[brobinson]

>It's not known how much time has passed between the end of mankind and the events of Automata.

Doesn't one of the texts you pick up state that the last humans were wiped out some time around the year 3,xxx? (so like 8,000 years prior to the game or thereabouts)

[fpgaminer]

I may be misunderstanding the lore; I'm certainly no expert. But I was under the impression that YoRHa is the one that believes it's year 11XXX or whatever. And YoRHa and their backstory are fabricated. Basically most of the Automata story should have repeated many times before. It gets "reset" whenever the machines defeat YoRHa and the machines rebuild YoRHa and set them up with a fresh backstory. So YoRHa would always believe it's the year 11XXX. When actually it might be 110,000 for all we know (and poor Pascal's village will have been murdered 10 times...).

I guess it's not really important the exact chronology. Automata is abstract enough that story details are more like flotation devices than concrete structures. The point is that much of the Automata story has been repeated over, and over again, and both you the player and YoRHa are oblivious to this (until the last act).

[anotherman554]

It's my understanding that there are two different factions, Machines and Androids. The Machines were built by aliens and the Androids were build by humans.

I don't remember anything in the game about Machines rebuilding YoRHa. Did you mean Androids rebuilding YoRHA?

I don't remember anything suggesting this has been "literally" an endless cycle, in fact I believe they say the aliens were only killed 600 years before the events of the game. (Specifically the YoRHA commander says nobody has seen the aliens in 600 years and then the main characters find the corpses of the aliens and Adam says he killed them.)

So absent any further plot twists (and I don't recall any) the events of the game would have to be at least a bit different from previous cycles before 600 years in the past, and I don't believe there's a suggestion that the exact events of the game ever happened before.

I googled this very quickly and don't see any consensus that your interpretation is correct, but my search was hardly thorough.

[brobinson]

One of the revelations from the machine AIs (red girls) is that they intentionally kept an opponent around to force their continued evolution (referenced in Jackass' report [1]). IIRC they also knew about (or installed?) the backdoor in The Bunker.

[1] https://nier.fandom.com/wiki/Machine_Research_Report

[setr]

>that they intentionally kept an opponent around to force their continued evolution

I don't remember the details of the plot well, but from that report, it's more:

1. Assigned goal: Defeat Enemy

2. Defeats enemy, but realizes that if it's fully defeated, they can no longer fulfill their goal

3. Keeps the enemy alive, so they can have an enemy to defeat. But they're stuck with a contradiction

4. Start corrupting the network to force evolution, to find a solution

That is, keeping YoRHa alive and fighting is independent of the evolutionary task -- it's a side-goal, to fulfill their base requirement (Defeat the Enemy). Keeping YoRHa around is necessary for the android's continued existence, and really all it's for.

The evolutionary task is a search to find a way to get out of this current state (endless war; contradictory/nonsensical setup).

[brobinson]

Interesting, I thought the repetition was the "machine wars" and they were on the 14th iteration or whatever it was. I've played through it twice, but I didn't pick up anything about the entire YoRHa setup being repeated. Maybe it's time to play through it again.

[fpgaminer]

shrug I definitely don't know for sure. Clemps on YouTube has a theory that "Automata leads to the events of drakengard 3,which lead to events of drakengard 1,which lead to events of nier which lead to Automata." So there's at least the possibility that it loops that way. Which is a bit ... odd. I just thought it repeated in the sense that the machines use the YoRHa backdoor, wipe them out, and start over again.

I don't recall exactly what the Red Girls say, but I thought they implied that they'd built YoRHa multiple times. Don't remember now though...