Drakengard NieR Lore Theory - The God in the Machine
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- čas přidán 29. 08. 2024
- A video about how the machines from Automata connect to the Watchers in Drakengard.
Songs used in video:
Main Theme - Child's Play
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni OST - Higeki
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni OST - Hayashi Version 2
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni OST - Chousa
Mechanical Tears - steam punk soundpack
#nierautomata #nier #nierreplicant #drakengard
Amazing. The entire story is an infinitely branching timeline, and a loop that undergoes eternal iteration.
I think the same.
- Why are you wearing that suit?
- I am caim uploaded a new video.
"Wake up, babe. New Nier Lore video from I AM CAIM just dropped." :D
I've quietly speculated the Machines of Nier eventually becoming the Angels of Drakengard somehow or another for years now, and getting to see a video come out and list that as a possibility has been fantastic. Your videos have been nothing short of a miracle to me because Yoko Taro's stupid world wont leave my brain alone and this is the closest I get to any relief lmfao.
Yoko is a mind virus. This convoluted lore is rooted deep in my brain
@@boldnbrash7028 Its true! Yoko Taro and his associates have invented the exact kind of stupid shit designed to haunt me and it is working in a painfully efficient way. I love it, please make it stop, I want off this wild ride but I can't help myself.
If you're referring to the Grotesqueries I've seen a manga of dubious canonicity that explains that they are an evolution of dragons that devoured the world once
@@cajhonson44 it's canon. It happens after Drakengard 3's A ending.
DoD 1.3's ending A has the dragons devour Manah and all dragons go mad with the red eye disease. They devour everything in sight and upon Caim's death Angelus becomes a humanoid with black wings and begins killing the mad dragons to get to Caim's falling corpse. After devouring nearly all life the dragons now impossibly large begin taking the shape of the grotesqueries and after nothing else is left they devour each other until all that's left is a glowing sphere that is described to be able restart the now dead world.
I also believe that.
Yoko Taro is a very innovative creator in terms of what has been possible in games before.
And you know what the most impressive part is?
_I don't think he _*_means_*_ to be one!_
I resonate with your views on the series quite a bit. I've thought for awhile now that 'divinity' in DrakenNier is purely a construct born from 'humanity', whether it be from actual humans or beings imitating or attempting to be human.
Hmmm... Yeah, some theories are interesting, others don't make any sense. I would say that Her Inflorescence clearly alludes to Zero, it's practically a tribute to her.
The entity that possesses Manah is a Watcher that detests humanity and has the ability to influence weak minds that are on other planes. That entity that possessed Manah didn't die from the Golem's attack, that entity just lost the puppet. That watcher had already managed to summon the seeds, the watchers and the Grotesque Queen who was later killed by Cain and Angelus in our plane. I would say that this entity wants to exterminate not only humanity, but all traces of it. From replicants and Gestalts to automatons. In Nier Replicant he used the WCL to create a legion of undead, in Nier Automata he used a legion of machines. The Empire of DOD1 are red-eyed warriors with no will of their own, the Legion is an army of red-eyed undead commanded by a leader called Red Eye, the hostile machines are those with red eyes. In both the game and anime, Adam tortures 9S mentally just like Manah does to Inuart. I 100% believe that the entity using Red Girl as an avatar is the same entity that used Manah. I believe that only the watcher slayer that was sealed can destroy this entity when the seal is broken.
Yes, the setting of Her Inflorescence is surrounded by a destroyed white city very different from the dark setting of DOD1, I interpreted Her Inflorescence as a failed attempt by Red Girl to copy Zero with 2P's body as the seeds of destruction never recover nothing like it should be
The entity controlling Manah is not a Watcher. It refers to the Watchers separately from itself and was meant to be the voice of God according to the DOD guidebook. This was retconned in the DOD3 Dengeki round table interview where Taro said that the voice was a agent of God who is trying to break the seal and who hasn't been depicted yet in the series (as of DOD3).
I would argue Her Infloresence also alludes to Kaine
What the fuck
I always get goosebumps from your speculations
Given that the extinction of all plant life- eg the inciting incident in F66x's backstory- is canon to Nier Replicant from the dialog in The Great Tree sidequest, I'm thinking the rise of the Flowers occurred some time during humanity's conversion to Gestalts, when 'true humans' as such were still walking around developing androids and setting the groundwork for their own revival.
Tying in with other hypotheses, a revised Nier timeline that includes revelations from Re[in] goes something like:
(Noelle) Eleanor demonstrates an altered response to maso and Angelus's remains, allowing for improved Legion countermeasures ->
(Yuzuki) Yuzuki's Dark Memories has his team locating a scientist who retained his sense of self despite WCS, which may have been the former Dr. Underwood ->
(Noelle) assorted deployments of Eleanor's 'sisters' echo the themes of O63y/F66x and Automata, project eventually implodes due to Red Eye, which the sisters, and thus dragons, remain susceptible to as 'humans' ->
(F66x) Her Dark Memories show cloistered humans attempting to revive a devastated nature, contamination by maso may have precipitated the sudden development of Flowers, F66x's original eventually leverages pre-existing Eleanor research to synthesize plant-human clones, areas ravaged by the Flowers experience the restoration of 'normal' nature in their aftermath; clones retain the capacity for Red Eye through their 'human' heritage, Flowers may have integrated the capacity for Red Eye through interactions with the clones ->
(Replicant) Flowers are eventually suppressed or leave as maso supply dwindles, the Tree of Memory/Sleeping Beauty is built by androids or the few remaining humans to retain humanity's legacy and drive Project Gestalt using innovations made possible by studying the remains of the Flowers and how they use maso, Kaine borks that by reviving Nier ->
(Noelle) Androids rediscover Noelle's facility during either the android civil war following humanity's extinction or the Alien invasion, leading to the development of 'dragoons' ->
(DoD3) Michael recalls fighting 'worms/insects' and 'puppets' in his earliest memories, likely Aliens and machine lifeforms (ML) shown fighting side-by-side in Emil's memories in Automata ->
(Automata) Beepy triggers the ML's awakening, they capture what remains of Sleeping Beauty and integrate the Flower's growth capacity with the single-minded expansionism of the Aliens, ultimately destroying the latter, and gain the capacity for Red Eye through the Flowers' influence on Sleeping Beauty
The DoD/Nier thread then looks like: Tainted maso precipitates the development of the Flowers -> The Flowers are used in the construction of Sleeping Beauty -> The ML's contact with Sleeping Beauty causes the Cataclysm somehow -> An ML-contaminated Sleeping Beauty becomes the Black Flower we see in DoD and is either suppressed in the Nier-verse prior to the Cataclysm, or following the Cataclysm by Accord and the Capital's original inhabitants, purified maso likely floods the world during the Cataclysm and is progressively tainted by the Black Flower during the events of DoD 3/1 -> Sleeping Beauty-contaminated ML in Nier eventually produce N2, the virtual embodiment of Red Eye, and Project YorHa is developed to hopefully end the perpetual war by coopting ML's self-improving ethos in new android-aligned weapons while also covering up android leadership's deception via No. 9's backdoor, unknowingly leaving YorHa androids vulnerable to mass Red Eye infection via that same method.
The problem with F66x being in the main NieR timeline is that according to her, plant life has already been extinct for over a thousand years. That doesn't fit with the timeframe in NieR, especially considering that the day/night cycle still seems to be fine in the prisoner's stories.
It also seems like the flowers have already killed all of the humans and it's pretty much just the clones left, which makes it seem very unlikely that they'll win the war, especially since a lot of the clones have started worshipping the flowers and joining with them. The prayers of the flower cultists also make mention of heading to a new world, so it seems like the flower is already getting ready to move to a different branch.
It's possible that timeframe the original F66x mentioned was a mistake by the devs or a lie, but with how it's all been presented it seems like the least messy way to interpret it is as being a separate timeline that the Flower used as it's starting point.
Since the prisoners are plant/human hybrids that have soldiers wanting to fuse further with the flowers and become mindless, I've thought it could be possible that the aliens are actually the fused prisoners that use the ships to travel between timelines, but there's not a lot of evidence for that.
@@iamcaim The Aliens being former Prisoners that went full-plant would be on-brand for YT; I agree that the evidence isn't really there yet.
I just feel uncomfortable with the Prisoners timeline, which seems to be fully in the scifi camp, making the jump to the magic side of things without being acted on by other parts of the story, and timey-wimey stuff has been pretty thoroughly in the magic camp for DoD/Nier even if we see dimension-hopping in other scifi media. Nier/DoD has generally done a good job drawing a line between 'this is what magic can do, this is what technology can do,' and it feels weird for the Flowers, who have some uncanny threads to the rest of Nier/DoD, don't have a clear way of getting 'out of their box' for lack of a better word.
If there was a Hidden Story or a Record that came out showing how, say, the Flowers accidentally get vacuumed up during the Cataclysm and start munching on the ML's that got caught up in the explosion, hence the Black Flower gaining ML traits and inspiration, or maybe that the climax of DoD1 somehow dropped the Flowers into mainline Nier, where they proceed to do bugger-all because humanity's already 'gone' from their perspective, what with nothing but Replicants and androids running around, then it'd feel a little better.
It's possible that there may already be Maso in the prisoner's world. When an army of them is shown fighting the flowers in chapter 7 you can see some of them using magic staffs. They might just be advanced tech that resembles magic, or advanced tech that uses small amounts of Maso like the Pod programmes in Automata. The Flowers in general already seem to be magical, since the original starting generating energy and increased it's mass from nothing.
@@iamcaim I feel like there definitely ought to be some sort of relationship between the flower and the aliens/machine cores. It seems strange that the devs keep referencing plant material/plant cells in the context of them. Though I agree that it probably isn't as simple as F66x being in the same timeline somehow.
Where is stated in Nier replicant the extinction of plant life? Which side quest?
Update: Oh, it's the sidequest to retrieve a root, where te merchant says "In the distant past all plant life just dissapeared from the surface"
Emil is probably a seed of destruction and the seeds of destruction are probably the clones of Emil being sown across all the timelines in the multiverse
That. And according to "1.3", they're also merged versions of Watchers who became one while trying to eat each other.
@@JabamiLain It would be awesome if in reality, it was Yoko Taro who was the god and he was sowing his balls (seeds of destruction) all over the multiverse. It would also fit the "is this the land of the gods?" quote from Angelus in ending E. And it would make sense that the seeds transform you into weird versions of yourself, just look at Taro's head, it looks like Emil's
So THAT'S why YT answered the question, "What all of the extended universe is canon?" with "All of it!"
I do love the fact that the seeds of destruction have the ability to not only spread to multiple timelines in the drakenneir timeline...but can also *end up in timelines completely unrelated to the drakenneir universe.*
The watchers are an existential multiversal TERROR.
The watchers are confined to the drakenneir universe but if not taken care of properly, much like a virus...or an invasive flower species, they can proliferate and spread into worlds they do NOT belong in.
Wow you even found links in Drakengard 2 and Sinoalice. Great work compiling everything!
Great video dude. I'm so glad someone actually is taking the FFXIV crossover seriously in terms of lore; i felt like i was going crazy when I mentioned details from it and people dismissed it lol.
It is canon after all
Probably because Nier/Drakengard has probably some of the most convoluted lore known in existence.
Name another video game franchise that made a crossover in an MMO canon to the greater storyline of the mainline games?
Imagine telling me that the cross over Diablo did with CoD was somehow canon to the Diablo timeline. I know a Nier and FF crossover being canon isn't as ridiculous as that, but it's still unconventional, and would potentially drive some people away.
I know I have a headache trying to wrap my head around all of this lore and what connects with what.
It is sO Refreshing seeing someone explain yoko taro's lore specially from every game to understand everyone, I Get lost in this deep(Mombo Jombo) lore from time to time as well, NICE👍
Another fantastic video! Picking up all the breadcrumbs of lore is a big undertaking. Thank you for summarising all of this, Caim!
13:32 given that it's a loop, "which came first" it's an impossible question to answer, since one leads to the other. That's maybe where the "breaking of the Samsara cycle" references become relevant
I had basically the same theory but not as well put together. A very important detail that I don't think you mentioned is that all of Nier happens because Angelus and Caim decide to go to the birthplace of the watchers, and they end up in Tokyo. That right there tells me that Nier is a prequel to Drakengard. It's how the Watchers/Gods were created, and would then go on to invade other timelines. Cathedral City in Drakengard is very obviously something like the Copied City or the Ark.
Tokyo 2003 isn't actually where the angels came from, Angelus just asks if it is because she has no idea what's going on (and it's a slightly meta joke about the game being made in Japan). According to the DOD1 guidebooks Tokyo 2003 is just one of many timelines that exist alongside each other, the angels and God are (according to DOD1 lore) from somewhere outside of the Great Time itself.
@@iamcaim Can we be sure that that lore hasn't been retconed since Drakengard 1?
No we can't be sure.
Spoilers for Re[in]carnation:
It seems that Reincarnation takes place in a new Automata branch and based on what's been implied so far I believe that this specific NieR branch could be where the machine network that becomes "God" originates from.
@@iamcaimWhile I have your attention, do you happen to know if there's any confirmation or suggestion in the lore that android were made with magic? I have that impression from the level of technological development humans had during the apocalypse.
Devola/Popola have magic and Sleeping Beauty has maso.
Makes me think that robots and androids were made not by programing but by using magic to copy human minds or something like that.
Androids wouldn't exist without the technological developments brought about by maso research, but I don't think the androids themselves have maso inside of them.
The Gestalt terminal contained maso and the pod programs in Automata either use or emulate maso. Devola and Popola aren't magical by themselves, it's specifically the staffs they use which contain magic.
This seems in hindsight. Especially with "Become as gods" constantly being said. I don't know why I never put this together.
I remember trying to put this theory together in a video years ago.
While I think it’s impossible to assume Taro had this planned from the very start, he’s definitely set things up in Automata and D3 to hint at a sort of eternal recurrence.
I’m convinced that the machines/androids of NieR are the dragons/watchers in the Drakengard universe.
Things like the cathedral city (a freaking metropolis that just appears in the Drakengard universe for no reason) that brings magic into Drakengards worlds has to be an advanced form of the machines technology coming into the medieval world of Drakengard.
There’s the fact that all the magic and technology throughout the series clearly looks like data and code.
There’s also this tiny lore tidbit that never gets mentioned that the androids use a ‘dragon’ weapon in the night kingdom.
Is the cathedral city a modern city sent through time in the kingdom of night into Midgard?
The entire thing would just be so incredibly Yoko Taro because the entire story of the series would essentially see the humans doomed to extinction due to an eternal war throughout time to propagate their existence. So essentially the thing that will doom humanity from the very start is actually created by their need to propagate their own memory.
An entire time loop of doom around the ego and hubris of man is just so Taro.
I think that the rough idea was planned out during the development of DOD3, since at the same time Taro was working on YoRHa (the idol group).
The DOD3 side materials alluded to the dragons fighting in a war against "puppets" and the world guidebook has a story about androids fighting sphere machines to upload data to a moon server.
It was also during the DOD3 development where Taro started saying the voice controlling Manah wasn't directly God itself, which seems to me like a retcon since DOD1+2 very much treat it like it is.
Yoko Taro always wanted to push past creative boundaries, perhaps a singular canon is one such creative barrier?
Reincarnation basically unleashed his "everything is canon"-phase, and now that ambition of transcending a rigid canon is woven into Accord's core motivations
I wonder if he will ever definitively answer where Maso comes from: God, aliens, machines, androids, Humanity seem to all be possibilities now
You really do the best work here. Wonderful video!
With Nier Reincarnation ending, we reached new elements to the story.
THIS CHANNEL IS AMAZING
I love your videos!
Wonder if you will run out of nier stuff to talk about though?
Probably not if your notes look like mine (and i bet they do)!
If I ever stop uploading, just assume I died in a fiery explosion of some kind.
Hell yeah 👍, ready for another great video
Thank you for this.
That would make a lot of sense by virtue of being timeline shenaningans, something that made DoD3 very intresting
Great videos man
After studying the whole nier timeline... I'm convinced the red girls and "God" are effectively the same antagonist throughout the series. The way the red girls toy with 2B, 9S and the player themselves suggest they see themselves as God, after all they have basically unlimited power, so how could they see themselves in any other way?
Then that raises a question, how does this connect to the God of Drakengard?
all the vids you drop are bangers
At first I was like "that actually DOES seem like kind of a stretch" but then the video just kept going, and oh god, I've got some lore to catch up on, apparently.
I love this channel. So happy to devour all this lore
Subscribed, this is really well done and detailed!
Bro, screw Kingdom Hearts.
This is probably the most convoluted lore I've ever seen.
I'm in the process of playing all of the games, and I can barely understand what's going on in the middle of playing the games.
I guess the main things I can understand is that the God(s) don't like humanity, and essentially want them and all traces of them, gone from all of existence.
You think so? Considering it's a time loop, that makes it easier to understand (for me). Kinda like Terminator 1 and 2, the paradox of something from the future getting sent to the past which triggers the events leading to that same future in the first place.
Kingdom Hearts on the other hand... I stopped caring when old Xehanort revealed he was recruiting new members of organization 13 with previously killed members and several versions of himself from different time periods. And then there's the whole "Master of Masters"...
5:49 according to the Emil head the machine server is still around
That's a new network reconstructed by the leftover machines.
Amazing info!
It's always a great time when you upload a video. Can you make a video on Accord or what happened in Replicant's Ending E?
I'm going to be talking more about Accord in the next video. My Recycled Vessel video goes a bit into Replicant's ending E, is there something specific about the ending you wanted me to talk about?
@@iamcaim Oh I just saw your recycled vessel vid after making that comment. Thank you.
That last question is probably the most important question of the series going forward. Is the flower the origin of all corruption, or is it just a creation of the machine network, aimed to assimilate everything?
Is there a divine aspect to it that transcends all technology, as with things like magic and souls, or is it and every other divine aspect on all of the series just technology taken to such a degree that it's indistinguishable from divinity?
Then what is the soul?
I think when we get the answer to these questions is when we'll finally understand the flower, maso, and the entire series.
Did I just see the bunker from nier automata in ruins
Eternal return
Nier: the future that is the past
Drakengard: the past that is the future
I think drakengard 1 had started the time paradox where the angels had been formed.
If drakengard will get a remake I think it would have automata plots in it if I'm wrong.
I think drakengard 3 is not just a prequel to DoD1 but even a sequel to automata
And where NieR Reincarnation matches in all of it?
That voice tho... 🤤
I got reminded of this video because the abstract 10h weapon name "Deus ex machima". Also the 10h hidden stories pretty much prove you right
yeah it's pretty much guaranteed at this point unless Taro decides to replace N2 with another twist villain in the last chapter.
@@iamcaim This aged like fine wine lmao
@@bunnicula3221 How so???
amazing video as always I AM CAIM :)
That higurashi ost made this feel better indeed.
I have to ask: What are the music tracks used in this video? I remember it being in the description but I can’t find it now for whatever reason.
Thanks for pointing that out, I've put them in the description now.
Main Theme - Child's Play
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni OST - Higeki
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni OST - Hayashi Version 2
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni OST - Chousa
Mechanical Tears - steam punk soundpack
@@iamcaimThank you so much!
'only then will we become flowers and reach a new world', the aliens are described as plant-like and they're obviously from a different world. i feel like their existance is connected to the flower as well
edit: i'm new to nier lore so i dont know if this is obvious to everyone here! ^^ it's just a thought
10:44
Can someone tell me what the voice says after "I see it. The light"?
"we move on forward to the future"
The logic virus was created after the machines learned about the red eye disease.
Also in the ff14 crossover we see the red girls are the ones who created the flower
We never see the flower in FFXIV. The existence of Red Eye disease had very few to no records in the NieR timeline.
@@iamcaim the final boss is called her inflorescence. Directly connecting her to the flower.
Yoko taro mentioned in an interview about the machines finding records of the red eye disease
@@novustalks7525 connecting her to the flower is different from showing her creating it. Can you tell what interview you are referencing?
@@iamcaim the flower wasn't around at that time so how else would she be connected to something that doesn't exist yet?
Also I believe it was the dinner talk discussion for automata
@@novustalks7525 The flower was present during the cataclysm, which means it was in the NieR timeline a long time before the start of Automata.
I wonder if the aliens are even aliens at all. They are plant-like, they're found underground. They could be an evolution of Sleeping Beauty that Emil and the Androids mistake for aliens. Or they could have come from a project similar to Sleeping Beauty that was housed in space, maybe on Mars or They could be related to whatever happened to the moon.
I do think it's possible for them to be connected to the flowers, but we don't really have enough information on them to make solid theories.
Great video, but question: do we know for sure that the flower from the prisoners world is the same flower in drakengard?
No that hasn't been confirmed. However there are so many similarities between the two that having them be unrelated would be very convoluted.
@@iamcaim yeah I see, in the very least, it shows how such a flower *could* come about. Considering that the machine network is currently attacking the cage, maybe they were "inspired" by watching the flower story and tried recreating something similar.
My only doubt for them being the literal same is that the two flowers don't exactly look the same, and the one from the prisoner world isn't as powerful as the drakennier one.
Well, just like the researcher, kaine in ending e, and so on, maybe the machine network simply wishes upon a flower
Scientists made the flower? I thought that the gods made it to destroy humanity
so now all those Watchers in drakengad 1 are actually beings created by the machine network from another timeline, I'm very confused, can you explain this a little bit?
Then the gods never existed and this whole universe was a war of the machine communication network and the accord. That sounded ridiculous to me or I didn't understand
@@jiron865 Yes, that is my opinion on where the story is going.
@@iamcaim btw recently ı opened a channel about nier and dod. Fot just now ı translate nier drama cd in turkish and ı wrote a guide for basic lore about dod to nier on steam and guide is approved by steam, ı motivated when ı saw your channel so thank you please keep going ı love this channel. Anyway, so ı just translate and upload your video in my channel, can you approved it ?
@@iamcaim if you don't have a problem
@@jiron865 Sorry for the late reply, this comment didn't show up in my feed and I'm just seeing it now by chance. You can translate my videos or do whatever you want with them, I don't mind.
What is that last scene from? The one of the book with the flower?
Nier Reincarnation O63y Hidden Story 9.
Now it all makes so much sense. Aliens are very likely connected to (they also might be the parts of) The Flower. They are described as "almost like plants" and they are reaponsible for the creation of the machines, the same way that flower created the watchers as we see with Zero (she becomes very reminiscent of Queen beast) and with f66x. Machine cores are even described as similar to plant cells which further indicates their connection to the flower/aliens. Machines=Watchers Aliens=Flower
What game is this o_O
11:26 music?
Mechanical Tears - Yuli Audio Craft