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

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

Like the game, the anime is set in the distant future. The Earth has been abandoned by humanity, now living on the moon. The Council of Humanity sends android soldiers to fight in their stead in a war against machine life-forms, themselves sent by alien masters. The androids look human (and eerie 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, likewise), special forces androids working for the rather ominous organization YoRHa, which operates out of a space station — its operatives all dressed in doll-like finery.

From the YoRHa androids’ multiple lives to these cycles of endless war, to the multiple playthroughs required to complete the game, Nier is all about iteration, repetition — which is part of why an anime retelling immediately makes a certain sense. It was already a multimedia project; it’s 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 get a new perspective on Nier’s consistent heartbreak.

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

So what’s added for people who have already played the game? Some shows get around it by using the world of the game as a springboard into new stories in its faraway corners, leaving the directors, writers, and designers a little more room to play (take, for example, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners or Arcane). Nier: Automata is a tricky case in that it’s one of the most video game-y video games in recent memory, as player input and video game language is intrinsically tied in with its storytelling. The best example is the ending of the game, a direct confrontation with the player which, vaguely speaking, asks them to place their experience of playing on a set of scales. It remains to be seen how that moment will translate; there are still some awkward bumps in the move from game to episode. One storyline in the second half sticks out because of how close it feels to being a video-game objective (“go collect these three things”) but the cruel drudgery, and the acting in response to that, sells it anyway.

While some frustrations persist, Ver.1.1a made a case for itself once it started capitalizing on the new things that this medium can do over what it can replicate. Some of the best elements from the very beginning are its end credits stingers made with puppets — using that goofy, whimsical animation to both address minor pieces of world-building and reenact the game’s silly alternate endings, which included things like 2B dying from eating mackerel.

Another of those things is rather simple: how editing changes the delivery of this narrative. One of the most affecting examples is “broken [W]ings.” It opens with a small montage of 2B’s memories of encounters with 9S, broken up by inter-titles of words 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 flip this to a mirroring sequence from 9S’ perspective, compressing their relationship into a striking, anguished summation that puts their points of view in direct contrast with each other. Thinking back to how it started, this episode felt like a realization of the show’s actual potential — using the change in mediums to find new routes into the characters’ subjective perspectives, elaborating on the nuances of relationships that are, to say the least, incredibly thorny.

Ver.1.1a’s interest in exploring the multimedia sprawl that Nier has become, rather than just a straight 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 earlier 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 rereleased as Nier: Replicant), then triggers a flashback to characters from that story. The episodes “[L]one wolf” and “bad [J]udgement” adapt the YoRHa stage play, which itself is an expansion on the game’s Pearl Harbour Descent lore entry, a tragedy about a failed mission which informs both A2’s and Lily’s backstories. Written lore connections squirreled away in the game also get dragged to the surface: “just y[O]u and me” begins with a live-action shot of a storybook, a lore recap from Drakengard, which is Yoko Taro’s precursor series to Nier. The sequence then draws the line from this to Replicant. These connections existed in Automata the game, if you searched for them. But the elaboration makes the show feel special and expansive, even though you can’t control what is being explored and when.

It’s an approach that I wish something like The Last of Us had capitalized on more in order to make it less of a simple narrative retread of the game. Especially considering how many little written side stories from the game the show left by the wayside, save for its most critically acclaimed episode. Regardless of its flaws, Ver 1.1a’s best quirks shine through when it’s clearly thinking about how to make itself different from its source material, something that seemed to be an objective of Yoko Taro and series director Ryôji Masuyama from the very beginning. The best parts of Automata Ver 1.1a didn’t land right away. And now that the show has had a chance at airing in an unbroken run, those qualities have more consistently appeared in sharper relief across the stories’ more dramatic second act — one that has placed it in my highlights of this anime season.