Why is this game praised for its story?

[Il Luppoooo]

It seems that many people cannot distinguish between the initial setting and the actual plot. The initial setting of this game is very intriguing: the alien invasion, the machines, mankind exiled on the moon, YoRHa and so on. The actual plot developement, meaning the set of events going on from here, is actually poor.

For most of the time you just follow the commander's orders to go here and there performing unrelated tasks with no actual feeling of progress. I'm not talking about side quests, I'm talking about main story quests. The, once in a while a major machine attack randomly happens (Engles in city ruins, Grun in the ocean, Eve going mad, the virus attack, ...) and it starts all over again. Almost no development whatsoever.

An actual plot has to feature agents (e.g. characters) having a purpose and trying to reach it, interacting with other agents and the environment, making a series of events unfold. This happens very rarely in Nier: Automata. The only part where they really tried to do it is with Adam and Eve, but they end up doing almost nothing. You can literally summarize all they do in a couple of lines.

Things get a little better with run C, but it's still not enough to make a solid, deep plot. Pacing is badly managed, lots of questions at the beginning and way too much stuff going on in the final tower, with some random, fuzzy Deus-Ex-Machina moments (A2 fckin up the red girl by not attacking) and forcedly introduced wtf plot twists (2B = 2E).

Some claim this game brings storytelling to the highest level, but I think it's actually nowhere near the average of classic JRPGs from 20 years ago. Storytelling from any Final Fantasy from 6 to 10 (don't know about the more recent ones) just crushes Nier: Automata very, very badly. Did people forget about those games?

[Nino_Chaosdrache]

I kind of agree, but for different reasons.

While the story telling itself was great and made me feel something for characters, the story itself is rather mediocre. Robots that want to become like humans has been done to death by now and as an ousider, it was rather irritating to listen to 2B and 9S that machines shouldn't have emotions when they, as being machines themselves, shouldn't have any emotions either.

Again, I don't know anything about the Nier and Drakensang universe except of Automata, so maybe everything is supposed to be like this. But for me, it seemed like both the machines and androids had some serious bugs in their porgramming, when it came to the whole emotion topic, which kind of ruined the story as a whole for me.

And the final chapter created more questions than it answered in the end.

[lessthanoff]

"Robots that want to become like humans has been done to death by now"

First of all, nearly everything has been done to death by now. Stories that seem original to you likely only seem that way because you haven't seen the mountains upon mountains of similar stories that inspired them. Second of all, that's not even what the story is about. It's not about machines/androids wanting to be like humans, it's about machines/androids trying to find their own meaning in a world that has essentially given them none. I would even say it's the exact opposite of what you described -- in the end, in order to find their own meaning, the machines/androids have to shed the will and direction of those who created them and walk their own paths.

"it was rather irritating to listen to 2B and 9S that machines shouldn't have emotions when they, as being machines themselves, shouldn't have any emotions either."

It makes perfect sense they would behave that way though, considering androids were created in man's image, to not only reflect their physical appearances, but also their emotional and psychological states as well. They're symbols of humanity, just as much as they are soldiers of them. Machines, on the other hand, were only created by the aliens to fight and destroy.

"And the final chapter created more questions than it answered in the end."

How can you call the story mediocre though, if by your own admission, you didn't seem to understand what was going on in the end (arguably, the most important portion of the story)?

[Carighan]

Publicado originalmente por myhr2:

Will you manipulate the characters to lead them to their inevitable destiny, as written by Yoko Taro, or will you have the chance to alter the writing of the story itself...or maybe you already have? This is, imho, what blow people's mind, the fact that there are in fact three levels in the story : the plot, the story, and the player's agency, which is really what is so unique to videogames.

Eh... I don't see any of this. It's one single pre-written story, told in 2,2-ish repetitions of playing the game.

I somewhat agree with the OP in that the "plot" as they describe it is paper-thin, but only insofar that while a lot happens, due to the holes in the lore and the general lack of worldbuilding there's not much connecting them into a bigger whole. Mind you the individual plot pieces are cool.

I think my biggest gripe however is that whoever wrote the characters couldn't nail down whether the main protagonists are actually androids or actually humans, and often ended up alluding to either. This set up an interesting plot twist that... never happened. So it's just a shortcoming in the end, something that was probably at one point planned differently during development.
(There are plenty discussions between characters that make no sense from the perspective of a robotic body, might as well be talking about menstruation.)

[lessthanoff]

"due to the holes in the lore and the general lack of worldbuilding there's not much connecting them into a bigger whole."

What holes are there in the lore, and what "general" lack of worldbuilding is there?

"I think my biggest gripe however is that whoever wrote the characters couldn't nail down whether the main protagonists are actually androids or actually humans, and often ended up alluding to either."

There is not one single moment in the story where the game ever implies that the androids are "humans." They are androids who were created to be very human-like. As I said in the comment directly above yours: "It makes perfect sense they would behave that way though, considering androids were created in man's image, to not only reflect their physical appearances, but also their emotional and psychological states as well. They're symbols of humanity, just as much as they are soldiers of them." This, of course, is meant to be a direct contrast to the machines, who were created to be mere weapons of war, and had never showed any of the qualities the androids did, prior to the different machine subsets being severed from the alien network to ensure it only had enough numbers to prolong the war, which applied a sufficient amount of evolutionary pressure on the network, causing an ego (based on the large amount of human data collected) to emerge and take control of it.

Regarding why YoRHa androids were told to suppress their emotions and behave more like machines, however, is a different story. YoRHa androids were *not* created by humans, and were not created the same way. They were created using machine cores, which, in the eyes of the androids who created them, made their lives less valuable. YoRHa androids are nothing more than a disposable fighting force, put together with dead machines, so that no more "actual" android lives are wasted. This is why YoRHa androids are not given proper names, but instead merely a letter and a number. But, of course, because of the nature of Project YoRHa being so focused on boosting morale among androids, no one knows about this except for the select few behind it. After all, if the other androids were to find out they were starting to be replaced with the very thing they've been fighting against all this time, many would be disgusted and in-fighting would likely ensue. So YoRHa androids have qualities that reflect the other androids so they are able to blend in better, but they are secretly told they do not deserve their emotions.

"This set up an interesting plot twist that... never happened."

You were confused about what the story was actually doing, and based your disappointment on something that was never there in the first place.

"So it's just a shortcoming in the end, something that was probably at one point planned differently during development."

That doesn't seem likely, since Yoko Taro wrote the ending of the game first and worked his way backwards to the beginning.

[Exarch_Alpha]

What´s your source for him doing the plot from end to beginning?

[lessthanoff]

Publicado originalmente por Exarch_Alpha:

What´s your source for him doing the plot from end to beginning?

There are quite a few articles where he is interviewed talking about it. Just look up Yoko Taro and "backwards scriptwriting."

[lailaamell]

why necro this thread

[lessthanoff]

Ask Xanflins. But as long as it's here, I'm going to respond to posts I want to respond to.

[Carighan]

Having fully finished it now, I would argue that the overarching story is genuinely rather poor. The setting is wasted on conceptualized but underdeveloped plot elements, which are in turn wasted on a techncially inept implementation.

I make this sound overly harsh, granted. Clickbait and all. :P But really, they could have done so much more with their world, and while the combat is easily the game's strongest point it's also Platinum's weakest comparing games such as W101, Bayonetta 1/2 or the more up-to-date Astral Chain. Nevermind the atrocious PC port.

That being said, the game also has strong points, even if they're not inherently "the story", but "part of the story". The very final interactive element in ending E is a strong setpiece that is executed extremely well, too. The question asked afterwards works as a result of how well-utilized everything is. Short as that part was, it was done flawlessly.
Another element to highlight is the general integration of the UI into the android narrative. It's a shame that status conditions are a bit under-utilized but when they are used they work really well, never mind endings such as... I think T? Removing the OS chip?

I just wish this had been more consistent. The world and its lore could have used more exposition, and the game could stand not being as needlessly stretched out.

If I had to summarize my thoughts, it's a heap of amazing ideas let down by atrocious technical implementation (mostly but not all in the PC port!) and a Hobbit-syndrome of wanting to drag things out to 3 episodes instead of using what setting there is for a 12-15 hour romp that could be well-paced.

Still, for the reduced price, decent game.

[lessthanoff]

So instead of responding to *any* (not even a single one) of my points, you just throw out a blanket, non-explanation of "overarching story is genuinely rather poor?" without a single detail explaining why this is the case, followed by this: "The setting is wasted on conceptualized but underdeveloped plot elements, which are in turn wasted on a techncially inept implementation" -- a pretentious word-salad ramble that would make the average critic on Rotten Tomatoes blush.

Cool.

This is usually the part where I ask "why do you think this is the case?" but considering I've done that at least 60+ times over the last few years and have either gotten no answer, or an answer which demonstrates the poster(s) has absolutely no idea what actually happened in the game's story, I think I'll just throw my hands up and say "Sure, whatever, buddy." After all, I just love spending my time typing long, in-depth posts explaining what the story is about only for those posts to be completely ignored by the person I'm responding to 100 percent of the time.

[lailaamell]

Publicado originalmente por Carighan:

Having fully finished it now, I would argue that the overarching story is genuinely rather poor. The setting is wasted on conceptualized but underdeveloped plot elements, which are in turn wasted on a techncially inept implementation.

I make this sound overly harsh, granted. Clickbait and all. :P But really, they could have done so much more with their world, and while the combat is easily the game's strongest point it's also Platinum's weakest comparing games such as W101, Bayonetta 1/2 or the more up-to-date Astral Chain. Nevermind the atrocious PC port.

That being said, the game also has strong points, even if they're not inherently "the story", but "part of the story". The very final interactive element in ending E is a strong setpiece that is executed extremely well, too. The question asked afterwards works as a result of how well-utilized everything is. Short as that part was, it was done flawlessly.
Another element to highlight is the general integration of the UI into the android narrative. It's a shame that status conditions are a bit under-utilized but when they are used they work really well, never mind endings such as... I think T? Removing the OS chip?

I just wish this had been more consistent. The world and its lore could have used more exposition, and the game could stand not being as needlessly stretched out.

If I had to summarize my thoughts, it's a heap of amazing ideas let down by atrocious technical implementation (mostly but not all in the PC port!) and a Hobbit-syndrome of wanting to drag things out to 3 episodes instead of using what setting there is for a 12-15 hour romp that could be well-paced.

Still, for the reduced price, decent game.

Its not really a game made for story its a walking fighting sim

[lailaamell]

Also cant forgive for what happend to 2B

[VinnyBoy]

Yes, this game's worth lies in its backstory and setting. Once you learn of this, a lot due to the event of the game itself, many details becomes suddenly quite more important with a hidden secondary meaning. It's true that the main events seems irrelevant when you end up just wandering around solving stuff that amounts to nothing. It goes with the main theme of the game.

[afrodude11243]

I am compelled to bring this thread back from the grave and wholeheartedly agree. I just got this game on sale and decided to see what all the fawning praise was about. 50hrs in, I have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue, yet the whole ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ world still thinks its a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ masterpiece.

You know... I like the Metal Gear series, but I fully accept the plot is retarded. In the past, I would try to argue its merits to people that hated it. After playing Nier: Automata, I completely understand how people just 100% hate Metal Gear, and will never argue its merits again. Metal Gear just happened to be the right flavor of retarded to get me to look past the mountain of pretentious stupidity; Nier isn't the right flavor for me.

Never before have I experienced a plot so incomplete and meaningless that wasn't explicitly unfinished. "Oh, but it's SUPPOSED to be meaningless!" they say. Well a kick in the balls is SUPPOSED to hurt, does that make it okay?

Route A and B are utterly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pointless, the game should just start at route C for all that you learn or accomplish beforehand. Adam and Eve are born (never explained), meaning the machines just ♥♥♥♥ out 2 Death Star exhaust ports whose deaths can ♥♥♥♥ up their whole operation; I know there's an explanation for all the machine's idiotic behavior, but that explanation isn't developed AT ALL and amounts to ♥♥♥♥ all. Anyway, Adam decides to kill himself fundamentally out of boredom. That's all well and good, but opens up a MASSIVE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ plothole in regards to Eve. Considering Adam was killed earlier, and states that he cut himself from the network to allow himself to die... how in the ♥♥♥♥ does Eve die then? Eve has no reason whatsoever to cut himself from the network, and seemingly never does. So how exactly does stabbing him in the head kill him? and what the ♥♥♥♥ happened to him when in the "giant ball of scrap" boss fight with him? did he transform into a machine core? Shouldn't he be dead after that fight? Did he transfer his soul to the giant scrap worm? Either he pulled some houdini ♥♥♥♥, which doesn't explain how he dies later, or you kill him like 3 times, which REALLY doesn't explain whats so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ final about the 3rd death. Nothing about these two is ever ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ explained, nor is it explained why the machines can't just ♥♥♥♥ out 2 or 4 or 300 more of them.

And at the end of it all, you're right the ♥♥♥♥ back where you started, launching an attack against the machines with 2B and 9S that ends in a black box suicide, only this time some actual plot happens, hence why the game should just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ start here. Yorha gets infected by a machine virus and taken out, 9S and 2B avoid it due to circumstance... but then 2B just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dies immediately after anyway, so what was the point of that? Would it not better explain 9S' psychotic breakdown if he learned 2B's real mission in a fight where he had to kill her? Or even just have it be a "supposed to lose" fight (which the game already has) where A2 jumps in and kills her so you don't have to change a single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing else. Either of those would be a roller coaster of conflicting emotions that could realistically lead someone to snap, instead of what we actually got, which was "9S is sad and angry, but fine. Oops, some inexplicable memory hacking thing happened, now he's crazy!"

So the machines just have a city-sized rocket launcher hanging around, and they put an elevator on it so androids can come up and play with them, because they pretty much act in whatever way leads to the greatest novelty (what compelling antagonists, these guys). 9S goes in, fights infected Yorha, ends up shoving a 2B unit's arm in his socket as a replacement (OMG THE SYMBOLISM), which starts infecting him, but he's the hacking guy, so he fixes it. Or he doesn't. He gets the red eye effect later, so did he fix it or not? It didn't really change his behavior, and A2s ending where she hacks him, like everything else, amounts to ♥♥♥♥ all because as far as the ending is concerned they both died anyway... but I digress. The REAL machine overlord is defeated by doing nothing, so really everyone could've just stayed the ♥♥♥♥ home and let the overlord kill itself, because subverting expectations is more important than coherence or engagement in modern writing.

Both C and D apparently end the same way, or else ending E just follows D because it presumes 9S is dead; it isn't clear if anyone lived or died in C, but guess what? It amounts to ♥♥♥♥ all anyway because the real ending basically presumes D happened. So the pods gain sentience from their new instant messaging app, naturally, and rebuild 9S, A2, and 2B... so wait, did 2B actually die or not, then? Don't they only have her memories from her sword? Before we can even process that, they worry that rebuilding them the same way will result in the same thing happening and oh jesus was this supposed to be a "repeating cycle" plot? When the ♥♥♥♥ was that a thing?!

How in the ♥♥♥♥ would rebuilding them repeat events? Yorha is dead, the machines are... something (the overlord killed itself in a hacking space, is it really dead? the machines complain but don't seem very deterred from keeping on their mission; is the network gone? what the ♥♥♥♥ did anything with the red girls amount to? you probably know the answer by now), 9S is crazy, 2B has no directive to kill 9S now (though she might as ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ well), I guess A2 is basically back where she started, but all her entire character amounted to was pissing off 9S anyway. Not exactly starting right where you left off.

So the game ends with some contrived shooter session trying to deliver a message about teamwork that wasn't present anywhere else in the game until that very ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ moment, and 95% of every explanation for everything that happened is dumped on you in a post-credits codex entry, which is not just hilariously bad storytelling, but unsurprisingly doesn't really answer ♥♥♥♥.

This game doesn't have plot holes, it has tiny islands of plot drifting helplessly in a plot abyss. You teleport from one island to another, each time left to wonder "wait, how in the ♥♥♥♥ did I get here from there? I'm missing about 99 of 100 steps required to bridge this gap...", and at the end you find a note explaining about 3 steps. My summary barely scratches the surface of all the nonsense in this plot. I didn't even mention how the very premise of the game is broken, though considering there's barely any plot to break in the first place I can understand why most players wouldn't mind.

If these androids exist to fight machines, why, oh why, are they given human emotions? One sidequest foolishly brings up the fact that the pleasure-centers of their brains are tweaked to enjoy killing robots, and popola/devola are stated to have been given an ETERNAL SENSE OF GUILT because apparently the android engineers in this world are designing androids to satisfy their sadism rather than to perform a function. If they can do all that, why not just make dumb kill bots with AI operators in some server far from danger? Well because then the whole ruse with the council of humanity and 9S specifically, the only two things that could be considered driving factors of the plot, make no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sense whatsoever. If the androids were losing morale, and you have the capacity to just make morale+50000 androids, I don't think "elaborate deception to convince our pointlessly emotional killbots that humanity is still have" is gonna be anyone's first suggestion. The funny thing is I came up with a solution to all this that requires nothing but a few dialog changes. Change the "Yorha Betrayers" sidequest.... oh ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ christ I gotta get into how THAT and A2 break the narrative now, too. Pause my solution.

SO... there are traitorous androids. I presume they found out the truth about Yorha, so... why the ♥♥♥♥ did they even allow the 9S model to be used at all? You're telling me they assigned a personal executioner to this guy because they were SO WORRIED about him finding the truth... when 4 regular ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ grunts are running around who somehow figured it out already? Why even use 9S models at all if you're already doing such a ♥♥♥♥ job at keeping the secret? Is Yorha intentionally doing a ♥♥♥♥ job because the commander secretly wants to be exposed? Well who the ♥♥♥♥ is keeping her from just saying "♥♥♥♥ it" and calling off the whole ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing, she's the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ commander! Moreover, why don't ANY of the traitors even attempt to tell you the truth? If I found out my employer was planning to kill all of us and was sending my former co-workers to kill me for knowing, step number ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ one upon any encounter with a former co-worker is going to be "blurt out the truth as fast as possible, furthering Yorha's exposure and keeping me alive at the same time". Yet all we get is A2 hinting at it and then ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ off; her entire character centers around her guilt and frustration over failing to save her former co-workers, by the way: obviously, she'd have no interest in sparing another ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sentence to potentially save the lives of these two fellow androids, right?

Anyway, my solution to pointlessly human androids. Obviously you need the androids to be human-like because stories about emotionless robots would be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring (at the least, I can say that this game isn't particularly boring), so how do you do that without making it so stupid it completely pulls people out of the experience? Well here's a good place to start: make "Yorha Betrayers" a quick little main quest. Instead of being about traitors, though, it's now about prototype androids gone crazy. When you fight them, have them say weird, nonsensical ♥♥♥♥, perhaps like the machines. When it's over and you get your pat on the back, have 9S ask why they went crazy, to which the operator/commander replies with something to the effect of, "we can manufacture android AIs based off of old blueprints, but we don't really understand how it works. Yorha needs to keep trying to improve on the old designs to keep up with the machines, but every time we try to do more than a few little tweaks... well, you've seen what happens. Obviously, Yorha doesn't want weapons with emotional problems, but everything humanity has tried outside of androids just doesn't cut it against the machines." There, Nier now has a workable foundation. Now we just need to fix everything else.

I could be here all day long, probably longer listing this game's major flaws, and believe me, they don't end at the story. All I'll say about the gameplay is that it feels like most of the designers were quality professionals who wanted to make a simple, but solid gameplay experience, but there was one sadistic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who snuck around the office ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with everything they did, resulting in multiple moments of "what the actual ♥♥♥♥ were they thinking?" suddenly appearing at several points in the game. The bunny enemy comes to mind; an enemy that you can only fight after fruitlessly wailing on it for like 7 real-time minutes of constant attacks... what ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lunatic designs something like that? The secret boss as well; a secret boss should be hard, but it should test your skills with the gameplay mechanics, not test your willingness to give yourself arthritis to beat a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ video game boss; all he does is fill the entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ screen with projectiles, and after you've permanently damaged your wrists to get him down to like 10% health, he does a 100% unavoidable area attack that is nothing but a gear check, instantly killing you if you don't have enough health; if you DO have enough health to get past that, the fight is trivial, beyond the wrist damage. There is zero ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ challenge to this fight but your physical ability to rapidly press the "dodge" button for 30 seconds straight several times, with a 5-10 second window inbetween to do literally anything else, like deal damage in the hopes of eventually ending your suffering. Again I ask... what ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lunatic designs something like that?

Okay I'm done, I can't ♥♥♥♥ on this game forever... well I probably could, it's just that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ borked of a game... but you know what I mean.

[lessthanoff]

"Never before have I experienced a plot so incomplete and meaningless that wasn't explicitly unfinished. "Oh, but it's SUPPOSED to be meaningless!" they say. Well a kick in the balls is SUPPOSED to hurt, does that make it okay?"

So you completely missed the point of ending E, which shows what relying on a predefined meaning (AKA: believing and obeying what an absent god-figure, or in this case "humanity," tells you to do/believe) will lead to, and the only true way someone can live is to create their own meaning: "A future is not something that is given to you, it's something you have to take for yourself." So to say the plot is "meaningless" is untrue, it's simply a cautionary tale to not only avoid taking things purely on faith, but also to never construct your entire life and meaning around something that is purely faith-based, otherwise (when you are ultimately let-down by whatever you believed in ending up to be untrue) your life will "seem" meaningless, when you could have been creating your own meaning instead. That's the point.

"Adam and Eve are born (never explained)"

Adam and Eve were the result of machine-kind's evolution, as was setup by N2, who used the war with the androids to put evolutionary pressure on itself in order to evolve to become more human-like. I thought this was pretty straight-forward >.>

"meaning the machines just ♥♥♥♥ out 2 Death Star exhaust ports whose deaths can ♥♥♥♥ up their whole operation"

Yes, because that's exactly what happened after Adam and Eve were killed. Oh wait. No, because after their deaths, N2 revealed they could have destroyed YoRHa from the start (before proceeding to do so with the virus), but didn't, because, as we find out later, they were using YoRHa for the purposes of putting evolutionary pressure on themselves.

"I know there's an explanation for all the machine's idiotic behavior, but that explanation isn't developed AT ALL and amounts to ♥♥♥♥ all."

Probably because you're the type of person who is incapable of inferring anything.

"Considering Adam was killed earlier, and states that he cut himself from the network to allow himself to die... how in the ♥♥♥♥ does Eve die then? Eve has no reason whatsoever to cut himself from the network, and seemingly never does"

Again, you weren't paying attention, and arrogantly assumed that, because you didn't catch it initially, it must be the game's fault. 9S hacks into Eve during the boss fight and blatantly says, as he's doing this, that he is disconnecting Eve from the network so that he can be killed. He succeeds, and 2B is able to kill him.

"Yorha gets infected by a machine virus and taken out, 9S and 2B avoid it due to circumstance.."

...Again, if you were capable of paying attention, this was because, at the end of Route B, 9S finds a strange signal/noise coming through the server and pragmatically disconnects both himself and 2B from it.

"Would it not better explain 9S' psychotic breakdown if he learned 2B's real mission in a fight where he had to kill her? Or even just have it be a "supposed to lose" fight (which the game already has) where A2 jumps in and kills her so you don't have to change a single ♥♥♥♥ing thing else. Either of those would be a roller coaster of conflicting emotions that could realistically lead someone to snap, instead of what we actually got, which was "9S is sad and angry, but fine. Oops, some inexplicable memory hacking thing happened, now he's crazy!""

9S knew the entire time that 2B had been killing him (not necessarily why, but he knew she was doing it). The "you're thinking about how much you want to **** (kill) 2B, aren't you?" scene that happens when Adam probes his memories, and the Soul Box scene where N2 probes his memories and forces him to kill a digital representation of 2B, who is stealing his memories of their time together away, shows that he had known the entire time, and had been hiding it. Also the concert scripts written by Yoko Taro demonstrates he figured out who 2B is and what she has been doing to him for years prior to the events of the game. He has a love-hate view of her, as shown in the scene where he fights the 2B models in the tower, where he gleefully tells her he wants to tear her apart. He didn't just suddenly "snap," but instead did a very good job of hiding his obsession and love/hatred for her prior to her death.

"So the machines just have a city-sized rocket launcher hanging around, and they put an elevator on it so androids can come up and play with them, because they pretty much act in whatever way leads to the greatest novelty (what compelling antagonists, these guys)."

As Pod 153 already pointed out, the entrance was a trap. N2 wanted to capture the remaining YoRHa androids in its web to finish them off. It had also evolved to the extent that it adopted a fair bit of human-like cruelty, and it wanted to torture them both. In the end (during ending D), it gets what it wants. YoRHa is destroyed and it leaves Earth to find a new home.

"It didn't really change his behavior, and A2s ending where she hacks him, like everything else, amounts to ♥♥♥♥ all because as far as the ending is concerned they both died anyway... but I digress."

Wrong. 9S lives in her ending, but they both die in 9S' ending, which is the true ending that leads into ending E, because every YoRHa unit needs to be dead in order for it to happen. So ending C isn't technically canon.

"The REAL machine overlord is defeated by doing nothing, so really everyone could've just stayed the ♥♥♥♥ home and let the overlord kill itself, because subverting expectations is more important than coherence or engagement in modern writing."

N2 doesn't die in the true ending. It, as well as the memories of all the other machines attached to its network, launches itself into space after evolving so far that it developed the final, arguably most important human-like trait: empathy. N2 emapthized with the androids and decided to leave Earth to find a world of its own, rather than robbing the androids of theirs, as well as the god (humanity) they revered. In the end, the machines got exactly what they wanted, even if evolving to such a human-like state caused them to change their initial plans, which was originally to evolve far enough to become the dominant species, in place of humanity and androids.

"Both C and D apparently end the same way"

Except they don't. Ending C = 9S is alive, N2 is dead, Project YoRHa never sees its conclusion. None of those things happen in ending D.

"So the pods gain sentience from their new instant messaging app, naturally, and rebuild 9S, A2, and 2B... so wait, did 2B actually die or not, then? Don't they only have her memories from her sword? "

Yes, 2B died. Or were you only half-paying attention to that, too? All of their memories were backed up, but the pods were not supposed to rebuild them because doing so would result in a failure of Project YoRHa, which requires all YoRHa androids to cease to exist.

"oh jesus was this supposed to be a "repeating cycle" plot? When the ♥♥♥♥ was that a thing?!"

Oh, I don't know... Maybe in the second sentence out of 2B's mouth, within the first few seconds of the game?

"How in the ♥♥♥♥ would rebuilding them repeat events?"

I know you're one of those people who is desperate to show everyone how smart you are by telegraphing how much more clever you are than the writer/film-maker/etc of whatever you most-recently watched or played, but this is too much. Pod 153 is talking about the cycle the characters are personally caught in, like 9S' insecurities about 2B, his hatred for A2, etc. She's not talking about the literal events happening again.

"(the overlord killed itself in a hacking space, is it really dead? the machines complain but don't seem very deterred from keeping on their mission; is the network gone? what the ♥♥♥♥ did anything with the red girls amount to? you probably know the answer by now)"

A lot more than you do, that's for sure. FYI: the red girls are N2, the subset of the machine network that evolved after enough evolutionary pressure was placed on the network as a byproduct of the war.

"I guess A2 is basically back where she started, but all her entire character amounted to was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ off 9S anyway."

I'll admit, I'm not a huge A2 fan. Everyone else seems to love her, but to me, she is pretty much little more than a vessel to be influenced by 2B's memory data, as she becomes more attached to 9S as a byproduct.

"If these androids exist to fight machines, why, oh why, are they given human emotions?"

Because, unlike machines, they were created to be near-perfect representations of humanity, physically and emotionally. They were created long before the war, back when humanity (obviously) was still around. In many ways, they are symbols of humanity, which in turn strengthens their resolve and conviction while fighting their opposites: seemingly cold, unfeeling machines that were created not as symbols of their creators, but as mere tools for war. That's the entire point of why the androids feel they are so superior, because their creators made them in their image (like god creating mankind), while the machines were just created to be tools. YoRHa androids were created using machine cores, and, for the sake of morale (since morale is such a large part of Project YoRHa), they were created to be very similar to the already-existing androids. After all, if the other androids knew they had machine/android hybrids fighting along with them, that would have the opposite effect on their morale.

"...because apparently the android engineers in this world are designing androids to satisfy their sadism rather than to perform a function."

Yes, parish the thought that human-like creatures would develop and make use of human-like traits. Humans never do evil, sadistic crap in real life in the name of performing a function.

"SO... there are traitorous androids. I presume they found out the truth about Yorha, so... why the ♥♥♥♥ did they even allow the 9S model to be used at all? You're telling me they assigned a personal executioner to this guy because they were SO WORRIED about him finding the truth... when 4 regular ♥♥♥♥ing grunts are running around who somehow figured it out already?"

So can you show me where those traitorous androids found out the truth of humanity? Because A2 is also a traitorous android, but didn't know about the truth of humanity until the end. What likely occurred is that those other androids ran into A2, who told them what happened to her and her squad (which never led to A2 ever even coming close to finding out the truth of humanity), and decided to defect. Your entire point here is propped up by a huge strawman, and shows you are either just making a string of bad faith arguments, or (more likely) you just have no idea what you are talking about.

"so how do you do that without making it so stupid it completely pulls people out of the experience?"

It's not stupid, you just got literally every single part of your synopsis of the story wrong, that's all.