Quote Originally Posted by KizuyaKatogami View Post
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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.