop's inventory has several sets of goods (awesome-yet-inefficient rank +3/+6 chips, rare materials, a few weapons, and cosmetic alterations) that change depending on where in the city ruins he is encountered. This is never mentioned to the player at all, and a certain random factor remains even when you know about it, which makes it even harder to get him to sell the stuff you need.
  • The game's resident Ultimate Blacksmith isn't much of a secret. Hints as to his existence are dropped early on by various NPCs, and he isn't particularly hard to nail down either (hint: he's the one that doesn't reside in an allied camp or village). However, getting to the only vendor who fuses plug-in chips to level 8 is a different story. No one ever mentions such an upgrade is even possible (let alone where to look), and the chances of finding out about it are slim because she's located in such an out-of-the-way spot in the Forest Ravine.
    • The weapon and Pod upgrades are problematic because, as mentioned just above, side quests can yield the upgrade materials for certain weapons' / pods' advancement, meaning even if you know 'what' you need, you may not know 'where to get it' or how you happen to have some already and still need several more.
  • There's a secret superboss battle against Emil that's very hard to find if you don't know where to look, if you even suspect it exists in the first place. The boss in question gives only the vaguest of hints in this regard, it requires the completion of a specific Fetch Quest beforehand, and it doesn't show up in the questlog at all. If you somehow manage to find and beat this boss, it unlocks a second, much more difficult battle that can't be accessed until all weapons have been found and upgraded to the highest level, which in itself is a non-trivial task without a guide. This second fight at least gets a dedicated quest, a map marker and one of the many secondary endings.
  • Players may suspect there's something up with the bunny statue at the amusement park, since it reads like an enemy on the minimap. Wailing on the thing until you've hurt it enough to piss it off and make it move is far less intuitive, especially since it's a level 80 enemy that won't take any damage at all unless you're 50+ when you try.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Inverted, the current battle model androids are all women while the scanners are men who use hacking or their pods as firepower. 9S is an exception as he taught himself melee combat, but even then he prefers to guide his weapons remotely instead of wielding them physically like the others do.
• Hacking Minigame: During hacking segments you enter a stylized area where you have to play a twin-stick shooter-style sequence in order to pull off the hack. When you play as 9S, you see this much more often as he has the ability to hack others.
• Hailfire Peaks: The game world encompasses sprawling urban ruins, a desert, and a lush forest, all of 'em in more or less direct contact with each other, with sharply defined borders, and they're crammed into an op zone less than two miles across.
• Handshake Substitute: Among the ways the YoRHa interact with their pod's, 9S can fist bump with 153. 2B, meanwhile, simply pets the top of 042.
• Harmless Enemy: A few different varieties. In some areas, such as the early-game City Ruins and Amusement Park, there are enemies that will fight back if you attack first, but otherwise won't harm you. Other machine NPCs, such as the ones in Pascal's Village, won't fight back even if you attack them. And then there are the multi-tier type units, who can't attack because they don't even have arms.
• Heart Drive: Machines have a core unit which contains everything they are. As long as it remains undamaged, it can be placed in a new body and that machine lives on.
• Held Gaze: 2B and 9S have an intensely emotionally charged example in Ending A/B after removing their visors. When 2B realizes that 9S has become infected with the Logic Virus, she gently strokes his face as they gaze deeply into each other's eyes and she leans in close like they're about to kiss, before she moves her hands to his throat instead.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: At the start of Story C, 2B puts on Powered Armor with a face-concealing helmet, like the rest of the YoRHa soldiers. She takes the helmet off during a cutscene—just before the other, still-helmeted soldiers get infected by the Logic Virus and become enemies.
• Heroic Sacrifice: When you finish Ending E, Pod 042 gives you the opportunity to help a random player in need during the credits fight. However, doing so means that all of your save data is erased.
• Hidden Elf Village: Two of them, actually, both inhabited by machines, and bonus points for both being hidden in a forest. Pascal's village is an exceedingly friendly example full of pacifist machines that cut themselves off from the network in order to escape the Forever War. The second example, the Forest King's secluded realm, originated from the same intention but isn't nearly as inclined to welcome outsiders.
• Hikikomori: In the machine village, there is a son machine that decides to dedicate his life to seclusion, seeing interaction with others as too hard and complicated. At first his mother is worried about him not interacting with anyone else, but becomes happier when realizing his dedication to something.
• History Repeats: A recurring theme of the game, where events are destined to repeat over and over. From the machines' simplistic programming leading them to repeat the same actions, the 14 wars between android and machine, and even Androids and their actions are not exempt from this. Fittingly, Pascal reads a book by Frederich Nietzsche, who wrote about Eternal Recurrence. Even with the cycle finally broken on Route C/D/E, the Emil's Head weapon reveals the machines begin rebuilding their network 477 years after Automata. Whether this will lead to a 15th Machine War or not is unknown.
• Hope Springs Eternal: What happens during Ending E once the player starts receiving encouragement from other players and accepts the help of those who willingly sacrificed their save data.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: At the start of Route C, you can't destroy the corrupted YoRHa flight units. They rapidly regenerate health once they get low, and eventually start using EMP attacks that trash 2B's flight unit.
• Hourglass Plot: During Route C. The distant loner A2, who believes the only good machine is a dead machine, learns to open up, connect with others, and empathize with the machines. Meanwhile 9S, who starts off gregarious and agreeing that maybe machines are people, goes mad from grief, cuts himself off from everyone else, and attempts to genocide all machines.
• Humongous Mecha: Some of the larger machine lifeforms, classified as "Goliath", veer into being this. The Engels definitely count, but they all pale before Grün, a monstrous leviathan of metal and aggression that's stated to measure over 1,000 meters in height when standing upright. The first thing it does during its introduction scene is grab a full-sized aircraft carrier in its mouth and bite it in half.
• Humanity Is Infectious: A major theme of the game: the majority of the main cast, NPCs, and enemies are all non-organic, mechanical lifeforms, yet they continuously show very human traits. Which makes this a very interesting variation, because humanity is long dead by the time of the game.
  • The machines imitate human culture to varying extents based on their own capabilities: ordinary ones simply imitate human behavior in a Cargo Cult of sorts without realizing the implications; while more sophisticated ones - like Pascal, the Forest King, and Father Servo - use human culture as a starting point to decide their own goals, and thus manifest their own will and personality. Some take the example of humanity too far, namely Adam and Eve: they take attributes such as pride, ambition or curiosity to their extremes, which makes them unable to empathize with anyone but each other.
  • The androids, on the other hand, are content with already being good facsimiles of humans and are dismissive of machines' much cruder understanding at first. As the game goes on, they realize to great distress that there was a preprogrammed sinister purpose behind the YoRHa forces that made their free will largely irrelevant, ironically making them more automaton-like than they themselves suspected. It is the example of the machines that allow the playable characters to circumvent this and reaffirm that they indeed Grew Beyond Their Programming.
  • The true ending is achieved when even the Pods, who are more machine-like than either of the above and have been passively following orders throughout most of the story, have observed, learned, made some conclusions for themselves and decided to act against their core directives in order to save 2B, 9S and A2.
• Humanity's Wake: In the Ending B storyline, the YoRHA Commander reveals to 9S that humanity is long extinct. The Council of Humanity was set up by YoRHa to maintain the morale of the androids by convincing them that humanity had escaped to the moon when, in truth, the moon base is just a data server maintained by a small handful of androids. The C/D storyline further reveals that humanity had gone extinct as a result of the failure of Project Gestalt.
• Humans Are Special: Adam claims that when compared to humanity's depth of emotions, culture, and abstract thought, his alien creators were at best children, at worst plants in terms of intellectual capacity, despite their incredibly advanced technology. Both the machines and androids long for what humans had, so much so that they've been fighting each other for millenia to become more like the humans.
• Humans Are Warriors:
  • Adam makes it very clear that the part of the human experience he most admires and wants to emulate is their capacity for violence.
  • When the Terminals achieve diversity of opinion, and immediately attempt to destroy each other to have the dominant point of view, A2 opines that "They're acting just like humans."
• Humans Are White: The YoRHa androids, who were built to closely ressemble humans, are all white-skinned and blue-eyed, often white-haired too, while the operators and the Commander are all blonde; and Adam and Eve's appearance is modeled after those androids. The Resistance androids have a noticeably darker skin and hair, however, although it's unknown whether they were built that way or if that's the effect of centuries of exposure to constant daylight.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Humans are both an enigma and a constant source of fascination for every mechanical entity in the game. Machine lifeforms imitate assorted human cultures and behaviors (like sex) without fully understanding their meaning. Adam and Eve go a step further in trying to imitate what they regard as proper human behavior from literature, namely the Bible. Even the androids don't fully grasp human concepts even though they ostensibly serve humanity, finding things like roller coasters and shopping centers incredibly odd. After learning about the Western film genre, 9S comments "Warfare as entertainment? What were humans thinking?".
• Holy Halo: Subjugated machines have halos above their heads.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: A key difference between the YoRHa Androids and the Machine Network. Throughout most of the game the YoRHa Androids have access to emotions, which makes them believe that they are as close to humanity as they can be, because of this and the fact that they look human, they tend to look down on the Machines and their efforts to be closer to humans, unaware of the fact that all that separates them is superficial at best, they are far closer to what Machines used to be than Humans and it takes the awakening of this reality for them to start acting human, such as the case with A2 and the reveal of her expendable nature, or 9S and the reveal that the Android's cause is a lie and all the shit show that follows. The game shows this contrasts between Machines and Androids by having Machines acting like humans from the beggining of the game, whereas it takes to the last third of the game for there to be another Android other than A2 to behave like a human, for better or worse, in the case of 9S.
• I Know You Know I Know: It's revealed at the very end of the game that 9S knew the whole time that 2B was actually 2E and that her true function was to kill him if he ever got ahold of too much classified data. According to Taro, he actually didn't know it from the start; he only realizes it during the story through deduction.
• Implied Love Interest: By the end of the game, it is made very clear in every way possible short of being directly stated in dialogue that 2B and 9S are in love with one another but are incapable of acting on it. The relationship between the two of them forms the emotional core of the game's story, and indirectly drives the plot of routes C and D. 2B reacts with uncharacteristically violent rage whenever 9S is endangered, and it's later revealed that the disastrous state her psyche is in is the consequence of having to kill the boy she loves over and over again. 9S, meanwhile, has an extremely obvious schoolboy crush on her, bordering on obsession, to the extent that he goes absolutely bugfuck nuts in Routes C and D when he sees A2 Mercy Kill her.
• Improbably Female Cast: All YoRHa Androids except for Scanner models are female, and no other Scanners besides 9S play a role in the plot. When asked why this was the case from a design perspective, Yoko Taro gave the rather legendary response "I like pretty girls."
• In Medias Res: The game begins well into the millennia-long war between the androids and machine lifeforms, with details as to what the war is all about withheld until after the prologue is over. Concerning the personal drama between 2B and 9S, Route C also makes it clear that their story began long before the opening act, and represented only the latest of the many times 2B encountered 9S and was forced to watch him die.
• Innocuously Important Episode: A quest available during Route B has 9S meet an android who is of the secret YoRHA type E "Executioner" designation, and who was tasked with assassinating deserters and other androids threatening the integrity of YoRHA's secrets. She's been driven insane due to having to kill her dearest friends and lovers.
  • It's revealed at the end of Routes C and D that 2B is actually an E-type herself, meant to kill 9S units if and when they learn too much.
• Insufficiently Advanced Alien: According to Adam, the aliens were so stagnant they were akin to "plants" when compared to humanity, which is why machines killed them and decided to copy human behavior instead. It's kind of telling when they were struggling against a race that was extinct before they even arrived.
• Interface Screw: If you're severely damaged, infected, or get hit with an EMP attack from specialized machines, your HUD becomes jumbled, like your HP bar becoming really large and wrapping around the screen, or your visuals becoming a curved cathode-tube-like amber screen. In some cases you might even be unable to attack.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • You might collect chips that spoil what you get later in the game. For example, getting hacking chips before you play as 9S.
  • In the The End of Yorha Edition, you get some extra accessories and skins right at the start of the game. With some of them, the descriptions in the inventory mention they can be worn by A2, which spoils the fact that she will become a playable character (despite appearing as an NPC antagonist in routes A and B), which only happens in the last third of the game.
• Internal Death Squad: The Executioner (Type E) units are a line of YoRHa androids deployed by the Bunker to execute deserters like A2. Sometimes they will monitor unreliable assets so they can quickly execute them if necessary, such as 2E keeping tabs on 9S.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence:
  • The endings for Routes A and B have 2B straddling 9S' waist as she strangles him to death.
  • In addition to this, during a sidequest Jackass reveals that during combat androids are programed to experience pleasure, and even something close to love in the heat of battle. Which gives an entirely new interpretation to the scene towards the end of Route C, where 9S is confronted by a room full of spare 2B bodies and proceeds to violently destroy all of them, repeatedly stabbing the last one in the chest, in a twisted reversal of endings A/B. And speaking of those, what exactly did Adam bleep out when he accused 9S of wanting to "＊＊＊＊ 2B" — "fuck"... or "kill"? Is there a meaningful difference between those drives in YoRHas? Can it be that this is exactly how 2B fell in love with 9S in the first place — by killing him again and again?
• Intoxication Mechanic: You can buy a special drug for androids from resident Mad Scientist Jackass. Consuming it will temporarily cause various types of Interface Screw that will alter the sound and/or the image, such as the screen getting pixelating or the music turning 8-bit; although it won't directly harm your character.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Your equipped chips are given representation as a visual stack, which you can move around in order to get the chips to fit. If you'd rather not contend with that, you can choose the optimize option to sort and stack the chips automatically.
• It Has Been an Honor: In the doomed prologue, 2B and 9S say as much to one another just before they activate their Black Box reactions to take out the surrounding enemies. At first, it seems a bit misleading, due to the immediate reveal of the memory-backup system, but the significance is spelled out later: If an android isn't backed up extremely close to the time of their demise, the "you" of a given moment might as well be dead going forward. 9S is the one who initiates the exchange; Route B reveals that 9S knew there wasn't enough bandwidth to back up himself and 2B, and chose to prioritize her.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Androids and, as we eventually discover, machine lifeforms, have social genders and will refer to themselves and each other with the proper pronouns. However, any official documentation (i.e. Intel entries) will consistently use "it".
• It's a Small World, After All: The vast majority of the 14th Machine War's momentous events that will decide the millennia-long struggle between androids and machines takes place in a small section of a ruined city, plus the surrounding regions - all of which combined measure no more than a few square miles.
• Joke Character: Multi-tier Type machines can grow to impressive size, look somewhat intimidating, are often found in large groups... and are completely harmless because they lack weapons (they're literally unarmed - their only limbs are their stubby legs). All they can do is glare at the protagonists and awkwardly waddle after them when they get close. Even the intel database points out how utterly preposterous their design is. What makes their pitiful existence even worse is the fact that they drop certain rare upgrade materials that're very hard to obtain from other sources. However, later segments of the game upgrade them to Lethal Joke Characters - their enhanced versions are armed, and quite heavily, to boot.
• Joke Ending: The game has several "bad" endings that are hysterical due to the absurdity of how they're achieved, putting them firmly in joke ending territory.
  • Ending K, a.k.a. death by mackerel. You need to catch a mackerel and eat it. Mackerels are an instakill for androids due to the chemical reaction the mackerels have when they're ingested. According to the text box, though, the mackerel was delicious...
  • Ending U, which you get when you self-destruct in the command bunker. The flavor text goes on to say that the Bunker exploded, but it looked pretty from Earth! It also says that the Commander still floats in space with a stern look on her face.
  • Ending T, where you disconnect your own OS chip, which naturally kills you instantly. You can even sell it! (for an insultingly cheap 28G, no less). Oh, and the interface explicitly warns you about it too:
    Caution: Handle With Care!
    Removal of the OS chip will result in death.
  • Ending L. 2B spends ten years on the run from both android and machine assassins so she can keep playing the fishing minigame.
  • Ending O has the snarkiest narration of them all.
    Some YoRHa units abandoned their mission, the operation failed, and every android met their demise. ...Well, except for the really selfish ones. They were fine.
• Justified Save Point: When you save your game, the android is actually using an access point to backup their memories. This also means you can't save if you're too far from a working access point.
• Karma Houdini: The true Big Bad of the game is arguably the android leaders who created YorHa and who perpetuate the lie that the war is necessary, when they know fully well all the deaths and sacrifices are pointless. But the protagonists never even find out who these people are, so by the end of the game they suffer no consequences from their actions, and even though Jackass's final message states that she's gonna find them and make them pay, we don't know whether she actually succeeds in that.
• Katanas Are Just Better: 2B's default weapon is a silver-bladed katana with a white grip (Virtuous Contract). 9S's equivalent is a gold-bladed katana with a black grip (Cruel Oath).
• Killed Off for Real: If machine lifeforms lose their core they can't come back since their self awareness is encrypted there. Androids can also die if their data doesn't get uploaded in time to the Bunker and of course if the Bunker itself is destroyed.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • Implied with the original S-Type series. The current models are all male, but the YoRHa stage play had S-Type S21 and the rest of her kind as female. As they were sent on a mission meant to fail it's implied the rest of the female S-Types were wiped out to make way for the more advanced male S-Type.
  • The A-Type and G-Type were discontinued by YoRHa in the past, leaving A2 as the Sole Survivor of her series.
  • By the end of the game, there are still a few survivors of YoRHa's destruction, such as 4S in the Forest King's castle, the two drug-addicted androids in the desert oil field, and one more android at the desert oasis. But in Ending E, Pod 153 confirms *all* YoRHa Black Boxes have gone offline, leaving it unclear if they also died or were disconnected from the network, leading the Pods to view them as dead.
    • According to Taro, part of the Pods' duties is wrapping up and deleting everything about Project YoRHA, including hunting down any survivors, and 4S is directly mentioned, the Pods likely killed them.
• Killer Rabbit: A literal one (although considerably larger than the average example) spends its days disguised as a golden statue at the amusement park entrance. It doesn't attack unless it's provoked by dealing it enough damage, but when it does, it turns out to be a level 80 enemy that can one-shot most player characters below level 75. It's the most popular target of experience farming runs in the whole game because it's extremely easy to kill with 9S' hacking ability, and destroying it this way results in gaining a guaranteed 2-6 levels plus some very valuable items.
• Kill Sat: YoRHa has at least one satellite-based laser cannon in orbit around Earth. It's used against the largest, most dangerous Goliath-class machines there are, although the results tend to be less than impressive.
• Lack of Empathy: Most machines and androids have it. One sidequest has a machine ask you to kill his kind in the Amusement Park so that he can use their component to make a video game. Other androids reveal themselves to be caustic. The leaders of both sides treat their army as disposable, sabotaging themselves so the war can continue; later, though, they act humanely enough to have their data used for new model androids and/or machines, deleting the past models that have outlived their usefulness.
• Lady Land: YoRHa forces, despite mainstream expectations for a military force, are made up almost entirely of androids modeled after women, even the strictly non-combative Operator type models. Only the combat-secondary Scanner type model is given a masculine chassis. The stage play ''YoRHa Boys'' explains just why this is the case: Male-frame androids are stronger than female-frame ones, but they are also more independent and self-assertive, which means they would not cooperate with the rest of their unit as well as female androids; this means they are deemed too inefficient for mainstream combat status. It also made them harder for the Project YoRHa commanders to manipulate and keep deceived.
• Lemony Narrator: The joke endings are a few sentences long, but an overwhelming number of them have some pretty darn sarcastic narration.
• Lethal Joke Weapon: Fishing in the sewers can net you an iron pipe that counts as a small sword. When fully upgraded, it has the widest damage range of the small sword class, from lower than any other small sword's damage output at level 1 to matching a fully upgraded Type 3 Sword in having the highest damage of any small sword, and comes with perks that give you a chance to score critical hits and stun enemies.
• Level Limiter: The Forbidden Fruit item lowers your level by 10, which can only be won by beating the Special Rank match at the Forbidden City Arena DLC.
• Level Scaling: Flight sections have enemies scale to your level.
• Life Drain: An Offensive Heal chip lets you recover a percentage of HP for every hit you land. Deadly Heal regenerates your health every time you kill an enemy.
• Lighter and Softer: Double subverted. At first, the game has a fairly standard RPG plot, right up until a late game plot twist in Route B reveals humanity has already gone extinct, and you've been fighting for nothing. Then Routes C and D start, and all of a sudden YoRHa is annihilated, your supporting cast begins dropping like flies, and by the end of the whole mess every major character save Anemone, Jackass, Pods 042 and 153, and possibly Pascal and 9S are dead. However, the ending is rather optimistic for a Yoko Taro game.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Well, Linear Warriors Quadratic Hackers, but, whereas 2B is a powerful sword fighter, she pales in comparison to 9S' absolutely overpowered hacking mechanic (which can make mincemeat of enemies well beyond your level).
• Living Statue: You can attack the giant rabbit statue at the Amusement Park, at which point it comes to life and becomes a grueling Superboss.
• Long Song, Short Scene: A rare example with gameplay implications. The boss fight against the Opera Singer has Mickey Mousing, with many attacks lining up with the music. One part in particular when the singer changes has the camera pan out for a Bullet Hell segment. However, the average player should be able to damage the boss enough to move her to phase 2 before that segment of the song starts, thus never seeing the gameplay segment.
• Loophole Abuse: In the Steam version you can subvert the save data erasure in Ending E simply by backing it up and restoring it afterwards (it's stored in Documents\My Games by default).
• Machine Monotone: All machine lifeforms that can talk have one, with the sole exceptions being Pascal, Adam, and Eve. Pascal's voice still has his species' heavily synthetic inflection, but it's much more emotional and nuanced than any of his peers'.
• Macross Missile Massacre: No futuristic JRPG would be complete without them:
  • Engels-class Goliaths are capable of launching a barrage of worryingly big missiles at their target.
  • Whenever 2B and/or 9S pilot a flight unit, their pod attack gets replaced by their mount unleashing a ridiculous number of small, tightly clustered missiles that can destroy just about anything as long as most of them hit. Naturally, it has a lengthy cooldown to balance out its power.
  • Pod C's standard attack is a salvo of powerful homing missiles that automatically lock on and seek out enemies within the player's field of view. That includes targets far beyond the current engagement range, which can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the situation. Its only drawback is that the missiles are launched vertically from the pod rather than from the front, so very close small enemies will likely be targeted but not hit when the missiles attempt to arc back down and hit the ground instead.
• Made of Explodium: Machine lifeforms generally explode violently when they're destroyed, with the size of the explosion naturally scaling with the size of whatever it is that explodes. Fortunately, being near them when it happens doesn't hurt the protagonists (unless they were kamikaze units), and the explosion usually scatters various amounts of money, plug-in chips, and/or upgrade materials across the immediate area. However, a hacked machine made to explode will damage its friends if they're close enough.
• Madness Mantra:
  • "This cannot continue." "Become as gods." They become part of songs during combat.
  • As revealed in Route B, Simone - the operatic boss in the amusement park - has "He won't look my way" as hers.
  • Some of the weapon stories include this as well.
• Masochist's Meal: Androids can eat any fish except for mackerel. Tasty though it is, mackerel causes androids' bodily fluids to congeal, resulting in paralysis and death.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Everything the androids can do is explicitly technological in nature and often contains some Techno Babble, like their use of magnetic fields for throwing their swords the way they do. Magic, on the other hand, appears to be a known phenomenon as well - the pods outright call the insane Emil clones a "magic weapon from the old world". Both examples together make it all the more jarring that nothing is ever made clear about how Adam's and Eve's abilities work, from Adam being born from some golden juice excreted by a bunch of primitive machine lifeforms, to Eve rising fully grown from his brother's limp body in a pillar of light, to all the other insane feats of which they're capable.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The subtitle in the game's title, "Automata", refers to the plural form of "automaton", another word for "robot". Both the protagonist YoRHa androids and the antagonist "machine lifeforms" are non-biological, mechanical lifeforms.
  • Furthermore, one protagonist's name is "2B" (to be), and another's is "9S" (nein ist, German for "is not", a.k.a, not to be), and they have to contend with a traitorous YoRHa whose name is "A2" (et tu, as in Caesar's famous last words, "Et Tu, Brute?").
    • Likewise, Pascal, the leader of the Machine Village, is named after noted mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. Which becomes even more fitting when you remember that the Pascal is the IS unit for pressure, aka stress on an object via outside forces. And BOY, does Pascal get stressed from outside forces.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: Overlaps with LEGO Body Parts given the nature of the game. When 9S reawakens after losing an arm in an explosion, he rips the arm off a nearby 2B clone's corpse and jams it into his own stump. Incredibly, he can use the new appendage immediately, good as new, after having to hack himself to purge a weak viral infection.
• Mechanical Animals: The alien race that invaded Earth, among other things, tried to create robotic fish in order to eliminate life in Earth's oceans. Unfortunately for them, the robots were a bit too close to the real deal, and so now when you go for fishing there's a chance you get a robot fish instead of a normal one. Oceanic ecosystem is still perfectly fine.
• Mecha-Mooks: The machine lifeforms, natch.
• The Meaning of Life: One of the main themes of the game revolves around the philosophical concept of existentialism, and explores the overwhelming despair that accompanies self-consciousness in the face of an absurd and seemingly meaningless world. It's also about accepting that meaninglessness, choosing to emphasize the importance of constructing one's own meaning, rather than succumbing to despair and living in bad faith.
• Metal Slime: The golden bunny in the amusement park. It takes a tremendous amount of punishment to wake up, let alone put down, but hacking it to death gives more experience than any of the game's boss fights.
• Meta Mecha: The biped goliath enemy is not a single robot, but a huge mecha suit piloted by four normal-sized machines.
• Meta Twist:
  • Devola and Popola are back, and those familiar with the original NieR probably won't trust them. Automata, of course, expects this, as not only are they truly on your side, not only are they not the duo from the original game, but a pair of androids from the same line, but all of android-kind distrusts and resents them on a subconscious level for the actions of the original Devola and Popola, and the twins in Automata have been programmed to feel continuous guilt over it.
  • Earlier Drakengard games had their Multiple Endings be straight-up AlternateTimelines that were incompatible with each other. The original Nier played with this convention, in that Ending B was essentially a Perspective Flip of Ending A's events, but not a divergence. Automata, however, takes things further by having Routes C and D take place after Endings A and B, meaning that playing through the New Game Plus routes becomes essential to experiencing the entire plot, and no divergences occur until you make the Last-Second Ending Choice in the C and D routes.
• Mickey Mousing: The opera singer robot has her attacks happen in time with the music, such as her lasers firing when the orchestra reaches a high point in the music, or a slow paced Bullet Hell segment when the music cuts out for the lone singer.
• Mighty Glacier: The golden bunny is large, telegraphs all its attacks, and is fairly slow, but hits like a truck if it actually manages to catch you.
• The Mind Is The Plaything Of The Body: Played with. Androids tend to typically be attracted to other androids based on their personality regardless of their bodies' genders. Examples include No. 2 units being close to No. 9 units; while No. 6 models are shown to be attracted to the same sex only. Gender does however influence how an android acts as YoRHa Boys reveals. Men are far more powerful than their female counterparts but are also more uncontrollable. Female units are weaker, but more obedient, and far less likely to rebel. This is why male units stopped being mass-produced and the ones that remained were reformatted into S-Types.
• Mind Screwdriver: The game provides an answer to one particular plot point that seemed like an inconsistency from the prior game. Namely, it answers why humans still seem to exist in the YoRHa stageplay and various side materials when they are supposed to have been made extinct by Nier's actions, by revealing it to be one huge lie.
• Mini-Game Credits: During Ending E you have to play a hacking-style game against the credits while prompts pop up to taunt you whenever you die.
• Modular Difficulty: The game features difficulty customization in the form of "plug-in chips". Most of the core HUD, from damage numbers and health bars to the minimap and text log, can be unplugged from the player character in order to add in other chips. Easy Mode has its own array of optional chips, including an auto-attack and auto-evade. Just don't remove the OS chip, unless you want a Non-Standard Game Over.
• Moral Myopia: The YoRHa androids never seem to notice that their condescending comments about machine lifeforms can apply just as much to themselves. This gets even more complex when it's revealed that their vital Black Boxes are based off of machine lifeforms' machine cores- meaning, in a way, that YoRHa androids are hybrids running around in human-looking exteriors.
• Motivational Lie: To maintain morale in an endless war, the androids at the top hid the extinction of the humans and claimed they were waiting on the moon for Earth to be livable again.
• Multiple Endings: 5 main ones, with 21 Non Standard Game Overs (each representing a letter of the English alphabet) and one DLC ending (whose symbol is a triangle containing a circle).
  • "flowers for m[A]chines": Adam and Eve are both killed, and 9S manages to back himself up after getting hit with the Logic Virus. While the war isn't won, it's a great victory for the androids (and for 2B and 9S, whose combined efforts have allowed YoRHa to gain a foothold on Earth).
  • "or not to [B]e": Same as the above but from 9S's perspective. It also ends on a much less optimistic note as 9S ponders his true purpose now that humanity is gone for good.
  • "meaningless [C]ode": A2 manages to purge the Logic Virus from 9S before a Pod carries his body away, then she destroys the Machine Lifeforms' Tower and falls to her demise as the tower collapses, giving up her life in the process.
  • "childhoo[D]'s end": 9S kills A2, but he slips in her blood and falls onto A2's blade, inadvertently killing himself. The Machine Lifeforms fire the rocket, successfully travelling to a new world, and 9S either comes with them or stays on Earth to die.
  • "the [E]nd of yorha": The Pods decide to go against their programming and prevent the deletion of the YoRHa Project's data. They reassemble 2B, 9S, and A2, giving the three of them one last shot at life now that the project has been shut down.
• Multi-Track Drifting: Boar drifting returns from the previous game.
• Mundane Utility: The Pods are capable of shooting lasers, bending physics, and creating Hard Light devices of death; but they are also good for creating makeshift fishing chairs, being used as fishing hooks, providing illumination, and being used to slow falls from high places.
  • In the concert, what is the best use for an atomically thin sword that can cut metal like butter? Digging 40 feet through solid rock!
• Mutual Kill: An accidental example with Ending D. 9S and A2 are fighting a battle to the death, and when A2 has the chance to kill 9S, memories of 2B asking her to protect 9S distract her, giving 9S the opportunity to run her through with his sword. However, her sword is still outstretched, causing him to accidentally impale himself on it while stabbing her, causing him to slowly bleed out too.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The YoRHa get their name from a stage play by Taro Yoko called "YoRHa", which is said to take place many years after the first NieR game, in the year 11941. The whole YoRHa story is an allusion to many events that transpired during WWII.
  • The Recorder android Accord from Drakengard 3 is mentioned by the Weapon Trader at the Resistance Camp to be the owner of the store.
  • The tattoos that spread across Eve's body include the symbol of the Cult of the Watchers from Drakengard (which we learn in Drakengard 3 is the two Ones together).
  • A Japanese pre-order DLC can let the Pod Support System look like Grimoire Weiss from the original [1] game. Gameplay-wise, the Pod Support System serves as this game's version of Weiss.
  • The NieR track "The Dark Colossus Destroys All" is reprised as "Dark Colossus - Kaiju" for the assault of the titanic machine lifeform fought in the ocean during the Missile Supply mission. Both scenes also happen to be points of no-return for their respective storylines.
  • The crooked blindfold that 2B wears over her eyes is styled like Shadowlord/Father Nier's eye-patch.
  • The code numbers in Pod 042 and Pod 153 coincidentally are the same numbers that the Intoners from Drakengard 3 are named after.
  • Several weapon stories reference prior games in the line:
    • The Iron Pipe story is a narration by Yonah to Nier during the WCS crisis.
    • Virtuous Dignity's "fourth owner" describes the life and fate of Brother Nier, while Cruel Arrogance describes Shadowlord/Father Nier.
    • Dragoon Lance describes Caim and Angelus.
  • One of the first files 9S can find in the factory's servers details the appearance of a Dragon and a Giant sometime in 2003. One of the weirder endings to the original Drakengard which in turn inspired the NieR franchise.
  • The three 3C3C1D119440927 DLC outfits are the two outfits of Brother Nier and Kaine's outfit from the original NieR.
  • The Terminals bears a resemblance to Manah from Drakengard, even sporting a male voice like the Watchers possessing Manah.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The machines you can encounter include cowboy robots, clown robots, zombie robots, and zombie clown robots.
• Nintendo Hard: The 3C3C1D119440927 DLC adds three Blood Sport arenas to the game, each with its own unique quirks and a set of six challenges ranging from level 25 to level 80. These aren't much of a problem to beat, but once you've finished the sixth one, an additional level 99 challenge unlocks that's predictably more difficult to beat. The one in the desert is just a kill-count challenge that isn't particularly hard, but the other two are punishing:
  • The bonus fight in the Flooded City pits the player against 21 waves of level 130+ enemies that one-shot even a maxed-out level 99 protagonist, which means you'll die very quickly and have to start over when it happens. Auto-Attack/etc. chip use is disabled, so you'll get your ass kicked even on Easy Mode. Every couple of waves a beefed-up, Shade-colored campaign boss shows up that summons lethal backup if it isn't killed very quickly. The whole battle must be finished within one realtime hour. It takes up to 20 minutes of fighting to emerge victorious while playing in debug mode with invincibility and other cheats enabled, as demonstrated in this video. Players have since discovered some fairly viable methods to beat this challenge legitimately, but those still don't change the fact that you'll die in one hit from anything, including failed hacking attempts as 9S. To add insult to injury, the battle doesn't even net you any reward that would be worth the effort - all you get is a collection of bog-standard +6 chips, ten Forbidden Fruits that lower your character level by 10 each, and perhaps a warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment.
  • The bonus fight in the forest arena has the player pitted against waves of machines specifically designed to counter any type of machine the player may choose. If you chose a Ranged body? Some enemies have shields. Chose Melee?. Some shields have spikes and there are big ranged attackers. Chose a big machine? Spread out little ones with guns. Choosing to play as ones with just guns is practically suicide, and everything else still takes a lot of skill.
• Noble Bigot: The protagonists generally despise Machines due to their war with and losing several comrades to them, but they're willing to help (or at least ignore) non-hostile Machines.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Cutscenes always show the protagonists with their respective standard weapons and outfits no matter what they're actually equipped with. This also means that 2B will put her skirt back on even when it was previously blown off (or removed on purpose with the Dress Module).
• Non-Heteronormative Society: Because no character in the story has biological sex (they're either Androids or Machines), the concept of gender and sexuality is a bit hazy. According to side material, Androids can choose to install or not to install a component resembling genitalia, and even choose to imitate a pregnancy just to experience it. Both Androids and Machines are implied to have gender in an attempt to imitate humans, and some machines have a pretty basic understanding of it, which translates in simply wearing bows or tuxedos. Among Androids, the attraction between androids of the same gender seems to be so common that they won't even bat an eye to it, some of which includes A2 being in love with her teammate A4, 6O being openly attracted to another female android, and 16D, a female android in a relationship with her mentor 11B, who was also female. The fact that the YoRHa organization is 90% female probably also has something to do with it.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Little Sister Machine is easily larger than her Big Sister Machine.
• Non-Standard Game Over: There are short endings that can be triggered throughout the game by doing things such as removing the OS chip, blowing yourself up with your self-destruct sequence while you're inside the Bunker, going the wrong way when there's an obvious (and at times not-so-obvious) goal in front of you, killing a friendly NPC(s) or using an item that's stated to have potentially adverse effects on you. All of which are different from the other endings by the credits being sped up.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: One machine lifeform from Pascal's village is famous for always choosing a cheap coin over a more valuable one. After hacking in to him, you find his logic circuits are actually more advanced than most, and he reveals he's doing this on purpose since it's making him money—the other machines are happy to keep mockingly giving him the cheap coins.
• Ominous Chanting: The Paris Games Week trailer shows the music using fast-paced ominous chanting.
• Ominous Television: A hidden elevator in the Amusement Park leads 2B and 9S into an underground bunker with a tower of eerily flickering TV sets. While its exact nature is never explained, there are indications that that room is the origin of the logic virus, as it is there that the pair encounter the first infected machine lifeforms.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Every android in the know will never forget that the Devola and Popola models doomed humanity. While it was an issue with only one pair and partly the Shadowlord/Original's fault, the remaining Twin models are treated with hatred by their fellow androids and were reprogrammed so they'll always feel guilt over it.
• Once More, with Clarity: Route B is basically Route A but from 9S' perspective, which offers some perspective on things like the motivations of certain bosses, or 9S' thoughts during certain scenes.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Playing the game on Very Hard mode makes it so not only do the enemies hit harder and you can't use your lock-on feature, you also die in one hit. And this is a game with Bullet Hell elements. Hope you're good at dodging!
• One-Man Army: Don't let 9S's friendly demeanor decieve you, because when serious, he can be quite the killing machine. Despite scanner models not even being built for combat he trained himself how to fight in physical combat by observing 2B. This, combined with his hacking skills makes him nearly unstoppable in combat, taking on squadrons of machines which most YoRHa units can't handle, and far surpasses the current, up-to-date YoRHa models in combat.
  • This gets exaggerated in Route C/D, when 2B succumbs to the logic virus and mercy killed by A2. 9S undergoes a Sanity Slippage and goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. He takes on a literal army of infected and advancd YoRHa units, killing multiple E-Model clones of 2B that were designed to kill him, and taking on no less than 6 flight units on foot. He then proceeds to duel and go toe-to-toe with A2, a renegade attacker unit with years experience, who killed him at least four times in the past along with 2B. Oh, and all of this is done while he's infected with at least 95% of the logic virus with sheer determination (to put things into perspective, 2B could barely move at that percentage.) One-Man Army much?
• Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending: With the game having multiple endings, this is both played straight and averted. Endings A and B have the leads and the supporting cast survive, then endings C and D have two or three of the three leads killed (depending or whether you choose to have 9S leave Earth or die there), with most of the supporting cast having already died before that. The final ending, Ending E shows the Pods resurrecting the three leads, but almost all of the supporting android and robot characters are still dead.
• Optional Boss: Several can be found in the game.
  • The machine Father Servo being the most recurring, he becomes stronger with the materials 2B and 9S bring until he's level 60 in his final fight.
  • The Amusement Park has the dormant level 80 bunny machine statue, which is actually a machine lifeform acting as a statue until he's forced to protect himself.
  • A particularly strong machine, the Lord of the Valley from the eponymous quest, can be found at the end of the forest valley, impaled on multiple swords and asking for death. You can oblige him, but he is really tough early game since he's set at level 60.
• Orange/Blue Contrast: In Shoot 'Em Up hacking segments, orange bullets are destructible, while dark blue ones aren't.
• Paradiegetic Gameplay: To unlock Ending E, which brings the characters back to life with their memories and a second chance, you have to beat a Bullet Hell section that the vast majority of people will only beat by connecting to the network and getting someone's help, after which the game explains that if you want to help someone like that you have to delete your data. It means the help you received was from someone who deleted their game so you could achieve the same ending they had.
• Paying It Forward: In the Ending E, other players (or rather, their automated copies) come to your rescue during the borderline impossible-to-beat Final Battle sequence. After beating it with their help, you are asked whether you would like to help another, random player somewhere in the world achieve this final ending, too, — but the price is the deletion of all of your saved games and progress.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: If you return to the place where you first meet Adam after escaping it, you'll be able to fight endless waves of machines, scaled to whichever Route you're currently playing. Short of fighting the extremely tanky golden bunny, it's the fastest way to earn experience, with the added benefit of all the money, chips, and materials they drop.
• Permadeath: Played with: For most of the game, Death Is a Slap on the Wrist since the Bunker backs up data for YoRHa androids so that they can be re-uploaded into a new body. The only caveat is that you would need to re-collect your plug-in chips from your old chassis before dying again, or risk losing them. Later in the game, however, the Bunker is destroyed, meaning that any surviving androids would be unable to back up their data. Thus, death becomes permanent. In practice, this means that in the Ending C/D Route, dying means having to reload an earlier save file, but without having to hunt down your old body for chips.
• Permanently Missable Content: While the game generally averts this, allowing you to go back and get any sidequests, equipment or endings you missed at some point or another, Ending Y is the only ending you can be locked out of permanently since it requires a superboss to use a certain attack, and if you defeat said superboss you'll never get another chance to fight it again.
  • Upgrading your pods to Level 2 requires one Powerup Part S each. Two can be earned through quest rewards, but one is dropped by a specific enemy that you only encounter one time. Missed out on it? Tough luck!
  • One of the weapons needed to get 100% completion (and unlock the superboss) is sold by Pascal in the last portion of the game, but ONLY if you choose to wipe his memories with A2. Make any other choice, and his store will be unavailable. Thought you can replay the relevant mission with chapter select and make a different choice.
• Pet the Dog: For all of 9S' and A2's hate of machines, they're willing to hear out the needs of Pascal's pacifist village and genuinely care about Pascal. Notably, 9S still tries to be cordial with Pascal and is concerned about him in Route C/D, when his genocidal thoughts toward machines is at a high.
• Pietà Plagiarism:
  • Shown on the game's cover art, where 2B holds 9S in the iconic manner. 2B also does so briefly in a cutscene after recovering him from Adam.
  • At the end of the second boss battle, a newborn Eve holds his injured brother Adam this way.
• Playable Epilogue: The end of Route B. While the credits are rolling, you have control of 2B and can run around the Bunker talking to everyone, with everyone mostly gushing over how awesome 2B and 9S are. The Route will only end after you speak to 9S and return to your room.
• Player Data Sharing: If you connect to the network you can choose a message to display to others when they come across your fallen body. You can also give a message to those who are struggling on Ending E.
• Plot Tunnel: Late in 2B's story, she returns to the factory from the opening of the game. The doors lock behind, and she has to fight through a mostly linear level to get back to the open world. Even the save points, which she could normally use to teleport around the map, temporarily can't connect to the outside world.
• Point of No Return: Going to the Sunken City to initiate the "Missile Supply Mission" story quest in Routes A and B will lock the player out of any uncompleted sidequests due to 2B and 9S being separated after the mission and only reuniting in time for the final battle against Eve. Fortunately, the player will eventually unlock Chapter Select near the end of the game and be able to go back and complete these sidequests.
• Powered Armor: The standard combat attire of all YoRHa frontline fighters except for 2B and A2, for some reason. 2B then briefly gets one herself at the beginning of Route C (finishing the game unlocks it as a costume), but it's just a cosmetic item that doesn't do anything except look cool. It is possible that it's only used for full on assault while 2B was doing recon with 9S beforehand.
• Power-Up Magnet: With an Auto-Collect Item chip equipped, items are automatically drawn in to you when you come close enough.
• Precision F-Strike: Not spoken, but in text form from Jackass during her "Machine Research Report" of the entire truth of the game.
  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.
• Press Start to Game Over: Two of the joke endings can be achieved very quickly into their respective Routes.
  • Ending W ("broken [W]ings") requires you to die in the prologue of Route A. On the highest difficulty, a single hit from the first projectiles of this sequence will kill you.
  • Ending G ("hun[G]ry for knowledge") can be acquired in mere seconds after gaining control of 9S on Route B, by walking in the wrong direction.
• Press X to Die: The game offers extensive amounts of customization to allow a player to choose a combat style they want thanks to the chip system. However, one of the chips available is the OS chip, and removing that one causes an instant Game Over.
  • Pressing and holding both joysticks begins a self-destruct sequence, although this only drops your HP to One. Unless you self-destruct on the Bunker.
• Progressive Instrumentation: The final version of "The Weight of the World" ending theme, which plays over Ending E, starts off with a simple Chip Tune leitmotif, before adding more instruments, then the vocals, and finally a chorus as certain plot events unfold.
• Putting on the Reich: The YoRHa organization has shades of this, what with their black, white and red base, rousing martial speeches, spiffy black uniforms, and Kerberos-esque helmets. To cap it off, the Ho-229 flight unit is named after an experimental World War II German jet fighter.

R - Z

• Rage Against the Author: The final bit of gameplay before unlocking the final ending is a shmup segment where you fight against the credits. Implicitly, after your characters died, you've become as a god fighting the other gods of the game's world for the sake of those characters.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Just like in the original NieR, despite the immense amount of time that has passed since civilization's downfall the ruins looks fairly fresh with only a bit of rust and overgrowth and with some of the old factories still being operational. Probably justified to a certain extent, as civilization on Earth has had about 8,000 years to not only rebuild, but advance. It's implied some machines do know how to build or re-purpose human buildings.
• Random Drop Booster: Drop Rate Up chips give a better chance for enemies to drop items.
• Reclaimed by Nature: Pretty much all outdoor locations are former urban areas being slowly reclaimed by nature, some were overgrown by plants, some were simply covered by the desert sands in the thousands of years since humanity's extinction.

• Real-Time Weapon Change: You can have two weapon sets ready and switch between them with a press of a button.
• Really 700 Years Old: Justified, since by nature, androids and machines can't physically age.
  • Several of the characters, including the commander, Anenome, and A2, are in their hundreds or thousands, despite looking like young women.
  • Pascal and Emil remember the initial alien invasion.
  • Inverted with 9S, who looks like a boy in his mid-to-late teens, but is revealed in Ending D to have first been born 3 years before the events of the game. And this doesn't even cover all the times 2B had to kill him and reset his memories.
  • Taken to comic levels, as the forest King is over 200 despite being an un-growing robotic infant.
• Record Needle Scratch: A dramatic variant in the climactic battle of Routes A and B, as the boss music continues to play right up until 2B stabs Eve through the back of his skull.
• Recollection Sidequest: You unlock not the protagonists' memories, but those of Emil, a returning Non-Player Companion from NieR. Emil asks you to find Lunar Tear flowers scattered throughout the world, and doing so unlocks parts of his memories, revealing how he ended up in his current state after the events of the previous game.
• Recycled Soundtrack: Some soundtracks are rearranged pieces from the first NieR game, more specifically, the tracks "Grandma", "Ashes of Dreams", "Wretched Automatons", "Song of the Ancients", "Dispossession" and "Emil- Sacrifice" received remixes. Meanwhile, some of the Leitmotifs from the first game are directly reused in some scenes like "Kaine - Salvation".
• Red Eyes, Take Warning:
  • Machine lifeforms' eyes are normally yellow until they turn hostile. Once engaged, their red eyes flash even brighter as a cue to initiating an attack.
  • At some point, Eve's tattoo spreads over his body...and he smiles as his eyes glow red.
  • Also happens to the many YoRHa units infected with the Logic Virus.
  • The Q&A from the strategy guide reveals this is because the red eyes are connected to the Red Eye Disease from Drakengard.
• Resurrective Immortality: YoRHa androids maintain back-up copies of their memories and personalities via their Black Boxes and the central servers on the YoRHa stations. This allows fallen androids to be brought back to continue fighting, but there can be problems if their back-ups aren't up to date. Played for horror with The Reveal about how this also ties into the ability for YoRHa androids to have their memories rewritten and altered by their superiors.
• The Reveal:
  • The aliens and the humans are functionally extinct by the start of the game. In fact, the aliens have been extinct for centuries, killed by their own machines, who they only programmed to "destroy the enemy". And humans have been extinct for millennia, ever since the end of the first NieR, and long before the aliens invaded. The only remains of humanity's organic legacy lie in a DNA and memory storage center on the moon.
  • The YoRHa Commander is aware of humanity's extinction, but keeps the lie intact so that the androids do not lose their raison d'être.
  • 2B is more than a combat class android, but rather is an executioner-class android designed to kill to preserve YoRHa secrets, "2E". 2B has killed 9S many times over, with each incarnation of 9S not retaining his memories. However, while 9S doesn't get to keep his memories about the truth behind the humans whenever 2B has to kill him, he does retain (to a certain degree) the memory of knowing 2B's true function.
  • The YoRHa androids' consciousness routines in their Black Boxes are repackaged versions of machines' own core systems. Due to being disposable by design, this was seen as a humane option compared to using normal android AI into the YoRHa line.
  • The YoRHa network has had a backdoor into it open for an indeterminate amount of time, allowing the machines to kill them all with a Logic Virus whenever they like. All in order to remove any evidence that the Council of Humanity is a fabrication.
  • The Pods were created by the commanding androids who also created YoRHa; the Pods were made to oversee the YoRHa project until its conclusion, gathering any data that could be used to create an improved generation of androids. When all YoRHa units' Black Boxes shut down (presumably when the aforesaid Logic Virus was used against them), the Pods were programmed to completely delete the YoRHa data, including the units' consciousnesses. The good news is the Pods have grown too attached to 2B, 9S, and A2 over the course of their travels and decide to gamble with their own lives in order to salvage the androids' bodies and memories, and give them a chance of living for themselves rather than fighting, suffering, and dying as part of an organization that was founded on a great big sham. It works.
• Revenge Before Reason: Has this happen to 9S during the second half after he sees A2 kill 2B, unaware that she was succumbing to the Logic Virus and had asked A2 to Mercy Kill her. During the Tower, even after learning the Awful Truth that there is no moon base, mankind is well and utterly extinct, making every android's mission on earth All for Nothing. He also learns from A2 that 2B's real designation is 2E, as in "Executioner" class, and that she's always killed 9S cause he always discovered YoRHa's secret and hated it. By that point, the Logic Virus has taken over, this time with him unable to clear it since It Only Works Once. At that point, you decide who to control in the final battle between A2 and 9S. Either way it happens, he ends up dead.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • A major reveal in the very last playable section of the game really turns a lot of the interaction between 2B and 9S on its head once you know it: 2B's, or rather, 2E's true relationship with 9S is to serve as his executioner, and she is also In Love with the Mark. Her constant admonitions to stop showing emotion, stop being so curious, and to focus only on the mission can be interpreted as 2B/2E quietly begging him to not do something that will require her to kill him.
    • The opening cutscene of Route A can be viewed in a new light with this knowledge. Two of the YoRHa units in the squadron are designated 7E and 11B. Completing the sidequest "11B's Memento" will reveal that 11B was planning to desert YoRHa. 7E's presence most likely means that Command was aware of 11B's upcoming betrayal and sent an Executioner unit on the mission to terminate 11B, which probably would have happened had they not been shot down by an Engels unit at the factory.
    • Near the end of the prologue mission, 9S is badly damaged and on the verge of death by the Engels unit in the factory. 2B has a near-Freak Out when she gets to his body and becomes extremely desperate to save him. This looks very odd, because 1) she had no such reaction when her squadron was wiped out at the beginning, 2) she has only met 9S for the 1st time less than an hour ago, and 3) she's already told him to stop being emotional. But her reaction makes perfect sense knowing that this is far from the first time he's died in her arms; in fact, it may be one of the only times where his death was not a result of her killing him, and thus explaining her hysterical outburst since this is an "innocent" version of him she's holding.
    • While wandering around the Bunker after the prologue, you can talk to one of the Operators, who will mention the fact that 2B and 9S are always together and she's glad they're good friends. "Always" together is a very odd thing to say, considering that 2B and 9S have only just met for the first time. Supposedly.
    • After leaving the Bunker for the first time, 9S questions why a combat model like 2B would be deployed with him to gather intel when a Scanner like him could do the job just fine on his own, a question that she nonchalantly brushes off as "Orders are orders". Her orders are to monitor his progress and to swiftly execute him if he discovers too much sensitive data.
    • While traversing the castle in the Forest Zone, 2B accidentally refers to 9S as "Nines," which is what he asked her to do in the Amusement Park. He's very pleased at this, but 2B hastily tries to go back to calling him 9S, acting as if she never said "Nines". It's cute and adorable. That scene becomes heartbreaking once you know the reason why she so casually slipped up and called him by an affectionate nickname, only to furiously backpedal on it, is because she has many happy memories of being close to him that inevitably end with her killing him.
    • You never see a single other android the entire game who's wearing the same uniform as 2B, even the other B-types - she's the only one wearing that outfit. The player might logically assume it's just to distinguish her visually from the other NPC androids in the bunker, but another possibility emerges when you know that she's not really a B-Type, so it makes sense for her to be wearing a different uniform.
    • One conversation between 2B and 6O has 2B mentioning that she's the worst possible person to ask for relationship advice. The first time around it sounds as if it's because 2B is so dedicated to her mission that she's never had a relationship. On a replay, it's clear that she meant that because she's been forced to execute the one she loves multiple times in the line of duty.
    • The infamous "You're thinking about how much you want to ＊＊＊＊ 2B, aren't you?" line from Adam. The natural replacement for the asterisks is "fuck", but if you assume that's the case, 9S's response (freaking out and claiming he'd "never do anything so horrible") comes across as bizarre and overly defensive. Unless you assume that the actual censored phrase is "kill", and Adam is haunting him with his resentment over knowing the dozens of times 2B has executed him. An even wilder possibility could be "rape," considering how Jackass's research finds that sex and violence for YorHa androids produces nigh-identical feelings of pleasure for them.
    • In the Tower when 9S is confronted with the clones of 2B, his first reaction is breaking down in tears before cracking up laughing that he "finally" gets to kill her. At this point the player's natural reaction is that 9S has simply gone completely insane - until you learn that he has, on some level, always known what 2B's true purpose is, and he's rejoicing in the chance to release his feelings of resentment without actually hurting the woman he loves - or loved.
    • The "YoRHa Betrayers" sidequest becomes doubly uncomfortable. Of course the Commander would assign 2B to this job, since killing traitors is part and parcel of what Executioners do. After the mission is complete, 9S's demands for more information on what exactly the supposed "betrayers" were up to (since they didn't actually steal any supplies) is met with stonewalling by Operator 21O and by 2B, who manages to dissuade him from prying further. The chilling fact is that 9S may have come very close to triggering 2E's kill order here. Operator 21O may also be aware of the many deaths of 9S at 2E's hands, explaining her hesitant pauses and subtle warnings to him not to pry any further.
    • The "Amnesia" sidequest in Route B is heavily affected by this as well. 2B's rather out of character passive-aggressive sniping at 9S for accepting the quest because the person asking is a pretty girl sounds more like she's irritated he's being curious again. At the end of the quest, the girl's realization that she was actually a type-E YoRHa unit makes 2B uncomfortable and she tells 9S to leave, then when he starts asking questions about the E-series, she gives him very vague answers. Replaying the quest again with the endgame knowledge, it's clear that 2E is becoming very uncomfortable with what the girl is saying about killing her own friends and lovers because it's hitting way too close to home with her own relationship with 9S.
    • Ending A/B, where 2B kills 9S, lamenting afterwards that things always seem to end as such. At first, it seems to be a Call-Back to the opening mission and how 9S always dies, but what she actually means is that she always executes 9S.
    • The audio log you find in 2B's crashed flight unit in Route C, and 9S's reaction to it, is already tragic to begin with, but becomes utterly heartbreaking when you realize that he already knows her true designation at this point. He's not just mourning the loss of the woman he loved, he's realizing that her true feelings for him weren't a facade and that she really did love him despite having to kill him dozens of times, and was torn apart by it emotionally.
    • Another tie-in comes relatively early during Route C. After A2 defeats the giant machine centipede in the desert, she ends up having to do a hacking defense where she comes into contact with some of 2B's memories. The specific memory A2 experiences is an audio log where the Commander is giving 2B orders:
      Commander: Normally you'd be called [static interference] but we'll be calling you 2B for the time being. Continue to observe the situation and dispatch [static interference] if necessary.^note The static interference is covering up the fact that the Commander is saying "2E" and "9S."]
    • While exploring the commercial facility, 9S tells 2B that after the war they can go shopping together, and offers to buy her a t-shirt - to which 2B, somewhat uncharacteristically, warmly agrees. It's already an adorable scene, but becomes even sweeter when you realize that the reason she accepted this attempt at getting to know her better after shooting down so many others is because after the war is won, there would presumably no need for her to continuously kill him to keep YoRHa's secrets from being leaked to the enemy, so she can actually get to know him without worrying about receiving the execution order.
  • A different example is Anemone's first words in the game, which don't hold any meaning for first-time players. "You're... Number Two." Route C then reveals that the reason for her hesitant delivery was because she momentarily confused 2B for A2, since the latter was the former's predecessor unit model and they share the same face. This also tells you that Anemone is closely acquainted with A2 but has lost touch with her for a while.
  • The strange appearances of the holographic red girls during Route B. You learn what they are near the end of Route C, which implies that the Terminals have been watching 9S for a long time and know exactly the triggers he has that will drive him insane.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Both the androids and machine lifeforms are oddly human:
  • Androids are programmed with human emotion, can be infected with computer viruses through physical damage like an animal with an infected wound, are able to eat (although they don't need sustenance beyond purified water), are shown to be capable of crying and producing tears on multiple occasions, have some kind of blood-colored fluid in their bodies, apparently need to breathe since 2B is able to strangle 9S to death, and can even experience motion sickness.
  • Machines, meanwhile, seem to instinctively emulate human behavior, with Adam in particular trying his hardest to seem as human as possible. This turns out to be a Justified Trope, as the machine lifeform network is trying to develop machines that can replace humans, while the YorHa androids are reverse-engineered from the machines' technology.
• Riding the Bomb: During the fight with Grun, 9S finishes it off by physically steering a cruise missile directly into its mouth. It doesn't work out as well as he hoped.
• Rings of Activation: Both self-destruct and recovery are accompanied with rings of light. Self-destruct produces two red rings while recovery produces a single golden ring.
• Robot Buddy: The "Pod" Tactical Support System is one for the player characters. It can help with aerial stunts, grabbing hard-to-reach items, and attacking enemies. It also functions as the Automata counterpart to the original game's Grimoire Weiss, as it can shoot projectiles similar to Weiss's Dark Blast magic, along with other similar moves (e.g. the "Dark Hand" returns as "Hammer").
• Robot Girl: Like all of YoRHa save for S-Types, 2B and A2 are a machine that look like human women.
• Robotic Undead: The friendly Non-Ironic Clown Machine Lifeforms in the Amusement Park become infected by the Logic Virus, turning them into nightmarish Monster Clown versions of themselves. Their visual design, from partially destroyed exteriors (to simulate decomposing flesh) to a shambling gait, invokes the Zombie Apocalypse — and in a way, they are undead, since the virus destroyed their personalities and sapience, leaving them as aggressive mobile shells of their former selves.
• Robot Religion: A group of robots begin worshiping a god. Or possibly the God. However, later on they come to the conclusion that dying will make them "Become as gods" and they begin slaughtering everyone.
• Robot War: Humans with the YoRHa androids vs. aliens with the machines.
• Running Gag: For all the game's depressing atmosphere, it still manages to come up with a couple of recurring funny moments.
  • 9S' habit of answering with a snarky "yeah yeah...".
  • Operator 21O's stoic "one affirmation is sufficient" reaction to the above. Doubly funny when it gets picked up by other characters as well as the story progresses.
  • Pod 042's constant Captain Obvious behavior and 2B's deadpan reaction to it.
  • Emil appearing out of nowhere within seconds every time 2B and 9S find a Lunar Tear for him, plus 9S' growing irritation about it.
• Scare Chord: A mechanical-sounding chord plays whenever an android's eyes turn red as the Logic Virus takes over.
  • The song Broken Heart opens with a heavy chord, which gets used a handful of times, notably when 2B is killed.
• Scenery Gorn: Lots of gorgeous ruined, post-apocalyptic cityscapes in this game. Even the amusement park looks old and worn out, and prominently features a giant, nearly-toppled over ferris wheel.
• Schmuck Bait: One of the chips in your customization menu is the OS chip. It's literally the OS of the protagonist. The game warns that removing it kills you. Of course, nothing's stopping you from removing it anyway. And, as warned...
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • With the alien invasion and the onslaught brought on by the machine lifeforms under the command of the aliens, humanity had no choice but to abandon the Earth and take refuge on the moon. Now it's up to the YoHRa to counter these machines. The truth is, the humans were already extinct before the aliens showed up, only genomes and memories were sent to the moon in the hope they can come back.
  • Many of the Nonstandard Game Overs are triggered by the player abandoning certain plot important battles.
  • In Ending D, the machines have evolved enough and decided that their war with the androids is pointless, so they upload themselves into an ark and launch themselves into space in hopes of finding a new world to colonize.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The machine compatriots of the feral machine Kaiju Grün banished it to the depths of the Pacific long ago because it was completely uncontrollable and killed machines and androids alike. After millennia of inaction down there, Grün rears its titanic head again during the events of the game.
• Secret A.I. Moves: If you hack into and control a flight-capable machine, you can only make it hover for a few seconds before it loses altitude, basically limiting you to a slower jump with a longer duration. The computer, naturally, has no such limitation.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism:
  • All androids come with a self-destruct option that can be toggled on and off in the options menu. By activating it in the YoRHa bunker, you get Ending U, in which you destroy the base with the only survivor being the Commander, who is now furiously drifting across space.
  • Machines can also be made to self-destruct if you take control of them. It's one of the ways to resume control of your own body once you're done.
  • The superboss fight against the Emil clones ends with them all activating a self destruct, which all combined together destroys the planet, leading to one of the bad ends.
• Sequel Hook: It's not blatant, but careful reading of the text for some optional quests and weapons' histories indicates there is still more story waiting to be told, even after Ending E. Specifically, the weapon stories for Emil's Head indicates that the machine lifeforms are rebuilding their network 477 years after Automata, and a year afterward, an Emil clone encounters a black-clad 2B-like android but he doesn't remember her specifically. In addition, the Machine Research Report written by Jackass after the game's end indicates she's planning to hunt down "every single asshole behind Project YoRHa," whose identities were never revealed in the story.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • With clever use of the games mechanics, a player can reach areas way sooner than one is meant to and manage to skip huge sections of a dungeon.
  • Pod C can (and probably will) be acquired much earlier than Pod B, though this has nothing to do with story progression.
• Sheathe Your Sword: To defeat the Terminals during the Tower climb, you must not attack and instead let their representations multiply in order to mess up their logic circuits. If you fight them for too long Pod 042 points out as much.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: Some robots carry shields that deflect ranged attacks, and can be used offensively when the robot shoves it at an android. Others have electrified, spiked shields that cause contact damage, but lose the charge after taking a hit or two.
• Shifting Sand Land: The areas the YoRHa can visit include a vast desert.
• Ship Tease: 2B and 9S have a ton of this, almost to the point of being an Official Couple. But, this being a Yoko Taro Game...
• Shock and Awe: The Type-4O line of weapons generate an electrical charge after the weapon has been on standby, and are used to stun enemies and deal increased damage for a short time. This is represented in-game by them being wreathed in crackling lightning discharges that intensify the longer the weapon hasn't been used.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The stated purpose of the androids' newest force (YoRHa) is to drive off the machines, and the aliens that built them, so that mankind could return from the Moon to the Earth. Later it is revealed that mankind went extinct before the aliens even arrived, and the only traces of mankind left are ruins on Earth, and genome records and servers full of human-centered data on the Moon, so it is realized that YoRHa failed their mission long before the game even started. Since they are already diverse enough with their own wills and drive, you would think that YoRHa's androids would be allowed to live out their days on the planet they have been defending all of these millennia after the machines are gone, right? Wrong. The entire YoRHa force was actually designed to be expendable, with many of the more advanced models (like 9S) being killed off after every mission by their partners (specially assigned E-Model androids like 2B - secret alias of 2E) for fear that they would discover and reveal the awful truth of humanity's extinction and demoralizing the rest of the androids.
  • All of the destruction and suffering caused by the Terminal(s). Their conduct toward the androids (especially to YoRHa before finally enslaving them with the Logic Virus and then destroying them) in the millennia-long wars; as well as their conduct toward their own drones by disconnecting them from the network (allowing them to develop their own personalities) and then force them to suffer; and 9S in particular, which it psychologically tortured via various hardships, all out of its own curiosity and self-evolution. After all of this it goes off to a distant planet where it goes completely free of consequence. 9S is denied his revenge for all of his loved ones' viral enslavement and deaths, and dies alone bleeding out with the very person that killed the only person he ever loved (regardless of whether it was a Mercy Kill). What few machine lifeforms that remain on Earth will be left wandering to fend for or destroy themselves until they rebuild their network.
  • Subverted in Ending E, where it is shown that Pods 042 and 153 rebuilt 2B, 9S and A2's remains to reactivate them, with 9S coming to the realization that his hatred for the machines was not entirely fair.
  • The Concert has two endings, the bad one of which ruins Ending E: 9S never wakes up, and 2B tries futilely to get him to wake up, searching for any possible cure. She finds his personal data was deleted in a suicide since he would never be with 2B again. She then shuts down and never moves again.
• Shoot the Medic First: The first YoRHa to get shot down in the opening mission is 12H, the squadron's only Healer unit.
• Shop Fodder:
  • The game outright states that fish are to be sold. One notable exception, however, is the fact that eating a mackerel results in a Cool and Unusual Punishment where 2B dies eating exquisite cuisine.
  • There are other items, such as jewelry, meat and machine cores, where the flavor text explains that they can be sold to the vendor, and have no other purpose than that. The only time you actually need these kind of items for anything is one specific quest that requires you to turn in a single piece of moose and boar meat.
• Shout-Out:
  • A lot of people are noticing how the machine lifeforms are giving off very Castle in the Sky-vibes, design-wise.
  • Some of the weapons you can get in the game include the Engine Blade and the Cypress Stick. The former adds a Warp-Strike effect to your character's evasion dash when fully upgraded and its weapon story alludes to Noctis's relation with Regis, and the latter also makes the treasure chests you'll find in the game a lot more like the treasure chests you'd find in a Dragon Quest game. Both of them alter the numerical damage display to fit their respective game, with thin neon-blue lettering from Final Fantasy XV and a cartoony orange font for Dragon Quest.
  • The designations of the YoRHa in the opening squadron are 12H, 11B, 7E, 1D, 4B, and 2B. Excluding 7E and the playable 2B who is also an E-type, as revealed in the ending, the model types of the remaining four members correspond to the default/recommended 4-man party in Final Fantasy XIV: one Defense unit, one Healer unit, and two Battle units.
  • A2 is a walking Raiden reference. She's borderline edgy, talks in a gruff, almost perpetually angry voice, acquires an ally's weapon after they die, one of her taunts mentions turning off "pain circuits", and she even has an overpowered Berserker mode that gives her way more strength than usual.
  • One of the Pod Skins makes the Pods look a lot like a sideways PlayStation console. It's even called a "Play System" Pod Skin.
  • On the flip-side, the Steam version has a set of digital pre-order accessories for 2B that put red valve handles on her eyes and the back of her head, a Logo Joke to Valve's Vanity Plates (both the old "eye-valve" logo used in Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and the incumbent "head-valve" logo introduced in Portal and Team Fortress 2).
  • The Overclock chip allows characters to invoke Bullet Time upon dodging an attack with perfect timing, just like another game developed by PlatinumGames. It even uses the same sound effect!
  • At the end of the prologue, 2B beats Engels by using its own weaponized arm against it, very reminiscent of a previous Platinum title.
  • Beauvoir/Simone eating Android flesh thinking she'll become more beautiful is a reference to Casshern Sins (The game itself can be seen as a Whole-Plot Reference to the anime in some instances, too).
  • The stamp collecting sidequest in the Amusement Park eventually takes you to the basement, where you fight an army of zombie machines that spew out projectile vomit. Their movements, numbers, and even the color of their vomit all resemble the zombies from Metal Slug 3, which is further helped by the fact that this is a 2D section. Another reference to Metal Slug comes in the dead aliens, which look very similar to the Martian aliens from that franchise.
  • The Monster Machine, a one-of-a-kind unit found in the Forest Kingdom in late Route C, is a robot version of Shin Godzilla. Its primary attack even behaves and looks the exact same way as that character's.
  • The ending of Route A has the subtitle "flowers for m[A]chines", likely a reference to the Science Fiction short story Flowers for Algernon, quite fitting for a story featuring a protagonist who starts out obinent and clueless, only to start resenting his work and the people in his workplace and growing increasingly rebellious as becomes increasingly aware of the true nature of the world and his co-worker's nastier sides, only to end up having it all taken away from him again and going back to his original state.
  • The ending of Route D similarily references classic sci-fi literature, though in this case the subtitle, "childhoo[D]'s end", is lifted directly from Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name.
  • The sequence of the first Engels Goliath assembling itself from various heavy machinery bears a striking resemblance to how Devastator assembles himself from various heavy construction vehicles in Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen.
  • Grün, a feral too-big-to-exist (machine) lifeform that rises from the deepest depths of the Pacific to wreak havoc on everything it can find on land, calls to mind certain parallels to Pacific Rim. It's basically a mechanical Kaiju of epic proportions. A track related to it is even called "Kaiju Groupie".
  • One type of enemy is a headless, explosive enemy that runs at you to explode in your face, and screams like mad while doing so.
  • The merchant in the Flooded City DLC area constantly quotes the Resident Evil 4 merchant. He explains that he studied an ancient human artifact and learned how merchants are supposed to talk from it.
  • At the end of the "Gathering Keepsakes" quest you battle a pair of tanks fitted with huge, rather cobbled-together looking spikes and pipes spewing enormous flames in the middle of the desert. The whole vibe is very Mad Max.
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare:
  • Just in case 2B's designation flew over your head, Ending B caps off with the line "or not to [B]e." It also serves as some subtle foreshadowing as to who and what she really is, or rather, is not.
    • Similarly, 9S can also be read as "nein ist", German for "is not", or, in this case, "not to be"; thus, when their names are put together, 2B and 9S's names complete the famous phrase.
  • Another Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar, is referenced in A2's name; specifically, Caesar's last words, "Et Tu, Brute?" This is also an allusion to A2 being betrayed by YoRHa, just as Caesar was betrayed by Brutus.
  • And of course the machine's performance 'Romeos and Juliets'.
    Juliet 1: Die, Romeo! Thou stupid asshole.
• Sinister Geometry: The game seems to have a recurring cube motif going on, and it all seems to be linked to something important. It's because Adam and the Terminals are replicating human infrastructures using voxel geometry.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: Father Servo's side quest from 9S's point of view. 9S is only willing to scavenge pieces for Father Servo just so he and 2B can beat him again for making them run errand.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: A number of characters in Route C manage to avoid misfortune by sheer luck. 4S is the most literal example of this trope, as he avoided the YoRHa-wide Logic Virus simply because he wasn't activated at the time and woke up after the Bunker's destruction. The two YoRHa women in the desert were doped up on E-Drugs and also were spared infection. There's also the YoRHa android in the oasis (the only place you can fish for beetle fish). A shut-in child in Pascal's village avoids infection, most likely because he never leaves his room and is disconnected from the machine network. When the Amusement Park is infected with the Logic Virus, one of the few survivors is the machine taking a break in the back alley.
• Socialization Bonus: When connected to the IRL network, you can find the corpses of other players lying around. You can pray for them to restore their health in their game, and subsequently retrieve them for some money and temporary buffs, or repair them as a temporary ally in your own game.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: When delivering love letters for the Jean-Paul's Melancholy side quest, the philosopher's name^note the family estate is lawsuit-happy over use of the name "Sartre" is bleeped out, while the subtitle renditions leave the name as-is.
• Spectacular Spinning: There's a whole lot of awesome spinning in this game, from the protagonists spinning huge swords in combat or idle animations, to some machine lifeforms' spectacular Spin Attacks, to the Engels' gigantic weaponized rotary excavators, and more.
• Spider Tank: The machines field a medium-sized unit class with six legs that has a distinct spider feel to it, one type having a gun mounted on its front, and the other have a pair of blades where the spider's pedipalps would be. Certain Goliath-class units like Ro-Shi boast scores of legs as well.
• Spin Attack: Some of the larger machine lifeforms, such as the quad-copter automata, use spinning as a part of their attacks. The dual axe-wielding bipedal machine lifeform does this after a moment of windup and positioning its axes, and then spinning it's entire torso. The Pod Program "Blade" and some Large Swords also have this effect.
• Spoiler Title: The actual title of the game doesn't spoil anything, but the the Nintendo Switch version of it is called "The End of YorHa Edition". While at first it may only seem like wordplay, combining the term "end of year" with the name of the military organisation in the game, it actually hints at what happens at the end of the game, when YorHa is completely decimated, and due to Jackass revealing the awful secrets behind it to the Resistance, it's not likely it will ever be reconstucted. Thankfully most players won't even realise it's a spoiler until after they've seen the events it spoils.
• Square-Cube Law: The largest Goliath-class enemies, like Grün and the Engels, demonstrate nicely how extremely ponderous such gigantic constructs move by necessity of their enormous mass. Objectively, they still cover huge distances in short order thanks to their sheer size, but the much smaller and more agile YoRHa units still have no serious trouble evading them.
• Starfish Aliens: The alien invaders have phallic, cephalopod-like bodies. Somehow they became spacefaring conquerors, even though (according to Adam and Eve) their minds were only comparable to a human child—or maybe a plant.
• Stealth Pun: 2B's name, as well as Ending B, which is called "Or not to [B]e", a reference to Shakespeare. At the end of the game, we learn that there is an additional layer to this pun, as 2B is not, in fact, 2B, but actually 2E - not only punning on her name, but on Ending B's title.
• Sticks to the Back: The YoRHa models all have a built-in electromagnetic field that allows them to keep their weapons hovering on their back. This is also the in-game explanation as to how they get away with throwing swords constantly.
• Story Branch Favoritism: The Final Battle favors 9S narrative wise. When you play as 9S, there is dialog during the battle, unlike A2's version.
• Stylistic Suck: The song that plays whenever Emil is rolling around in his ramshackle truck is ridiculously peppy, and so unfitting for the bleak, post-apocalyptic world that it's funny, and it's accompanied by its owner's amateurish singing. Emil starts off just randomly humming along before he belts out with some hilarious lyrics that honestly sound like he's making it up as he goes.
  My stuff's so cheap
  That you will not believe
  How much you can save.
  So swing on by
  And then purchase things
  Til you're broke!
• Superboss:
  • Emil is a level 99 fight, found underground where he attempts to punish his android friends for stealing from him. The Emil Head weapon is earned upon his defeat.
  • After this first Emil fight and upgrading all weapons, a final battle against a group of giant insane Emil copies will occur in the desert. Failing to stop them from self-destructing when they are defeated results in Ending Y.
  • A DLC has you fighting Yosuke Matsuda and Kenichi Sato, the CEOs of Square Enix and Platinum respectively.
  • The aforementioned DLC also has Masamune the blacksmith appear as a superboss, as well as a special gauntlet at the end of the Flooded City coliseum that ultimately ends in a couple of enemies labeled "Unknown", but look suspiciously like Shades from the first NieR..
• Super Drowning Skills: Androids can't swim because they're simply too heavy for it and their bodies have zero buoyancy—according to the World Guide, 2B, 9S, and A2 weigh 148.8kg, 129.9kg, and 139.2kg (or 328.0lb, 286.4lb, and 306.9lb), respectively. Falling into deep-enough water results in their pod rescuing them and setting them down somewhere on dry ground with a minor loss of health.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi, a pair of huge spherical Goliath-class enemies that players encounter on the way to Route C's penultimate boss battle, take several epic beatings at 9S' and A2's hands in short order, but return for more multiple times mere minutes later.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: Ending E is surprisingly uplifting compared to creator Yoko Taro's other works, which are filled with Downer Endings and Pyrrhic Victories. The Forever War is over, the Pods and by proxy all androids and machines show themselves capable of growing beyond their programming, and all the main characters get to live on in one last set of bodies, free from the machinations that left them suffering. Also lampshaded by Taro:
  (Excerpt from Nier2.com)
  [Famitsu]: What might lie at the end of this battle...?
  Saito: A happy ending.
  Taro: A... happy ending.
  [Famitsu]: Somehow I want to believe you... (haha)
  Saito: I don't think many people look forward to Yoko-san's so-called "happy endings"...
  [Famitsu]: Whether it's androids or robots, it really seems like there will be a lot of emotional moments in this story.
  Taro: There will be a happy ending this time. I swear, I'm not joshin' you! Don't worry! I keep telling people this, but nobody believes me.
• Sword Beam: The Shockwave chip allows melee attacks to launch projectiles with each swing.
• Spoiler Opening: If the game is left alone on the title screen, a trailer plays. This trailer contains information from very late in the game, as far as Ending C. While some of it is vague, it will still spoil some major plot twists. The trailer shows 2B struggling to move while infected with the Logic Virus (showing the HUD messages about her corruption). It contains the Commander's line telling 2B and 9S they are the last surviving members of YorHa. It plays a majority of 2B's final recorded message, which the player can only discover midway through Route C. And while it's not a spoiler directly, the trailer begins with A2's last line from Ending C.
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: An incredibly dark variation with 9S. In the very last playable segment, it's revealed that the Scanner models like 9S, which were designed for reconnaissance and discovering enemy secrets, kept finding out the truth about humanity and as such 2B was assigned to kill him before he could figure out the truth, which he did repeatedly. In other words, his bosses have 2B assigned to kill him for being too good at his job.
• The Talk: During the Little Sister Machine escort mission, Little Sister wonders how to make children. 9S has no idea, and gets flustered as Little Sister keeps pushing the point.
• Take a Third Option: Two such choices appear during Route C.
  • After losing the children from his village, Pascal asks you to either delete his memories or kill him. It's not stated in dialogue, but you also have the option to just walk away and leave Pascal to decide his own fate.
  • After you defeat Auguste, there's a brief moment of interactivity. It's not explicitly framed as a choice, but if you attack, then you kill Auguste and Friedrich, and if you walk away, you'll spare them both.
• Take Your Time: Zig-Zagged: most of the time, barring ticking time limits and environmental hazards, there is no pressure in reaching a particular destination or completing a particular task. If time is a factor, however, taking too long will lead to a joke ending. Better save beforehand.
• Taking You with Me:
  • The game starts with 2B and 9S finding themselves outnumbered and damaged, so they use their Black Boxes to blow themselves and their enemies up. It happens again when they're swarmed by their fellow androids, driven mad by a Logic Virus.
  • The various kamikaze machine lifeforms will attempt this on any android that crosses their path. Interestingly, players can pull this trick themselves by activating 2B's or 9S' self-destruct system. The explosion deals very heavy damage to anything in the blast radius but is survivable for the user, which means it can be deployed as a desperation move when low on health and surrounded by powerful enemies.
• Tank Goodness: The Machines have a fleet of heavily armored battle tanks that they unveil from time to time, and they are considered Goliath class enemies.
• Their First Time: An extremely twisted example at the end of Route A/B. 2B strangling 9S after he gets infected with the Logic virus is deliberately framed like a sex scene, complete with her straddling his chest while he moans and gasps. The sexual implications are taken even further when Jackass's sidequest reveals that androids are programmed to process inflicted violence as sexual pleasure. Side materials also reveal that the previous 47 times 2B killed 9S before the game started, she did so in a cold and deliberately detached manner with her sword - which makes her killing him with her bare hands even more emotionally and physically intimate for both of them as a result.
• Theme Naming:
  • The two Japanese versions of the original game were named Replicant and Gestalt in reference to significant entities in the game's story. The sequel continues the trend with a title referring to automatons.
  • Adam named himself and his brother Eve after reading the Bible, using it as a guideline of how to be human.
    • Eve wonders why they weren't named Cain and Abel instead, after learning that Eve is a woman's name.
  • Machines Beauvoir and Sartre, named after existentialist authors and couple Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
  • Machines Hegel and Engels are named after philosophers Georg William Frederich Hegel and Fredrich Engels.
  • Pascal is named after Blaise Pascal.
  • Machines Friedrich, Auguste, and Grun after named after philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, Auguste Wilhelm Schlegel, and Karl Theodor Ferdinand Grun.
  • Machines So-shi, Boku-shi, Ko-shi, and Ro-shi are the Japanese pronunciations of Chinese philosophers Zhuangzi, Mozi, Kongzi, and Laozi.
  • Forest King Ernst and Forest King's son Immanuel are named after Ernst Cassirer and Immanuel Kant.
  • Cult King Kierkegaard is named after Soren Aabye Kierkegaard.
  • Anemone's Resistance squadmates, who were killed in the ill-fated Pearl Harbor mission that took place before the events of the game, are all named after different flowers.
• Theseus' Ship Paradox: A supplier in the Resistance camp has trouble walking because his leg is heavily damaged. When he's questioned why he doesn't just replace it, he explains that the leg is the only original part of him remaining. Up until that point in his life, his assorted components have been damaged and subsequently replaced, and, if he switches out his old leg, then there may not be anything left of him anymore.
• This Is a Drill: Huge drills are part of the machine lifeforms' melee arsenal, to the point that "drill-equipped" is an established subcategory in YoRHa's enemy intel database.
• 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.
  • The sword-throwing attacks are a lot less awkward than the usual 'spear chucking' type seen elsewhere. Instead of trying to impale an enemy on the point of the blade, 2B tends to hurl the blade into a spinning buzzsaw motion, presumably using the previously mentioned magnetic fields to maintain cutting force and control the trajectory of the blade. You can even make brief pauses (~1 second) in your combos during these attacks and the sword will keep going, pushing enemies back and stacking on more damage, then rebounding to 2B when you continue the combo. The really interesting part is that if you don't continue the combo, the sword will lose momentum and start to drift off before somehow teleporting back into position on 2B's back.
• Tin-Can Robot: The various Machine Lifeforms are clearly designed for function over form. The ones that look humanoid at all still have spherical heads, cylinder bodies, and boxy limbs.
• Title Drop: Pod 153 mentions the title of the game when asking if you want to perform a Heroic Sacrifice (read: delete your save data to give another player a chance at beating the final Nintendo Hard Bullet Hell Shoot 'Em Up to achieve Ending E).
  • Also done in Ver1.1a by various characters during the puppet segments at the end of each episode (minus the Ver1.1a part).
• Tomato in the Mirror: 9S discovers documents in the Tower stating that the YoRHa units, specifically their AI, were created by reverse-engineering and adapting the consciousness codes of the machine lifeform cores.
  • Also the subject of a B Route sidequest: the Resistance member asking you to find out who killed her friend in "Amnesia" discovers, to her absolute horror, that she was the murderer due to being an Executioner-type YoRHa unit who wiped her own memory out of trauma.
• Too Dumb to Live: Some of the Joke Endings where you die are due to this...
  • As the protagonists are androids, there is a chip menu in the game where the player can obtain different chips and modify which of them is programmed in the protagonists... However, one of the chips is the "OS Chip", as in, the operating system the androids are running at the time. The game blatantly tells you that removing it kills you, but you can freely uninstall it anyway, predictably resulting in a Nonstandard Game Over. You fool!
    fa[T]al error: Caution: Handle With Care! Removal of the OS chip will result in death.
  • During chapter 06-01, one of the of the fish you can catch in the game is the mackerel, you later receive an email telling you to go and see Jackass, she warns you that eating the fish is deadly for androids, but you can eat it anyway, predictably resulting in yet another Nonstandard Game Over. You idiot!
    aji wo [K]utta: Having consumed the mackerel, it didn't take long for the android's bodily fluids to congeal. Muscle rigidity and paralysis soon followed. "It was good though," the android thought as consciousness faded. "Exquisite even. No wonder humans used to eat them..."
  • In emergency situations the androids have a self-destruct built into them by pressing the two thumbsticks, pressing these usually results in an explosion, Clothing Damage and HP to One... but nothing's stopping you from doing this in the Bunker, resulting in a Nonstandard Game Over for your efforts. You moron!
    deb[U]nked: By self-destructing at the Bunker, the entire structure ended up exploding in a spectacular fashion. But hey, it sure did look pretty from Earth! Somewhere in the depths of space, the Commander still floats about with a stern look on her face.
• Tragic Villain: The opera singer Simone/Beauvoir became obsessed with becoming beautiful so she could win Jean-Paul/Satre's affections, and attacked and cannibalized machines and androids because she hoped it would make her beautiful.
  • Eve wants to avenge his brother in a suicidal attack at the ends of Routes A/B.
  • Route C/D's 9S is pretty much a Villain Protagonist who wants to kill everyone by the end of the game, if it means stopping the cycle of pain he is in.
• Transforming Mecha: YoRHa flight units can switch at will between their default graceful Mini-Mecha form and a dedicated fighter jet mode that's capable of interorbital operation. Both modes are capable of deploying a huge BFS that forms their tail while not in use - even in mid-flight.
• Trauma Conga Line: The entirety of Route C is this for 9S.
• Triumphant Reprise: Once you accept the rescue offer from other players in Ending E, the credits song gains a triumphant chorus.
• True Final Boss: The ending credits during Ending E. In order to see Ending E's conclusion, the credits sequence - that you've likely seen several times already - turns into a lengthy and tremendously difficult Bullet Hell minigame where you have to take out the name of just about every person involved in the production of the game, with the game pressing you with each death to give up. Persisting will net you some unexpected support from another player who was willing to make a poignant sacrifice to ensure you would have the firepower necessary to defeat this final obstacle.
• Turned Against Their Masters: Adam reveals relatively early on that the machine lifeforms killed off all the actual aliens a couple of centuries before the start of the game.
• 20 Bear Asses: Needed to upgrade weapons^note Literal bear asses are not required at any point, though moose skins are. Said asses are random drops (making the Drop Rate Up chip very important), and enemies are capable of dropping many different things, but rarely drop more than one item per death. This can be frustrating if you need Broken Keys and the enemies are only dropping Rusted Clumps (or vice versa), or if you need some rare environmental drop and can't find it. Fortunately, most crafting materials can be bought from vendors at some points in the game. There are also numerous quests that require collecting these upgrade materials, but the game helpfully marks areas where they can reliably be farmed on your map.
• Ultimate Blacksmith: There is only one character capable of upgrading your weapons all the way to level 4. The blacksmith, Masamune, can be found in a hidden room in the Forest Castle.
  • Only the machine merchant at the bottom of the Forest Ravine can fuse plug-in chips past the regular level cap of 6 to a maximum of 8.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • The camera changes perspectives occasionally from 3D to top-down to side view, with the controls changing in correspondence. Other segments play out like shoot-'em ups in both forward-firing-only and 360-degree versions.
  • Whenever you enter the Forest Castle, the camera shifts to a 2D side-scrolling view, emulating classic Castlevania games, appropriately enough.
  • Similar to the original NieR, the protagonists can decide to put the entire 14th Machine War on hold to... go fishing. It's basically an integrated, entirely optional mini-game that's completely removed from the narrative and the game's fast-paced combat. A number of useful items, including weapons and Pod B, can only be acquired this way.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • Route B starts with the player controlling a little robot that's attempting to revive its "brother" by bringing the latter a pailful of oil. If you hit the jump button, the sprint button or walk into any obstacle while carrying that (comparatively) huge bucket, the poor guy will faceplant into the floor and spill the oil, forcing you to go back and start over.
  • The androids sink like rocks in water due to their complete lack of buoyancy.
  • Adam finds out the hard way why living beings fear death.
  • During Route B's fight against Grun, 9S finds out that Riding the Bomb is a lot harder than it looks.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: If the player is offline during the Bullet Hell sequence of Ending E, they will get no help whatsoever. While it is downplayed in that it is technically possible to beat it without help, most players aren't good enough to do so, so good luck if you want to get Ending E's conclusion during an internet outage.
• Unwinnable by Design: The hostile YoRHa flight units that 2B and 9S encounter after the destruction of the Bunker in Route C can be damaged but not destroyed by any means. Even if 2B sustains no damage at all during that segment, her crash landing at the Flooded City is inevitable.
• Urban Ruins: The first post-tutorial levels take place in the urban ruins of the human civilization on Earth, centuries after it had been overrun by robotic alien invaders.
• Variable Mix:
  • The background music changes during key moments, like vocals being added as a battle wears on.
  • During hacking segments the music segues to a retro version of the track.
  • During the credits sequence of Ending E, once you accept the rescue offer from other players, the music takes on a Triumphant Reprise and adds a backing chorus.
• Victory by Endurance: A2's fight against the Terminals inside the machine network. Since she fights them inside the network, and they completely control the network, it's impossible to beat them through straightforward combat. Instead, at Pod 042's suggestion, A2 just dodges the attacks and lets the Terminals make more copies of themselves—until the computers have trouble running that many copies, and realize a new avenue of improvement.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Until you get on the roller coaster, none of the machines in the Amusement Park are hostile, and the player is allowed to ignore them and let them have their fun.
  • There's a secret command that allows the player to pet their pod as 2B or A2, and give a fist-bump as 9S.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: If you kill any of the friendly machines in Pascal's village, they will scream in fear and agony at you (There's an achievement for killing 10 friendly robots). Also, if you want 100% Completion, you're required to walk away from certain plot-related events (such as walking away from 9S as 2B after killing Adam, ditching Devola and Popola as 9S at the Tower, etc.) in order to get certain joke endings. Have fun!
  • The "Death Rattle" chip. It takes up 6 memory slots and does nothing for you unless you really like the sound of things crying out as they die after 9S hacks them.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: Even before the full release, players had fun spotting the best shots of 2B's ass, or using the "Self Destruction" to destroy her dress and leaving her skirtless. Using "Self Destruct" while playing as 9S reveals his boxers under his shorts. You even get an achievement related to perving on both of them.
• Villains Out Shopping: When Adam and Eve aren't trying to make life difficult for the Androids, they spend their time just sitting at a table researching humanity by doing assorted mundane things like reading books and eating apples.
• Walking Armory: The YoRHa captain 8B carries no fewer than nine weapons - four huge katanas about as long as she is tall on her belt, as well as two additional BFSs plus a spear and a pair of humongous combat bracers on her back. It's impressive she can actually fight with all those things obstructing her every movement.
• Warp Whistle: Partway through the game you gain the ability to transport yourself between terminals you've unlocked and that aren't disabled for story reasons.
• The War Sequence: The Invasion in the post-A/B Route pits 2B and 9S against a seemingly never-ending deluge of machines.
• Weaksauce Weakness: You discover in Ending K that androids will die instantly if they ever ingest mackerel.
• Weaponized Offspring: In addition to the normal projectile variety mentioned above, Biped Goliaths can also rarely shoot out smaller mechanical lifeforms out of their hindquarters.
• We Have Reserves: The machines' leaders are more dismissive of their own troops than the android leadership is toward theirs, since they can mass produce simpler machines, can transfer the data of the machines to the network, and the Terminals have a serious God complex; so they use them to test the androids' capability a lot.
• Weird Currency: G, which is just assorted scrap metal picked up from machine lifeforms or found in treasure chests. Justified in that androids are always in need of spare parts, and said scrap metal is frequently used in equipment upgrades. When asked what the 'G' stands for, the Strange Resistance Man says he doesn't know, bringing to mind how several other RPGs use a 'G' word for its currency.
• Wham Line:
  • Adam: You're thinking about how much you want to ＊＊＊＊ 2B, aren't you?
    • Due to the nature of the line, its punch first really hits when it is revealed that 2B has killed 9S numerous times, and 9S is on some level aware of this. Adam could refer to sexual tension between 9S and 2B, or he could just as easily refer to 9S carrying a murderous degree of resentment towards 2B for all the times she has killed him.
  • Towards the end of Route B, after 9S helps 2B defeat So-Shi:
  Commander: Yes. We installed the Council of Humanity's server on the surface of the moon.
  9S: But that means...
  Commander: Mankind no longer exists.
  • It carries little significance to the narrative, but in the Machine Examination 2 quest it's casually revealed that the sun no longer sets.
  • In Route C, when 9S is investigating the Soul Box:
  Each YoRHa unit is equipped with a "black box", an item created by reusing the core of a machine lifeform.
  • During the beginning of the Boss Battles of Endings C/D, A2 begs 9S to listen to her to not try to avenge 2B, as she explains what she learned about her. This line recontextualizes everything we seemed to learn about the relationship between 2B and 9S.
  A2: 2B hated to keep killing you. It caused her so much pain. The 9S type is a high-end model. They knew you’d discover the truth eventually. But the model designation “2B” was just a cover. The official designation... is 2E. Number 2, Type E. They were a special class of members designated to execute YoRHa units. But you knew that... Right, 9S?
• Wham Episode: Each Route has at least one:
  • Route A: The aliens have been extinct for ages.
  • Route B: Humans have been extinct for ages before the aliens even arrived.
  • Route C is just one Wham Episode after another, starting with the destruction of the Bunker (meaning Death Is a Slap on the Wrist no longer applies) and 2B's Out of Continues.
• Wham Shot: At the start of Route C, as 9S runs to 2B's aid, he sees 2B on her knees, impaled on A2's sword.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Ending E leaves the fates of 4S and the drug addicted YoRHa units unknown, who were shown to be still alive when they were last seen. However, considering that Pod 153 states that all YoRHa Black Boxes are offline at the start of Ending E, they must have died or are excluded.
  • Pretty much everyone in Ending C. This includes 9S' fate, which is also left unknown. Pod 042 simply carries him off somewhere.
  • If you opt to neither kill nor memory wipe Pascal and simply walk away from him in the abandoned factory, there's no word on what happens to him in any ending.
  • If you complete his sidequest, Jean-Paul leaves the robot village and goes on a journey to "find himself." What happens to him after that, and whether he got infected by the Logic Virus like most of the rest of the villagers is unknown.
  • The "Parade Escort" machines travel to another location to spread their message of peace and joy. The one machine that changed its mind and stayed behind mentions that they were last seen in the desert, and they were never heard from again.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: A major theme throughout the game is the alleged inhumanity of the machine lifeforms. It is stated time and again that the machines have no souls and are not truly living, that there is no meaning to anything they do. When you see them throughout the game, however, they appear to exhibit, or at least emulate, human behaviors: some form families with siblings and children, some form communities or found religions, some adopt a pacifistic demeanor and refuse to fight, some emulate sexual intercourse, and so on. They also exhibit human emotions: love, hatred, fear, kindness, jealousy, and loneliness. And what of the androids of YoRHa: what makes them so different from the machines? Foreshadowing that YoRHa units are actually repurposed machine lifeforms, meaning the androids might have very well gotten their own emotions from them.
• What You Are in the Dark: A meta example at the end of the game. You're told that some other player(s) made a Heroic Sacrifice to help you Earn Your Happy Ending by sacrificing their save data. You're given the option to pay it forward, and make the sacrifice yourself. You don't have to, but it would be nice.
• Wheel o' Feet: The Goliath Bipeds, when using their bigger limbs as feet, can spin their legs like this as an attack, rather than to run.
• Why Am I Ticking?: 9S's hacking in combat, when successful, can turn any unfortunate machine on the receiving end into an AoE bomb doing massive, usually fatal, damage to themselves and half that damage to any companions nearby, with extra range, burning damage, and AoE stun applied when supported with corresponding plugin chips. This skill alone makes 9S incredibly powerful in group combat.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Zigzagged with gold ore, where the flavor text explains that gold was valuable to humans but is useless to androids, but is still a key component in equipment upgrades (not to mention how gold is a useful component in electronics, making the flavor text even more baffling.)
• You Are Not Alone: When you get killed enough times during Ending E, you'll start to receive messages of encouragement from other players. Die a few more times, and eventually you'll be assisted and protected by several other ships carrying the names of other players, who will see you through to the end.
• You Bastard!: In Route B, you will feel like crap when you've defeated the third golden stubby, who tells you to Get It Over With because you'd already killed their family and friends, and so planned on dying after getting vengeance on you first.
  Vengeful Child: Accursed androids... how much longer will you torment us?! You damn monsters!
  • The Gambler's Colosseum questline is practically made to make you feel bad just for advancing through it. The S-Rank in particular requires you to slaughter a bunch of machines while they beg for their lives and curse you for, among other things, killing someone's daughter. Pod 153 even comments that the androids in the colosseum are developing unusual amounts of cruelty just before the end of the quest. Then again, you get a skimpy outfit for 2B for your amorality.
• You Didn't Ask: One side quest involves looking for veterinary supplies at the abandoned shopping mall. When you find a pharmacology textbook, 9S's pod reveals that it already had the complete text of that book saved in its hard drive, making the entire trip pointless. 9S wonders why the pod didn't say anything sooner, and the pod answers that he never asked it.

Tropes Unique to Ver 1.1a

For tropes that only apply to the anime adaptation Nier Automata Ver 1.1a.

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• Adaptation Deviation:
  • The biggest one seen so far is that Anemone is not the leader of the Resistance. Instead, it is Lily, with episode 6 showing she survived the events of the Stage Play. As for Anemone's fate, it is left uncertain after her Last Stand with No. 21, but she is presumed dead as Lily is established as the only known Resistance survivor of that mission.
  • The Reveal about the aliens is postponed; their ships don't show up at all. This time, Adam built a replica of Popola's library, then showed copies of the alien corpses to 2B there.
  • Adam tells 2B that humanity has gone extinct, just like the aliens have, though it's unclear whether she believes him. In the game 2B does not learn about the fate of humanity before she dies.
  • Eve is killed before Adam instead of the other way around.
• Adaptation Distillation:
  • In the anime, the game's battle with Grün is merged with the battle against Adam (who replaces Eve as the final boss of the first act). Instead of fighting in a One-Winged Angel form like in the game, he becomes giant kaiju who's defeated with YorHa's orbital laser, just like Grün.
  • Just like in the game, Simone's motivation for her actions is trying to make Jean-Paul notice her. But Jean-Paul himself is Demoted to Extra, so his rude personality and his mistreatment of Simone and other female fans are not shown in the anime.
• Adaptation Expansion: The anime expands on events that don't focus around 2B and 9S's journey, such as the exploits of various Machines as they struggle with their attempts to attain their own humanity, as well as the backstory of Lily and the rivalry and mistrust between the Resistance and YoRHa.
• Continuity Nod: When 9S hacks into Emil, he catches glimpses of his memories from over ten thousand years ago.
• Vocal Evolution: During her time with YoRHa as No. 2, A2 had a fairly high-pitched voice to pair with her optimism, but by the time 2B and 9S encounter her, her voice has changed to reflect her bitterness. Not only that, a good 6 years had passed since Cherami Leigh originally recorded her lines for A2 for the game, so, like with Laura Bailey and Kaine in the remake of NieR Replicant, she sounds different in the anime than in the original game due to being older.

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"Everything that lives is designed to end.
They are perpetually trapped... in a never-ending spiral of life and death.
However... life is all about the struggle within this cycle.
That is what "we" believe."