Missable content and points of no return can feel unfriendly from a design perspective, but there’s merit in permanence – be that permanently losing a party member, your abilities, or over 50 hours of gameplay in an action RPG that forced you to collect every single weapon just to see Endings C and D. Getting to Ending D in Nier is a labor of love in & of itself, and to permanently lose everything you have earned is more impactful than a character death could ever be.īut that is what makes Ending D a beautiful sacrifice. The only way for Kainé to find peace is for you to let go of a video game you have put dozens of hours into. Ending D goes beyond a sad goodbye to a character you have been playing as all game, it is a genuine sacrifice of all the effort you’ve put into Nier. By making you delete all your data, Ending D forces you to feel the magnitude of Nier’s sacrifice. You can never use your main character’s name for a file again and the only proof they ever existed is the addition of Kainé’s Lunar Tear to the title screen. After that, you can only sit back and watch as every page of Grimoire Weiss – your in-game menu – is deleted one by one. You are asked four times if you really want to go through with erasing your data, entering your character’s name to formally complete the act – your very last act in Nier mirroring the first. Ending D is a proper commitment in the original Nier, one that fundamentally reshapes the game. Nier erasing himself from existence so Kainé can have a normal life obviously injects deeper pathos into the story, but it is not what makes Ending D special. This is not to say Ending D lacks narrative weight. His successes and failures are just as much yours. He can never save Yonah and doom humanity to a slow extinction if you do not play the game, after all. Nier’s arc is entirely dependent on your control. Video games are not passive and demand a deeper level of engagement by design. Video games are a unique medium in that they can take advantage of interactivity between art and audience. ![]() Where Endings A through C flesh out Nier’s stories and characters, Ending D specifically plays into your connection to Nier as the player. Ending C is an important reminder after Ending B that while Nier & Kainé’s actions are ultimately monstrous, neither one is a monster. Kainé may be gone, but she is free from a pain that was eating her alive and died knowing she was loved. Nier plunges his sword through Kainé’s heart, kisses her goodbye, and promises that they will always be together as he holds the Lunar Tear he grew for her in the light of day. The story continues for one more boss after defeating the Shadowlord and you are tasked with making a difficult decision: either kill Kainé – a character who’s developed considerably over the course of the story and found a reason to live – or sacrifice your life, erasing all traces of Nier from existence while permanently deleting your file.Ĭhoosing to kill Kainé triggers Ending C, a relatively character-driven conclusion that ignores Nier’s narrative framing (going so far as to remove Yonah from the premise altogether) to emphasize the relationship between the story’s two leads. In the game’s original 2010 release, Route C was simply an extension of Route B. Such a reinterpretation already goes beyond what is expected of a New Game Plus, but Nier pushes things just a bit further with Route C. ![]() More often than not, Route B’s unique dialogue reveals that the Shades just want to live in peace. The point of Route B is to make audiences understand that there’s another side to every story while subverting gaming’s tendency to portray the protagonists as wholly good and the villains wholly bad. Nier exclaiming that he will not show him any sympathy does not land nearly as badass the second time around, when all the Shadowlord can respond with is a pained, “But why!?” Focus is pulled from Nier’s struggle to rescue Yonah and lit onto the Shadowlord’s suffering. Route B recontextualizes the Shadowlord from a basic video game villain holed up in his castle into a tragic figure pushed to his absolute emotional limits. Instead of ending on a touching scene of the protagonist Nier reuniting with Yonah, Route B ends on a bitter note as the “real” Yonah comforts the Shadowlord after an emotionally charged defeat. This second playthrough, also called Route B, adds subtitles for any boss and enemy dialogue, translating lines that make the Shades considerably more sympathetic antagonists. After completing the game once, Nier’s New Game Plus starts you roughly 60% of the way through the story to redo the last batch of dungeons. Multiple endings are not uncommon in video games, but few titles in the medium utilize them half as well as Nier. Major spoilers for the ending of Nier Replicant.
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