Thread: Revelations from Patch 5.3

Originally Posted by Iscah

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Elidibus / Stones

One of the things Y'shtola questions Elidibus on is whether or not his memory is still clear, and the PC can later call him out on trying to fulfill the wishes of those who have all passed on. Both times he defaults to "It's doesn't matter," but this is more of him defaulting to his programming as a primal than his earnest thoughts and feelings. As a consequence of all those who initially called on / needed him passing away, he no longer has them to keep his existence grounded, and begins losing even more of himself as he draws more and more on the wishes of heroes across the worlds for strength. It's a consequence of his existence as a primal.

Best illustrated in one of the pre-battle cutscenes; when you tell him those he swore to serve are all gone, he tries to restate that oath... but can't remember to whom he swore it.

That said he still does clearly recognize Emet-Selch when he bails you out of the Rift, so who knows.

Regardless, the fact none of the Ascians, save perhaps Emet-Selch, recognize Azem in the PC is a fairly clear sign their memories aren't perfect either.

YoRHa

I agree that what we've gotten so far is a bit dull, but it's important to remember this is Yoko Taro, whose MO is to throw a cruel twist into the final act that recontextualizes just about everything. There are also hints that everything is not what it seems; from 2P's boss title translating to "Longing" in hex, to the contents of her log of the same name, to where said log is found, it's clear things aren't as simple as it appears. That said it ultimately just looks like a rehash of Automata proper, so I'm rather unimpressed. (Unlike a lot of other big raid references, that one was released not so long ago, so riding on nostalgia is a less viable option.)

And yeah, literally every character in the quest chain treating the PC as little more than their gofer hasn't endeared me to any of them. I get that it's a mark of Yoko Taro's writing, but still.

Originally Posted by Cilia

Elidibus / Stones

One of the things Y'shtola questions Elidibus on is whether or not his memory is still clear, and the PC can later call him out on trying to fulfill the wishes of those who have all passed on. Both times he defaults to "It's doesn't matter," but this is more of him defaulting to his programming as a primal than his earnest thoughts and feelings. As a consequence of all those who initially called on / needed him passing away, he no longer has them to keep his existence grounded, and begins losing even more of himself as he draws more and more on the wishes of heroes across the worlds for strength. It's a consequence of his existence as a primal.

Best illustrated in one of the pre-battle cutscenes; when you tell him those he swore to serve are all gone, he tries to restate that oath... but can't remember to whom he swore it.

That said he still does clearly recognize Emet-Selch when he bails you out of the Rift, so who knows.

Regardless, the fact none of the Ascians, save perhaps Emet-Selch, recognize Azem in the PC is a fairly clear sign their memories aren't perfect either.

If anything, i think the fact that the other ascians not remember Azen is more due to the fact they have always saw him as a traitor because Azem always went against traditions and people tend to never remember properly the people they hate.

Azem directly resolved the issues himself with others while the other memebrs for the 14 follow the tradition of sitting in their tower safely in their city sipping tea and debating on how to resolve the issue first before finally agreeing in majority what to do. A tradition that no doubt left issues to spread to a point when it was already too late to resolve because they chosen to sit on their butts too long on what to do first. From what we learned in the Ascian society, they were more of Majority must agree before they can act kind of people but Azen being a act first and discuss it later type of person does not really give them the best impressions for in their eyes they may see him/her as reckless and dangerous for acting alone.

Heck it is even mentioned Azem was the only one who went outside of the city and tower to explore the world to see the issues directly as well while the 13 members remaind in their city with the only knowledge they get from outside the city are from reports that may not contain all the details about what is going on and in some possible cases may arrive too late to act.

Originally Posted by Iscah

The thing is, it's going to be very hard for this shocking third-act twist to be meaningful if I don't care about what little I've seen happen so far.

The characters are just there. They've barely shown a personality beyond "fight the enemy". I don't feel like I know enough about them for there to be a twist that changes my understanding.

Are they simply relying on prior familiarity with the characters, despite no guarantee that players have it, or is the writing like this in the original too?

TL;DR: Basically.

As the story is presented in the original game, the first two routes ("Endings") don't give much context beyond an alien-created machine army conquering Earth, humanity fleeing to the Moon, and the PCs (2B and 9S) being soldiers in the war to reclaim Earth. As YoRHa they strive to keep their emotions to a minimum and carry out their tasks with mechanical efficiency, to the point 2B's catchphrase is "Emotions are prohibited." Further, the machines are cast as all nothing but mindless automatons carrying out their programming; excepting those not linked to their network everybody treats them as just fodder.

Then you get a bunch of whammies that recontextualize everything:

• Having assimilated a lot of data on humans into their network, the machines have become for most intents and purposes human other than their mechanical bodies.
• YoRHa units are made using repurposed machine cores, so they're effectively the same.
• Both the aliens and humans the two factions fight on behalf of are extinct (the machines turned on their creators when they realized they had no use for them, while humanity went extinct as a result of what happened in the original NieR; there's nothing on the Lunar Base except an incomplete human genome and a propaganda center).
• 2B is actually 2E (Executioner), created to kill 9S whenever he gets too close to the truth about the war and has done so several times before. (The "A" Ending has her strangling him to death and hinting at this while she does so.)
• The war is designed to be unwinnable on both ends.
• In the event YoRHa gains an edge over the machines, there's a backdoor into their orbital Bunker that allows them all to be infected with a Logic Virus that will effectively turn them into zombies.

... but most if not all of that interesting information is locked behind hours of gameplay, requiring a runthrough of the same story twice from different perspectives. However once you do that you learn the YoRHa units are far from emotionless as the above revelations take a severe psychological toll on the characters - 2B succumbs to the Logic Virus but not before confessing her love for 9S in an audio log, and 9S himself essentially goes insane with grief and rage.

But yeah, for the first two routes you aren't given much context or details on what's going on other than "go kill the evil machines to reclaim the Earth for humanity." It's certainly a poor way to hold your audience's attention if they don't know your MO though.

As for the story in XIV itself, it does appear to be relying on familiarity with the characters and story of Automata to keep your interest... which is a problem.

Don't misunderstand - I'm not saying what we've gotten so far is "good" by any means (given we've barely gotten anything at all). Just that Yoko Taro's MO is to withhold context until the final act, and make said context sad and tragic to elicit pathos from the audience.

That makes it predictable to a T, like how there's always a twist in the ending of M. Night Shyamalan's films; once you get the trick, it's boring.

(And like I said elsewhere it doesn't appear to be going anywhere the original Automata didn't, and that theme was pretty recently explored using Omega within XIV itself, so... whatever.)

EDIT

Originally Posted by SecretCrowds

Question about our dear Elidibus and his motives.

Sorry if this has been discussed already. But something still confuses me about the MSQ. What was the reason for Elidibus making all those people see the starfall and think they are the Warriors of Light? I can’t seem to piece it together with what he did at the climax, summoning all those other-world heroes to fight the scions and all.

As a primal, Elidibus is powered by faith. It's to make people put their faith in Warriors of Light (of which he is the first ever in context), which he draws on for strength, rather than keeping their faith in the Warrior of Darkness (the PC).

Step 1: Awaken normies to the Echo.
Step 2: Say they're Warriors of Light and encourage them to be heroes.
Step 3: Give them engineered threats to put down via Black Masks, increasing faith in the Warriors of Light.
Step 4: Profit!

Originally Posted by Fenral

Unless the real plan is for every Scion but Alph and Alie to have some sort of Sword of Damocles like Y'shtola's cast-from-lifespan aethersight, and for them all to come back into play at the worst possible moment. Yeah, not going to think about that anymore...

Let's see...

Apart from the aforementioned, Thancred does have an inability to use Aether and Urianger has....job security until they require the EX ARR Trials. Krile didn't have any known adverse effects from being rescued from Eureka, but then again her involvement in that plotline gives her a simialr aegis to Urianger's.