NieR

Story

The game begins with a prologue in the summer of 2049 during a snowstorm. In a modern, run-down grocery store, Nier (Jamieson Price) fends off attacks from ethereal monsters to protect his sick young daughter, Yonah (Heather Hogan). After defeating the monsters, he checks on Yonah, who has begun coughing badly. The game picks up 1,312 years later, where the player seems to see the same two characters now living in a village built on the ruins of an ancient city. The low-tech village is one of several and is surrounded by more modern ruins such as the remains of railroad tracks and industrial machinery. The areas between the towns are teeming with monsters called Shades that attack travelers. Since Yonah's disease, the Black Scribble, is incurable, Nier sets out to find a cure. In the process, Nier finds a talking book, Grimoire Weiss (Liam O'Brien), who suggests that the two team up to use Weiss' magic to find a cure for Yonah's illness. In their quest, they meet Kainé (Laura Bailey), an irascible and foul-mouthed swordswoman, and Emil (Julie Ann Taylor), a blindfolded boy whose eyes petrify everyone they see. After they have traveled for a while, the village is attacked by a giant shadow. The battle culminates in Yonah being taken away by a suddenly appearing master shadow - the Shadow Lord - who carries his own book, the Grimoire Noir. The game then jumps forward five years. Nier and the others are trying to find the pieces of a key that they believe will help them find the Shadow Lord and the Grimoire Noir. After defeating five shadows and assembling the key, the team sets out to defeat the Shadow Lord. There, Devola and Popola (both voiced by Eden Riegel), who accompanied Nier on his quest, appear and try to stop them. They explain that over 1300 years ago, humanity was threatened with extinction due to an incurable disease. In order to survive, they separated their souls from their bodies with the help of Grimoire Noir and Weiss. They created clones that were resistant to the disease, the replicants, and planned to join the souls, the gestalts, to the replicants' bodies once the disease died out; Devola and Popola were androids to oversee the project. Over time, the replicants began to develop their own identities, while the Shapes, the Shades, became aggressive toward them.[7] Nier defeats them, with Emil sacrificing himself to ensure the advancement of his friends. The remaining group then defeats the Shadow Lord, and the player learns that he is the Shape of Nier from the prologue. Driven by a desire to protect his Yonah, he was the first figure and has united her with the replicant Yonah. However, the original Yonah tells the Nier figure that she can hear the new Yonah inside her and that she loves the replicant Nier and deserves the body just as much.[8] She leaves the body and Nier and Yonah are reunited. When the player replays the game, he starts right after the five-year jump. He learns about Kainé's past, including that she is intersex, which along with the death of her parents led to her being ostracized as a child, and that she is partially possessed by a shadow. The player gets the ability to understand what the shadows are saying, including the shadow that possesses Kainé, although Nier, Weiss and Emil can't yet do that in the game. Also, additional cutscenes are shown explaining the motivations and backstory of the shadow bosses they fight, showing them as sentient humans trying to defend their friends against Nier. The end of the second playthrough shows that Emil survives his sacrifice and that Gestalt Nier and Yonah are reunited in the afterlife. In the third playthrough, at the end, the player is faced with the choice of saving Kainé, who is in agony; Nier can either kill her to end her suffering, or sacrifice his life for her. The latter not only erases all memories of him from the minds of the other characters, as shown in a final cutscene, but also erases all of the player's saved progress, as if the game had never been played. Also, when the player wants to start a new game, he/she cannot enter the same name he/she chose for the Nier character in the previous playthrough.