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Spoiler Warning: The following essay contains significant story reveals for NieR, NieR: Automata, and Stellar Blade.
I recent played through Stellar Blade, and setting aside…a bunch of things about it…I found myself somewhat underwhelmed by a core component of its theming. Interestingly, though, this was not due to some kind of failing where the creators had not included any kind of theme, or had not attempted to integrate that theme into other parts of the game and story.
Rather, the stumbling block came from the visuals of the game itself. We hear about various kinds of dissonance when it comes to art, and one such dissonance in storytelling and theming is how a work can raise a question for the audience, but then present an obvious answer. It is a dissonance where the audience is asked to ruminate on a topic, but the game undermines that rumination.
And the core concept here is the question “what does it mean to be human?” It’s a question that has plagued philosophy and human beings more generally for thousands of years. And it’s an interesting topic, especially within the context of science fiction. Hence why so many sci-fi stories raise that question.
But there are a variety of ways to present this theme within a story. Indeed, “what does it mean to be human” does not even need to be the core question. It could be a secondary concern, a byproduct of other themes.
And by the same token, that theme can be presented well or poorly. This can be true along a number of dimensions – it can be subtle or blunt or non-present; it can be ambiguous in its “answer” or hit you over the head with the creator’s beliefs; it can be integrated into the medium or inserted haphazardly.
I want to explore one aspect of this presentation which is perhaps not really thought about too much, and yet should be somewhat obvious. And that is “what do the characters look like?” In other words, if you’re trying to present multiple different “races” as human, the ones that look like humans are going to innately become the answer. “Which of these characters are the real huma-“ It’s those ones. The ones that look like humans.
The visuals of the characters are not the end of the question. It is possible to get around this gut reaction. But that is precisely the issue: the theming needs to put in the work to get around this reaction. If the story doesn’t push the audience out of that comfort zone, then they will stay there.
So I wanted to examine three games and how they tackled this topic. I wanted to compare Stellar Blade with NieR and NieR: Automata. I grant that at first it seems weird to compare two games in the same series. Why not just pick one? But I wanted to do both because they each present different ways of addressing this question, and thus different paths that can be taken despite the core subject.
I think the comparison can be useful for examining how something as simple as visual presentation can set the stage for how we think about these questions and the answers we come up with.
NieR – Humanity and Morality
Let’s start with NieR. I’ve tackled a lot of NieR’s theming in a previous essay, but I think it’s good to try and cover the basics here.
NieR is set in a future where humanity has been sent back technologically due to a threat from creatures called “Shades.” These Shades are humanoid, but otherwise appear simply as amorphous monsters made of black squiggles. These are your primary enemy throughout the game.
The key bit of info comes at approximately the halfway mark of the game (what is referred to as “Ending A”). During the final sequence of events you are given a set of lore entries to read through. These all detail the backstory of the game.
The core conceit is that humanity was originally fighting a war against an otherworldly threat. The opposing side could basically attack the soul of human beings. Which led to humanity devising a system to defend against this attack: what if you could separate out the bodies and souls of humans? By doing so, the bodies could continue to fight, while the souls remained in stasis. Once the threat was gone, the two could be reunited.
But while the separation part works, eventually things start to fall apart and those souls begin to wander around and – not having a body – go crazy. These souls are the Shades that you fight throughout the game. In other words, Shades are humans.
Now that reveal could be neat, but on its own there’s not much to it. Oh no, you were actually killing humans this whole time! However, the reveal itself doesn’t really change what the player feels. Because the hero you are controlling looks like and behaves like a human, and is the hero, and is engaging in fights that are clearly justified, he gets to be “human.” The solution is easy.
NieR has to find a way around this problem. It needs you to truly sympathize with the Shades in order to recognize their humanity and perspective. If you don’t see the Shades as in some way sympathetic, then the story has fundamentally failed.
And NieR accomplishes this task by recontextualizing the story. After you’ve learned all of this backstory and defeated the final boss, you replay the latter parts of the game again, but with additional context. The story now allows you to “hear” the Shades – originally just groans and warbling – by subtitling their lines. This information is presented only to you as the player (there is another character who can hear the speech and reacts to it, which provides new light on their actions from the first time around).
And these lines and the vignettes that accompany them illustrate the Shades as creatures often attempting to defend themselves. That while some Shades pose a threat to the humans as you understand them, others are hunted down simply for how they appear, and this includes children.
The goal of this reveal and the new lines is not to ultimately ask you “which of these are human?” The game tells you that the character you play as (and all the other “human” characters) are not really human. The real humans are the Shades. But you as player recognize that the non-Shades are in fact human. What is key is that by not just reiterating that the Shades are “the real humans” but also showing you how they are human, you recognize them as human as well. Through that recognition you then question to what extent your character’s actions are right – are you necessarily playing as “the good guy” in this story?
The theme of NieR uses this question of humanity to explore the problem of perspective in morality. “Who is human” is a tool to get at the question “who is the good guy?” Which is what I meant before about the topic of humanity being a secondary theme. And yet we could also see how this could fall apart if the question was poorly handled.
Imagine, for example, that the game told you that Shades were humans, but then did nothing further. Never gave you any peek into the life of the Shades. Then it wouldn’t really matter what the game says. You only observe the perspective of the hero – the one you recognize as human – and thus he and others become human by default. The game’s statements don’t matter. And as a consequence, the question of morality would fall apart as well. Of course you’re playing as the good guy – you’re the human in this situation, and humans matter most.
NieR gives us insight into how the question “what is a human” can be a stepping stone to other questions, but also how the appearance of characters paints our understanding of those characters. Between the “humans” and the Shades, the mere comparison leads to an easy answer. The game has to do additional work to get you to avoid that easy answer. To see the Shades as human despite how they appear.
NieR: Automata – Humanity’s Successor
So now let’s look at NieR’s sequel. Automata is set thousands of years in the future, so “sequel” feels a bit off. Nevertheless, it does continue the world left behind by its predecessor.
The core idea as presented is that Earth was at some point invaded by aliens. These aliens waged war with machines, and to avoid being destroyed humanity escaped to the Moon and created androids to fight in their place. These androids resemble humans externally, but always talk about how they fight on behalf of humans. In other words, the androids look human, but continually reference their own non-humanity.
Meanwhile, as you encounter the machines you learn that they are much more varied. Some are hostile, some don’t really bother you, and some are even friendly. They have conversations, build towns, get scared, seek revenge, and all sorts of other things. The end result is that these machines behave like humans, even though they don’t look like humans.
And about two-thirds of the way through the game the major reveal hits: humanity has long since gone extinct, and the humans that the androids are fighting for are just a fiction.
Without “real” humans in the story, the question becomes “what do we make of the androids and machines?” The story has set up three entities: humans that don’t exist, androids that look like humans, and machines that behave like humans. Which of these are “human?”
Here we see Automata engaging more directly with the theme of “what does it mean to be human?” It invites the player to ask what qualities make something human, especially when those qualities are no longer biological. Is humanity more about a set of practices and feelings? Can something biologically non-human be human?
But as I mentioned, the androids look human. They are the de facto answer to the question unless the game can do more to get us to connect with the machines. The machines are humanoid, but still very obviously machines: they’re made of metal, they clang as they move, their voices very clearly sound robotic. Can we see these machines as human?
Yet the game tries to continually get you to interact with the machines. They have families. They show emotions. They muse on the nature of what it means to be alive. Behind their blank faces they show a rich inner world. And so the game asks again and again – if we can likely accept the androids as “human” because of how they look despite so clearly not being human, why not accept machines? Indeed, machines feel almost like a better candidate for humanity’s successor, as they have engaged more directly with human history and culture in a way that the androids haven’t.
But this wouldn’t work if machines were always simply enemies. If we ran through the game just killing machines and being shown how they were simulating human behaviors, we’d just perceive them as mindlessly copying actions they learned about elsewhere. The game needs to do more than just tell us that the machines are emulating humanity. We need to see that emulation firsthand. We need to be able to peer inside their heads (something that you get to literally do at a few points).
Without this insight, the answer would again become obvious. Androids are humanity’s successor. They look like humans, and they show sufficient emotion. Sure, they don’t do a whole lot outside of fighting, and they don’t really engage much with literature and philosophy the way the machines do, but appearance is a powerful shortcut. The fact that they look human is enough. And so Automata needs to push you out of that initial reaction.
Stellar Blade – Humanity as Predecessor
Having seen how NieR and Automata handled these topics, let’s look at Stellar Blade.
Stellar Blade begins with an all-out attack from a bunch of (all female) warriors against a series of grotesque creatures called “Naytibas.” Your main character, Eve, is the only survivor of the assault, and you are now tasked with trying to take out the Elder Naytiba.
The core conceit here is that Earth is uninhabitable, having been taken over by these strange creatures. Humanity has been forced to move to a space colony, under the careful governance of an advanced AI known as Mother Sphere. Although very quickly you learn that there are other humans still living on Earth, trying to make ends meet, which you will then help.
The game eases you in to a confusing concept of “human” by noting that humans have been modified in various ways over many centuries. Indeed, a number of the humans you encounter in the main hub city sport numerous robotic appendages, with one even being a head on a robotic body. Only a few look like “normal” humans. But the game continually refers to them all as human.
However, it turns out that they’re androids. Sometime before the game, Mother Sphere creates androids, which are so superior to humans that she decides that humanity needs to be wiped out to make way for this new race. A war is fought, and humans are driven underground, where they then engage in various experiments to try and rapidly mutate their DNA to become stronger.
Which leads us to the reveal that the Naytibas we’re fighting are actually humans. Or were humans, however we’d like to frame it. These Naytibas managed to push back the androids and Mother Sphere basically killed billions of androids, humans, and humans-turned-Naytiba in order to keep the space colony safe.
And the end result of this is…not really much. A few individual characters drive a lot of the ending, and you get a final choice about what you want to do – fuse with the Elder Naytiba to create a new race that combines human DNA with advanced machinery, or destroy the Naytiba outright. On a basic storytelling level it mostly works, but the theme feels hollow.
Insofar as the game wants us to consider what a human is, we’re not really given much to go on. We’re initially told all of these human-like characters are human…and then told that actually it’s the Naytibas. But we’re back to that original bias. Those human-like characters look…well…human. Why would I ultimately accept these ugly monsters as human instead? Even if they were human, surely they’ve turned into something else entirely.
Combine that with the way the two races act. The androids have markets and a city and technology and communicate with each other. They feel human on a basic level. Meanwhile, the Naytiba are just monsters that attack. They are capable of something resembling strategy, but their existence is solely about violence. With only three exceptions – a Naytiba that somehow fuses with an android before the story and serves as an important character (this reveal is only provided in their last moments), an android that seems to basically be able to turn into a Naytiba (which you fight at the end of the game), and the Elder Naytiba who turns out to be basically a human with an angel wing – the Naytiba are driven entirely by killing everything. So when analyzing them from a sort of cultural level, the Naytiba again seem fundamentally inhuman.
And Stellar Blade doesn’t do anything like NieR or Automata to help you overcome this initial bias. You are told about the history of how humans were driven to experiment and turn themselves into these creatures, but you never get a glimpse of the Naytibas’ thoughts. They are only and ever just enemies. They are only and ever just monsters. The Naytibas aren’t shown as something to even really be sympathetic toward. The object of our sympathy is ultimately the androids still living on Earth, who live in fear of the Naytibas.
We can thus see that a question of humanity is tied with sympathy. Our ability to feel a connection to a character or group of characters is what allows us to potentially see them as human. When that connection is removed or never fostered in the first place, the theme falls apart. There is no point in asking “what it means to be human” because there is no underlying conflict. There is just one race that is human within the game, and it’s the androids. So being human is being that.
Concluding Remarks
I hope that this comparison helps to illustrate how something as simple as how a character looks can impact the ability of media to present a theme.
Because the underlying question – “what does it mean to be human?” – is an interesting one. And there are a multitude of ways to explore it and use it to communicate interesting stories and get players to think critically. While it can sometimes sound silly, those kinds of questions that feel obvious get incredibly complicated and difficult to answer when approached earnestly.
But the problem is that those questions are ones people often don’t approach earnestly. When there is an obvious answer, we generally gravitate towards it. Hence the need to push an audience away from that obvious answer. To get them out of their comfort zone.
Tackling a theme is about more than simply stating what that theme is. It requires a deeper understanding of how all aspects of the medium help to sell that theme. To get the audience to notice that theme and engage with it.
Abstracting Games 