I can't speak much for the existentialism, but I can at least give you my impressions of it.
Basically the whole game's plot seems to be picking on the importance that humanity gave itself, its life, its religions, even its desire for a simpler life.
hell, humanity, despite never fucking appearing in the game, gets fucking roasted by the plot.
to start with, one of the first things you notice is how 9s constantly tries to convince you of how machines are basic entities, in this way he's being used to contrast them with humanity without mentioning them. we don't have any humans to compare machines to, but the machine life forms are definitely taking on human characteristics. we don't know why, but they are. machines form villages, suddenly have desires, act extremely human, all the while 9s continually tries to convince us that machines aren't human and can't show emotion.
machines are basically gaining something akin to humanity, in one area (the sandy pit) machines are literally fucking and trying to reproduce, they ironically succeed, creating an enhanced machine in adam. later on adam and eve, his defense mechanism/counterpart end up meeting their creators and, in their disdain, they kill them before trying to find a new role model in humanity.
the joke here is that we're in danger of doing the same thing if machines are evolving to resemble humans. if we ever met our creator we would just straight up kill him for not being satisfactory enough, and the funniest part is, according to christianity this is a thing that happened. (idk, i don't understand religion lol) the next area we go to is a theme park, here we meet a machine who is so obsessed with her love for a certain great philosobot that she has eaten and killed machines and androids to enhance her beauty. the joke here is that love, that sacred thing we cherish so much, can fuck us up, there's also something being said about "vanity culture" simone is basically a victorian opera singer, the larger joke here is that the standards of a culture can make us monstrous, simone didn't come up with this idea out of the blue, she heard other machines discussing beauty and, with nothing better to do with her time than seek the attentions of her crush, went out of her way to attain this ideal of beauty.
but there is no ideal of beauty, simone is a victim of her culture's perceptions and subsequently, when we meet her she's just seen as horrifying and monstrous. her pursuit of love led her to ruin and her pursuit of beauty made her ugly, but it was all due to her listening to the gossip of her people in the first place that it all went south for her at all.
in the factory we get a good look at how religion is put on the chopping block, pascal goes to the factory to discuss a peace treaty and strengthen ties to other machine life-forms, but just as she gets there the machine in charge of the cult occupying the place dies, and all the machines go crazy...well not all.
the majority of them go mad with a religious fervor, others want nothing to do with their counterparts and their desire to die, but fuck them anyway because they end up being butchered by the fanatics. what follows by the very end is an almost surreal end-sequence where machines throw themselves into the rivers of molten iron all around the factory while bidding farewell to their friends, it's straight up cult-horror at its finest and you can do nothing but watch in shock as they just happily leap to their deaths in the name of their religion. there's a message here about religion guiding one's life to ruin.
the best part of this though, is the biggest dilemma all the machines face.
they don't know.
I mean, think about that, the machine life-forms are just now gaining self-awareness and human-scale reasoning and thought, they have literally no fucking clue what their world is, who they are, what they truly want, they're running blind and scared, and pascal is the best example of that, pascal forms his village to bring machines together in peace, but he doesn't know anything about life or living, or humans for that matter. we even see him reading neichtze (i fucked up the spelling, but you get the idea) the machines have NO foundation with which to build their culture on, they're borrowing it from humanity and combining it with a bunch of bad ideas.
the overarching joke here is that we ourselves don't actually have a foundation of our own. all societies and cultures at large are just made up bullshit designed to help us sleep at night. laws? bollocks, might as well be play-pretend on a playground designed to keep the unruly kids in check. religion? just excuses for not having anything to look forward to in death.
the idea here is that the machines are borrowing our culture because they don't have one of their own to make, but we ourselves borrowed from countless other cultures across our entire lifespans, we don't have an original foundation, it was all cobbled together nonsense, the same as it is with the machines.
the machines are a parody mirror of us in a way, but they aren't exactly parodying either, that's what makes some of the more "silly" moments so disturbing, you can totally see a human leaping into a lake of fire for the sake of becoming a god, it's not even a stretch, it's been done in some way or another before.
the machines don't know, but we as humans haven't figured out that WE don't know. we grow up with this pretentious idea that we have a foundation, that just because our society made these rules we as the younger generation must trust in and believe in the standards and ways of our culture and the joke here is that the ways and standards of any culture were made up based on other cultures and insights gleaned from the continual rise and fall of those cultures. american society? it's bullshit. british society? it's bullshit. chinese society? it's bullshit. there is no truly real ideal, it's all a sad joke for a flawed species to entertain themselves with.
so looking at nier, it's very easy to see that the machines, in imitating humanity, are a tool to make fun of how fucked up we are. it's not even making fun as a stretch of the imagination, this is all shit we've done without immediate provocation, we can totally fuck up like this again in this exact day and age and we'd be entirely blind to the fuckup, irregardless of how much insight we have, just because we're wholly unaware of just how little we actually know due to being caught up in pretending to know everything.
I think ko-shi and ro-shi are the best possible representation of the dilemma the machines are facing in the game. we, as humanity want to transcend ourselves.
into fucking what?
ko-shi and ro-shi are, in a way, a parody of that ideal, they're the BIG machine life-form in charge of everything, they're shown to be incredibly clever and manipulative, however the thing they want to transcend into is humanity.
the joke here is, they've more than succeeded by this point, and where does that get them? well when a2 fights the ai the pod supporting her tells her to let the ai's selves multiply to capacity, when she allows it all the ais come to a disagreement and then turn on each other, violently, and just begin killing each other.
this is basically humanity's biggest flaw, inability to come to a consensus and resorting to violence in order to solve the problem. the joke is that ko-shi and ro-shi, in aspiring to become human, have royally fucked themselves over. they're human now in the best sense of the word, they transcended themselves...now? they find out the horror of being human. their vaunted transcendance proved to be a mistake the whole time, and sure they do aspire beyond that, but to what end? would it truly be better to be above human? no. because when they transcend to some higher being, they also fall victims to its flaws.
TL;DR the machines are being used to pick on humanity's flaws in brutal fashion as well as question pretty much everything about us. right down to the pretentious facade of civilization we hold so high above our heads. they bluntly reflect all of our problems, ALL of them, even the ones we ourselves aren't aware of because we've taken them for granted for so long.
hell, the one philosopher in the game is literally an arrogant moron who spouts previously uttered ideas and is detached from his "reality" to the point where he turns down the affections of countless female machines (and led into simone's madness) so even that's being picked on.
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