After an alien invasion, Earth was overrun by the machine lifeforms they created as weapons of war. With humanity making their last stand, they retreated to the moon and dispatched a series of combat androids from a space station to eventually reclaim the Earth for humanity.
Brutal conflict and harsh realities play out before the eyes of 2B, an all-purpose battle class android who starts to waver as she questions her very existence and what she must sacrifice for the sake of humanity.
While it had its production issues, Nier does a pretty good job adapting a legendary RPG to anime format as well as adding to the pile of philosophical and ponderous android anime. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like NieR:Automata Ver1.1a, head on down below.
Anime Like NieR:Automata Ver1.1a
For Fans of What We Do After The End of the World
Girls’ Last Tour
With all civilization dead, only Chito and Yuuri remain. Together they decide to hop on their motorbike and wander aimlessly looking for their next meal and fuel.
Despite a bleak existence, they remain each other’s light in this dead world.
Girls’ Last Tour, while also a post-apocalyptic story like Nier, is a decidedly different experience. While Nier has action, intrigue, and even a few plot twists, Girls’ Last Tour is literally two girls driving around a world where war wiped out everyone except like five people.
Both series are post-apocalyptic series where there is really no “saving” anyone or anything, the world is dead and society is over. They are instead meditations on how the small number of remaining beings live their lives when there is no future.
Girls’ Last Tour, while a bit melancholy if only because if its setting, is more of a slice of life series, but a very thought-provoking one. It’s not as high-minded with philosophy like Nier can be, but it poses some interesting thoughts.
From the New World
After a small portion of humanity suddenly developed psychokinetic powers, the world underwent a rapid transformation. After 1,000 years of turbulent history where regular humans struggled against those with powers, we focus in on Kamisu 66, a small town where 12-year-old Saki Watanabe finally awakened her powers.
This awakening means she is finally able to join her friends at the Sage Academy. However, things in Saki’s life do not remain as simple as those precious days.
With missing children in the village, rebellious rumblings, and a world steeped in myth and mystery, Saki and her friends are about to face the shocking truths of their peaceful society.
Both Nier and From The New World are post-apocalypse anime that excel most in building a mystery. Not just building a mystery that is intriguing enough to invest you, but providing sufficiently surprising twists while unraveling that mystery throughout the story too.
However, From the New World is not a sci-fi anime. It follows the portion of humanity that evolved psychic abilities far into the future after the modern day. While the cause of the apocalypse is obvious in Nier, From the New World plays coy with how the world got from modern society to the much less populated and technologically advanced post-apocalypse.
Heavenly Delusion
After a disaster fifteen years ago caused society to collapse, the survivors struggle to eek out an existence. Alongside trying to scrounge together food, clean water, and electricity, these survivors are also plagued by the appearance of man-eating monsters.
Two young survivors, Maru and Kiruko, wander the wasteland and make money off Maru’s ability to kill these man-eaters with a touch. Together, they are searching for a place called Heaven that they both hope will hold the answers to the tragic burdens that they hold in their heart.
Both Heavenly Delusion and Nier tell post-apocalypse stories with a similar type of storytelling. It tells the tale in a sort split between what happened in the past and what is happening in the present. It intrigues you with the events and then slowly weaves them together so the split storytelling makes sense.
The big difference is that Heavenly Delusion is not quite a technologically sci-fi. It is more based on monsters rather than machines, and humanity is kind of struggling along rather than android fighting for a planet.
For Fans of Machines and Emotions
Vivy – The Fluorite Eye’s Song
In a theme park ran by AI, there is a lonely stage where the first-ever autonomous humanoid sings in order to fulfill her mission of making everyone happy with her songs.
This AI, named Diva but given the nickname of Vivy by a young fan, has an encounter with an AI named Matsumoto who explains he traveled from 100 years in the future where AI have advanced so much that they rebelled and started exterminating humanity.
Together, he guides her to singularity points on a hundred-year journey in order to change the course of history.
It is a bold proclamation to say that Nier and Vivy are the top-tier of android anime, but its not false. Both series feature androids as a main characters, and they take full advantage of the possibilities that having an ageless, near-immortal main character provides.
While Nier explores its post-apocalypse story fighting against machines, Vivy takes a different route. It follows an android at different points over 100 years as she tries to stop events that would ultimately lead up to AI rebelling against humanity and exterminating everyone. So both series follow androids fighting for the sake of humanity..
As Vivy frequently skips decades at a time, it allows a lot flexibility and creativity in its short arcs so the plot never gets stale. Like Nier, Vivy also dips its toes deep into philosophy and really packs in emotion for two series following artificial intelligence.
Land of the Lustrous
In this world, Gems inhabit the ruins of a world.
Taking on certain characteristics, gems are assigned roles depending on their hardness. The hardest among them fight the Lunarians, aliens that seek to shatter them to decorate their own bodies.
Phosphophyllite, or Phos, is young and fragile, but wants desperately to help the war effort of her fellow gems.
While Land of the Lustrous follows living gems in the shape of anime girls, the way the gems are presented is actually quite similar to the androids in Nier. Like the androids in Nier can often die and be revived in the bunker, the gems in Land of the Lustrous can be completely shattered and put back together providing enough pieces of them can be recovered.
Both series tell intricate and occasionally philosophically ponderous tales in a world that seems to be empty outside of gems/androids. They both follows these never-aging beings as they fight an endless war against an enemy that they don’t understand and simply try to endure.
In essence, I’m sure more than a few fans started watching both Nier and Land of the Lustrous for the anime girls they bait you with, but stay with the series for the sheer depth and detail put into the plot and characters.
Ergo Proxy
After the explosion of the methane hydrate layer, humanity was forced into a select few domed cities where society is strictly controlled. To assist humanity, autonomous robots called AutoReivs were spread throughout the cities.
Enter Re-L Mayer, granddaughter of the regent, and charged with investigating a series of cases in which the AutoReivs have gone haywire. In her investigation she comes in contact with a mysterious monster called Proxy.
After meeting a man called Vincent Law that was blamed for several of the incidents, the pair strike out across the wasteland to unravel the mysteries of the Cogito Virus.
While they differ in the finer details of their settings, both Nier and Ergo Proxy feature a post-apocalyptic world where androids and machines have started to gain sentience and a sense of self.
While Nier depicts a dead world populated only by machines and the occasional actual animal, Ergo Proxy has humanity living in domes to escape the inhospitable wasteland outside while also widely assisted by androids.
While Ergo Proxy starts off as more a sci-fi mystery, like Nier the plot grows widely above what it was initially, delving deep into philosophical pondering on humanity.
For Fans of Fighting Against Machines
86
For years, the Republic of San Magnolia has been at war with the Giadian Empire. They were constantly plagued by their hordes of unmanned drones until the government created an unmanned solution of their own, finally able to wage their war without casualties.
However, that is not quite the truth. The “unmanned” combat weapons are actually used by those of the 86th sector of the Republic, but they are not considered even human.
This is the tale of both Shin, an 86er and battle commander, and Lena, their sympathetic handler who remotely commands the detachment from inside the city.
Unlike Nier, a story about android fighting for humanity against a never-ending horde of machines, 86 tells a similar tale, but this time it is humanity fighting a never-ending horde of machines. 86 is also about doing all that using a particular group of people as disposable as androids.
While Nier and 86 tell a similar sort of machine apocalypse war story, easily the most similar aspect between these two series is how wonderfully they tell those stories. Both series are war tales that are actually filled with impactful emotion due to the connections the characters forge with each other, and thus, the audience. While both are beautifully animated and tell emotional war stories, Nier definitely leans hard into philosophy while 86 is more about finding a purpose to both fight and to live.
Girls’ Frontline
After World War III decimated the world population and rendered a large part of Earth uninhabitable, private military companies were established using the might of combat androids to maintain peace. While overwhelming in their might, they still needed a human commander to make complex decisions and formulate battle strategies.
One company tried to bypass this with an experimental android capable of complex thought. It resulted in the entire company being destroyed and the rogue AI seizing the factories, replicating itself, and starting to destroy humanity.
Facing this new hostile android invasion, the Griffin & Kryuger company investigates and establishes a team to gather classified information. When caught in an ambush, the team disperses to protect their findings, now the gifted, but lazy Gentiane is tasked by the company to find this missing team and the data they posses.
Both Nier and Girls’ Frontline follows a war between machines where one side is painted as evil and the other side fights for humanity. However, unlike in Nier, both sides of Girls’ Frontline are androids, one side just happens to be led by a rogue AI android bent on killing humanity.
Both Nier and Girls’ Frontline are also both anime adaptations of games, but while Nier has a strong narrative throughout and the anime makes adjustments to make it translate better to anime format, Girls’ Frontline, the game, only has a strong story in the second half, and the anime didn’t even get to that.
Girls’ Frontlines is a great option if you liked the sort of world presented in Nier and cute android anime girls, but its story is not nearly as strong.
Casshern Sins
With the world over and humanity gone, all that is left behind is sentient robots. They were supposed to live forever, but as they begin to rust and die, a rumor goes around that eating one called Casshern will stop their passing.
Casshern, the target of their intentions, knows nothing of his past, but leaves death everywhere he goes as he is constantly hunted.
You would think the basic premise of “machines fighting machines in a never-ending war on a dead world” would be a well-mined plot in anime, but it is actually pretty rare. Nier now joins Casshern Sins as a compatriot in that set up.
Like in Nier, the world is dead and free of humans. Now, the only things that lives are machines, and of course, now even the machines find themselves threatened. Unlike Nier and its more intricate plot, Casshern Sins has all the machines slowly rusting away and seeking to kill the titular main character to prevent their death. It is a simple, battle-driven plot, but filled with the same ponderous philosophy that Nier explores about machines and humanity.
Do you have more anime recommendations like NieR:Automata Ver1.1a? Let fans know in the comments section below.
