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daxieoclock · 1 year

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Drakenier Timeline

Someone was interested.

Here’s a writeup of the Drakengard and Nier interconnected timeline, making a lot of extrapolations and assumptions.

I’ve divided the timeline into three sections based on the three confirmed areas of story we’ve gotten so far: Midgard, Earth and The Cage. The games covered here are: Drakengard 1, Drakengard 2, Drakengard 3 (and spinoff manga), Nier, Nier Stageplays (briefly), Nier Automata, andd Nier Re:Incarnation. Re:Incarnation is still updating so that section of the story is subject to alterations. It’s also the most incoherant, despite providing a few aspects of glue we can use to piece together the timeline. This timeline also does not include Argo or Yudil’s stories since, interesting as they may be, we don’t yet have any interesting timeline implications to draw from them.

TW for mentions of parental abuse, sex abuse, eye trauma, child death and suicide

Midgard

- Akeha is an assassin in a country that resembles feudal japan, and is assigned to kill a young princess, but ends up having a change of heart and kidnapping the girl instead, raising her as her own child. In order to hide their identities, Akeha takes the name Scarlet and the princess takes the name Indigo. [Re:In Chapter 4, Hidden Story 4:7]

- A girl known only as Zero is abandoned by her abusive mother, doing sex work to survive, and befriends another young sex worker named Indigo. The two rob the brothel together and try to escape, but Zero is captured again, while Indigo takes the money and runs. Zero kills her handler and finally flees as well, free for a few years, eventually caught and imprisoned for that murder. She meets five other prisoners and forms a sisterly bond with them, but they all die in prison. Zero only survives after a parasitic flower of supreme destructive potential blooms within her. Zero, afraid of the flower's whims, tries to die to protect the world. The flower resurrects her sisters, giving them each a fraction of her power, and Zero has to hunt them down to expunge the flower for good. [D3]

- Zero is watched over by an android named Accord. We'll get to her later. [D3]

- Zero does manage to expunge all the Intoners, and successfully makes the first pact with her dragon Mikhail to end the Intoner lineage with her. However, the flower has secretly created a clone of One, known also as One (but he's a guy. for some reason). He appears, kills Zero and Mikhail, and then goes on to have children and ensure the Intoner bloodline perpetuates, even as the Flower itself seems to vanish. Brother One also forms the Cult of the Watchers, hinting potentially that the Flower has some connection to them. His descendants, Seere and Manah, are important in Drakengard 1 and 2. [D3]

- The Red Eye disease begins to manifest as a direct result of the Watchers’ meddling. Brother One tries to redeem himself by exterminating the disease, but ends up realizing that he is the source of it. He dies in an attempt to cull the diease, not realizing that the Red Eye is tied to his bloodline. The disease perpetuates into Drakengard 1. [D3 Spinoff Manga]

- Humans, likely through the lingering influence of the Intoners, begin to learn and master magic. Saryu and Priyet are two young mages at a magical academy. Priyet falls in love with Saryu, but is taken advantage of, abused and assaulted by their mutual friend. That friend tells Saryu that he and Priyet are dating, and Saryu flees in heartbreak, leaving Priyet to their friend’s whims. To protect herself, she ends up killing that friend, though he curses her to become a Werebeast, captive to her trauma and cursed to never know love. Priyet, as the Werebeast, kills 99 other magic users in desperation to become human again, before Saryu confronts her. Realizing what happened, horrified and guilty, Saryu attempts to take her own life. We don’t see the outcome, but the curses here do have interesting implications on Red Eye and similar “curses” in Drakengard. [Re:In Sun/Moon Chapter I and II, Hidden Stories II:1-4, Magical Pharmacology and Forbidden Tomes of Thaumaturgy Memoirs]

[TW Animal Death for these next three.]

- Drakengard 1 happens. Lots of deeply fucked-up people doing horrible things to each other. Then the Cult of the Watchers attempt to summon the Queen Beast Watcher to end the world. The apocalypse is narrowly averted EITHER by the protagonist Caim, his dragon Angelus and the Queen-Beast of the Watchers being sent to real world Japan (more on that later) or Caim sealing them away using Angelus as that seal. The timeline splits here. [D1]

- If Angelus becomes the seal, Drakengard 2 happens. [D2]

- "Modern day" equivalent of Midgard, scientists attempting to engineer crops to combat a worldwide famine end up resurrecting the Watcher's Flower. Those scientists are cloned into cyborg soldier bodies (two important ones being 063y and F66x) repeatedly over thousands of years to try and kill the Flowers and save humanity, but it turns out humanity is long since gone. All that is left is this nightmare war machine stuck in a standstill with the Flowers until the end of time. This is a parallel to Automata, but can't exist in the same timeline. [Re:In Chapter 7 and 8]

Earth

- Caim, Angelus and the Queen Beast appear over modern day Japan and are shot down by the Japanese air force. Caim, infected by the Red Eye disease, vanishes and becomes patient zero for the Red Eye on Earth, influencing a state of global unrest. Angelus and the Queen Beast are autopsied and studied, and the Japanese government starts conducting experiments on the resulting particles, called Maso, that will eventually yield the Grimoires, Emil and his sister. [D1, Nier]

- A man of an unknown name acts a a modern day programmer, and escapes from his mundane life by playing video games. Dreaming of being a game designer, he eventually quits his job but dies abruptly and tragically before he can start his new career. He’s thrown into a hellish dream world, becoming a monster, losing all memories and clinging only to the name that truly represented him, the name of his video game avatar: Levania. [Re:In Levania Dark Memories]

- Lars and Griff are two soldiers stuck in a long war during this period of global unrest. Their army’s technology is more advanced, including an anti-infantry water cannon, but these soldiers use both guns and swords, a regression that would become more prominent after Project Gestalt. [Re:In Chapters 9 and 10, Hidden Stories 9:3]

- An advanced military state at war infuses magic and technology to create an artificial intelligence to automate military activity, loosely based on the original Intoners. This AI, Marie, and her prototype successor, Yurie, are directly symbolically tied to Zero and the Intoner sisters. After trying her best but failing to stop the country’s capital city from being destroyed, Marie deserts her post and becomes a digital idol, using the magic of song to soothe people and influence independence and subtle rebellion. Her signature song is Normandy, from one of the Yorha Stage Plays, which could be seen as tongue-in-cheek reference to Accord (a Yorha android) being present during Drakengard 3. Marie’s sister, Yurie, is created without her right eye (the same eye that Zero lost to the Flower) and haunted by her imperfection. She eventually hunts down Marie and kills her, tearing out Marie’s eye to replace her own. Yurie becomes complete, only to realize her existence as a machine of war, and end her own life as well. The country collapses soon after. [Re:In Sun/Moon Chapter III, IV]

- The remains of the Queen Beast, beyond being the source of magic in this world, also causes a new offshoot of Red Eye called White Chlorination Syndrome, which turns its hosts into monsters known as the Legion, which the Red Eye lead like an army. Global unrest turns to a full blown pandemic until humankind is on the verge of extinction. In order to preserve the remnants of humanity, the remaining governments institute Project Gestalt, extracting and hiding the souls of all living humans, since WCS and Red Eye are diseases of the souls. The remaining bodies, ageless and given artificial souls, are called Replicants. The last humans also invent the first androids, including the Devola and Popola models, in order to watch over the Replicants and Gestalts (their souls). [Nier]

- Noelle and her sister are some of the first combat androids developed by humanity. Through their work, the Red Eyes and Legion are eventually exterminated, but the Red Eye disease changes form and infects these androids as well. One of the Noelle models slaughter the rest and the entire facility they call home, guarding the entrance to prevent any stragglers from escaping. This quarantine remains in place Exactly one other model remains, stuck in stasis. [Re:In Chapter 11, Noelle’s Dark Memories]

- Even as WCS is eliminated, Devola and Popola uncover an error in Project Gestalt. The Replicants and Gestalt cannot reunite yet, and they buy themselves time while studying the first Gestalt, the Shadowlord, for solutions. The Replicants form a medieval society in the meantime. [Nier]

[These next two can take place almost anytime before the First Machine War.]

- A young girl named Fio lives in a kingdom with a rigid caste system. She and her parents are poor, but make do, until the kingdom changes its policy and introduces a new lowest caste: "Goat People," named that way because their rights are equivalent to livestock or slaves. Fio's parents, goat people, struggle to get by, and her life is miserable. However, she ends up meeting and befriending a strange insectoid monster (Levania), who seems to exist only in her waking dreams. After she meets them, her daily nightmares also stop, which brings her some comfort. One day, Fio's father is fired from his job, and beaten to death when he tries to beg for it back. Then her mother abandons her, leaving the girl homeless. Fio dies from the cold soon after, but her memories and consciousness are brought into the Cage, and her story continues there. [Re:In Chapter 12, Fio’s Recollections of Dusk]

- Impatient with Devola and Popola's lack of progress, the Shadowlord frees the Gestalts and uses an army of them to hunt the globe for the Replicant of his sister, a girl named Yonah. The Gestalts are called Shades by the Replicants, and many of them wander around lashing out randomly, though some befriend Replicants. The Shadowlord finds and kidnaps Yonah’s Replicant, causing his own Replicant, Nier, to join up with a magical talking Grimoire named Weiss, a Replicant girl named Kaine partially possessed by someone else's Gestalt, and the magical weapon Emil, in order to get his sister back. [Nier]

- Devola and Popola try to stop Nier from killing the Shadowlord, but fail, and become pariahs among the other androids as a result. Nier kills the Shadowlord, rescues his sister and dies for metatextual dramatic reasons, but the remake has Kaine and Emil bring him back. Either way, with the Shadowlord gone, the Gestalts and Replicants remain unable to reproduce, and slowly die off, though Emil and the androids remain. [Nier 1.2]

- Rion is a sickly prince who speaks out against his father's warmongering and is imprisoned for that insolence. While in the prison, he meets a clockwork soldier, an early attempt by the Replicants to make their own androids. This soldier, Dismos, helps him escape, and they travel the kingdom together spreading talks of peace. Rion eventually succumbs to his illness and Dismos remains by his prince's side, protecting the boy's body for hundreds of years. [Re:In Chapter 1 and 2]

- A young hunter named Gayle and her sister are captured by a crazed kingdom obsessed with "saving" humanity / Replicants by combining them with android tech. Gayle's arm and leg are replaced with android prosthetics, and her sister is forcibly turned into a cyborg. Gayle rescues her sister and secretly takes care of her, taking up bounty hunting to make ends meet. One of her mark ends up being Dismos, who is still guarding Rion's body even as his own is falling apart. Gayle buries them both side by side. [Re:In Chapter 3]

- A researcher with red hair takes Dismos’s remains and rebuilds him, making androids out of the remains of clockwork soldiers from long ago. This may be one of the Devola or Popola models, or simply a Replicant revitalizing android research, but she is no doubt a foremother to Yorha. [Re:In Dismos Recollections of Dusk]

- The Replicants go extinct. Aliens attack Earth using an army of self-replicating "Machines" led by an advanced AI. Emil and the androids fight these Machines for thousands of years. [Automata]

[We don't know the exact order of these next three, but I did my best.]

- Five thousand years into the Machine War, faced with dangerously low morale, an android named Zinnia come up with the idea of lying to the next generation of androids, convincing them that humanity is alive and hiding on the moon, in order to give them something to fight for. This lie, and the next models of androids being given some machine parts, constitute the YoRHa project. [Automata, Stageplay]

- A robot known as P33, who befriended a Gestalt tens of thousands of years ago, is uncovered and interfaces with the alien-made machines, telling them about how wonderful humanity is. The machines begin to worship P33, calling him Prometheus, and end up killing their alien masters in order to try and break the cycle of violence. This also begins the trend of machines attempting to emulate humans even as they don't understand what a human really is. [Nier, Automata]

- Noelle awakens into a dead world and attempts to escape her facility, ending up facing off against her eldest sister, still standing guard in this quaruntine. Wanting answers, Noelle kills her sister, pushes past, and leaves the facility, seeing the world of machines and androids beyond. Unfortunately, the Red Eye infection exists in her as well, in a form that will come to be known as the Logic Virus. [Re:In Chapter 11, Noelle’s Character story, Ephemeral Memories Memoir]

- Noelle acts as patient zero for the new Red Eye, accidentally infecting other machines and androids. This Logic Virus infects and warps the AI in control of the machines, which comes to identify itself as the Red Girls, taking a form similar to Manah, one of Zero / Brother One's descendants. The Red Girls perpetuate the war between android and machine over and over and over, manipulating both sides and studying the results in attempt to uncover some vital truth that will let them escape the bounds of their own programming and become a higher life form. [Automata]

- A YoRHa android named Accord is sent into the distant past of Midgard through unknown means in order to observe Zero, and possibly other moments in Midgard's history. We don't know for sure why, but it's likely something done by the Red Girls, studying the origins of Red Eye to aid their search for the key to their evolution. [Automata, D3]

- The Red Girls gain control over Yorha and guide them through puppet-conflicts, steadily iterating on them over the course of each "Machine War." We see some of these earlier conflicts depicted in the stage plays and spinoff novels, where the structure of Yorha and the models involved in conflict are somewhat different. However, at the 14th Machine War, they reach an equilibrium they are satisfied with, and conduct that same war over and over and over again with slight variations, primarily focused on the actions of a few key players, namely the androids A2, 2B and 9S. [Automata]

- A2 is involved in one of the first fights of the 14th war and is the lone survivor of her division. She goes rogue and kills every machine she can find in revenge, though has no love for Yorha. 2B and 9S are stuck in a cycle of their own, with 9S constantly looking for more information and 2B having orders to kill him every time he learns too much, at which point a new 9S model will join her. The 14th War plays out a number of different ways, shown by the different ending routes, and none of the androids nor machines (except for the Red Girls) are any the wiser. [Automata]

- After each iteration of the 14th War, the Pods that accompany the Yorha androids (spiritual successors to the Grimoires) and track their progress dutifully report all data to the command (which get to the Red Girls) and then purge their databases. However, after either Ending C or Ending D, 2B's pod (042) decides not to purge his database. He and 9S's Pod resist their programming and decide to move into the next iteration with their memories intact, refusing to let these tragedies continue. [Automata]

The Cage

- The Cage is a dreamlike realm of unknown shape and function which acts as a archive of stories from Midgard and Earth (if not more worlds), making those stories into a form called a “Weapon Memory.” These Weapon Memories are bound, self-descriptively, to different weapons created by somone named Akorde (thought this may be intented to be a joke on “created by accord”), and watched over by a race of entities that resemble sheet-ghosts. While these creatures do not appear to be a full hivemind, many are given the same name, relating esoterically to their job in some capacity. We know only of foujr such names: Mama, Papa, Babe and Carrier. The sheet-ghosts and some other visitors identify the Cage as a repository of human sin, but I believe this to be an interpretation rather than complete fact, since the Weapon Memories do not fit that theme cleanly. [Re:In Lost Archives]

- Over time, some people from different worlds and periods of time end up stumbling into the Cage and becoming trapped. Some, like the Pale Man, help the sheet ghosts, while others simply do their best to survive. [Re:In Lost Archives]

- At some point, the Cage becomes inhabited by massive entities known as Cursed G-ds, who bring with them Black Birds, which infest and corrupt the Weapon Memories. The Black Birds outside of the stories show some rare cognizence, but are most likely similar to the machines in Automata, replicting human behaviors infinitely without proper context. Also like the machines, it’s entirely possible the Birds and their progenitors are implicitly harmless, but inconvenient to the sheet-ghosts. In order to rid this “pest problem,” the sheet-ghosts begin calling on the help of visitors, both pulling people into the cage and going to their world to recruit them. [Re:In]

- Levania, formerly a human, is a dream eating monster residing in one of the realms connected to the Cage. While most monsters spend their time eating the wandering dreams of people in far-off worlds, Levania craves and covets dreams so intensely that he turns against the other monsters, killing them and stealing their dreams as well. He wishes for nothing more than to become human again, and would do anything for it. A sheet-ghost named Carrier visits him, offering to help, to give him the freshest of dreams in exchange for helping rid the Cage of some pests, assuring him that it will turn him human. Levania agrees and is taken to the Cage. [Re:In Original Sin’s Door event]

- Levania’s Carrier introduces him to a young human (actually a Replicant, but human enough) girl named Fio, who is having nightmares about the distorted stories in the Cage. Levania purifies the weapon memories and consumes Fio’s nightmares. Over the course of five nights, the cold and gruff Levania keeps Fio company and slowly begins to open up to the girl, who affectionately refers to him as Mister Monster. [Re:In Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]

- During the sixth night, Carrier reveals the final memory is in progress, and it’s Fio’s, depicting her woeful life and untimely death. Carrier pulls Fio, either wholely or her soul, back into the Cage and does what he promised: turn Levania human...by having Levania and Fio switch bodies. Levania becomes a human/replicant girl, and Fio is healed and becomes a dream eating monster. Confused and not used to the horrifying hunger that Levania has been stifling, Fio flees, and Levania lashes out against Carrier. Despite being initially untouchable, Carrier’s ego ends up being his downfall. While bragging to Levania about his employer being a “supreme being,” Carrier’s protection vanishes instantly, apparently sentenced to death by that surpreme being. Levania gladly kills the ghost, and is approached by another, who identifies herself as Mama, and offers to help the girl undo wht was done. Levania agrees, wishing for Fio’s happiness more than her own. [Re:In Chapter 12]

- As “penance,” Levania purifies another set of Weapon Memories, and finally rids the Black Birds’ influence from her own story. She meets with Fio again, gives her back her own body, and the two reunite as friends before their stories as crystalized into Weapon Memories as well. Whether this places them into stasis, or if Levania and Fio are still playing and exploring the Cage together offscreen, isn’t clarified. Mama meets with another Mama and places the purified Weapons in their rightful place. [Re:In Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12]

- An estranged brother (Yuzuki) and sister (Hina) are pulled into the Cage at a later point as well, Yuzuki guided by a different Mama sheet-ghost and her “child” Babe, and Hina guided by a Papa sheet-ghost. We don’t yet know where their story ends beyond the fact that they both lived in modern day Japan, their parents divorced when they were young, and their mother and father both died right before they were pulled into the Cage. They’ve also been promised a “wish” by their respective guides, though we haven’t found out what these wishes are or if they will be granted as capriciously as Levania’s was. [Re:In Sun and Moon]

#drakengard #nier #nier reincarnation #neir automata #drakennier

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