Despite being set 9,927 years into the far future, Capitalism in the world of NieR: Automata has, against all odds, managed to survive; the 14th Machine War is a battle for private property, ownership of the Earth itself, overseen by a small ruling class and fought for by their oppressed workers. The 21st century’s forms of oppression and class division still exist, but on a scale much, much larger than it has before, and the economy is now solely focused on the prospect of perpetual war. For both the androids and machine life-forms fighting on the two sides of the conflict, their work-lives are a never-ending series of missions without break; it’s impossible for them to maintain social or private lives, and they have no real collective organisation as a result. During their duties, androids of the YoRHa android special forces (of whom the protagonists are members) are accompanied by Pods, small flying drones that relay messages between their assigned units and Command, constantly monitor their assigned soldiers’ actions for their superiors. There is no choice in whether to work or not.

One of the player’s first experiences in this world is “the never-ending cycle of life and death” — the main androids, 2B and 9S, are killed off dramatically in the prologue, only to be immediately re-uploaded into new bodies and sent off to fight again. The androids were designed to be disposable, so much so that they have a mandated self-destruct function, and the corpses of their comrades, players who have died and transferred to a new body, litter the landscape of the city as forgotten trash and leaving only a cryptic epitaph for someone to find. This symbolism becomes a major throughline in depicting alienation; the physical bodies that these characters inhabit are not their own, owned by whatever corporate overlords they work for, and so they feel estranged from their own actions. It’s a constant reminder of both the physical cost of a 6,000 year war and the inescapable cycle that both sides find themselves in.

Practically all the inhabitants of NieR: Automata’s world have to confront the fact that their existence is relentlessly cruel and unforgiving. Even as humanity’s “ultimate weapon”, the YoRHa task-force don’t know what the purpose of the war is, just as clueless as everyone else is to its purpose; the conflict just becomes a fact of life, a presumed inevitable fate that both sides are mortal enemies with no common ground, forever condemned to a life of combat. 2B avoids having to think about the circumstances by declaring that “emotions are prohibited” and trying to frame every interaction in terms of mission efficiency, keeping all her companions at arms distance at all times. This tactic obviously fails, but it also clearly shows the way in which such a cruel system tries to force its inhabitants to detach from the world around them.

The story navigates through a series of machine communities who, disillusioned with the war, have tried to become independent of it — there’s an amusement park that repurposes their weapons to fire harmless decorative balloons, a Forest Kingdom that uses its military might to defend itself, and Pascal’s Village, a small group of peaceful machines living around a giant tree, headed by the eponymous pacifist Pascal. Rather than fight against the system these communities simply try to avoid it at all costs, hoping that by not posing an immediate threat they’ll be left alone. However, even just exploring alternatives makes these communities targets — their existence threatens the narrative of an unavoidable war, exposing its conditions as constructed rather than a natural force. Pascal’s village, for example, rejects the notion that a machine’s only purpose is to fight, and as such has to set up huge barricades in order to defend itself, not from androids, but from machines.

Of the androids who have deserted and tried to escape, the ex-YoRHa unit A2 is the most prominent. After being sent on a mission that killed her entire squad and realising that they were set up for a suicide mission, she ends up becoming a third party in the War, both taking revenge against the machines and defending herself against the organisation she used to belong to. Her role in the cast is unique in that she’s the only major character actually fighting against the ruling system rather than avoiding it, even if she struggles to escape its influence over her. Similarly to the machine communities, A2’s awareness of what purpose YoRHa exploits its soldiers for has her become a prime target, and with no-one taking her side she resigns herself again to an existence of fighting.

Ultimately what YoRHa Command and the Machine Network fear is not losing, since they’ve created a scenario neither side can lose for as long as the War continues, but the idea that their soldiers will collectively turn on them. The only way that a war of this scale can sustain itself for so long is if the worker feels like it’s such a monumental power that they can’t fight back — by pitting workers as individuals in competition and framing alternatives as an enemy, it tries to forcibly alienate its workforce from each other, making them fearful of ever stepping out of line. Likewise, because it positions itself as an ingrained emotional feeling, it appears to be simply a natural force that has to be lived with rather than confronted. But as we’ve seen, it’s a deliberately created phenomenon and not a natural one. As such, it can always be unmade.

The final third of NieR: Automata focuses heavily on the characters A2 and 9S, exploring their responses to alienation under similar circumstances. Much like A2 loses every friend she knew in her old squadron, 9S is the sole survivor of a massive attack that destroys all of YoRHa — he also discovers, like A2 did, that this tragic event was intended, and has to face the fact that the system he lived under was designed to be as cruel as possible to him. Unlike A2, who channeled her disenfranchisement into anger, he resigns himself completely, believing that his entire life was meaningless and that there was nothing he could do about it.

By the game’s conclusion 9S has distanced himself completely from the world around him, having convinced himself that existence itself is a cruel joke, while A2 continues to fight back against the system that exploited her for so long. In the final confrontation between them you make a choice; you can take 9S’ side, continue the cycle of life and death by killing everyone, or with A2 you can spare 9S in the hopes that he’ll choose a different fate. Whichever ending you choose, practically everyone is already dead and it’s already ended in tragedy.

This isn’t the end of their story, though.