Almost four years after NieR: Automata’s release, a cheat code that lets you skip most of the Japanese action-RPG’s content to go straight to the credits sequence of Ending E has been found.
Twitter user Lance McDonald is the discoverer of this cheat code. McDonald wrote, “I found a cheat code in NieR Automata that allows you to skip to the last ending immediately after killing the first boss and unlock the bonus modes. I'll do a full video soon. It's not a glitch, it's an actual cheat code hard-coded into the engine.”
When asked how he’d figured it out, McDonald replied, “Hundreds of hours of reverse engineering.”
The discovery of the cheat code prompted the English NieR: Automata Twitter page to congratulate McDonald, while the Japanese page cautioned social media users who haven’t played the game to be careful of spoilers. The game’s creator Yoko Taro retweeted McDonald’s discovery and noted that it had taken three years and 10 months for the cheat code to be found.
The Japanese NieR: Automata Twitter page also referred to the cheat code as the game’s “final secret” in its tweet. The existence of a “final secret” was first brought up in 2018 in a Weekly Famitsu interview, and it looks like we finally know what it was thanks to McDonald.
It’s cool to see that NieR: Automata, with its multitude of endings, still had a surprise for fans after all this while. If you haven’t played NieR: Automata yet, you really should as it’s a fantastic game. It’s also on sale on Steam, PlayStation Store, and Microsoft Store (albeit on the US version only, and with less than two hours to go at the time of writing.)
