- Who do you consider the main protagonist of this story?
It's an ensemble. It's there on the cover, 'Lead androids 2B, 9S, and A2 to reclaim Earth'
How has this game surprised or defied expectation for you?
The Fall of YorHa. I was expecting the commander to be corrupt, but she went down with the ship (apparently at least)
Are you ready? (you're not ready)
I don't know. It seems clear enough that something very bad is in that tower.
What we know so far.
YorHa was designed with a backdoor from the start, it was designed to fail.
Androids are made from machines, because it would be too unethical for AIs (Problem: previous information has established that machines can't learn)
Seems like some kind of social experiment to achieve self awareness, because it doesn't seem YorHa is actually intended to win the war. Either there's an unrevealed mastermind, or this was setup in advance so that the androids could advance to a stage of being able to inherit the earth. Or it's all a simulation, to justify all the video gamey meta-ness. I dunno what's going to happen, other than it's going to be depressing. The Council of Humanity is still sending mail, somehow, and it was 'the offensive failed' mail, reacting to events, although not specifically I suppose. And nobody took A2 the fugitive off the mailing list.
So, when last we left off, A2 needed a new filter from her fight with Hegel, and so we went to the Resistance Camp. Pascal was loitering outside being attacked by machines for some reason, and flew away when I rescued her, meaning she was not actually in danger and was just trolling me. If not, wow Anemone, what kind of outfit are you running, the leader of the people that gives you vital supplies is being attacked right outside your front door and you're doing nothing. Bad resistance! Bad! I don't kill her even though that's out of character for A2, because 9S wouldn't like it.
Checked in with Anemone, and she can't give us any filter because Pascal makes em. So I dropped into her village and she trolls me some more by sending me to kill things she doesn't like, because she's a pacifist and doesn't kill things she doesn't like. So I get the damn tree bark that I'm headcanoning isn't even needed to make the filter, and she promptly sends me to kill more things she doesn't like to save a village child, for which the vital part she needs happens to be in the middle of a bunch of dangerous machines in the Abandoned factory,leaving me wondering if she's legitimately trying to kill me and there's no sick child at all.
I pick up some philosophy book from Anemone, and we cut away to Pascal reading Nietsche, who she can't decide if he's profound or nuts. Never read him so can't comment. Meanwhile, all the villagers decide to start randomly eating each other, so A2 to the rescue... by killing them all. (I fall off a cliff first, which the game interprets as 'A2 decided to take a soothing walk, which gave her a great sense of peace and fulfillment. Unfortunately, Pascal's village was destroyed by the time she got back') In another timeline, A2 arrives, and isn't any more help.
The villagers are randomly eating each other (do they actually have teeth?), and I arrive to save the day. Pascal is somehow immune, and flies away having saved the kids. I legitimately try to save the villagers but fail, which I'm not sure is incompetence or how the story rolls at this point. Since all of the uninfected were already evacuated, that makes my killing of all the villagers pointless, but whatever.
They take refuge in the abandoned factory, which is safe since 2B earlier killed everyone there. Hurray for pacifism, everyone! At which point the machines launch a massive assault on the...eight or so village children, which is a much higher priority than the androids or Yorha, it appears. I mistake Pascal for an enemy machine and attack her, and she is not amused.
A2 fends off the first wave with the vaunted 'run in circles shooting blindly' strategy, while Pascal hijacks an Engels unit and destroys the rest of it, including another Engels unit.
We return to the children...who are all dead, having killed themselves because Pascal taught them fear. So yet another mission filled with more pointless death. Pascal asks A2 to either kill her or erase her memories, and I walk away instead. Live with the consequences of your actions, you coward. A2 does (Also, found A2's past in Anemone's diary, it's pretty much the story we expect by now. Sole survivor, broken by war, mindless revenge.
Speaking of mindless revenge, 9S emerges from his tower and heads to the next one. He finds the rest of the missing Resistance members (all dead) and has pretty much the same reaction as me. There's finally a mission where I find someone alive, just trapped behind a pile of boxes, but he won't talk to me when I clear a path, so a glitch prevents me from rescuing at least one person, leaving my 'rescued NPCs' tally still at 0.
The medic twins asked me for a bunch of random crap which I accidentally collected, and then ask me to go find some flowers. I have one left over that I never managed to give to Operator 60, but they want some that only grow in a super dangerous area. I level up like 5 times killing waves or robots looking for the damn flowers, don't find them, and eventually get bored and die on purpose because I don't want to be overlevelled.
9S eventually finds the tower, and this one is a hacking tower, where you have to hack open the doors, whereupon he gets told that Yorha was designed to fail and the tower is a giant cannon aimed at the moon, which may or may not be true. He also discovers that androids are made of machine cores.
At the top, 9S finds the tower trying to absorb his memories of 2B, which displeases him. He kills it, which may be the real 2B's consciousness somehow, or just the tower defending itself by trying to look like her.
He's damaged thereafter (or possibly sabotaged by his pod, worried about his mental stability) and has to go to the Resistance camp for maintenance. That wraps up quickly, and then he goes to tower 3, and hacks his way to the top...only to face his former Operator, 210, in combat gear.
That's no coincidence, that's intelligent design, someone setting out to cause him pain for some reason. He hacks her (it is still extremely hard for me to believe that a hacker like 9S has no ability to hack her non lethally in some kind of 'shut down motor function' deal. Simone could do it.) but can't quite deal the death blow, so A2 does it from behind. This pisses him off, and he attacks, but gets punted through the floor as a machine named Auguste attacks. He's rather cute, trying to hug A2 with his adorable electric arm-balls, but I kill him anyway with the patented 'run around in circles shooting blindly' method.
Sorry if the tone here is a bit sharp, I just haven't recovered from the fall of YorHa. Also, somebody please post, stop making me ashamed of my free time.