NieR Replicant Ending E Analysis: Explained and Compared

kept you waiting huh let's do this okay first let's unpack what we're talking about here we're talking about the new ending added to the near replicant remaster remake i'd say there were two big significant chunks added to the game with this version up this an episode mermaid i've already made a video on that one by the way so if you're interested in breaking episode mermaid down you should go check it out of the two i don't think it's controversial at all to say that this is the far more significant piece of content however this is a completely new ending i mean depending on what your definition of new is but that's some nuance that we'll get into later also we had a pretty definite link between near replicant near ottawa beforehand but the stuff in here just seals the deal you'll see what i mean by the way you might have guessed this but being a close look at the definitive ending of the game this video is going to have a lot of spoilers just a word of warning if you are planning to experience it for yourself anyways now that we got that paperwork out of the way let's get into it so first it might be prudent to mention where exactly this new content slots itself into the game being the new definitive ending you might have guessed it shows up right at the end in which case you'd be right you most likely know how this goes at the end of route d you fight kane and put her down after that you're given a choice you can either kill kane or sacrifice your existence so she can be free of tyrant's possession and live out a normal life in a world you slowly condemn to extinction of ruin good job on that one by the way you know what goes down after this point your save file vanishes into the wind and you watch it slowly delete itself in front of your eyes like when you had to free up blocks on your gamecube memory card for them big boys back in the day you get booted back to the title screen which now is a flower on it as a reward a heavy price to pay but hey you did it for a good cause right this is where the original game ends maybe it's even where your replicant version 1.22 playthrough ends if you didn't know to keep going i mean imagine a world where you didn't have the internet and you didn't have instant confirmation by checking online that there was in fact an ending e well i guess one of the things you could do is check out the trophies not on psn of course it'd just be hidden but scrolling down the list something uh kinda sticks out yeah that picture with the e is kind of blatantly obvious but what's with the trophy name seriously did you just hammer fist the keyboard three or four times and then call it a day i don't know if the trophy name and description both starting with the letter e is a cool coincidence or if it's intentional well dear viewer watch this let's translate the trophy name from hexadecimal to utf-8 don't worry if you didn't understand what i just said i don't even understand what i just said but roll with it what comes out is kyokusaba which means memory server okay okay what about the trophy description hikarigamieru which is like i can see a light these might seem like some cool buzzwords but keep them in mind for later anyways back to unlocking this ending once you thanos snapped your own save file you gotta hit new game and start playing again you gotta get up to about when you fight hook in the area with kane you know this goes you stomp the boss out kane's laying on the floor on the other side of the airy you make your way over to her expecting to see the greatest cutscene in the history of video games yes you and i are friends now one suddenly it just happens we're in uncharted territory now kane wakes up in bed three years later thinking about the people she's lost like emile and even has some of his mementos littered about she's clearly pretty frustrated that there's someone she should be remembering but she just can't no matter how hard she tries also this is me from the future coming here live while editing this video judging by this loading screen letter it seems that waking up crying isn't a phenomenon exclusive to kane yona seems to be experiencing it too and she even wants to reach out to kane because of it just something i noticed while watching the footage over again anyways kaine gets out of bed and hold up this is a near replicant first we got a whole new character to play as here with all new attacks and combos even the buttons the signs of magic is near have all new special attacks associated with them and check out this devil may cry 5 virgil summon swords teleports behind you nothing personnel kid [ __ ] [Music] this is pretty hype they put some work into this we get to learn about the world without nearing it based on some ambient dialogue kane has as she's traveling she notices the contradictions in her memory things that couldn't be the case unless a mysterious someone else was there as well kane sets off to your home village which is now called jonas village instead of near's village which really cements his absence home on the road you meet someone who's going to go run an errand to the forest and myth who you save from getting squad roasted by a bunch of shades remember since near killed the shadow lord things are getting progressively worse and worse in a seemingly throwaway line of dialogue near has at the beginning of the game he says that populations are decreasing shades are getting more violent and people say it's the end of the world the black squawl is the ultimate fate of all replicants as their guest adults no longer have a way to re-merge with their bodies after the shadow lord was killed and grimoire noir destroyed a thousand or so years past the prologue we can see that the black scroll is still a relatively rare occurrence we only know two characters that get it yona and the old king of facade we also know that about 800 years after nir killed the shadow lord humanity came to a complete and total end so it can be reasonably speculated that [ __ ] really slammed on the gas pedal after that this is also brought up when kane talks to this postman anyways he passes his errand onto us and we forget all about our little trip to the village by the way you can go but when you do kanye just mentions how'd she just freak everyone out obviously this is a carryover from the main game when pope will ask kanye and emile to get out and stay out but really kanye is a decorative centerpiece in the library for five full years and an additional three years have passed since that you're telling me the villagers still ain't chill i could understand skull face over there but kinda doesn't even look different from a regular human and she isn't even possessed by a shade anymore uh whatever heading to the forest to myth all the villagers have been killed and they're these machines pouring out of the divine tree these are new enemies too so you know you're about to be in for something good even though they kind of look like and behave like the robots from the junky and oh god i just want a memory alloy please drop i've been in here for hours with the enemies defeated the door into the tree opens and kane makes her way inside it's at this point in the video where i gotta slam on the brakes real quick cause there's something important we gotta talk about if you watch my near iceberg video you might know where this is going we gotta read since the year 2010 jurassic park the lost world has been completely evicted out of my mind to make room for the new lost world which is ending e of near now you might be thinking you just said 2010 and near replicant version 1.22 came out in 2021 right yeah well what if i told you that ending e was actually originally released in a book called grimoire near yeah well it's true the reason i'm bringing it up is because i think there's a great opportunity to do some comparison work here if you've played ending e which uh i mean you probably did if you're watching this video but i mean if you haven't don't click away or anything because we're about to break some ground here then you know there's things in near replicants ending e that couldn't possibly have been in grimoire near's version so easy let's compare the two only one issue the translation is incomplete to say the least the document available to read on the near wiki is quote a rough translation taken from chinese forums and blogs and it's uh it's a bit light more of a summary look here's the thing i don't just want to spend half of this video parroting back the events of a plot line you've already experienced i'm trying to add stuff break it down you know analyze it and this summary just ain't enough for that so [Music] now that i've read the original novella in japanese in its entirety i'll be doing some comparisons where i feel the novella differs from the game as we go along sound sound all right let's resume so how about up to the point where we are now with kaine entering the forest and myth well interestingly the novel starts off in media res with kanye waking up in sweats near the area being a two days earlier flashback kane also does a bit more questioning in the novella as to what happened to tyran as in her perspective he just kind of disappeared as well kanye thinks over what devil and popola told her about project gestalt whether she believes it and whether she did the right thing and killing the shadow lord remember by the way since near disappeared from existence that's something she thinks she did so the supposed guilt from possibly ending the human race kind of falls on her shoulders it clearly troubles her but she decides she doesn't care not in an edgy sort of way more of like i'm not too thrilled about this whole being a live thing anyways sort of way other than that we're pretty spot on as far as differences between the novel and the game go so let's continue kane rolls up into the deku tree and she immediately starts hearing a pair of voices who know everything about who she is and what she's done in the novella this is only a single voice but there's a very good reason as to why that's become two and we'll get to that in a second [Music] after walking a bit further into the tree kane comes face to face with the two figures known as the administrators taking the shapes of a young boy and girl so you might have noticed who these voices are they're 2b and 9s's i wouldn't blame you for not noticing 2b's va yuishikawa is doing a pretty good job of putting on a different voice also you know asterisk i played this segment in japanese so i don't know how different uh kira buckland's 2b voice is to the voice she's putting on here that's something you're gonna have to judge for yourself i'm gonna say though that the patterns on their clothes are probably meant to invoke the ones on your high androids now i'm not saying that these are specifically 2b and 9s but we know the androids and their personality archetypes go way further back than we're led to believe so could be something here but i'm gonna leave speculation about that to a potential future video we're looking for them concrete facts right now now obviously there can't have been two administrators in the novella because there wasn't any near automata to make reference to in 2010 simple enough next kane cuts up a p33 model robot while they expose it information about project gestalt and the nature of replicants on her and it's time for on information mentioned in the novella that doesn't get brought up in the game lightning round ready let's go the junky robots were originally created to dispose of replicants if project guesto were to fail when kane picks up her sword she has three rules if it's a shade kill it if a human puts you in danger kill it if you don't like it kill it the administrator was tasked with controlling and using the remaining muscle in the world no longer having a purpose the administrator's current objective is ending the world and finally the novella uses kaine's thighs as a unit of measurement that's uh that's not a joke after defeating the robots kane follows the administrators deeper into the tree where they explain that this is an installation meant to record everything in anything about the world kind of like an organic wikipedia you do remember the name of the trophy as memory server right then they summon a bunch of copies of kinae to fighter and they pretty much push kanye to her limit the novella claims that the fight thus far has lasted for over half an hour and while it would be you know really damn boring to constantly fight the same enemies for 30 minutes in a game we can infer this to mean kanye's been at it for a really long while all hope seems lost when a familiar face shows up [Music] his it's our boy emil with some uh extra appendages you know when i was like 10 i'd look at my machamp pokemon card and wonder what it would physically feel like to have two extra arms but that's a tangent for another day in the game kane doesn't ask about these arms until later but in the novella she's pretty quick to be like hey what's with the freaky arm skeletor man in the game emil says there isn't time to worry about that and in the novella he just tells her that more is better than less so what's the real reason the actual answer is if you read the near novella around the world in 80 days you know our boy didn't exactly have the easiest time reforming his body going into the full thing would understandably take too long so let's just say that one or two magical mishaps later and two extra arms isn't the worst mistake you can make when it comes to putting yourself back together emil comes in for the assist and focuses on breaking the barrier the administrator set up while kinda continues fighting her clones all the while their voices taunt her saying they're impressed with how far a replicant like her has come and i mean they're not wrong given that kaine's immense strength and ability to use magic was something given to her by tyrann she does seem to be keeping pace pretty well again we turn to the novella which states that when tyrann left kane lost her ability to use magic but her ability with a sword and quote abnormal physical strength remained i'm just gonna assume they're stretching this to explain why she can still literally disappear swing her swords faster than the eye can see and ko like six shades at once it ain't my job to decide the limits of that like i said it's masso i gotta explain [ __ ] furthermore she says that using magic was never really her thing so she's not too negatively affected by its absence now while near was strong a lot of his power came from the fact he had grimoire weiss to back him up while kaine is currently completely sans magic all that was a pretty roundabout way of saying there's a good chance that kane is the most powerful replicant to exist which explains why the administrators are marking out over her abilities emile finally manages to break through the barrier creating an opening for him and kaine to continue forward it's at this point we gotta take the novel chuck it in the trash and glory kill slam the lid on top because near replicant is about to go off the rails they coalesce back together in the ending but for now it's time for our video game to go off on its own i mean the novella couldn't have had this stuff in it the content being referenced in uh you know exists at the time if you want to know what i mean let's just say you'll automatically figure it out [Laughter] our duo enters a white area that kind of looks like the top of the lost shrine but there's some you know obvious differences something seems familiar but not familiar to replicant we get some dialogue between kaine and emile as they make their way through this new environment and it really goes to show how close these two are sure kane probably has feelings for near she couldn't express earlier because tyrann would a team kill her if she showed emotions other than hatred and emile definitely has a crush on our former protag but these two have something that possibly goes deeper than that they understand each other because of the mutual ire they draw from the people living in the villages something they get over by mutually supporting each other they each haven't had the support in three years and now they're finally reunited sure they had near who unconditionally supports him as well but by virtue of being the hero someone who can freely enter towns earn the trust and respect to the people and generally doesn't face much ostracizing he doesn't really understand them the way they do each other one line that particularly stuck out to me from the main game is when near decides he wants to show solidarity with kaine and emil by sleeping outside with him by the end of the conversation kane rejects his idea by saying he shouldn't waste his time which is pretty indirect but in japanese she straightforwardly tells him no and says to drop it whether that's because she sees it as a meaningless gesture and she doesn't want to subject near to a needless burden or she genuinely doesn't want to compromise the one-on-one time she has with a meal a time where she shows a more vulnerable side of herself noted when she tells emil to shut up because she's got an image to maintain is a decision for you to make anyways second tangent aside emil seems to have the same brain fog as kane and yona as he can remember near kind of like how you can remember the level layout of some snes platformer you played once as a kid he even says that he could remember making a promise to someone that they would go eat something delicious together you get to a replica of the shadow lord's castle and kanye then fights a boss a memory core sitting at the end of a long room due in this fight you might have noticed something a boss at the end of a hallway that doesn't retaliate when you reach it having to cross the long room dodging patterns of projectiles a total of three times yeah you might have noticed that this fight is pretty similar to the final fight with the shadow lord at the end of a regular playthrough something to keep in mind is who we're trying to bring back right now this core represents the world's memories as well as kaine's memories something that's been sealed away kanye slams open the core while simultaneously inventing some new expletives [Music] and the screen fades white and hold up uh that lone screen do be looking kind of different though [Music] yo wait a minute that's the near automata hud the life bar the map again i mentioned this before but i could speculate on this all day and the video would explode further than it already has if i got into why this is and to be honest i don't want to go too far into unconfirmed speculations but let's lay down one ground theory i'm gonna say the administrators are based on number two and number nine prototype androids created by zinnia the founder of yorha who formed the baseline personalities for 2b and 9s i mean their voices are the exact same in both languages which was a deliberate choice made for a reason what we're seeing here could be the groundwork for the technology that would eventually lead to the founding of yorha as much as i want to keep going with this the length of this word document is already starting to scare me and i'm not trying to rewrite war and peace here if i ever do a potential video in the future exploring the links between near replicant and near automata as well as all the side content in between i'll be sure to explore this connection further so this area is extremely similar to nir automata particularly when diving into an android probably best seen when a2 dives into 9s near the end of the game it's here that kane has to do battle with her memories summoned up by the administrators taking the forms of various bosses from the game something that strongly suggested during the main game is that kane can hear shades voices shades uh other than tyrant i mean near slaughter shades at a rate that would make doom guy go wide-eyed but devil's advocate you could argue that he was ignorant as to what he was actually doing if not willfully so when devil and popola finally spill the tea he's already come too far to turn back and you could argue that because they quote betrayed him he wasn't all too inclined to listen slash believe what they were saying anyways nier makes the biggest oopsie in history and accidentally ends the human race but he was at least completely convinced he was in the right yokota himself stated that one of the themes a near-replicant is centralized on this topic you don't necessarily have to be a bad person to do horrible things you just have to believe that what you're doing is right surely of all those who've gone through near replicant there are probably a fair amount of players who do believe nir was in the right and this isn't trying to dunk on people for not understanding the story or not seeing the bigger picture you're forced to go through this game in near's perspective there's bound to be a large number of people who empathize with this goal whether they acknowledge or fully comprehend that what they're doing through him as a player is wrong or not seriously i joke about how near closed his eyes when i do not see it and put a full stop to humanity but it'd be hard not to empathize with a character you've shared a goal with for dozens of hours if you're that player fighting the bosses while the administrators taunt you over what you've done is the way the game forces kaine and to a greater extent forces you to acknowledge your actions kane and by extension you through your current control of her lose all plausible deniability the game rubs your face in it and at the very least forces you to come to terms with your actions kaine's response whether she chooses to own up to her actions or continues to push forward is up to her and similarly the same thing is up to you you can acknowledge what you're doing is wrong and still continue i mean it's the only choice you have this ain't a choose your own adventure game it's not like you can influence a direction or you can assert that you're correct either way by directly broaching the topic it means you can't just sit on the fence anymore are you nier and kane right or wrong what's your reason everyone likely has a different opinion and reasoning on the topic and honestly i think that's one of the strengths of near replicant's storytelling time to switch gears back to the story again once kane finishes curb stomping some shades she's forced to confront her worst memory the one shade i don't think anyone's sympathizing with the one that killed her grandma and stole her life away big lizard boy hook foreign kanye puts up a good fight but she's getting her [ __ ] pushed in hook is a lot tougher this time around since the administrators gave him a few enhancements all the while during the fight she's shouting that she can't remember that certain someone even though it's on the tip of her mind hook summons up weird shadowy versions of the villagers from the airy who taunt and insult her just like they did back in the day that's pretty harsh man all in all kenny's pretty much neck deep in her worst nightmare right now just like before with the clones all hope seems lost and kaine's pushed to her limit when another assist comes in hey everybody it's grimar weiss who didn't disappear apparently or maybe lives in the data space i don't know and he's come here to help kanye out though he can't resist throwing a little shade at her in his entrance grimoire weiss's magic has this like digital style effect to it applied for this boss fight and it's all brand new this might be a personal opinion but i think it looks hella cool they didn't have to do this but it gives a nice flare of visual personality kaine actually says some genuine words of thanks to weiss for coming in to help her but they both quickly agree that that's kind of out of character and they're more comfortable with their usual banter it's not that kane doesn't appreciate weiss or anything like that them taking the piss out of each other constantly is just their way of expressing their affinity for each other they're completely their true selves with no fake politeness when they're together even if weiss constantly calls kanye a thought as if he's got a quota [Music] side note when kanye thinks twice he asks her are you in your cups again and i have no idea what that means google seems to claim it's some old-fashioned british slang for being drunk but in japanese he asks her if she's eating something off so let's go with that with grimoire weiss's magic kane turns the tides on hook and manages to squeeze out a w this creates a giant burst of light that slowly dissolves the administrators hey giant burst the light remember what that trophy description was as they disappear they say that possible futures are blending together this could suggest that by altering the records of the world and humanity kaine is creating a timeline where near exists kane then makes a big emotional speech where she decides what life means to her and throws a few expletives near his way to bring him back [Music] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] you then have to input the name you used for your own save file you know the one you deleted after ending d this is a good way of giving the player a sense of control over the action same way they got it when they had you input the name to delete it but fellas you know someone somewhere on this wide green earth one single person got to this point and realized they'd completely forgotten what they named their save file and there in a single walkthrough or strategy got on the planet that can help you with that weiss disappears again and maybe it's for real this time i don't know he's done this before you know how he is speaking of timelines blending together this is when the book reconvenes with where we've ended up kane calls near back and a giant lunar tier flower sprouts up from the ground kinda reminds me of the imagery from when the tower sprouts up in near automata now i know what you might be thinking giant flower ah yes striking guard 3. oh yeah it's all coming together look here's the thing i could be wrong but i'm fairly sure this isn't the same flower as the one and zero's eye simplest reason why the novella has this specific flower scene and it was written in 2010 before drakengard 3 was a twinkle in anyone's eye now i'm not saying they're not thematically related there might be some common imagery of flower equals beautiful thing equals evil going on here it's just too suspicious that not only near replicants and drakengard 3 have giant flowers in them even near reincarnation got in on that party the camera zooms in on the middle of the flower where kane is holding on to near i'm gonna be real with you full transparency when i first read the novella back when near in my brain was always associated with old pancake face poppineer cause i mean you know that was the only version of him our square enix overlords allowed us to play at the time all that is to say when this cutscene played and she was holding twinknir i had a small brain turn off moment even though it makes a lot more sense for it to be kidner in retrospect kane makes another big speech and with that endingee comes to a close you did it you're done near replicant is forever finished you get your old save file back so now you can suffer trying to get that trophy for harvesting a lunar tear flower or something great epic you can go back to the title screen and there's a new option in the menu it's just a short thank you message from the cast but hey it's a nice touch statement me hey you yeah you thanks for watching this video might have been a bit long for a section of a game that takes about two hours total but i mean there's a lot here especially when you bring the book into it hope you learned something today i sure learned a lot making it anyways if this video gets 1 million likes i'll do a karaoke cover of ashes of dreams anyways till next time [Music] you

Channel: BrandoSP

Views: 236,087

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Id: 6aDGMeaJcgc

Length: 27min 43sec (1663 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021