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Adictiv.:NieR - Player[s] Compilation Album for NieR 10th Anniv.

AdictivNieR is a fan-made compilation album featuring remixes and arrangements of NieR Series Music from Unisphere Doujin Music Circle. The album created in commemoration of NieR 10th Anniversary. The music originally composed by Keiichi Okabe & MONACA Team, remixed and arranged by various doujin music and rhythm games composers.

Tracklist

黒皇帝 - The Ancient ~運命論~ [Song of the Ancients]

Yooh - Shadowlord (Yooh Remix)

Arkplot - 廃墟、機械、自然 [City Ruins]

satie - Amusement Park (satie Remix)

rN & ZekaiDot - 終ノ戦 [The Sound of the End]

BilliumMoto - Pas Revoir [Voice of No Return]

Edelstein - Lament for a spark of hope [Vague Hope]

EBIMAYO - 叛逆スル者達 [End Of The Unknown]

ikaruga_nex -  Kali Ma [Grandma / Destruction]

Raphiiel - The Aftermath [Dark Colossus x Vague Hope]

Dictate - Copied City (Dictate Remix)

BilliumMoto - Evening (Bereave, Blood, Black) [Mourning x Dependent Weakling]

Weight of the World (Player[s] Remix), Vocal by Nanao

More info and Download

R.I.P. Strelitzia (and everybody else)

So after everything (released up to 3/8/19), there’s only three people that I can suspect of killing Strelitzia.

Ventus, Brain, and Vanitas.

Every other possible suspect has either a reason not to have done it, or no reason to do it.

Lauriam’s her brother and is desperately investigating her disappearance, seemingly unaware that she was chosen to be one of the leaders like him.

Elrena is helping Lauriam investigate and unless she’s lying in order to manipulate him for some ridiculous end, she doesn’t know about the current state of the world in Union X. Manipulation’s unlikely though since she’s managed to keep up a familiarity with Marluxia all the way through KH3, something I wouldn’t believe possible if he had figured her out (which he would have by then) or if she was trying to accomplish something with a deadline back in UX.

We didn’t do it (I think), since we aren’t shown to remember her and wouldn’t have run headlong into the Keyblade War if we had her copy of the book (unless we were suicidal and/or somehow learned from her book that we’d get saved and mind-wiped by Ephemer and Skuld and would get away with killing her and it’s part of our fall to darkness that causes everyone else’s fall to darkness and we were the villains all along, but that’s such a stretch that it’s borderline insane…)

And Ephemer and Skuld were guaranteed leader spots.

So why those three?

Well, Brain’s currently talking about hijacking the timeline and he seems to have known about the oncoming glitches, so he’s either got a more detailed book than the others somehow (Strelitzia’s maybe?), or he’s really been doing his research. Either way, that he spent most of the time up until now with his face hidden and that he said the same ‘virus that will overwrite the timeline’ phrase as the Secret Reports in KH3 are the main pieces of evidence indicting him. But at the same time, he’s talking about hijacking the timeline so that the world doesn’t end, which it hasn’t on account of UX being a prequel. Unless of course he’s talking about the world splitting into the various different worlds or the eventual collapse of Daybreak Town, but even then that would require him knowing too much about the future.

Maybe he’s the Master of Masters or Luxu in a new body? I don’t know, I just feel like he’s a little too perfect as a suspect to be responsible for everything that goes wrong during and after Union X. It feels like he’s being set up to be a fake-out, a red herring.

Ventus, on the other hand, is too quiet. It’s like if Brain is standing in the middle of the room and yelling ‘I might be the bad guy’, then Ventus isn’t saying anything at all while he’s trying to sneak towards the door. He doesn’t chip in much when the other leaders are deciding what to do, he hasn’t really given any details of his current life away, and we know from BbS that he has a pretty powerful dark side. Of all the repeated non-Disney characters that we see in UX, Ventus is the only one who isn’t eventually a Nobody or dead, so we know he won’t fall to darkness or get killed by the end of UX’s story. I’m assuming that UX is going to end like BbS did, where all of the main characters get screwed over or die in the fallout from the reveal of Strelitzia’s killer, and being said killer who gets away with it while the others fall like dominoes in his wake is a pretty decent reason for Ventus to still be fine afterwards. Otherwise I have to assume that not only does Ventus have nothing to do with that murder, but he doesn’t have anything to do with any of the events afterwards either. Basically, I’m banking on Ventus being in UX for a reason, because if he isn’t involved with the murder plot, and nothing happens to him after that murder plot is resolved, then he’s only in the game to fill a leader space and his eventual dark side comes from… what? Not fighting in the Keyblade War? Not manipulating his fellow wielders? Not doing whatever it takes to get what he wants? If Ventus ends up doing nothing in UX, then it means that his hesitancy during training with Xehanort in BbS comes either entirely from Ventus not liking Xehanort(which is fair), or because he saw what using a Keyblade did to the other kids back during the aftermath of the war that he helped lessen the terror of. And neither of those would excuse Vanitas’ extreme villainy and personality.

So we come to the last, the dreadfully and hilariously most likely suspect, Vanitas, who isn’t even in Union X. Yet.

Don’t worry, I’ll explain myself.

So from the conversation at the end of KH3 between Sora, Ventus, and Vanitas, it really isn’t hard to suspect/learn that Vanitas is the real identity of the Darkness character that showed up to talk with Maleficent in UX. Vanitas even ended the KH3 chat by saying ‘I Am Darkness’. 

So how’s Vanitas in UX? 

He used Xehanort’s time-travelling method through his connection with Ventus. 

Since Ventus and Vanitas are still technically two halves of the same person (but not in the regular KH way), any moment in time that Ventus exists is a time period that Vanitas can send himself to.

So why would Vanitas kill Strelitzia?

Because he already did.

Or rather, because Ventus found out that Vanitas did, learned that Vanitas was himself from the future, which would make him hate and fear himself, which leads to him cultivating both a darkness from self-loathing and a desperate want to avoid that future self, which leads to his refusal to accept that darkness in himself when Xehanort demands he do it to forge a X-Blade, which leads to Xehanort ripping the darkness out of Ventus and forming it into Vanitas (who knows at least an abridged version of what he’ll eventually do because Ventus knew), which leads to Vanitas going along with Xehanort’s plans so that he’ll eventually learn how to time travel so that he can go back in time, and finally it all comes full circle when Vanitas uses that knowledge to go back and commit the murder that he knew would lead to his own creation.

And the only evidence at this point that counters that Homestuck-level time loop nonsense is that we have been led to believe that Ava only picked five people to inherit the books and Unions and not six like the Master did.

tl;dr

If Brain did it, there’s only five books and he did it because he already knew the future and needed to steal Strelitzia’s spot/book in order to change the future.

If Ventus did it, there’s only five books and he did it because he’s not just a nod to the fans and is actually a stone-cold killer who eventually becomes a good boy after being exorcised of his murder demons.

If Vanitas did it, there’s six books and it was to screw with Ventus and to make sure that Vanitas was born.

If someone else did it, it’s because the writers are hacks and thought an unfounded murder with no motive was the best they could do.

Text on the back of the VERUM REX game case in Toy Box

I haven’t really seen anyone talk about this, but there are some Verum Rex games on display and you can actually read what’s on the back of them.

The summary goes;

That’s the story of the King of Truth.

RECLAIM YOUR HEART

After a long fight, weapons have brought great benefits for humanity. But the “KARMA” that sleeps in humans will accelerate further. In the light of the warhead in the night sky, they chose to fight while feeling the pain of their hearts…

Then there are two chunks of texts printed over some images below the summary.

A JOURNEY

WITHOUT A

PLACE TO RETURN

THE WORLD IS

TO ALL HUMANS

TO TURN A PANG(?)

The last word — pang — was difficult to make out. There’s definitely an “A” and an “N” in the middle of the word, and “pang” is the only one that really makes sense (but it’s still a weird word to use in that context).

Here’s my two cents, take it with salt;

The King of Truth is Yozora. (“Verum” means “true,” and “Rex” means “king/the reigning king.”)

Reclaim your heart, huh? Sounds like Yozora is in the same boat as Sora. Perhaps the reason we see him in the secret ending is because, he too, is in the Reaper’s Game. Yozora as a party member… sounds pretty neat to me.

The summary is literally an alternate version of the story of Kingdom Hearts…

“After a long fight, keyblades have brought great benefits for humanity. But the darkness that sleeps in humans will accelerate further. In the light of Kingdom Hearts in the night sky, they chose to fight while feeling the pain of their hearts…”

“A journey without a place to return,” Riku and Sora’s next journey together will keep them from returning home. They will be stuck in another world/worldline/universe, without any hopes of getting back.

“The world is to all humans to turn a pang,” the world that Riku and Sora end up in is a place where all humans wish to change their pain OR the world that Riku and Sora end up is made for humans to change their pain. Pang means “sudden sharp pain,” usually emotionally.

the ultimate mother

お祝いしなきゃな！

NieR Automata Devola & Popola at City Ruins Illustration by Himiko (SINOALICE Mangaka)

The thing about Vanitas

So, the kh new has been so exciting, but what caught my eye was Vanitas, not just Vanitas himself though, but the way that SE showed him. So, we all know that Vanitas has always been the type that keeps his cool and always thought of himself as better than others, but in the trailer we got, it was the exact opposite.

See, imagine being put in his shoes, training under a horrible man that tells you repeatedly that you’re an abomination and that the only reason you live is so that you can make a weapon. Now, you see how in BBS Vanitas’ goal was to forge the X-blade with Ventus? And when he got the X-blade, he was defeated right after? Now let’s go to how we see Vanitas in the trailer vs how we see him in BBS.

Vanitas is almost always known for insulting and mocking a person before a fight, and he did insult and mock Ven/Sora in the trailer, but something was off. The first words he said in the trailer was, “I need the half of me that sleeps on inside your heart.” That doesn’t sound like Vanitas at all, well to me. We know that he would’ve said something like, “I’ll be taking my lesser half now,” or something along those lines, but he didn’t. He said he needed Ven, his other half, which once again doesn’t sound like him.

Now let’s talk about his body expression. When Ventus speaks through Sora, Vanitas immediately recognizes and reacts to him, but the way he did isn’t like him. Vanitas’ response was “Ventus. What a strange place to slither off to,” while walking towards Sora. But the way he said it, the way he talked to Ven was so strange. His voice sounded like he was going to laugh or, as if he was relieved to have found him. Now, the way he reached his hand at Sora.

When he reached for Sora, his hand was shaking. His voice was sinister. Everything I saw throughout those last seconds just screamed desperation and instability.

Vanitas is finally reaching his limit. Everything he has gone through with Xehanort, all that pain, just to fail. Now he’s doing it again, he’s obviously getting desperate.

It was great seeing Vanitas in the new trailer, but he isn’t the character we knew in Birth by Sleep.

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