Warning: Spoilers Ahead
NieR: Automata features a destructive choice for its alternate ending. After completing most of the main endings, there’s a tough decision to beat the game fully: Suffer yourself through a gauntlet of a SCHMUP, or sacrifice your game data to help another player get through their gauntlet.
However, recently avid dataminer and hacker Lance McDonald found a cheat code input that allows you to skip right to the end of the game and make the decision on whether to pass on your save data or not.
This isn’t a glitch or exploit, nor bug nor modification. Yoko Taro, the game’s director, hinted in a reply that it’s been “3 years and 10 months” to find this supposed final secret.
To me, I wonder what this means for speedrunning. Typically any% involves ‘beating’ the game in any way possible as fast as possible, and this cheat code input will help greatly.
