Board 8 > NieR beated (spoilers)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Specifically, ver 1.2201040271727..

havent played Automata yet btw

Except for Ending E, I kinda wish I could have just watched a video of the other playthroughs in the middle. I didnt exactly get much out of playing it through again. Like yeah, the shades were humans and now you can read what theyre saying and youre supposed to maybe feel bad, but Im not dumb and had figured that out in the first playthrough even before Popola and Devola tell you so. Maybe if bosses werent invulnerable until the mid-fight dialogue is over (even if the dialogue is identical to previous playthroughs) I wouldnt have been quite as annoyed by having to go through the motions every time.

Emil, Kaine, and Weiss are great fucking characters each in their own way. Any scene where theyre all talking to each other is so good. I know most people just didnt play this game until Automata, but even after that I dont know how there arent tons of people obsessed with Kaine and talking about her constantly.

Im still not sure what Popola and Devolas endgame was though, aside from getting Shadowlord his body back eventually. A few scenes in the third playthrough suggest that they werent fully on his side? If any of this is revealed/implied through weapon stories let me know, theres no way I was going to grind for any of that shit and the few parts I read didnt seem to have any plot significance anyway.

Glad I didnt listen to whoever here told me I could just skip all the side quests, since weapons mandatory to the later endings were rewards from some of those. Pretty sure some were even in the child part I couldnt go back to. Spreading them out across all the playthroughs made them a little more bearable, and once I had all weapons I skipped anything else that was left.

The music is great, everybody knows that. Kinda wish there were a few more tracks though, a couple of them got reused enough that by playthrough 3 I didnt really want to hear them anymore.

Gameplay is like a solid 6/10 PS2 game, so its a good thing thats not what were here for. I wish you didnt have to do so much of it, the tedium:payoff ratio was definitely not balanced after the first time the credits roll.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

Im still not sure what Popola and Devolas endgame was though, aside from getting Shadowlord his body back eventually. A few scenes in the third playthrough suggest that they werent fully on his side? If any of this is revealed/implied through weapon stories let me know, theres no way I was going to grind for any of that shit and the few parts I read didnt seem to have any plot significance anyway.

It's literally their job. They're androids put in charge of overseeing the project. I forget how clear this is made in the game itself - it might have been in the extra materials which was like a LN released after the original Nier way back when.

Basically: Humanity got fucked up from that one crazy Drakengard ending that serves as the distant prequel where some of the characters ended up getting isekai'd into Japan and killed by fighter jets. They came up with a plan to separate souls from bodies and to create replacement bodies for all humans that wouldn't be affected by the weird shit that was destroying humanity at the time but for reasons I don't remember off the top of my head the Shadowlord was the key to all this (bonded with the Grimoire in the intro? Like I said, I forget lol)

Anyway, the projected needed time to develop but while they were waiting for things to be ready to shove all the human souls/shades into the replacement bodies/replicants... the replicants accidentally gained self-awareness and started living their own lives. IIRC this caused Devola and Popola to become conflicted as they came to bond a bit with the replicants.

But everything goes off the rails when the original Yonah decides she doesn't want to possess the Yonah we know for most of the game that was meant to house her soul and decides to just die to keep the Shadowlord from just forcing it to happen anyway. At which point he just gives up entirely and basically lets himself die to his own Replicant. With the project core destroyed, humanity is doomed to go extinct because it was only through his existence that Shades could retain *any* humanity.

There's actually some follow-up on this in Automata if you end up playing it one day. But the above isn't it, I just put it in tags in case it was in the extra stuff and not the game proper if that distinction matters to you.

If there's anything you didn't get, chances are good the answer can be found in Grimoire Nier (basically the game's version of an Ultimania). You can find it online and it's a worthwhile read if you enjoyed the story.

I knew all the stuff you spoilered there, and I gathered that Popola probably intentionally told Yonah about the Lunar Tear so that she could be captured and sent to Shadowlord to reunite their body and soul. Did they not anticipate that Grimoire Weiss would be awakened by Nier, or did they want him to find the book? What would have happened if Nier was killed, wouldn't that ruin the Project too? Seems awfully risky to keep sending him to all these dangerous places.

The thing they weren't banking on with Weiss was that he would bond with Nier and the others to the point that he was able to resist assimilating with the other grimoire, which threw a wrench into their plans.