The secret door of Nier Automata that no one can discover is getting even stranger

factions. in combat. Bonus whispers. Over the past few days, a file Yoke: automatic society was tearing himself apart Via a secret room, no one knows how to get in, which can be anything from a prank to cutting content to a well-executed spot for viral marketing. One thing is for sure: this whole story is crazy.

I mean of course something like this would happen in the orbit of PlatinumGames Yoke: automaticIt is an unpredictably bizarre action RPG in which you can inadvertently lead to the end of the game by eating a fish. It was bred by game design legend Yoko Taro and was first released in 2017. Yoke: automatic Loaded with secrets and multiple endings. By last year, players thought they’d seen all the game had to offer when top designer and data worker Lance MacDonald I found a loophole– Buried in the game code – allows you to go straight to the “real” ending. Even Yoko Taro himself seemed to assert that it was the “ultimate secret”.

But two months ago, this ultimate secret began to seem less than definitive. One Yoke: automatic One player, known only through their Reddit handle Sadfutago, posted a question to a few professionals. yoke subreddits: “How do you get into church?”

Posts are largely ignored. The few people who responded were confused. huh? the church? What the hell is this boy talking about?

But Sadfutago kept escalating the question out of place yoke subreddits until the homepage is not very specialized for this series. They posted video evidence of this church in a series of clips. (One of these photos was shot vertically with a mobile phone, although it only shows the entrance to the antechamber that leads to the hallway at the end of which this church is.) Here, for reference, is one of the more comprehensive videos:

Pretty wild, isn’t it? But the craziest thing here is that no one, apparently including Sadfutago, knows how to enter this room. Set in the copied city — level in Yoke: automatic With wide streets lined with Bavarian houses – the shots show the protagonist somewhat of an A2 entering a room, descending a staircase, and wandering down the hallway. All the architecture seems to fit right in with everything else in the copied city. It appears to be a legitimate discovery.

This does not mean that it is in and of itself. We know that there are no easily accessible tools for doing something like modifying a game, but there are multiple aspects of it all that don’t really add up.

“The evidence, at this point, is highly indicative of the fact that it is not real and it is hard to believe that it could be,” said Discord user Vats3, referring to an unsecured Church in yoke Dispute AdjustmentTell Kotaku. “The probability of it being a fake is much higher than it being real.”

Over the past few days, yoke Discord users quickly created a few channels expressly dedicated to learning how to get into the church. One of them, #churchhunting, has been burning like wildfire all morning, breaking the evidence for and against the health of the church. At 9:40 AM ET, I looked away. When I came back again, at 9:57 AM ET, the number of new messages was a staggering: 271. In 17 minutes. The channel maintained this pace throughout the day.

As with most discussions that run online, it’s an astonishingly complex web of thoughts, feelings, and thoughts, in which many people think a lot of different things. But, yes, most people fall into one of two camps. Big kicks now…

case for

Given how realistic the church and its surroundings are, it is easy at first glance to believe that this is the content it was initially set up to be in. Yoke: automatic. It has voice acting, cinematic, and the entire nine yard space—too sophisticated to be a style, some members of the community initially thought.

right Now , yoke The mod community is trying to emulate the Hidden Church, just to see if it can be added to the game, says Discord user Meowsandstuff Kotaku. It’s still a work in progress, but here’s an early look:

“I started working on it yesterday just to imagine what a church would look like,” Meowsandstuff said. “It is possible that the way I designed it may not be immediately compatible with it yokedrive because it lacks important things like decorations in new areas.”

Sadfutago has been proven to play on PlayStation 4, and appears to be using version 1.00 of Yoke: automatic—This is the version that hasn’t had any updates coming out in the five years since release, which means it theoretically includes all of the original game files.

Then there is the name. in the beginning, yoke Players discover that “futago” translates to “twins” in Japanese. This will also follow a story Yoke: automatic, which features twins as part of its melancholy streak. But according to the screenshots shared with Kotaku By Azura, a member of yoke Dispute Adjustment, Sadfutago questioned the claim: in response to someone pointing out, Sadfutago wrote, “?? There is no Futago clan.” (Sadfutago did not respond to KotakuComment requests.)

Then again, based on Futago’s Reddit comment history, it’s also clear that there is a communication barrier between the person who discovered the secret and anyone else. The messages look elaborate, so we can’t assume there’s a 1:1 understanding of what’s going on. More on this when we get to the case against For the secret door to be real.

“The Futago clan is probably a Naruto signal, and convince a lot of people, myself included, that the OP is most likely a child,” Azura said. Other messages, including the one Sanfutajo mentioned the need to use a “mother’s phone,” have confirmed this belief.

The area is also filled with secondary references, obvious nods to other titles of Platinum’s works, including BayonettaAnd the DrakengardAnd the Bayonetta (which has a new entry scheduled for this year), and Nier: Buncha Duplicate Numbers (which was released last year but when Yoke: automatic, has not been announced). That’s it, if nothing else, a signature stamp from Yoko Taro.

“I won’t bypass developers to cut content that teases a new game,” Azura said.

The case against

“No idea how this video was shot, but it’s clearly not what they say,” MacDonald Wrote on Twitter. “They are lying about the situation.”

Although no one can say it with 100% certainty – a negative is harder to prove than a positive – the evidence for something fishy about this whole thing has been exhaustively cataloged in 14 Google Doc صفحة pagesHe is widely credited with leading the Meowsandstuff. (He described it to me as a “team effort”). It even includes a spreadsheet that accurately identifies the times Sadfutago submitted to Reddit, along with the erratic nature of those posts.

“Regardless of whether Sadfutago is lying or not, please do not harass them for information or otherwise!” Reads a letter in bold at the top of the document. (Given that many community members think Sadfutago can be a minor, seriously, people, please pay attention to that line.)

Part of the document details down to the inconsistencies in the image, but there is some disagreement about the character model in the clip, which matches that of last year’s “Yorha” character. Nier: Buncha Duplicate Numbers– Right down to the model bracelet. For some people, like Azura, this and other references mean that the developers have sneaked something into the game. But for people who think this whole thing is a wild hoax, it’s a sign of a clever steering error.

“Yoko Taro games are full of references and it is entirely plausible that he would make a hidden area with more references,” Vats3 said. “Anyone who knows Yoko Taro knows this, so a moderate will just use it [it] to try to make their trick more believable.”

Sadfutago is allegedly playing a base version of the game meaning they will have access to content that others, who are playing more updated versions of the game, won’t be able to see. The gaming world is no stranger to wild discoveries from unprecedented games. In 2018, for example, players of an unpatched version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider have found A completely different ending It was not meant to be included in the retail version. but in the subject Yoke: automaticQuestions remain.

“The pre-release review copy ran without proof of the secret,” Meowsandstuff said.

Then there is the more pessimistic reading: a copy of Yoke: automatic It’s coming to the Nintendo Switch in October, which gave some people the impression that the whole thing could be a marketing scheme. Part of what fuels this conspiracy theory is that Sadfutago has kept posting on Reddit, but seems to be repeating exactly what others have been saying about the discovery. While there is likely a language barrier, others now believe that this may be the case of someone who forgot to log out of their account while trying to appear as other people. And if so, this is probably viral marketing after all. But we cannot be certain of that.

predicament

Despite the mounds of evidence that something is fishy about Sadfutago’s secret discovery, there is still…no sure answer. Yoke: automaticThe official feeds didn’t help clarify anything either. After directing followers to take a look at his frustratingly obscure bio on Twitter, Yoko Taro came back to mind again this morning. “Yesterday. My followers increased by over 1,000 accounts. But I’m not what I expected. Normadi, don’t tweet in English. Because I’m an idiot. And I love sausage and beer” Taro[ttweetinEnglishlanguageBecauseIamsofoolishAndIlovesausageandbeer”Taro[ttweetinEnglishlanguageBecauseIamsofoolishAndIlovesausageandbeer”TaroWrote. (Same dude. Same thing.)

Upon reaching for comment, Square Enix representatives did not immediately have anything to add to the registry.

“It’s a pity that we can’t ask him about this,” Azura said.

On the yoke Editing Discord, Meowsandstuff floated the idea of ​​a $500 bounty for anyone who could legitimately, though noting Kotaku That it wasn’t a “serious show” (for now). If, hypothetically, there should be a bonus, you’ll need to show “clear source-resolution video taken from the same device the game was played on; including multiple angles and close-up shots of areas we don’t have a lot of videos or screenshots on.” to her “.

Over the past 24 hours, I have been immersed in the mystery of the surrounding community yokeThe Secret Chapel, and I felt like I had barely scratched the surface. I also feel that, as with the internet’s best heated debates (who remembers here dress?), the conversation has just begun, and may never end. There is no solid evidence – the kind Meowsandstuff pointed out – that neither side will get an answer here.

But I don’t think the answer is the bottom line. Amidst all the bullshit in the world right now – the housing crisis, the uncontrolled local outbreak, the ongoing global pandemic, potential second sparks – things like this are what we all need. It’s fun to theorize, hopefully, to get a distraction to just laughs and giggles.

“I still wish to believe that it was real,” Azura said. “Honestly, it would be very, very, very funny.”