Huh.

I woke up at like seven this morning.

On a Sunday.

That's part of a three day weekend.

This wasn't something I was particularly happy about, doubly so when I realized that turning over and trying to go back to sleep wasn't going to happen.  So I woke up popplio, and decided to spend the morning slogging through some of my youtube backlog.  By time, the largest unfinished watch was this Let's Play of NieR: Automata.  I'd only finished up through part 10, and the unwatched parts total a bit over six hours.  Due to the wonders of double speed, I was able to complete most of that this morning, saving the final two parts to watch just now.

I don't think I've seen a better game in a long time.

The basic story is that there are like four+ other games that happened already, and those are in the past of this game, so unless you played those games, you're starting at a disadvantage.  Helloween is very good at his LPs, though, so he's spliced in a bunch of important details from those games to try and give a more complete story.

The long version (still with a bunch of omissions) is that there are two groups of robots, pretty robots (who are good guys) and ugly robots (who are bad guys).  The pretty robots live in space, and are organized, but there are also Earth pretty robots, and they're on the same side, but they're "The Resistance" and aren't as well organized(???).  Anyway, Pretty Girl Robot is good at beating up things, and Pretty Boy Robot is her hacking backup.  They beat up lots of ugly robots, and in the first ending, kill the fake pretty robots the ugly robot made.  Then you can play through as Pretty Boy Robot, and cover the story from his perspective.

This is where I stopped watching, mostly because I had too many other things to watch, and it's hard to devote large chunks of time unless you wake up four hours earlier than expected.  It's also probably wasn't that great of a plan to binge so much of the story.

Because once you finish the play through as Pretty Boy Robot, the game continues, and I'm still a bit fuzzy on this bit, because I was up early.  In any case, at the end of the second play through (and I assume the first, but it's been awhile), Pretty Girl Robot has to kill Pretty Boy Robot, because he's become infected with a virus designed by the ugly robots.  It's sad, but he's mutating, so she strangles him.

But they're robots, so there's a back up copy of Pretty Boy Robot, so they just stick him in a new body, and everything can continue as it's all super happy.  Until the ugly robot virus infects everybody at the pretty robot space station, and all their friends and support and stuff are killed, and they crash land on Earth.  Pretty Girl Robot makes sure Pretty Boy Robot is safe, but she gets infected with the virus, and slowly falls apart (inside), and meets up with a previous model of Pretty Girl Robot who doesn't really wear real clothes, just underwear.  Pretty Girl Robot (regular) asks Pretty Girl Robot (underwear) to kill her to stop the infection, and Pretty Boy Robot sees this, and he's gets pissed because he loves Pretty Girl Robot.  He kind of goes a bit crazy, and this isn't even the most depressing part, because he then has to fight infected pretty robots, including his contact from the pretty robot space station, and that's kind of messed up.  Also Kind Ugly Robot, who thinks fighting sucks, and everyone should just not be jerks has his town of similarly kind ugly robots gets attacked by bad ugly robots, and that leads to all of his friends getting killed, including the children kind robots, who all commit suicide.

Holy crap, that's messed up.

And they go into some more of the back story, and we learn that the humans didn't all move to the moon, they "moved" to "the moon", which meant that my guess from like episode that "all the humans are dead, aren't they?" was true.  Also the pretty robot organization was just something invented by the (maybe ugly?) robot versions of the personalities of humans so they could test out fighting stuff to see how best to defeat the ugly robots, but maybe they're allied with the ugly robots, and I kind of lost a bit of the track here, but it's pretty clear things are all fucked up, and it's not going to end well for anyone.  Like Devola and Popola, who got to see all the humans die, get blamed for all the humans dying, and then end up dead themselves trying to help Pretty Boy Robot.

He fights the ugly robot/human personality thing, and Pretty Girl Robot (underwear) helps him defeat it.  But he's still a bit crazy and unhappy that Pretty Girl Robot (underwear) killed Pretty Girl Robot (regular), so they fight, and you can choose who to be in the fight (since both are playable characters), and that means you choose who wins.  If Pretty Girl Robot (underwear) wins, she has Pretty Boy Robot saved, and then dies in the convenient bad guy tower collapse.  If Pretty Boy Robot wins, then he dies, with the option to put his memories into the robot (are there even sides at this point?) rocket ship that's being launched into space (¯\_(ツ)_/¯).  Oh, also, one reason Pretty Girl Robot wanted to die is because she's a special execution robot, and she's tired of having to kill Pretty Boy Robot so much.

That's pretty messed up, too.

Then you can fight the credits (really), and if you lose, you can keep trying, and eventually get help from other people who have beaten the game.  However, if you get their credit-fighting-ship blown up, that deletes their saved game.  Yikes.  If you win, you get an ending where the assistant robots (who I've ignored up until now because we already have too many classes of robots to worry about) salvage the memories of all three important pretty robots, and then rebuild bodies for them from robot spare parts.  I have no clue if there are more endings, but I am really looking forward to more parts of this story.