Does the dialogue in the first level have any significance

nier-automata

I have been playing NieR: Automata on the hard difficulty and have played the first level more times than I care to admit! (Now that I have remapped my controls, things are better)

In doing level 1 so many times, I kept hearing dialog from 2B and 9S in the facility discussing an intercom message from the robots.

Something like:

2B: "What?"

9S: "It's just nonsense left over. Nothing machines do make any sense"

  1. First is there significance to the comment 9S makes (Yes/No)
  2. What does the intercom message say. I can't make it out even with headsets. All I can make out is the last line of "have a nice day".
  3. If yes to answer 1, can you explain the significance? (Please put this in spoiler text if it spoils the story or just let me know that it is explained later in the game sufficiently that you won't answer here.)

Warning: Then next question is a spoiler for the first level

Then later,

When you battle the facility itself outside, 2B notes that the robots can talk again, but I couldn't make out anything the facility said. Could anyone make sense out of what the facility said?

These questions have been bugging me every time I have to replay the level but now that I have beat it I probably won't play it again until part 2

Best Answer

As someone who also repeatedly died on the first level and had to replay it many times, I vividly remember this dialogue. A lot of the "significant" things won't really stand out until you've reached the true ending, so although I'm going to explain within spoiler tags, don't take them lightly.

  1. Yes.

  2. I honestly don't know exactly what is said, but from the bits I was able to pick up, it sounds like a mix of some prerecorded announcements and messages for the factory while it was still in use by humans before they left.

  3. See spoilers below, but as I said before, this includes very important plot points, so proceed with caution...

The fact that 9S says that nothing machines say make any sense is a bit ironic after you discover that YoRHa androids' black boxes are repurposed machine lifeforms cores. That is to say, YoRHa androids are essentially just prettier machine lifeforms. The YoRHa androids only differ from machine lifeforms in that they were created by different things. The argument that they look different is disproven when the machine lifeforms create Adam and Eve. This line in particular isn't exactly significant story-wise (however, the idea that androids are superior or otherwise different from machine lifeforms is a recurring theme and you will see dialogue like this throughout the game), it is something that you will pick up on when you hear it again after completing the true ending and learning the truth about everything.

Another reason this is important is that is a subtle hint towards the fact that is revealed much later on that machine lifeforms were created with the purpose of "destroying their enemy," however, they eventually realized that without an enemy, their existence is meaningless. Thus, they will never fully destroy the androids. In an effort to ensure this, they allowed themselves to be created with imperfections and anomalies that would hinder their own attack power. Examples of these anomalies would be Pascal, the Forest King, and the machine lifeforms who express more human traits, such as speech.

As for what the Goliath machine lifeform said outside the facility, unless I missed something, I'm pretty sure that one only repeats "KILL... KILL... KILL..."

However, you will meet MUCH more articulate machine lifeforms later on.

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