#this is literally just nier reincarnation i know i don't care

[muntadhir]

Nier Reincarnation inspired AU for promeo/carmeo where Romeo is the sickly prince left to die who awakens P, a clockwork soldier

They go on the run and then Romeo dies and P stays with his corpse forever and ever, because he knows and wants nothing else

[astralartefact]

Every Mention of YoRHa:Dark Apocalypse in Encyclopedia Eorzea III I got my Lore Book; Here's the only thing I really care about

They had the chance to do the funniest thing possible and explain the Lore of Y:DA in overwhelming detail. (They did not do that.)

I only gave the book a quick once over, but here are all mentions I could find right now. If I managed to miss an important page I will add it once I gave the book a proper read.

BTW YOU FUCKED UP THEIR PORTRAITS SQUARE, ANOGG IS THE WHITE ONE!!!

To give you a comparison to other quest lines, literally every other alliance raid instance has at least one page dedicated to it. I just want Tower at Paradigm's Breach/Her Inflorescence's Concept Art is that too much to ask for q_q

Anyways, since you might want to know if this could 'mean' anything: The only new thing to me is that Anogg's entry kind of implies they aren't real Dwarves in the first place since they clarify that 'nobody knows where they came from - but recent events have revealed [redacted]'* - and combined with Reincarnation's lore drops and the fact that AnoKono look at least inspired by Devola and Popola this could imply they are actually "Clones" based on their data in the Pseudo-Seed. (And hey, look who recently had a cameo in Reincarnation, it all lines up #AnoggForReincarnation)

*in-game they were referred to as orphans, but i always took that as 'their parents are dead' and not 'nobody knows where they came from'

Also tangentially related side note, the choices on who gets an entry in this book are something. 2B isn't mentioned at all, not even in a "What a Weird Woman! We know nothing about her! Crazy!" sort of way but Ronitt's Mother who we talk to like once gets one that talks about how Ronitt likes pies. And I say that as one of the two people who is a Ronitt stan. I felt personally represented by him having a hard time with saying hello to others. But then there also doesn't seem to be an entry for Pagaga for example and now it seems kind of weird where the priorities went.

(I mean okay I'll be honest: I expected nothing and I'm still disappointed. And sure I get it, you don't want to touch Yoko Taro's World too much, especially with his style of world building anything you accidentally put in there could have massive implications down the line and you don't want to step on his toes but also don't want to ask him to write something for you yada yada yada, but the lengths the writers go to to not mention Y:DA in any capacity is wild. At this point it would be easier to just treat the NieR stuff as 'a weird thing that happened to our world that nobody understands but at least we got some space-travel level technologies from it' - you know, exactly how Y:DA treats it - but No, we will not mention the burning satellite in our backyard at all costs. And now you have a massive hole in the game that the devs just don't talk about.)

[astralartefact]

Right, I forgot to post something about Reincarnation ending for real yesterday, so. uhh. what pseudo-deep thing do I have to say about all of this...

Reincarnation is allowed to end and its contents are allowed to be ""inaccessible""* and everyone involved in its production knew it was going to end like this from the start even if they likely thought it wouldn't end quite this abruptly.

Yesterday Matsukawa literally said on Twitter that one of the first things Yoko Taro told him was to keep all the design work they did in consistent structures so they could easily publish them afterwards, they knew, they're not as stupid and helpless to corporate greed as some of you seem to think they are.

*heavy air quotes here because it's not inaccessible, there are at least three seperate fan projects documenting its content and even all of the in-game data has been publicly archived by fans - how much more accessible do you want an online game to be after it ends???

I know we love to complain about live services because that's a buzzword to do with capitalism (which is indeed bad) but like. It being inherently impermanent isn't what makes it bad. Theater plays are inherently impermanent and I have yet to see someone complain that Theaters still perform plays seasonally and then change what they're playing. What if I couldn't see Faust 1 last year and this year they're only playing Faust 2??? i dont think faust is a theatre play

Video Game Archiving is weird because yes, there's basically no downside to keeping something accessible forever aside from cost - and yet to me it has kind of started to become a little bit like hoarding in the fear that you might need it eventually. Like sure, why not store a video game in perpetuity if you could, someone in the future might want to look back on it after all - but like. Do you really need to be able to play a video game to do that, to understand what it tried to do and how it executed on its premise?

If nobody actually liked NieR Reincarnation's gameplay - which a lot of you complaining about it ending seem dedicated to point out any chance you get - then why keep it around as a game and not just as recordings or in writing? And whose responsibility is it to record that stuff? For the most part History wasn't recorded by those that made that history happen either. History can be recorded in writing, in photographs, in paintings,... so why can Video Games only be recorded as that Video Game?

I think these discussions are important to have and it sucks that it's always undercut by "Well but Corporations should do it, especially since they only don't do it because of money" - which is perfectly true and I agree with that, just for the record - and yet even in a better societal structure than Capitalism these problems would remain. If money wasn't an issue should every person ever posting anything on the Internet have to make sure it will always remain there for people that haven't seen it yet just because they could? Taken to the next step, are you allowed to remove something from the Internet if anybody finds it some amount of impactful?

The answer is pretty easy. If you care that much about it you will just have to record it yourself somehow - like a lot of Reincarnation's fans already did. And yes, video games have an interactive component that is now lost - but so what. If that was so important then write down what it meant to you! Make art that expresses what Reincarnation made you feel! All perfectly valid ways to record and experience history!!!

I feel like some of you people haven't had the pleasure of not being able to afford a certain video game console anywhere in the foreseeable future but knowing there's a game on there that you would love and so you decide to experience it through everything but playing the game itself. That game for me was Drakengard 3 on the Playstation 3 - and it was my favorite game of all time before I actually was able to play it 7 years later. And I think that's why I'm not particularly bothered by Reincarnation being taken offline, because I know you can appreciate it and everything it had to offer without actually playing it - because in Reincarnation's case a lot of people did the actual work of making it accessible online and that includes both fans and the devs for structuring their game in a way that makes it easy to do so.

But all I see is this weird insistance that Lore will be lost and that people won't be able to understand NieR 4 because they can't play NieR 3 to catch up on the Lore anymore even though

a) that hasn't been a thing for a single Yoko Taro game. The only time that ever happened is YoRHa:Dark Apocalypse and even there it didn't actually happen, people just fully misunderstood what part of the story was the actual A Plot and blamed them not understanding that on the Lore.

b) Reincarnation has maybe a handful Elements of concrete Lore and each of them can be summarized in 2 Sentences at most - case in point Noelle's RoD crystal is now part of the official timeline.

3) Drakengard's lore has never been explained once, not even in Drakengard itself, and yet a lot of people were able to love it and/or everything following in its wake - so clearly the lore is not that important, is it?

I also can't help but point out that 10H's story is literally about how she has to rewrite stories from her own memory of them because they keep being maliciously changed and that when she loses access to them completely the first thing she does is to recreate them and then she ends up giving them to someone else to experience (which ends up being herself but aah, technically somebody else)

Anyways, something completely different as a reward for reading all of this bs: Do we think Accord is a Player Insert? Is the Player Accord recording what they're experiencing for the "greater sake of Humanity"? We're always watching the Player Characters from a Third Person View - Who's to say that's not actually Accord's First Person View?

Has Accord been here the whole time?

[astralartefact]

NieR Reincarnation and Kepler's Somnium Fiolxhilde, Levania and look who I brought :) it's who you think it is :)))

Okay, so I've finally sat down and read Somnium and it's certainly a fascinating work to try and wrap your head around. Think of all the context this could hold!

So first and foremost, short review: Easiest Thing to read if you want to appear smart to "normal people." just don't tell them it's only sixteen pages long.

Things I really liked were how 'certain spirits only appear in places like iceland, away from civilitation's lights' clearly referring to stars being obscured by light pollution and how he describes pretty accurately how the earth would look like from the moon hundreds and hundreds of years before we would actually step foot on there. Also, he points out that women know a lot, actually.

That being said parts of it are really boring because well... he wrote 16 pages that are mostly scientific facts about the moon disguised as Lore and if you know my stance on Lore you will know how I feel about that lol at least he has the benefit that his lore is (mostly) actually scientifically meaningful and not just made up for 'entertainment' (again, mostly)

But now for the part we're actually here for, what does it have to do with the Reincarnation one?

Well, because it's only 16 pages long it's not as easy as "This character is a contemporary take on Crime and Punishment's Protagonist Raskolnikov" - there is just not that much in Somnium to do that with. Still, while I don't think Fio 'is supposed to be' Fiolxhilde or something like that I do think they didn't just reference the names Levania and Fio(lxhilde) for the sake of referencing a book about the moon to foreshadow the Moon server either, but to explain that I have to delve into Somnium's context a little bit more.

A big thing to know about this book is that basically, because the early 1600s did their early 1600s things Kepler couldn't just put his findings and scientific observations about the moon out there without being thrown into a volcano (that's literally the phrase he uses for it btw, it was that bad) - so what he did was disguise them as Lore obscured away behind two layers of framing devices and a dedication to the Fürst added by Kepler's son for good measure.

A phrase Kepler seemed to love using in the context of what he wrote here is "Cyclopensitte" ('cyclops traditions', as in 'blind on one eye') which he used to describe the willful or maybe even determined ignorance of the public in the face of scientific progress. He himself knew full well that if he told these things to the public not only would nobody care, they would be indignant to not believe him and probably retaliate.

Call it my very own Cyclopensitte but the first thing this made me think about wasn't actually NieR Reincarnation but YoRHa Dark Apocalypse. Because there Yoko Taro did in fact do exactly that: hide significant "Real World Observations" behind two layers of *shrugging emoji* so nobody can get too mad about you talking overt politics in a video game cross-over (things he did: that.)

But NieR is NieR and I will give the (literary) references they make the textual importance they deserve, even if I have to do it all by myself. The writers named Reincarnation's main characters after a book that shared important information with the world, albeit obscured - even if it was dangerous. And I will say that in a day and age where everybody and their dad is complaining that 'they can't say anything anymore!' that's a pretty charged thing to theme your little gacha game around, isn't it.

So what does it have to say that's 'dangerous' enough to incur the wrath of the ignorant plebians? What could possibly be deserving of such a comparison?

Well, NieR Reincarnation is first and foremost about familial bonds. That bodes well. Quick! Everybody! Make sure to think of the Children!

NieR Reincarnation is a game about why, even though it can be good sometimes, in praxis the concept of Direct Reincarnation ends up being bad and unfair for everybody involved in it - and the directest reincarnation we have is Birth and the familial ties that come with it. Humans are caged the second they are born - and is that right? Is that what freedom is? Do we have to live with that or could we improve that?

Might Reincarnation dare to imply that... the concept of Families... is bad, actually? (or at the very least demands serious rethinking)

okay so i will officially end it here because that's as far as i've gotten but i actually thought about that before (as in civilization without the concept of birth families) and i do think that's a take that would be fascinating to see yoko taro explore because quite honestly, families aren't particularly 'utopian' - if we had a uniform societal system of communal upbringing that untied from their birth treated every child perfectly equal a lot of our big societal problems would probably start to disappear. and while i'm not a family abolitionist (lol) families are one of those societal structures we just will not interrogate all that much even though a lot of us can clearly see how much harm and inequality they cause individually.

all that to say - if the next nier set in the world created by fio and her doesn't feature birth families think of me because this is me calling it