The Copied Cathedral: Grimoire Nier
In September 2022, something odd happened.
A group of talented NieR: Automata modders released footage of a church they added to the game on reddit and twitter. It was a pretty big accomplishment - Automata’s engine is difficult to work with, and many players with a cursory familiarity with it felt that this kind of addition to the game was unfeasible, so for something of this scale to be created represented a shift in the landscape of NieR modding. However, this achievement was practically rendered irrelevant by the way in which they chose to reveal their work: an arg/”hoax” wherein they pretended to “discover” the mysterious church in an unmodded copy of the game, presenting it as a long-hidden easter egg.
This gained unusual traction. This kind of thing happens a lot, but I’ve rarely seen it gather the kind of steam the copied cathedral did. The collective practiced cynicism of the internet, as well as the increasingly white-box nature of our favourite games, reliably helps quash the kinds of rumors that would easily gain traction on the playground, when it was much harder for someone to definitively prove you a liar when you claimed to have climbed aboard a rocket and shot off into space to find Deoxys in Pokemon Emerald. And I think there’s a pretty clear reason for this: anytime anyone expressed scepticism over the church and its impracticalities, they were met with the same refrain.
“It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would do something like this.”
This refrain remained intact even when how people engaged with the modders’ work changed. In the beginning, it was “It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would include an easter egg that people would only find 5 years later!” When it became clear that the cathedral did not, in fact, exist in the game, it became “It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would craft an ARG to tease future NieR content.”
As someone who has had a relationship with Taro’s oeuvre since playing NieR at 14 years old, this was all very confusing to me. Because the Yoko Taro that I thought I knew didn’t do stuff like this. None of his games were ever advertised with any kind of obscure ARG disseminated through social media. His games didn’t really have obscure secret content that remained secret for years after the fact. I thought Yoko Taro was a guy who directed games with sweary, murderous protagonists connected to each other through intricate lorebooks that never left Japan…and showed up to promote Drakengard 3 as a sock puppet. Without my realizing it, what “Yoko Taro” was had changed, and he had become, in the eyes of many, a kind of mystical trickster, whose mad genius was simultaneously incomparable and unpredictable, whilst also falling into neat patterns that were easily and instantly recognisable.
Did I miss where these collectively agreed readings of Taro and his work came from? And if not, where did this perception of Yoko Taro come from?
When did Yoko Taro become Yoko Taro?
BRANCH A: ANARCHY IN THE UK (Drakengard)
BRANCH B: BAD MOON RISING (Drakengard 2)
BRANCH C GESTALT: COME TOGETHER (Nier)
BRANCH C REPLICANT: SCIENCE FICTION (Grimoire Nier)
BRANCH D: ————-
BRANCH E: ————-
In The Copied Cathedral Branch C Science Fiction
And Then There Were None is a short story from Grimoire Nier. It tells the backstory of not just our beloved friend Grimoire Weiss, but also Grimoire Rubrum, a book that the gang ran into while exploring Emil's haunted mansion, killed in approximately 20 seconds flat, and then never mentioned again. It turns out that the Grimoires were, in fact, once human - specifically, child soldiers who use a drug called Luciferase to fight the Legion at the behest of the Hamelin Organization. The person who would become Grimoire Weiss was locked in a room with a group of other children, including a girl who he had fought alongside before and developed a bond with, and told by an intercom to use magic books to kill each other until only one remained. In the ensuing battle, the last three standing have their souls and minds stolen from their bodies and trapped in the Grimoire, losing all sense of who they once were as living things, until they are reformatted and rendered unrecognizable, to suit their new purpose. It's a story that takes the overtly fairytale image of an arrogant talking magic book, and gives it an implausible sci-fi explanation.
So, about that elephant we haven't been addressing.
NieR is a sequel to Drakengard. Everyone knows this now. Yet it was important to me that the 14-year-old me that played NieR did not, and loved it all the same. It did not need prequels and sequels and short stories and lore, it was just good. When discussing the original NieR, I did so deliberately divorced from the paratext that clings to it like barnacles to a ship's hull as much as to underline this point as for my own indulgence. I wanted to talk about a game I played when I was young and left a huge impression on me that lingers to the present, without letting the vast Lore that now surrounds NieR obscure the game I loved so much back then. It was something I couldn't do for Drakengard - barring a particularly poetic traumatic brain injury, I will never be able to become someone who sees that game without NieR lingering in the back of my mind. Even now, it's hard for me to see this game as an extension of that one, so distinct are their approaches and intentions.
It's not that NIER's connections to Drakengard are absent. Even early on in the game's life, these links were noticed and remarked upon. Much of the weapons were grandfathered in from that game, and there are scattered references to a Red Dragon that fell from the sky being the start of all the troubles, references made more direct in the World of the Recycled Vessel DLC. In a modern era of aggressively marketed franchise intertextuality, these references jump out a bit more, but they remain well in the background, never stepping forward into the spotlight shared by Nier, Kainé, Weiss, Emil, and Yonah. Like Drakengard itself, whose joke ending's brazen confidence displays none of the import it will later be asked to bear, the connected work is at such a distance in the game itself that you could easily forget it entirely. And it doesn't consume the work entirely: for all that the Red Dragon is the inciting incident for all that follows, so much remains distant, vague, or even disconnected from it entirely, such as the dungeon of rules in the desert. For all that it was the game that started building Yoko Taro's notoriety, many of the signifiers that would come to associated with his aesthetic are absent in NIER.
Enter Grimoire Nier.
Grimoire Nier is a guidebook for NieR that was released in Japan shortly after the game came out, and was translated to English much, much later in a revised edition in the 2020s. It contains a recap, a walkthrough, concept art, behind-the-scenes information, and lore details and short stories that have forever altered how this game was not only perceived, but have determined the direction of the entire DrakeNier project, most prominently, with an extensive and exhaustive timeline of events from Ending E of Drakengard, all the way to the end of NIER. It explains the responses of various world governments to the event, the spread of the black disease that led to the extinction of humanity, their war with an almost completely irrelevant army of monsters called Legion, and finally, to the execution of and ultimate failure of Project Gestalt. Many proper nouns are thrown around. The Book of Revelation is evoked. It's all very weighty and important.
Except, of course, it isn't. None of this actually matters, at least as far as the game itself is concerned. The concerns of NIER did not lie in telling you all the details about how White Chlorination Syndrome is transmitted, it didn't discuss the final battle with Red Eye, the leader of the Legion, in the ruins of Jerusalem. It cared about it about as much as it cared to establish that the main characters breathe air or eat food. It was there, but wholly insignificant to the actual drama. It's aesthetic concerns lay far more in the worlds of the Brothers Grimm than that of Brandon Sanderson, and it prioritized the information it gave you accordingly.
This kind of information wasn't even important to the game on a structural level. When the game gives the player documents on Project Gestalt, it does so right before the Popola and Devola boss fight, and the idea of interrupting that emotional sequence to read some documents feels absurd to me, equally so the idea of reading them after Emil's death scene. This tiny stretch of space in the back stages of the Shadowlord's Castle is the only time you have to read them in the game: once you hit the end, you lose them until you get here in the next playthrough. It was part of the periphery, a tiny bit of detail and texture that helped contextualize the strict Why of the game's events, but that was all it was. Similarly, the game only gives you the barest details on the goings-on of Emil's mansion, because its focus is squarely on Emil himself. It gave you just a tiny bit of information, enough to drive the narrative and inform the goings-on as much as they needed, but wisely sidestepped the kind of step-by-step explanations that the timeline necessarily is comprised of, because the characters and their reactions to their context is ultimately more impactful than the series of events that created the context.
The timeline changes that. It drowns the powerful suggestions and impressions left by the game's lighter touch in a mountain of Lore that overwhelm the text itself. it drags NIER out of the realm of the post-modern fairytale and into the realm of pure science fiction, where each image refers back to an internally explicable material context within the game world. This isn't necessarily a worse approach, but it is decidedly a different approach, and it often over-signifies things that were of minimal significance in the game itself. You would be forgiven, for example, for forgetting that the words "Hamelin Organization" and "Legion" are scarcely mentioned in the game, if at all, given the significance the timeline places on these things. It renders the game, almost literally, into a footnote: the final bum note at the end of a complex and mysterious apocalyptic saga, rather than a story of someone who would rather fish than be attentive to a child in their care.
There is, however, clearly an appeal to all of this, an appeal clearly demonstrated by the interview in the center of Grimoire Nier, wherein the interviewer grills Taro at length about the mechanics of the timeline presented in the book, and Taro eagerly responds. Two entire pages of the interview: more than is devoted to the entire character of Kainé - are spent on a back and forth about the minutae of just how the Gestalt and Replicant system works, and both Taro and the interviewer are clearly enraptured. It's a little surprising to read, given how insignificant this was to the appeal of the actual game for me, but it shouldn't surprise me, really: people like lore. More people will watch youtube videos that explain The Horus Heresy than will ever read the entire 50-odd novel series that presents those events and characters in a more traditionally dramatic framework. Five Nights at Freddys became a cultural phenomenon as much because of its Lore as its scares, and there are those who are fans of the lore despite not enjoying the games. Learning information about fictional worlds has is something people enjoy doing even when separated from any dramatic context for that information.
Drakengard did not have lore. It's two nations were called The Union and The Empire. It had stock fantasy archetypes presented without context for their existence. It was completely uninterested in any question about how or why the situation of the game came about other than what is strictly necessary context. Even the weapon stories were, for the most part, disconnected pieces of microfiction with no clear connection to the world or characters of Drakengard. There's a little lorein Drakengard 2, with more of the weapon stories exploring the past of General Oror, significant to the plot but dead before the game begins, but that game remains primarily a character drama, and is not particularly concerned with details of setting beyond what is immediately important. NIER offered some scant details on how its world ended up the way it did, but it kept itself within the realm of broad suggestion. It didn't even have Weapon Stories like the Drakengards…until Grimoire Nier, which not only offered stories for each weapon - written by Jun Eishima, who also wrote the bulk of the short stories in Grimoire Nier - but one of these weapon stories - namely, the ones added in the World of the Recycled Vessel DLC - is simply some more timeline entries about the White Chlorination Syndrome disaster. Grimoire Nier is well and truly the introduction of Lore to the DrakeNier aesthetic, a marked contrast from a series of games that largely rejected it. If one wishes to point to a singular moment where the Taro Aesthetic coheres, where his shared universe fixations and stylistic flourishes become an expected, pre-packaged routine, it's right here in Grimoire Nier.
If Taro and his interviewer seem to wholeheartedly welcome the timeline and its assertions into the fabric of NIER, I find myself less enthusiastic. It's not just that this all largely feels ancillary to the game itself, it's that some of the additions change the game in ways I'm not sure I'm comfortable with, details that undermine the strength of the game's images and poetry. There's a tidbit from the timeline claiming that mostly only the rich and powerful underwent the process to become Gestalts, a detail which renders their plight much less sympathetic, and clashes badly with the sheer melodrama with which the game asks us to invest wholeheartedly in their tragedies and suffering. Similarly, learning that Emil and his sister were tortured as part of an effort to produce weapons against a genuine existential threat that was incapable of being negotiated or reasoned with, I find makes their whole situation just a touch less interesting, no longer able to be as clearly read in time with Nier's own cruelty towards Yonah. Following Grimoire Nier as a guide to its story leads to the same result as following it as a guide for its dungeons and quests, knowing every answer before you find it, never coming to your own journey or conclusions, entering every situation it presents you with the defined limit of its possibility clearly marked and fenced.
Ambiguities vanish and mysteries disappear, whilst new details threaten to bury the old. It's not all deletirious, though: there are elements of this book that have enriched the game's characters in ways that can be constructive. Certainly, Emil's sister Halua wasn't really a character until her story in this book. Similarly, many find that the short story that explores Brother Nier's history with a child predator in seafront adds a dimension to his character absent in Father Nier. And I would agree: that is a dimension to his character that isn't present with Father Nier, but only because it isn't present in the game - it emerges entirely from Grimoire Nier. Whether that is additive or subtractive is entirely up to a given reader - though I would question why we collectively agree that this past does not apply to Father Nier, or how you might feel about Jun Eishima writing this particular short story given her openly expressed attraction for the younger version of Brother Nier. But in the version of Nier packaged and reproduced by the internet, this separation no longer exists, many not making a distinction between the game and the book in this regard. It becomes as much a part of the experience as Facade or the Junk Heap is. Whether this detail makes this version of Nier better than the game that released in 2010 depends on you. But it certainly makes it different. And there are other details that I find far more straightforwardly destructive.
Of all the details added or altered by Grimoire Nier, the most significant of all is the end of the timeline, which asserts that by killing the Shadowlord, all the gestalts will relapse, and in turn, all the Replicants will die to the Black Scrawl. The Replicant Nier, in killing the Shadowlord to reclaim Yonah, functionally doomed the human race to extinction. Those unfamiliar with NieR except in the abstract may be surprised to learn that this detail is not, in fact, present in the game, but is added in Grimoire Nier's timeline, given that it becomes the singular point upon which every single future NieR game revolves around. However you may feel about this as a springboard from which to launch future games, I find it a troubling and problematic detail to inflict upon this game. There's a power in stating directly that the kind of possesive violence of NIER's finale could lead to the end of humanity, but you could comfortably argue that the game already does that: all this detail adds is a suggestion that it would be better for all involved if Replicant Nier simply gave up and let himself be used by Gestalt Nier, which is not only dramatically limp but renders a messy and emotionally heavy situation into something tediously solvable. It's a moment where the sci-fi jargon infects a crucial moment and wounds it, leaving it forever diminished as long as this information hangs over it.
I think this detail, among others, is one that NIER is better off without. And I can enjoy NIER perfectly fine without it: the attempt to rewrite NIER into a sci-fi apocalypse sequel to Drakengard and a game about fighting the Legion that hasn't (yet) been made finds little purchase in my appreciation of the game itself, of the texture and rhythms that actually playing it brings out, in much the same way that the knowledge of the existence of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock does not dimish the emotional power of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Does knowing that the "Snow in Summer" that begins the game is actually millions of humans that have turned into pillars of salt due to rejecting a pact from an extra-dimensional monster from a different Square Enix game make that image more powerful? For some, it might. For me, the power of that image lies in its strangeness, in the simple, palpable wrongness of a July blanketed in falling snow. I like The Red Dragon as arepresentation of the intrusion of the magical onto the world, the infection of of fairytale dreams and logic into the real, and not as something that I know was studied in labs by the united nations government for several years before being stolen by a mystery box. When I play NIER, I prefer to let all of this fall by the wayside.
This, however, is a luxury granted by my playing the game in 2010 without any knowledge of the connections it had to any past or future games, a perspective I have that produces biases of its own. I am, for instance, unapologetically a fan of the Father version of Nier over the Brother version, despite the latter's "canonical" status. I think the game is simply more powerful as a story of parental violence and possession than a story of anime sister complexes. Many fans of NieR, owing to the games less-than-stellar sales at launch and perhaps a reputation that the gameplay itself was a chore when compared to the narrative, have experienced the game without playing it, an experience which comes with it many of its own biases and contexts that shape the audience's relationship with the game.
Whether due to the inaccessibility of the game, or its reputation as having weak gameplay, for many people, perhaps a larger audience than ever played the game at launch, NIER became a game experienced entirely via secondary derivative forms, like Let's Plays, Video Essays, and even articles like this one, and invariably, these sources would often fold in Grimoire Nier into their presentation of the text, presenting these events alongside the events of the game with little distinction. The NieR that emerges from this is a distinct object from the game, one for which the timeline ephemera of Grimoire Nier is elevated to primacy, and rendered inextricable from it. This version of NieR disseminates further as it is recounted and retold by each successive teller, determined to give the audience everything they might "need to know" about this game in anticipation of its sequel. Fan additions, such as a photoshop in a Let's Play (pictured below) by self-professed Navy Seal With 300 Confirmed Kills "TheDarkId" depicting Caim from Drakengard as Red Eye, leader of the legion, becomes woven back into the fabric of NieR as it is presented in future accounts. More than once I've had to solemnly inform a friend that this was something invented by a SomethingAwful goon, and not any part of NIER itself. Is it any wonder that people are fooled, however? This fan "hoax", if you want to call it that (though it was never intended to be such), fits perfectly into the imagined aesthetic and narrative goals of NIER that emerge from an understanding of the work where Grimoire Nier's timeline is key a text as the game itself, that is invested in this kind of franchise connective tissue with Drakengard, that is invested in Red Eye and Legion in a way the game released in 2010 never was.
And for everything this new NieR picks up as it moves through the collective consciousness of the internet, every stray bit of extended universe paraphernalia that becomes as important to the narrative as the character of Grimoire Weiss, it loses something in turn. Things that don't connect to The Lore, things that were important to the aesthetic and narrative goals of NIER but were unimportant to the aesthetic goals of Grimoire Nier, things that can't potentially figure into future installments, get left behind in the wreckage. A recap that is focused on getting a prospective new fan "ready" for a future installment will explain what Red Eye is, but won't explain that you can grow a Lunar Tear by driving yourself completely nuts with the game's gardening systems for a couple months, and so, the NieR that exists in the mind of that audience contains the latter, and not the former. And a NIER without the gardening is not a version of that game I will ever welcome into my heart.
And yet, for all I can claim that this phantom NieR is not what NIER really is, it's a difficult argument to make in 2026. I've tried to keep my feet firmly in the contemporary moment for each of these works as we arrive at them in turn, but in this moment we simply have to acknowledge the existence of NieR: Automata, a worldwide smash hit that sent this entire oeuvre from niche cult classic to mainstream superstardom, a sci-fi game about robots fighting androids in the post-apocalypse, itself a sequel to stage plays that drew on elements at the periphery of NieR's Lore, and set in the aftermath of Grimoire Nier's assertion that the end of NIER represented the end of humanity. It is invested in being a Sequel to a Franchise in a way NIER was never bothered by. By any reasonable metric, NieR: Automata is a sequel to Grimoire Nier, and not NIER. Or, at least, it is a sequel to the cultural perception of NIER created by Grimoire Nier.
It's a transformation that is present within the book itself, also. Serving as the concluding part of Grimoire Nier - replete with splashy typography that marks this story with a significance that the other short stories didn't get - is The Lost World, a story that quite boldly announces itself as a new "Ending E" to NIER. Oh, and it's written by Yoko Taro. It is in fact, the first thing we've covered actually credited to Yoko Taro as a writer.
In The Lost World, we follow Kainé to the Forest of Myth, where she battles an army of robots led by the administrator of what is revealed to be the techno-organic computer that is the Forest, who tediously exposits about Project Gestalt lore throughout the battle. Kainé, along with Emil, stops the Administrator from destroying the world, and somehow, brings Nier back from non-existence thanks to a copy of his information being stored inside the tree.
It's striking that the first piece of writing we actually get from Yoko Taro in this series consists of him fatally undermining his greatest work. It's not that the story only manages to wring out surface-level evocations of Kainé and Emil. It's not just that Nier's resurrection robs the game's final choice of it's impact, erasing the decision between the cruel mercy Kainé asks for and her salvation at the cost of abandoning her and Yonah. It's not that it's a bizarre turn given Taro's reputation: the mad genius who loves to kill his characters and make you, the player, suffer, instead deciding to offer the kind of shallow, pandering move of resurrection and reversing tragedy that marks a soap opera in decline. It's not even that it flies in the face of what the game was doing with violence by positing that if Kainé simply did some more killing, everything would be fine. I mean, it is all that. But it's also that the very style of this new ending is an extreme tonal and aesthetic shift from the game supposedly leading up to it. It doesn't work at all as an ending to NIER.It works as an ending for Grimoire Nier.
The damage it can do is limited by its format, of course. Grimoire Nier did not update the game with a new ending that lets you get your save games back if you decide that actually, you'd like to have that cake you just ate. If, somehow, it did alter the game itself, I might have stronger feelings about it. But as a short story in an artbook, it remains safely contained as a baffling curio, if a revealing one. Grimoire Nier cannot harm NIER as a game. But NieR as a cultural object? NieR as an ongoing project? There its influence cannot really be ignored.
In the book's interview, Taro admits that he's not really interested in making a sequel to NIER, claiming that instead, what he's really interested in is "expanding NieR's lore", envisioning a growing franchise of stage plays, audio dramas, and books like this one. What's striking to me about this quote is not that the existence of NieR sequels means he was wrong, it's that he was right. Yes, there have been more NieR games since this interview, but I don't think Yoko Taro ever made a sequel to NIER. I think what he's made, what the entire NieR multimedia franchise consists of, in all its facets, are sequels to Grimoire Nier, a book which casts a shadow over this series so enormous, that you can't even see the game anymore.
In the end, NIER is gone. All that's left is the absence, a line traced around an emptiness inside and out, made of an unshakeable feeling that whatever was lost, it was something very special.
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