Nier: Automata Ver1.1a is the sleeper hit of the anime season

After feeling deflated by the first episode of Nier: Automata Ver1.1a, an adaptation of Yoko Taro and PlatinumGames’ excellent video game, I didn’t think I’d return to it. It played as a cynic would expect: an almost one-to-one recreation, but with uglier 3D animation; it felt like something was missing. It didn’t get much of a chance to stand up for itself; despite the glimmers of promise, the first half of the show was plagued by several delays. But now, thanks to its sharp handling of the game’s overlapping tragedies, over a year later, the show is leaving me deflated, but this time in a good way.

Like the game, the anime is set in the distant future. Earth has been abandoned by humanity and now lives on the moon. The Council of Humanity sends android soldiers to fight in their place in a war against machine lifeforms, themselves sent by alien masters. The androids look human (and creepy in their beauty), the machines look like rusty wind-up toys. The story follows 2B (Yui Ishikawa / Kira Buckland, reprising their roles) and 9S (Natsuki Hanae / Kyle McCarley, also), special forces androids who work for the rather sinister organization YoRHa, which operates from a space station – the agents are all dressed in doll-like finery.

From the multiple lives of the YoRHa androids, to these cycles of endless war, to the multiple playthroughs required to complete the game, Nier is all about iteration and repetition – which is part of why an anime retelling immediately makes some sense. It was already a multimedia project; it has been proven that the story can work when taken out of its original context. There are novels and a play that are both canon, using those other mediums to gain a new perspective on Nier’s ongoing heartbreak.

But anime adaptations of games can be a tricky prospect. With anime adaptations of manga, each medium obviously has its own drawbacks, but the first medium uses voice performances and music as well as animated acting to (ideally) add a unique interpretation where the reader’s imagination would fill the spaces between the panels. Games already work with that toolkit and are moving towards the more passive medium of television deleted player agency.

So what’s been added for people who have already played the game? Some programs get around this by using the game’s world as a springboard to new stories in far-flung corners, giving the directors, writers and designers a little more room to play (take for example Cyberpunk: Edgerunners or Arcane). Nier: Automata is a tricky case because it is one of the most video game-like video games in recent history, as player input and the language of the video games are intrinsically linked to storytelling. The best example is the end of the game, a direct confrontation with the player that asks him, vaguely speaking, to put his playing experience on a scale. It remains to be seen how that moment will translate; there are still some tricky bumps in the transition from game to episode. One storyline in the second half stands out because it feels like a video game objective (“go collect these three things”), but the brutal drudgery and acting in response sells it anyway.

Although some frustrations remain, Ver.1.1a made a case for itself when it started taking advantage of the new things this medium can do rather than what it can replicate. Some of the best elements from the very beginning are the stingers in the end credits, made with puppets – using that crazy, jagged animation to both tackle little bits of world-building and play out the game’s silly alternate endings, including things like 2B dying from eating mackerel.

Another one of those things is quite simple: how editing changes the portrayal of this story. One of the most poignant examples are ‘broken (W)ings’. It opens with a small montage of 2B’s memories of encounters with 9S, punctuated by intertitles of words that 2B associates with each of those occasions. Writer Yusuke Watanabe and episode director/storyboarder Satsuki Takahashi (no stranger to war stories with their time on 86) then inverts this into a mirroring sequence from 9S’s perspective, compressing their relationship into a striking, anguished summation that places their points of view in direct contrast. Thinking back to how it started, this episode felt like a realization of the show’s true potential – using the change in media to find new routes into the characters’ subjective perspectives, building on the nuances of relationships that, to say the least, are incredible. thorny.

Ver.1.1aNier’s interest in exploring the multimedia sprawl that Nier has become, rather than just a direct adaptation of the games, also keeps things fresh. The show can zoom out and paint a more detailed picture of the supporting cast. This was true of previous episodes before the (very long) delay cut them off: an encounter with the disembodied head of Emil, a character from the first Nier game (since re-released as Kidney: Replicant), then triggers a flashback to characters from that story. The episodes “(L)one wolf” and “bad (J)udgement” adapt the YoRHa play, which is itself an expansion of the game’s Pearl Harbor Descent entry, a tragedy about a mission gone wrong that provides both backstory from A2 when Lily inquires. Written lore connections that have been siphoned off in the game are also dragged to the surface: “Just You and Me” opens with a live-action shot of a storybook, summarizing the lore from Drakengardthe predecessor of Yoko Taro Kidney. The series then draws the line from here to Replicant. These connections existed in Vending machines the game, if you’ve been looking for it. But the execution makes the show feel special and expansive, even though you have no control over what is explored and when.

It’s an approach I would like The last of us could have been more capitalized to make it less of a simple narrative innovation to the game. Especially when you consider how many little written side stories from the game the show left out aside from its most critically acclaimed episode. Regardless of his flaws, Version 1.1a‘s best quirks emerge when it clearly thinks about how to make itself different from the source material, something that seemed like a goal by Yoko Taro and director Ryôji Masuyama from the very beginning. The best parts of Automata version 1.1a didn’t land right away. And now that the show has had a chance to air in an uninterrupted series, those qualities have consistently come into sharper relief in the stories’ more dramatic second act – an act that has it in my highlights of this anime season placed.