Thread: Revelations from Patch 5.5 (Part 1)

Huh. My first post was deleted and I have no idea why. I didn't actually swear in that one, IIRC, so not sure why it got moderated. (Though I prefer silence to public shaming, at least.)

YoRHa

It seems like NG+ isn't even available for these quests yet (now that I've remembered to unlock it). That probably means there's something substantial after the weeklies, but how would that even work on a replay? Leaving the same NG+ running for several months?


NieR and Automata both had you obtain multiple endings, then delete your save data for the true end. That's not functionally possible here, so I guess we'll just have to see.

Originally Posted by Alleo

About Nier raid

Maybe he did that in his games but he is only a guest in this one and imo we should have gottenat least a mostly whole story line when running it the first time. Right now we have nothing at all. If you had not played his other games you wont really know or imo care about the Nier characters and I really doubt that they will go out of the way to include redoing the whole raids but with a twist. (Which would mean a whole lot of new cutscenes for all of them + all the missing information) Of course I dont know how long these weekly quests will go until they are finished but I doubt that most players will even try to do them. At most (imo) we will get another cutscene at the end where we will meet the brother again and maybe find a way to save his sister or conclude it in another way.

Also what realistically could the player even sacrifice if we would get such another ending? The other dwarf?

Yeah and the weird thing is

They said that this would be its own standalone story that people wouldn’t need to have played Nier games to understand. But after talking with a lot of people, it seems like 90% of the inferences you won’t understand unless you played the games. This is why i really don’t like these kinds of collabs and i’m looking forward to them moving on to stories that have to do with this actual games story.

NieR Raid - Because I haven't seen anybody else mention it.

I haven't seen anybody else mention it yet, at least not in detail, but the reason it's so confusing is that fully appreciating everything requires not only knowledge of NieR: Automata and its predecessor, but Drakengard (at least 1 and 3, since Yoko Taro wasn't involved with 2) as well.

The first two bosses, the Knave of Hearts and Hansel and Gretel, are lifted to the original NieR. The semifinal boss lifted from Automata, where it served as the final boss and orchestrator of the plot. The actual final boss, on the other hand, has a lot of allusions to Drakengard: its subtitle translates from hex to "Aberration," but the DE code translates to "Grotesquerie." In the original Drakengard the Grotesqueries were... a race of extradimensional, giant babies with sets of adult teeth, that don't seem to have had any goal other than destroying the world. What set the NieR timeline into motion was ending "E" from Drakengard, where the protagonist Caim is drawn through a wormhole and fights the Queen Grotesquerie in the skies above Tokyo (1999 A.D., if I remember right); though he succeeds in defeating the thing it comes at the cost of his life, and the Queen Grotesquerie's corpse slowly infects the world with White Chlorination Syndrome. This leads to the Gestalt Project in an effort to save humanity, but this ultimately fails due to the actions of Nier; past that comes Automata.

Thus why, though it's in a digital space, we fight Her Inflorescence in the skies above Tokyo.

"Her Inflorescence" further refers to the flower from Drakengard 3 (which is a prequel to the original), the source of the setting's song magic. It was apparently created by the Grotesqueries (or Watchers, if you prefer) as a first effort in destroying the world, but is ultimately thwarted by the game's protagonist Zero (cold comfort, considering regardless of ending it leads to the original Drakengard). Her Inflorescence also wears Lunar Tears in her hair, referencing Kainé from NieR.

So yeah, even without doing the weekly "NG+" stuff I'm calling shenanigans.

Originally Posted by Alleo

About Nier raid

Maybe he did that in his games but he is only a guest in this one and imo we should have gottenat least a mostly whole story line when running it the first time. Right now we have nothing at all. If you had not played his other games you wont really know or imo care about the Nier characters and I really doubt that they will go out of the way to include redoing the whole raids but with a twist. (Which would mean a whole lot of new cutscenes for all of them + all the missing information) Of course I dont know how long these weekly quests will go until they are finished but I doubt that most players will even try to do them. At most (imo) we will get another cutscene at the end where we will meet the brother again and maybe find a way to save his sister or conclude it in another way.

Also what realistically could the player even sacrifice if we would get such another ending? The other dwarf?

About the last point...spoilers for final surprise for the endings of Nier and Nier: Automata below.

In Nier and Nier: Automata (albeit optional there) you sacrificed the entirety of your save data. Considering Yoko Taro would want people to sacrifice something else, but be unable to do anything extravagant due to this being an MMO, I won't be surprised if you are forced to forfeit all rewards from that run of the duty in order to get the other ending, or that he'll do a more story "sacrifice" type thing, making it so that section of Kholusia is "reset" back to before the 24 mans first started (albeit with differences) without any NPCs or the WoL remembering either other as if it never happened.

On Werlyt...

Did that today. Far from the most difficult of the bunch, but fun, although the lack of an Oversoul like Ruby's and Emerald's was a letdown. And also far from the worst redemption story they could've given Gaius and I suppose he will probably be representing Werlyt going forward if he has any MSQ presence. One could be forgiven for thinking the MC has picked up the former Emissary's old job of reconciliation with all of that going on recently. With the projected memories released at the end, I am kind of wondering if they're planning something similar for Zodiark and the ancients, "at duty's end", maybe with his crystal's core.

Also... mini Valens.

Originally Posted by KizuyaKatogami

Ten characters

The thing is though, they promised you wouldn’t need to play the other games to fully understand the story, but now that seems to not be the case. It just feels like them advertising the other games so we can understand wtf is going on in the story.

tl;dr: I completely agree.

The issue is that rather than trying to integrate the YoRHa stuff at all, they ultimately went with an alien invasion plot from the NieR-verse. While I agree this is a bit clunky and requires lots of legwork (either playing the previous games, watching videos of such, or just doing plain old research) to understand everything... I'd have to argue it was better implemented than the Return to Ivalice series, which features more coincidences than plausible accompanied by egregious infodumps. (Though I admit to being biased against Ivalice, so take that for what you will.)

You can understand the story without said legwork, but you won't grasp the implications of everything otherwise. Her Inflorescence even provides a few lines of dialogue - more than has been given by Grotesqueries beforehand - that hint at things not being entirely what they seem and suggest 2B and 9S might not be telling us (or even aware of) the whole truth.

Regardless... "you don't need to have played the previous games to understand it" is obviously shenanigans, which is hardly surprising considering it's Yoko Taro, who is (in)famous for lying about those sorts of things to the applause of his fans. Auteurs being hero worshipped; gotta love it.

The first "NG+" weekly quest just provides a datalog from Konogg that goes into the Collection.

If anything, when all is said and done I'm expecting something akin to an actual NG+, after a fashion, where after completing all the post-story quests for the Doomsaying Dwarf and Dig Site Chief it resets the storyline and offers a new questline that provides greater context.

Maybe. Possibly. Who knows.