Mordiceius posted:

THIS SPEED STAR QUEST CAN GO gently caress ITSELF

Bugblatter posted:

Is there any way to complete it without chips or salve? If you use them, you just run the direct path and it takes no special skill. If you don't take them there's no amount of skill that will get you there in time, as far as I can tell. Kind of a bummer. Traversal skills at least made a potential difference in the first two races.

Eopia posted:

You can actually fight the robot statue normally. If you attack it enough it'll come to life and attack you with a variety of lines during the fight. 2B even has a comment after the fight if you beat it at her. I haven't tried hacking it yet so I'll have to give that a go.

Bugblatter posted:

Nope. Yoko Taro said they're just there to tease the player and have no other consequence. But it's Yoko Taro, so maybe he's saying there's nothing to hide the fact that there is something amazing?!?!?

Vermain posted:

No, no: when she's strangling 9S to death in a pose that's clearly suggestive of loving. There's about five or ten different ways I can think of off the top of my head to film a scene of someone being strangled to death, and you only choose that specific one if you're being suggestive to the audience. The fact that all of the YoRHa androids are total babes/studs is no accident, nor is the fact that they're all highly adept at killing while also being total babes/studs.

It's deliberate commentary on the relationship between love, sex, and violence, especially the latter two. I can get into more detail if you really want, but consider this (ending B spoilers): When 9S is being taunted by Adam, he has the line, "You're thinking about how you want to **** 2B, aren't you?" Most people are immediately going to think of "gently caress," but this is a game that already has swears in it; why the censorship? In the context of all his talk about "hate" before, can you think of another four letter word that could fit in there?

Nina posted:

Any idea if the names of the Shi-type bosses are references to anything? Initially I figured they might be some kind of Japanese wordplay (like ko-ro-shi) but I'm not so sure about the specifics.

Ciaphas posted:

I read the NieR LP by TheDarkId, but whether thru lethargy or just being dense I missed most of the facts about the end of the game and the postgame. Since I get the feeling they come up in Automata eventually, can anyone explain some aspects of the end of NieR? My questions are who the hell Devola and Popola are and what their role was, what Replicants and Gestalts were, what the Black Scrawl was, why the Shadowlord kidnapped Yonah in the first place, who that prologue 20xx Nier and Yonah were, and finally who Tyrann was and his relationship to Ending D (which is its own confusing can of worms in my head).

So basically everything in the last third of the game I guess I somehow didn't understand

Electric Phantasm posted:

Was about to ask for this, thank you. Related question so route C spoilers:
How did A2 beat them? 042 was talking poo poo about her not getting it, but I don't understand it either.

Nuebot posted:

Dang I just screwed myself out of fighting a cool miniboss by already having the quest items for a quest I got the data entry for it, but I wanted to fight it.


Also, story question here; Who was the machine that discovered hate? Was it A2?

Tarezax posted:

The Romeos and Juliets play within the game is so Shakespearean, it's amazing

Alder posted:

Alain Post posted:

so when did Yoko Taro actually become like, "a thing", did Drakengard actually get a cult fanbase based on the insane protaginist, or was it after everyone seemed to like the writing in Nier (since Drakengard 2 only peripherally involved Yoko)

Augus posted:

I'd say the biggest let-down in this otherwise solid game was the rampant re-use of the So-Shi boss design. You fight, like, 5 different variants of it? The last machine boss you fight in the game is just two of them stuck together, even. I wanted to see more bosses like Beauvoir.

By the way, I never got around to toggling on Hard Mode in my playthrough. If I wanted to go back and do a fresh save Hard Mode run, are there any guides for how to go about that floating around, or at least just some tips people can provide?

THE AWESOME GHOST posted:

I read this entire thing and actually thought it was well done, good job. Also connected a bit of the dots I was missing personally (I just got why he was called Pod 42)

Irony.or.Death posted:

Nah, the character interaction in Nier really puts it over the top. Automata's way more fun to actually play, but I think the original is the clear winner if you look at the complete package.

Kharn_The_Betrayer posted:

yeah the second one was it. Thanks

Sage Grimm posted:

Only one Devola/Popola pair was actively attempting to sabotage Project Gestalt. Once this became known, the other D/P models were looked down upon, exiled and generally scorned because of their association, even though they did nothing.

Synthbuttrange posted:

It's more like idiotic phrasing of orders by the aliens who ordered the machines to fight the androids, not to defeat the androids

CJacobs posted:

I really like the irony of the whole situation. It gives a real good sense of existential dread.
The androids' entire MO is "we're different from the machines" but the game demolishes that bit by bit and by the end it's revealed to you that actually the only difference including the parts they are made of is that the machines don't look like humans.

Basically everything you're told about them is revealed to be a mistruth told to androids by other androids. You're told they don't think, but they do. You're told they don't have free will, but they do. You're told they don't feel, and they don't, but they're programmed to just like the androids are.

2house2fly posted:

I don't have much opinion on the butt (i read an interesting essay about how the sexualised character designs reflect the intoxication and exhilaration of violence which is intertwined with sex in the psyche, but of course I also read an interview with yoko taro where he said he asked them to make the butt sexy because he likes sexy butts) but I do find it interesting that it comes up relatively rarely. I mean people talk about it but not nearly to the extent that they talk about, say, the bikini sniper in Metal Gear Solid V, and it doesn't dominate people's opinion of the game. You've got people who are very concerned with social justice and feminism calling this game, where there's an achievement for trying to look at the butt cheeks, the game of the year. It must have some pretty distinctive story content to get that kind of response from that kind of crowd! That's weirdly one of the things that drew me to the game.


Also the beginning is severely good, like on its own the first half hour or so of C almost felt worth two playthroughs of just getting to know the characters and setting

Know Such Peace posted:

More post-game spoilers for a few of Moochewmoo's questions:

It's "YoRHa", not "YoRaH". There is no known reason for the name "YoRHa", aside from it also being the name of the idol group that was formed during the making of Drakengard 3. It is sort of similar to "Yonah", but there is no concrete connection there as far as I know.

The 'android illuminati' tried to convince androids throughout the world that a small group of humans were still alive on the moon with Project YoRHa. YoRHa was also meant to be expendable, but the intended backdoor was pulled early when the creepy machine girls discovered the security flaw.

At the end of A/B, 9S uploads tiny fragments of himself to a bunch of different machine lifeforms. It takes a moment for him to coalesce into one coherent 9S. 'Corrupted 9S' dies, while 'big-machine 9S' lives. It isn't shown in-game, but he presumably then transfers back into a local body.

The Yonah/machine connection is covered in side-materials, which I'm not super familiar with. Yonah ghost driving the machines seems vaguely correct, but it can be tough to tell with how Yoko Taro writes the plots to these games.

Hikaki posted:

I'm pretty sure the cause is "we didn't have the budget for night scenes in Nier 1 so we made some poo poo up and now we have to roll with it for Nier 2".

Ainsley McTree posted:

“poo poo hog? Oh come now, that’s not even a word”

I’d pay far too much money for a nier remaster. Hopefully they realize there’s free money in it after automata

NikkolasKing posted:

So I know this is random, but are we supposed to know Kaine's a hermaphroditie? I only learned this after finishing the game, along with a ton of other stuff that I think might only be in supplementary material. Or maybe I just missed a lot of it.

I was looking for an interesting analysis of NieR and God help me, I tried Youtube. There are good analyses of my other favorites like Metal Gear Solid 2 so I held out hope. All I got was some guy praising Taro for having Kaine'sexuality be understated and an afterthought unlike the awful SJWs at BioWare who try to market games to LGBTQ people. How dare they.

quote:

-There’s also two Nihonjinron readings in the machines and the bosses. Japan, as a country, is notable as one whose historical stages are based on the importation of foreign cultures, in succession, Chinese, European, and American. As a country, it verged from xenophilia to xenophobia and back, and the blind adoption of European cultural symbols and structures is well-accounted for in Tanizaki and Soseki. Players familiar with Japanese periods of xenophilia will immediately recognize the machine fetishization of human cultural forms as mirrors of the actual Japanese experience.

Likewise, the final machine, as opposed to android, bosses in the game are Confucius and Lao Zi. When the Japanese cite their fundamental cultural differences, they do not point back to the Wa detailed in the _Annals of Sui_, but instead to the influence of classical Chinese philosophers, as well as their synthesis in Neo-Confucianism. If the androids represent an immensely individual existence, the final philosophies they must transcend is the deep cultural influence of the Chinese. Likewise, the Ko-Shi / Ro-Shi synthesis, in forming a Taijitu actually represent the universe, or at least _a_ universe.

-You say that Camus is strangely missing. But in fact, he’s very much here. Camus, in speaking of the Absurd, sees the universe as fundamentally Absurd and the Absurd man’s responsibility to revolt against the Absurd. In “An Absurd Reasoning” Camus poses suicide as the fundamental question of philosophy, that is to say, whether life is worth living. Likewise, at any point in the game, when you are on the ground and thus able to access the system menu, you can remove your OS chip and die. And in making the Taijitu the penultimate boss, Yokou is posing a revolt against both the mystical and the immanent, after which your last remaining opponent is yourself, whether in A2 or in 9S–you are given a choice of living (and dying) for others or not living at all.