A Nier: Automata player (the mind-bending roleplaying game from legendary Japanese director Yoko Taro), has discovered an in-game cheat code nearly after almost four years of the game’s initial release. And by using this magnificent cheat code players can skip from the first boss to the very end of the game.
Now the player who unearthed this cheat is a goes by name Lance McDonald on Twitter. Lance McDonald is the same modder who previously managed to run Bloodborne at 60fps. And according to McDonald, he was able to find this ultra-rare cheat by doing hundreds of hours of reverse-engineering of Nier: Automata.
Yoko Taro, the Nier: Automata’s director, also confirmed the cheat code and even left a brief and celebratory reply to McDonald’s tweet, saying that it took 3 years and 10 months for the secret to being discovered at last. He also included a characteristically inexplicable “（◎血◎）” symbol, to express how surprised he is by seeing that someone actually went through the effort to find it.
And for people who are interested to find out how this cheat works. The cheat is simply a button sequence you have to put while positioning Nier: Automata’s main character 2B between a set of barrels during its very first boss fight. And ta-da without spoiling much about the game’s storytelling structure, this unique cheat will send a player all the way to the post-credits scene, finally unlocking chapter select (a feat that normally takes tens of hours of gameplay).
For a game like this which has been out for years, it’s actually surprising that a hardcoded cheat code like this remained behind the doors for this long. But of course, it was only a matter of time before fans like McDonald put their time and effort to find this magnificent game-winning cheat code.