Nearly 4 years after release, Nier: Automata's final secret found

Three years and ten months after release, someone finally found Nier: Automata's final secret. It was announced by discoverer Lance McDonald today, then confirmed  by series director Yoko Taro less than seven hours later. The confirmation of the final secret was also noted by the official Nier account. Spoilers follow, but frankly you'd literally have to delve into the game's code to discover this. Here's Yoko Taro's tweet, with McDonald's tweet embedded : Link to tweet here

The final secret is a cheat code performed after killing the first boss. It's a complex series of attacks, rolls, and moves in the vein of classic cheats that must be done while standing in a specific spot. Once performed, the player is instantly transported to the "last" of the endings, of which the game has many, a decision that deletes the user's save and unlocks bonus game modes. To be clear, it's not an exploit, it's a cheat deliberately programmed into the game. Asked how he found it, Lance McDonald replied "hundreds of hours of reverse engineering."

As of this writing, McDonald hasn't fully revealed what the inputs are to activate the cheat code, but the video above shows him doing so near some barrels after defeating the aforementioned first boss. The screen fades to black, and he is then able to sacrifice his save data.

Following this discovery, NieR: Automata's director Yoko Taro Quote Tweeted McDonald's video and appeared to confirm the discovery by saying "3 years 10 months.

The Japanese NieR Twitter also acknowledged the find, saying (via Google Translate), "It seems that the last secret has been discovered."

McDonald has said he will be releasing a full video of the game-skipping cheat code soon, but be sure to let us know if you figure it out before then!