In 2014, game designer Yoko Taro gave a talk about the creative process behind his cult PlayStation 3 title Nier: Replicant. He called the talk “Weird Games for Weird People”. That is the best possible description of what he makes.

Taro is famous for the eccentric persona he presents to the world. He rarely shows his face in public or interviews, preferring to talk from behind a sock puppet or the eerie wide grin of a mask. Yet his approach to design is weird only insofar as it’s rare for someone to understand that games about killing hundreds of people shouldn’t end happily or heroically. He always asks us to extend our sympathy equally to flawed protagonists and victims alike. The video game equivalents of low budget B-movies, his projects have never sold well, have never been well funded and have always lacked graphical polish. They ship with their technical seams showing. But even at their weirdest and most frustrating, they possess a unique kind of heart, and extend a rare kind of trust.

Yoko Taro talks about Nier: Automata

Given a talented team and a decent budget it was always possible he’d create a crossover hit, something to intrigue a larger audience than his fanbase. Now that has happened. In June 2015, publisher Square Enix announced that Taro would be making a new NieR title with PlatinumGames, the revered and experienced team behind action titles like Bayonetta and Vanquish – and also well known for transplanting its deep combat mechanics to established licences through its work on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Transformers Devastation. Released in March, the post-apocalyptic action adventure Nier: Automata is funny, heartbreaking and yes, it is weird. But it has sold over 1.1m copies worldwide.

And here’s why.

The game takes place amid a proxy war between humans in exile on the moon and alien invaders, fought entirely by robots on both sides. It’s now 11945 AD, during the 14th machine war (those arbitrary numbers conveying from the beginning just how endless and pointless the conflict is), and the robot proxies haven’t heard from their masters in centuries. The austere YoRHa androids – controlled by the player and blindfolded and indistinguishable from humans – are the latest generation sent by humans to reclaim earth. Their antagonists, the machine lifeforms, by contrast are eccentric and erratic, round and blocky, like vintage sci-fi toys. The androids are consumed by guilt and duty towards humanity, while the machine lifeforms naively imitate humanity and repeat their mistakes. The post-human world, overgrown and eternally sun-drenched, full of sunlit earth tones and vivid greens, remains abandoned and unchanged.

Lead character 2B and her companion 9S find an Earth devastated by war and now populated entirely by aimless robots. Photograph: Square Enix

It’s supposed to be a harsh and unforgiving war, and it is, but when androids 2B and 9S land on the surface, they find the obsolete androids and aimless machine lifeforms interested in anything but fighting it. Androids are running away with their girlfriends and manufacturing illegal drugs, machines are reading philosophy in pacifistic villages and parading through long-abandoned amusement parks. Every side-quest has something weird, sad or funny — like the dark turn an android takes if you explain her girlfriend was planning to desert her before she was killed, or the pushy arrogant robot that demands you make him stronger so he can beat you, or the flower your operator wants you to bring her from Earth.

The story of Nier: Automata is built from all these small human moments, which is perhaps a little funny and melancholy considering the fact that this is a game without humans. The design too is built from many disparate parts, each so important and unique it’s difficult to talk about the excellence of any individual element without missing the bigger picture. PlatinumGames’ senior gameplay designer Takahisa Taura directed thrilling action that’s extremely respectful of a player’s time and energy, while Keiichi Okabe composed an incredible fully vocal soundtrack that is half of the game’s heart. Meanwhile, localisation company 8-4 worked directly with the production team to create a script and performances that read accurately but just as importantly are evocative and original, rather than an all-too-common stilted and literal Japanese-to-English translation.

But what makes Nier: Automata so singular as a whole is the perspective of the game, and how it shifts, in so many ways. One small example: at times during play, the camera will change and Nier: Automata transforms from a 3D action game to a side-scrolling platformer, and you see the world from a new angle. A much bigger example: after playing the game through the stoic and dutiful eyes of the android 2B, you can start over as her plucky and curious companion 9S and see how differently the story appears from another person’s eyes. The new perspective and context changes the meaning of almost everything that has happened. Nier: Automata shows you something until you think you know it, then turns it until you see how much more there is left to understand.

Nier: Automata looks like a standard hack-n-slash adventure but it has a ceaseless capacity to change and surprise. Photograph: Square Enix

The capacity of Nier: Automata to surprise and make you reassess what you take for granted is overwhelming. The first time you get hacked by an enemy – a process that involves playing a brief shoot ’em-up mini-game in order to protect your robot’s defence systems from cyber-attack – there’s absolutely no warning it’s something the game is even capable of, and you’ll have almost forgotten it by the time the game will completely revolve around it. Even little side-quests play on your expectations. You don’t expect the tiny robot enemies to start performing Romeo and Juliet, or for increasingly more Romeos and Juliets to start entering the stage, or for them to then begin beating each other to death. Every weapon in the game has a story that’s progressively told as you upgrade it. Everything that Nier: Automata reaches for is built on these small stories and characters, which build everything big it has to say.

Placed against this theme of variation, however, is its opposite: repetition. This is necessary for the variation to work, because your expectations set in one iteration will be subverted in the next. You have to see the whole side from one perspective to understand why the people who can’t see the full picture do what they do, and to understand this is the tragedy that will define the whole game. Repetition is the real tragedy of Nier, the final antagonist no one can escape. You beat the game, then you beat the game again from a new angle, and then you see you’re only at the beginning. It is through the repetition that you understand thoroughly there is no way to resolve it happily, that the characters will always make the same mistakes, they fail to understand each other, exhibiting equally compelling irreconcilable motivations. For every new surprise the game shows you, there’s a tragedy you see coming a mile away with no power to stop it.

Yoko Taro spins funny and very sad stories that touch on big questions about humanity. These stories stay so grounded in the characters that drive them, you wonder why so much science fiction can’t ask similar questions about humanity. Sometimes sci-fi stories about robots are not interesting because there’s a question of whether or not machines that look and act exactly like humans count as human; they are interesting because not feeling human and doubting your value is human; longing for the touch and approval of humans is the most human thing to do.

“Can robots be human?” is a boring question. Can humans be human? Now that is much more interesting. It is a question that we seem to be bad at thinking about, but then it’s a very difficult one. Sometimes, it takes a weird game for weird people to give it a try.