factions in struggle Whispers of a reward. Over the past few days, the Nier: Automata community has been torn apart by a secret chamber that no one knows how to get into, which can be anything from a prank to content clipping to a well-executed spot of viral marketing. Only one thing is certain: this whole saga is crazy.
I mean, of course something like this would happen in the orbit of PlatinumGames’ Nier: Automata, an action RPG so unpredictably weird that it can inadvertently trigger the endgame by eating a fish. Directed by game design legend Yoko Taro and first released in 2017, Nier: Automata is loaded with secrets and multiple endings. Last year, players thought they had seen everything the game had to offer when prominent modder and data miner Lance McDonald found a loophole, buried in the game’s code, that allowed you to skip straight to the “real” ending “. Even Yoko Taro seemed to confirm this as the “ultimate secret”.
But two months ago, that final secret began to look less than definitive. One Nier: Automata player, known only by his Reddit handle Sadfutago, posted a question on some niche Nier subreddits: “How do you get into the church?”
The posts were largely ignored. The few people who responded were puzzled. huh? The church? What the hell is this kid about?
But Sadfutago persisted, elevating the question from niche Nier subreddits to the series’ extremely non-niche main page. They released video evidence of this church in a series of clips. (One of them was filmed vertically with a mobile phone, although it only shows the entrance to the vestibule leading to the corridor at the end of which this church stands.) Here, for reference, is one of more complete videos:
Pretty wild, right? But the craziest thing here is that no one, apparently including Sadfutago, knows how to get into this room. Set in the Copied City, a Nier: Automata level with wide streets surrounded by Bavarian houses, the footage shows a bit of protagonist A2 entering a room, going down a staircase and walking down a corridor. All the architecture seems to fit perfectly with anything else in the Copied City. Seems like a legit find.
That doesn’t mean it is, per se. We know there aren’t any readily accessible tools to do something like modding the game, but there are several aspects of the whole thing that just don’t add up.
“The evidence, at this point, points so strongly to it not being real that it’s hard to believe it could be,” said Discord user Vats3, who references the Church Non-Believer in the popular Nier modding Discord. Kotaku. “The chance of it being fake is far greater than it being real.”
Over the past few days, Nier Discord users quickly created a handful of channels explicitly dedicated to figuring out how to get into the church. One of them, #church-hunt-live, has been on fire all morning, breaking down evidence both for and against the veracity of the church. At 9:40 ET, I looked away. When I logged back in at 9:57am ET, the number of new messages was staggering: 271. In 17 minutes. The channel has maintained this rate throughout the day.
As with most Internet-driven debates, it’s a dizzyingly complex web of thoughts, feelings, and ideas, with lots of people believing lots of different things. But, yes, most people fall into one of two camps. Now in broad strokes…
The case for
Given the actual look of the church and the surrounding environment, it’s easy to believe at first glance that this is content that was originally planned for Nier: Automata. It has voice acting, cinematography, the whole nine yards, quite sophisticated to be a mod, as some members of the community initially believed.
Right now, the Nier modding community is in the process of trying to simulate the hidden church, just to see if it’s possible to add it to the game, Discord user Meowsandstuff told Kotaku. It’s still a work in progress, but here’s a first look:
Screenshot: Provided by Meowsandstuff
“I had only started working on it yesterday to visualize what the church would have looked like,” said Meowsandstuff. “The way I’ve modeled it may not be immediately compatible with the Nier engine, as it’s missing important things like textures in new areas.”
Sadfutago has been established to be playing on PlayStation 4 and appears to be using version 1.00 of Nier: Automata, meaning a version that hasn’t had an update in the five years since release, meaning that theoretically would do includes all original game files.
Then there is the name. Early on, Nier players discerned that “futago” translates to “twins” in Japanese. This would also be followed up with Nier: Automata’s story, which features twins as part of its brooding plot. But, according to screenshots shared with Kotaku by Nier modding Discord member Azura, Sadfutago disputed the claim: In response to someone pointing it out, Sadfutago wrote, “?? no futago is a clan.” (Sadfutago did not respond to Kotaku’s requests for comment.)
Then again, judging by futago’s Reddit comment history, it’s also clear that there’s a communication barrier between the person who discovered the secret and everyone else. The messages seem jumbled, so we can’t assume there’s a 1:1 understanding of what’s going on. More on that when we get to the case against the secret door being real.
Looking at their other comments, I think they are just repeating what people say and don’t fully understand what they are saying. They are likely struggling to understand English pic.twitter.com/hEtQ4YEVx3
— Sails (@SailsSez) July 27, 2022
“The Futago Clan is probably a Naruto reference, and it convinced a lot of people, including me, that OP is most likely a boy,” Azura said. Other posts, including one in which Sanfutago mentions the need to use the “mom phone,” have reaffirmed this belief.
The area is also littered with minor references, apparent nods to other titles in Platinum’s oeuvre, such as Bayonetta, Drakengard, Bayonetta (which has a new entry slated for this year), and Nier: Replicant Buncha Numbers (which came out last year but, at the release of Nier: Automata, it would not have been announced). This is all, if nothing else, a Yoko Taro signature stamp.
“I wouldn’t put it past the developers to reduce the content of a new game,” Azura said.
The case against
“No idea HOW they made this video yet, but it’s clearly not what they say it is,” McDonald wrote on Twitter. “They are lying about the situation.”
While no one can say with 100% certainty (it’s harder to prove a negative than a positive), the evidence that there’s something fishy about all of this has been comprehensively cataloged in a 14-page Google Doc , widely credited as fronted by Meowsandstuff. (He described it to me as a “group effort”). It even includes a spreadsheet showing the exact times Sadfutago has posted to Reddit, along with the erratic nature of those posts.
“Regardless of whether Sadfutago is lying or not, please don’t harass them for information or not!” reads a bold missive at the top of the document. (Given that many members of the community believe that Sadfutago might be a minor, seriously, listen to that line.)
Some of the document goes down to image discrepancies, but there’s some wrangling over the clip’s character model, which matches a “Yorha” character model in last year’s Nier: Replicant Buncha Numbers, down to the model’s bracelet. For some people, like Azura, this and other references mean that the developers have put something into the game. But for people who think this is all just a wild hoax, it’s a sign of misdirection.
“Yoko Taro’s games are so full of references that it makes perfect sense that he would make a hidden area with more references,” said Vats3. “Anyone who knows Yoko Taro knows this, so a modder would totally use it [it] to try to make their deception more believable.”
Gif: Square Enix / Sadfutago / Kotaku
That Sadfutago is supposedly playing a base version of the game means that they would have access to content that others, playing more updated versions of the game, would not be able to see. The gaming world is no stranger to wild unpatched game discoveries. In 2018, for example, players of an unpatched copy version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider encountered a completely different ending that was not supposed to be included in the retail release. But when it comes to Nier: Automata, questions remain.
“A pre-review copy had been reproduced without any proof of secrecy,” said Meowsandstuff.
Then there’s the more cynical read: A version of Nier: Automata is coming to Nintendo Switch in October, which has given some people the impression that it could all be a marketing scheme. Part of what fuels this conspiracy theory is that Sadfutago has continued to post on Reddit, but he seems to be repeating exactly what other people are saying about the discovery. While there may be a language barrier, others now believe it may be a case of someone forgetting to log out of their account while trying to impersonate other people. And if that’s the case, maybe that’s viral marketing after all. But we can’t say for sure.
The Impasse
Despite the mountain of evidence suggesting that there is something fishy about Sadfutago’s secret discovery, there is still… no definite answer. Nier: Automata’s official channels haven’t helped clarify anything either. After directing followers to look at her frustratingly vague Twitter bio, Yoko Taro weighed in again this morning. “Yesterday. My follower count increased over 1000 counts. But I’m not what you expected. Normally, I don’t tweet in English. Because I’m so stupid. And I love sausage and beer,” Taro wrote. (Same dude….[ttweetinEnglishlanguageBecauseIamsofoolishAndIlovesausageandbeer”Tarowrote(Samedude[ttweetinEnglishlanguageBecauseIamsofoolishAndIlovesausageandbeer”Tarowrote(Samedude