Wow! So much to talk about. Perhaps, a bit too much to talk about. If you haven’t guessed yet, we did not finish the A playthrough this time either. But it’s not our fault! It’s that blasted Jean-Paul. That guy, I tell you. We could talk about him for hours. We go from the Amusement park, to the Machine Village and at last, meet with the enemies of the Humans. If you like the podcast, please leave a like and a comment letting us know. Thank you, and please enjoy this episode of the State of the Arc Podcast!
Time Codes:
1. Intro (0:00)
2. Amusement Park (3:48)
3. Machine Village (20:40)
4. Aliens Underground (1:00:03)
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29 Comments
As a long time viewer since the Dark Pixel days, you have not lost touch. The amount of seriousness you treat this material is beyond what many commentators are doing. You're analyzing video games as one would analyze literature, and at a level that is deeper than face value, which is why I enjoy watching.
Yes the person who asks "what do you mean by God" gets on my nerves too
I think it was pure luck that there wasn't a Peterson robot in the game haha.
The clip of Yoko Taro rolling on the floor with a Nier Automata t-shirt and saying "S*** SquareEnix!" lives rent free in my head.
If I was to take a gander at the 2nd Goliath fight, I would imagine the colour palette adopts something closer to the Bunker because, unlike the opening sequence, the Bunker is more involved. The first Goliath fight took place through jamming signals and faulty bandwidth, so maybe that "this is all we've been hoping for" scenario didn't apply. Granted there's still shades of red, it could be just stylistic choices with all that stone and concrete dust clouds hovering about.
Also, this is one of the alternate ending triggers.
@45:25 I love how they are talking about not taking things too seriously and immediately his blood rushes to his head arguing about a make-believe conversation 🤣🤣🤣
I love these guys
A genius is the first one who states the obvious.
They think the goliath attack is a trap and they are set in their idea that the mechines are bad.
The fight with Adam & Eve in the underground bunker feels more like a cutscene disguised as a boss fight. Regardless of whether you do any damage or 'non' at all the fight will always end when Adam finishes talking.
If you defeat the goliath south of the other in the city center before getting into the flight unit you will get a call from the operator congratulating you. This voiced line will not be played otherwise.
The interactions between 2B/9S with their operators is so good that I was always disappointed when I return to the bunker throughout major story points that Operator 6O & 21O had nothing really interesting to say.
I think the "teleportation" machines only tranfers their data and loads it on spare bodies. It still causes us to ask the same questions as the Star Trek teleportation, is the conciousness of the individual really transferred or is it just making a new copy and destroying the previous one?
The teleportation machines in the game are also the explanation as to why you can die and come back. You transfer your data back to a new spare body, and you can even retrieve the chips you had equipped if you reach the place were you died. So the game does put the idea of teleportation and death side by side there.
The discussion on why we should not take ourselves so seriously, and how this applies to philosophy (and especially to our relation to the "Philosophers") was very reminiscent of my early days studying philosophy at the University. Even to this day I see "fandoms" for philosophers that struggle to understand this lesson and wholeheartedly defend every little thing about their work. Thankfully this is changing, and now I almost don't see it anymore as I moved to Norway and here the philosophy community is mostly working on things that go beyond what this or that philosopher once said, and more on updating their thought and bringing in interdisciplinarity to the field.
I remember loving the Jean Paul character as he reminds me so much of the (bad) teachers I had, so narcissistic that they couldn't get out of this charade.
There’s all kinds of conundrums that’ll pop up concerning A.I.
Selfishly tho, all I can think is; some talentless hack is going to write a hundred self published books with ChatGBPT while I’m toiling away on my own novels.
I’m a flesh and blood hack dang it!
But in all seriousness, I’m concerned about the further Marvel-isation of art due to these A.I.’s,”.
Because we all know the money men will embrace them and screw over writers, directors etc
Worse than that tho, is that I worry the audience would just accept it too.
Unless we get an A.I. David Mamet or something
Is this Casen's first playthrough of Automata? I know in the Gestalt/Replicant series, he mentioned he hadn't played Automata at the time, so I'm curious if it's his first experience with the game.
The Amusement park boss became instantly my favorite boss fight in any game ever when I played it back in November 2017, can’t wait for you guys to analyze her properly
I took 2B's earlier statement about 9S not calling her ma'am not as an invitation for 9S to be less formal, but that anything other than calling her by her designation (2B) was pointless, and that any other sort of "honorifics" were not needed. At this point, that seems to be the reason why she won't call 9S "Nines" either. They're also technically genderless, which might also contribute to her thoughts, which is interesting since the audience (and myself, since I just did it with 2B four times!) still designate them both as "he" and "she" because of how they look and how they're voiced. I still think 2B is one of the coolest designed female video characters ever. I like her so much that I have a print of a painting of her on my wall to my left of where I am currently typing this. But technically she's not female. However, I would argue that I'm sure all of the androids in fact do look at themselves as male or female though, and I'm sure that could play into the themes of this game quite well about what it means to be human.
This was one of the first games I actually binged. I played every day for 2 weeks and finished. For the next 2 months I religiously watched every theory and analysis video on the internet about the game
I always saw the City Ruins fight's monochrome aspect as a representation of rejecting nuance. By this time you know there's more to the machines, there's an intelligence (or the possibility of one) beyond the slaughter. When another Goliath-class machine begins rampaging it would be natural to start asking "Why?", but the orders come through from YoRHa and you are forced to reject the possibility of nuance, of colour. Things must be black and white – like the colour palette of the androids themselves.
To add to this, androids are clearly shown to have their own capacity for emotion by this time, but 2B states that emotions are 'forbidden'. There's a recurring theme of the androids forcing things into a black-and-white spectrum, refusing the possibility of anything else.
I think the black and white transition is ment to represent soldiers following orders. How in a battle or in a war we only see the world as black and white. When they have to explore their world veiw opens up, they are able to see the complex nature of the world. I honestly wonder if it is symbolical of the android "turning off their emotions" just like soldiers do in war.
Remnant: From the Ashes had a very subtle exploration of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment as it relates to teleportation, where there is an unstable teleportation puzzle that dumps you out in random places in one of the dungeons, and it might take 8 or 10 tries before you randomly teleport to the right place. But when you do, you appear in front of an odd pile of incinerated corpses, with a fresh one falling from a chute in the ceiling as soon as you materialize. It's not explained overtly, but if you work it out on the map or have a co-op partner who is teleporting as well, you can see that the teleporter was in the room above you, and every time someone teleports, their original body is incinerated and discarded. So you're standing in front of a pile of your old bodies, one of them from just an instant before. Brings to mind The Prestige as you mentioned, and also Thomas Riker from Star Trek, etc.
I never knew how badly I needed to hear Mike clowning on Jordan Peterson 😂
One thing I find interesting is that the aliens manage to do things that 2B's opening script says she wants to do. For reference:
"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 get the chance to kill him."
Aliens were designed to end. They brought new life to machines. They are the machine's gods. The machines got a chance to kill them and took it. The cycle continues.
Thanks for covering this game; I've been looking for an excuse to replay it for ages and now I have one!
JP: What do you mean by “is”?
Me: 🤦🏻♂️
Solid snake and 2B would be best friends
They both operate on instinct
I really like the explanation of the name change from Dark Pixel to Resonant Arc. Just very cool how they reached that change and the shift in content between this migration.
Great discussion as usual fellas
Guy on our right, been watching you uncontrollably cough in your content 2 years ago till today, If you haven't looked into it yet, I think you should, stay safe.
Was it me or were Mike and Casen on fire in this particular episode?
For the aliens attack on earth, i never considered the question about space, when i first heard about the aliens in the game, i thought it as a dimension invasion, not space, from drakengard