"The first Nier pulled the old Planet of the Apes gambit, where the fantasy world turns out to be the post-apocalyptic sci-fi future, and now Nier: Automata is set even further into the future, when things have come back around to being sci-fi again. The main characters are human-like androids fighting a seemingly endless war to retake the ruined Earth from an army of primitive but highly numerous machines that all seem to be modelled on women's sanitary products. The androids are doing this on behalf of humanity, whom we never see, but we're assured they're all living on a secret colony on the Moon that we can't go to and from which we only hear general announcements that all sound suspiciously pre-recorded. Doesn't quite take Alfred Hitchcock to see where that's going, does it? But ere you smite me with downvotes for the looseness of my spoiler-riddled tongue, the game's not actually about that. What it's about is the purpose of being, and what it is that separates a machine from a human, anyway. The story begins when some of the machines start to display human-like behaviour and emotions, in contrast to the androids, who were instructed to remain emotionless, despite having been programmed with emotions, possibly as a prank."