NIER - Backstory and Plot Analysis
Feb. 20th, 2012 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroOkay, fine, you asked for it. The story of NIER, as best I understand it. Note that a lot of this only appears on loading screens or supplemental materials; it seems like Cavia had hopeful plans for an interquel until they closed up shop.
Drakengard had five endings. The first and “canon” one involves the red dragon becoming a new seal on the abominations, which buys humanity another decade until Drakengard 2, when everything goes to hell again. The next three endings are various levels of Armageddon, none offering a lot of hope for humanity. The final ending, however, involves Caim and his dragon pushing the mother abomination through a rift in space into modern-day Tokyo, where they destroy it but are shot down by fighter pilots.
Turns out that the remains of an extradimensional abomination aren’t a good thing to spread all over a city. People start dying of “White Chlorination Syndrome”, which either causes them to turn into salt, or turn into giant white monsters. Examination of the particles from the giant and the corpse of the dragon lead to the discovery of alternate universes and the invention of magic in the early 21st century. Unfortunately, they also discover that in nuking Japan to destroy the white monsters (known as “Legion” and led by one with red glowing eyes) they’d spread the particles all over the Earth. The stuff can’t be destroyed, only sent back to the original dimension by magic, and in the meantime it’s killing or transforming everyone.
So the world governments come up with a hot new plan: We’ll separate everyone’s souls from their bodies (creating “gestalts”), and clone new bodies that are immune to WCS (called “replicants”), and just to be safe, we’ll have android overseers instruct the minimally-sentient replicants in cleaning up and sending back all the extradimensional stuff before we recombine people. Great, yeah? Just one problem: Gestalts go berserk when left out of bodies. But we can fix that too! We’ve created a bunch of magic books, and if someone can synch perfectly with the book, he can become an “original gestalt” that can keep the others sane.
This is the prologue: Nier is able to synch with the Grimoire and become the original gestalt, later known as the Shadowlord. His daughter Yonah isn’t so lucky—she is exposed to a book and starts to become a berserk gestalt. So the world leaders make a deal with him that they’ll keep her gestalt in suspension until everything is cleaned up, then they can have new bodies and everything will be great.
The plan goes well for 1,300 years or so—the extradimensional material is all gathered and sent back, the re-emerged “red eyes” (probably the consciousness of the mother abomination) is totally destroyed, and the replicants develop more intelligence and build a medieval-level civilization. So then they just need to get the two magic books (Grimoire Noir and Grimoire Weiss) to merge together and all the gestalts will be put into their corresponding replicant bodies. But in that interim, some of the gestalts have been getting loose and going berserk—and the intelligent replicant population thinks they’re body-stealing monsters.
This is where the game picks up—the “black scrawl” disease is gestalt-Yonah trying to claim the body of replicant-Yonah. The shades are berserk gestalts (and they’re totally people—the New Game Plus lets you understand their speech and explains why, for instance, the little ones always carry schoolbooks or coloring books.) Popola and Devola (the village’s android overseers) send replicant-Nier to find Grimoire Weiss and “recharge” him with the sealed verses. But Weiss was damaged in the intervening time and doesn’t remember his purpose any more, and the merging fails. Shadowlord Nier, not wanting to leave his big reward up to chance, takes Yonah with him in the chaos.
Five years later, Devola and Popola are trying to figure out what to do now that the plan has failed. They run Nier in circles for a while (probably hoping he’ll get killed) and eventually let him go to the Shadowlord’s Castle (which look like a modern-day luxury hotel). They try to stop him there; he kills them. Gestalt-Yonah abandons her body, realizing that replicant-Yonah is also a real person. Nier kills the Shadowlord, never realizing that they’ve always been the same person with the same goal.
So now nothing stops all of the shades from going berserk. Whether there is any hope for civilization at this point depends on your read of the situation:
- If this area was the center point of humanity and the plan (and the fact that the sun never goes down may be an indication that it’s one of the few habitable areas left), then everything is screwed. The LP author thinks that replicants can’t reproduce and had to be artificially created by the androids, which isn’t clear either way. But if that’s the case, then the gestalts all go berserk, the last generation of replicants dies out, and that’s the end of everything.
- There are a few points of hope: Several quests mention other towns and countries across the sea. They probably have their own overseer androids and may have their own grimoires. Heck, they might have managed the merging process decades ago, which is why the black scrawl arrived in Seafront by boat. So this area will die out, but humanity will revive elsewhere.
- If replicants can reproduce on their own, then they’re probably fine. Nier is a total badass and still young enough to slaughter shades for another decade or two. The plan has failed, but this new version of humanity is safe from WCS, can rebuild civilization (in whatever areas are habitable) and will never quite understand what the hell happened to them.
I’m probably a bit more on the optimistic side. But hey, Nier and Yonah are happily reunited regardless, right?
Drakengard had five endings. The first and “canon” one involves the red dragon becoming a new seal on the abominations, which buys humanity another decade until Drakengard 2, when everything goes to hell again. The next three endings are various levels of Armageddon, none offering a lot of hope for humanity. The final ending, however, involves Caim and his dragon pushing the mother abomination through a rift in space into modern-day Tokyo, where they destroy it but are shot down by fighter pilots.
Turns out that the remains of an extradimensional abomination aren’t a good thing to spread all over a city. People start dying of “White Chlorination Syndrome”, which either causes them to turn into salt, or turn into giant white monsters. Examination of the particles from the giant and the corpse of the dragon lead to the discovery of alternate universes and the invention of magic in the early 21st century. Unfortunately, they also discover that in nuking Japan to destroy the white monsters (known as “Legion” and led by one with red glowing eyes) they’d spread the particles all over the Earth. The stuff can’t be destroyed, only sent back to the original dimension by magic, and in the meantime it’s killing or transforming everyone.
So the world governments come up with a hot new plan: We’ll separate everyone’s souls from their bodies (creating “gestalts”), and clone new bodies that are immune to WCS (called “replicants”), and just to be safe, we’ll have android overseers instruct the minimally-sentient replicants in cleaning up and sending back all the extradimensional stuff before we recombine people. Great, yeah? Just one problem: Gestalts go berserk when left out of bodies. But we can fix that too! We’ve created a bunch of magic books, and if someone can synch perfectly with the book, he can become an “original gestalt” that can keep the others sane.
This is the prologue: Nier is able to synch with the Grimoire and become the original gestalt, later known as the Shadowlord. His daughter Yonah isn’t so lucky—she is exposed to a book and starts to become a berserk gestalt. So the world leaders make a deal with him that they’ll keep her gestalt in suspension until everything is cleaned up, then they can have new bodies and everything will be great.
The plan goes well for 1,300 years or so—the extradimensional material is all gathered and sent back, the re-emerged “red eyes” (probably the consciousness of the mother abomination) is totally destroyed, and the replicants develop more intelligence and build a medieval-level civilization. So then they just need to get the two magic books (Grimoire Noir and Grimoire Weiss) to merge together and all the gestalts will be put into their corresponding replicant bodies. But in that interim, some of the gestalts have been getting loose and going berserk—and the intelligent replicant population thinks they’re body-stealing monsters.
This is where the game picks up—the “black scrawl” disease is gestalt-Yonah trying to claim the body of replicant-Yonah. The shades are berserk gestalts (and they’re totally people—the New Game Plus lets you understand their speech and explains why, for instance, the little ones always carry schoolbooks or coloring books.) Popola and Devola (the village’s android overseers) send replicant-Nier to find Grimoire Weiss and “recharge” him with the sealed verses. But Weiss was damaged in the intervening time and doesn’t remember his purpose any more, and the merging fails. Shadowlord Nier, not wanting to leave his big reward up to chance, takes Yonah with him in the chaos.
Five years later, Devola and Popola are trying to figure out what to do now that the plan has failed. They run Nier in circles for a while (probably hoping he’ll get killed) and eventually let him go to the Shadowlord’s Castle (which look like a modern-day luxury hotel). They try to stop him there; he kills them. Gestalt-Yonah abandons her body, realizing that replicant-Yonah is also a real person. Nier kills the Shadowlord, never realizing that they’ve always been the same person with the same goal.
So now nothing stops all of the shades from going berserk. Whether there is any hope for civilization at this point depends on your read of the situation:
- If this area was the center point of humanity and the plan (and the fact that the sun never goes down may be an indication that it’s one of the few habitable areas left), then everything is screwed. The LP author thinks that replicants can’t reproduce and had to be artificially created by the androids, which isn’t clear either way. But if that’s the case, then the gestalts all go berserk, the last generation of replicants dies out, and that’s the end of everything.
- There are a few points of hope: Several quests mention other towns and countries across the sea. They probably have their own overseer androids and may have their own grimoires. Heck, they might have managed the merging process decades ago, which is why the black scrawl arrived in Seafront by boat. So this area will die out, but humanity will revive elsewhere.
- If replicants can reproduce on their own, then they’re probably fine. Nier is a total badass and still young enough to slaughter shades for another decade or two. The plan has failed, but this new version of humanity is safe from WCS, can rebuild civilization (in whatever areas are habitable) and will never quite understand what the hell happened to them.
I’m probably a bit more on the optimistic side. But hey, Nier and Yonah are happily reunited regardless, right?
