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I’ll admit, when I saw the announcement about Nier Replicant Ver.1.22474487139 last
year, I can’t say I was expecting too much—my initial reaction amounting to “yeah, given
the success of Automata, it’s probably about time they brought the 2010 cult classic original
to a modern audience” and that was about it. But with an awareness of the eccentricities
of Yoko Taro and the series he created, I guess it was naïve of me to think that this
“Version Upgrade,” as he puts it, would merely be a mechanical or graphical overhaul—that
there wouldn’t be anything added or little hidden secrets for long-time fans to dig up.
That said, I don’t think anyone could have expected what this new addition ended up being—that
this re-release of a game that’s over a decade old would suddenly get something as
substantial as a whole new playable ending to unlock. And not some jokey little aside
either but taking the bones of an idea outlined in the Japanese-only companion book Grimoire
Nier, and fleshing it out into something far more; an ending that so effectively carries
on interrogating the themes of this narrative universe and ties itself back into the game’s
sequel that, while it’s obviously not the literal end of the timeline, almost ends up
feeling like the thematic conclusion of the entire series. And the real kicker here is
that there’s nothing in-game to signify that all of this is even in there to be played.
See, after unlocking ending D—previously the final true ending in the game and one
that you’ve had to play through the second half multiple times to unlock—you’re taken
back to a menu with a single lunar tear as the sole reminder that your character ever
existed, with events demanding that main character Nier sacrifice himself so that his companion
Kaine can be brought back from the brink. In now typical fashion for the series, you’ve
chosen to delete your entire save file, leaving you only with the option of starting a new
game should you wish to play again. If you choose to do so, having already played the
game for potentially 40 hours like I did, you go through all the same motions as before—you
fight off the shades in the hellscape of 2053, you skip over a millennium into the future,
harvest the sheep, go to Seafront and fish for a bit, you go to the Aerie where you fight
Hook alongside the newly introduced Kaine, she gets downed while pursuing some kind of
revenge, whereupon our main character’s calling out about the virtues of being strong
and carrying on manage to reach her in the void and you manage to drag your wounded pal
back from the… wait, what? What’s happening here?
Well, the last couple of hours you’ve spent hitting all the beats of the game’s intro
are now framed as a dream that Kaine is waking up from, and it’s revealed that we’re
now three years past the events of ending D—with Kaine’s memory of ever actually
meeting this character now totally erased. As she gets up, you take control of her—serrated
dual blades and all—for the first time. You are now on a completely different ending
path and one that ends up going to some wild places.
Being sent to the Forest of Myth after fighting shades in the Northern Plains, she finds that
robots have massacred the residents. Entering the tree they emerged from, she tumbles ever
deeper into this web of intertwined, Giger-esque machinery countering the idyllic green fantasy
settings found outside, where mysterious voices (but familiar ones to those who have played
Automata) tell her of the tree’s actual function as a data storage facility run by
these two androids calling themselves administrators and that by killing the Shadowlord in the
original ending, Project Gestalt (which is its own whole other thing) has ended and the
remaining Gestalts are kinda just kicking about and she fights a bunch of models of
herself and then Emil shows up, then Kaine beats the shit out of what she’s told are
her memories and amidst reliving all of them through fighting old bosses again in oddly
familiar environments, she’s knocked unconscious by a stronger version of Hook, the boss that
brought her into contact with Nier in the first place and she has a text dream that
becomes a nightmare as a happy day with her grandma sees everyone turn to dust before
her eyes and then Grimoire Weiss shows up and lends his power to help Kaine defeat Hook
and remind her of Nier’s existence, whereupon she angrily chastises him for disappearing;
at which point the Forest of Myth suddenly sprouts a massive flower resembling a lunar
tear, inside which is Kaine cradling a young reconstructed Nier. Phew.
On its own, the sheer spectacle this ending packs into its forty minute run time is just
absurd—moving at such breakneck speed through several different environments and scenarios
that it seems impossible to stop and question how wild it is that you’re playing as Kaine
or that versions of 2b and 9s and Emil have shown up from out of nowhere because by the
time you’ve processed all that you’re fighting several Nier bosses at once in the
Copied City and Tower from Automata, replete with that game’s UI. It’s as disconcerting
as it is intensely nostalgic—in a series that has previously been this focused on framing
the player as complicit in the action unfolding on screen, here we have a scenario that feels
familiar to us but Kaine has no idea what’s going on—and, what’s more, despite moving
through all of this stuff so quickly, it somehow manages to find room to breathe with its text
adventure section. It’s paced unbelievably well.
But the real reason I love this ending so much obviously goes way beyond that—how
it reframes not only the original game’s final moments but, more broadly, features
we’ve come to view as part and parcel of Yoko Taro games. Let me explain.
Nier is a game that sets out to subvert tropes of RPG heroism where one anime boy can somehow
manage to save the planet—instead Nier Replicant presents a totally cruel, uncaring universe
whose complexities leave it near-impossible to fathom let alone save. Nihilism is weaved
into the very fabric of the world and its denizens, who usually end up either dying
horribly and scared or being lost to the endless void of time; all while your protagonists
gradually seem to fall into the role of brutal murderers rather than typical heroes, given
the reveal that the enemies you’ve been cutting down in droves are actually human
beings… and yet you return time and time again to unlock the further endings, I guess.
With that in mind, the original decision to delete your save and Nier’s existence ends
up feeling like the one actually heroic deed here—not just in restoring Kaine but in
recognising your own role in the horrible scenarios that keep playing out here and forcibly
extracting yourself from them. It was exactly the same in Automata, that we’re trapped
in an endless cycle of conflict and the only way to stop it is to bow out, as if to say
“if the player never picked up the controller, maybe this world could be a better place.”
But Taro, being the joker that he is, seems to use this new ending E to redefine that
sacrifice—as momentous and meaningful as it might seem for a player to give up their
progress—as just another layer of pseudo-heroic bullshit to be deconstructed. By placing you
directly in the shoes of Kaine and having you live out her pain in the three years since,
ending E now asks you “what gave you the right to leave me here?”
I mean, think about it—outside of ridding her of the Black Scrawl, it really doesn’t
seem like Nier’s sacrifice improved Kaine’s life in any noticeable way. Three long years
later and she’s still trawling the same fields, killing the same shades over and over
again, still cursing them out, killing to distract from the emptiness she feels—she’s
still deeply unhappy. The only meaningful change that sacrifice brought her is that
she now has nightmares as she vaguely remembers something, someone important that isn’t
there. She’s the same Kaine she always was, it’s just that now she’s… alone.
And it ties into a recurring point I saw during my time with Nier Replicant, most heavily
exemplified in the relationship between Nier and his sister Yonah—the one he’s fighting
to save through all of this. Throughout Nier’s limited interactions with Yonah and the townsfolk
employing him, you get the feeling that Yonah kinda just wanted her brother around—that
his presence made her feel better, even if the disease caused by the Black Scrawl still
brought her constant pain. And with Nier going to such absurd, mythical lengths in his quest
to cure his sister, is he sacrificing just, ya know… being a big brother? That is to
say, is it better to spend all your time trying desperately to hold back something that you
can’t fully understand… or is it better, more meaningful, to simply appreciate what
you have while you have it? And it’s this question that brings us onto
the dilemma of Kaine—another person who Nier goes out of his way to save multiple
times, even when it’s clear she doesn’t necessarily want or need the help. Nier kind
of gets in the way of Kaine’s big moment of revenge (and ends up taking a lot of the
work away from her), only to bring her back, spouting a bunch of platitudes about how she’s
stronger than just giving up even though he doesn’t really know her or her story to
make any kind of judgment about that, then when she does finally grow towards some kind
of peace with the dynamic of the group and her role within it, warming to Nier and his
friends, he just leaves her. At almost every stage Nier has taken away some or all of Kaine’s
agency to decide for herself how she finds meaning or happiness. He tells Kaine that
she has to keep going and not to give up, only to, well, give up himself, in a fairly
literal way. And just like Nier reached in and grabbed
Kaine after the Hook fight, the complete existential teardown Kaine goes through in reliving all
these traumatic memories she’s not fully aware she lived through—that she states
outright she doesn’t understand—seeing her grandma again only for that dream to crumble
in her hands, after three long years of painful solitude, she snaps and her vulgarity and
aggression now turns towards bringing Nier back—screaming at him “who the fuck are
you to decide what’s best for me or what I want? Companionship brought my life meaning
in this completely fucked world—your heroism took that from me and now I’m going to take
it back, ya piece of shit.” And this powerful defiance manifests in something
almost unheard of past the ending of a Nier game—it gives you your old save data back,
in exactly as protracted a fashion as it was taken away from you. Just like the game wants
you to know how much you’re giving up at ending D, you’re really made aware of just
how big a step this is. It’s kinda weird because, ultimately, what are you going to
do with that save data? Go through all of this again? Unlock the same endings again?
Well, it’s not really about what you do with the save data—more just that it’s
there again, it exists, you exist. That in itself is important enough to Kaine that whatever
comes next doesn’t matter. Your existence makes it all worth it.
And I dunno, there’s something that, to me, feels oddly empowering or self-affirming
about that. And I say odd because of course, this is a Taro game, so it’s impossible
that he could leave us with a truly happy ending—the blooming of new life many might
read into the ending’s massive flower has in actuality sent Drakengard fans into something
of a meltdown, given that in that series it’s the harbinger of the end of the world. But…
look, as much as I love how batshit the Nier and Drakengard timeline is, I’m never going
to claim to fully understand it, not even close. But in line with Taro’s own vision
of how he told this story, I’m far more interested in the purer emotional response
to this stimuli rather than the exact intricacies of how it all fits together. And with that
in mind, it’s impossible for me not to read something resolutely positive about this new
ending. And through tying all of this so closely to
the Automata settings and characters, ending E brings into stark focus the fact that this
saga maybe wasn’t truly… complete. Nier games have always involved you removing yourself
in order to save the world but, ya know, the world’s fucked anyway. Nier’s sacrifice
was still just one stepping stone on the route towards the dystopia of Automata, where the
same struggles play out in remarkably similar ways—Automata’s ending is incredible,
but who’s to say it’s not all going to cycle around once more after that?
Look, if the world is going to end either way, at least Kaine gets to go out reclaiming
the agency that was taken from her throughout the original game. No one is flailing about
trying to fix the larger world here—instead we see a stride into oblivion, middle fingers
pointed squarely at whoever is controlling all of this. Anyone else could overthink the
implications of this ending forever, constantly finding new ways to pick holes in whatever
outcome arises, but Kaine doesn’t; she’s fine with this. In her own words, she’s
not going back. She can’t control where the world will go from here, but she can be
happy or fulfilled in that exact moment she’s in—finally she has found the meaning she’s
been looking for. And with that, the reason I find ending E so astonishing is that it
takes the potentially endless, existentially draining cycles of conflict and sacrifice
the series has always represented and gives it as close to a full stop—dare I say even
a happy ending—as we’re ever likely to get.
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