NieR Chronicles 2 — Weiss, Kainé and the First Journey
Chapters in this story
- Grimoire Weiss and Kainé: The First Journey Toward a Promise of Rescue
- 1. The Lost Shrine Where Yonah Went
- 2. A Problem That Survives His Sister's Rescue
- 3. Meeting Kainé at the Aerie
- 4. Another Younger Sibling Waiting at the Junk Heap
- 5. Medicine at Seafront and Letters to the Lighthouse
- 6. Hook Returns, and Kainé Joins the Journey
- 7. Fyra Opens the Way Through the City of Masks
- 8. In the Forest of Myth, Fighting Becomes Reading
- 9. The Red-Bag Man and a Home to Return To
- Sources and Scope
Grimoire Weiss and Kainé: The First Journey Toward a Promise of Rescue
Spoiler notice: This installment covers the boyhood journey in NieR Replicant and background about his companions revealed later. It follows the Replicant version with the older brother as protagonist. The progression and relationships are explained in new prose rather than reproducing the original dialogue.
1. The Lost Shrine Where Yonah Went
The protagonist discovers that Yonah is missing from home. Drawn to the Lunar Tear and wanting to help her brother, she has gone to the Lost Shrine alone. The boy who traveled outside the village to protect his sister now sets out to find her herself. Both siblings wanted happiness for the same family, but Yonah's action shows that being ill did not make her want only to wait without doing anything.
The Lost Shrine is unlike the village's living spaces. The protagonist climbs the approach while fighting Shades, then ascends farther inside the building. Every stretch contains enemies and obstacles between him and his sister. He is not part of an expedition that has fully surveyed the ruins and the Shades within. He presses on to reach Yonah somewhere inside, encountering a peculiar book deep in the shrine.
The book speaks. While the protagonist urgently needs to find Yonah, it introduces itself as the white grimoire and makes its feelings about its name and treatment clear. The protagonist will also call him Weiss, but the name the book himself values is Grimoire Weiss. He is no ordinary implement carried in a backpack: he floats beside people, converses with them, and reacts to how they treat him.
Inside the shrine, the protagonist fights a pair of immense guardians. These enemies, Hansel and Gretel, form the first major obstacle requiring his newly acquired magic alongside his weapons. Weiss's magic adds another means of fighting to the boy's previously solitary weapon attacks. After the battle, he can rescue Yonah and take her back to the village. Finding her in the shrine, however, does not mean curing the Black Scrawl. His sister remains ill, and he must keep searching for an answer.
Hansel is destroyed in this battle, while Gretel remains temporarily incapacitated. The protagonist escapes the shrine as it begins to collapse, taking Yonah and Weiss with him. Encountering both guardians is different from permanently destroying both. The surviving Gretel is an opponent he will meet again when he returns as a young man. For now, he has escaped with his sister, without seeing the time that continues for the enemy left behind.
2. A Problem That Survives His Sister's Rescue
Back in the village, Weiss's presence connects the protagonist to a new possibility. Through Devola's song and Popola's explanation, he hears a story about the white grimoire gathering Sealed Verses and confronting a calamity associated with the black grimoire. Having had no clear answer to his sister's illness, he sees a path he can follow in this account with its names and procedures. His reason for traveling with Weiss becomes more than a single alliance to escape the shrine.
Weiss cannot fully remember his past. He is no perfect guide who knows everything about his intended purpose and leads the protagonist accordingly. The boy wants to cure Yonah, while Weiss needs to recover his abilities and memory. These purposes share one journey. Acquiring Sealed Verses expands the magic Weiss can use, giving the protagonist the power to cross more dangerous regions and confront stronger enemies.
Neither knows the journey's final outcome at this point. First comes the hope that trusting Weiss and collecting the verses can save Yonah. The protagonist must leave her at home and set out again. Gaining new power does not resolve the problem of having less time to remain beside her. The need to search for treatment and the need to stay with his sick sister continue to occupy the same life.
The journey takes him back and forth between the village and other regions. As the number of destinations grows, the problems he encounters cease to be limited to the Black Scrawl. A village threatened by Shades, brothers who need machine parts to earn their living, and a city whose prince has not returned each greet him with their own circumstances. Working through these situations helps him restore Weiss's power. Along the way, he gains relationships beyond his sister that he does not want to lose.
3. Meeting Kainé at the Aerie
The Aerie has houses clinging to steep rock faces, connected by passages across the gaps. The protagonist visits for assistance and information, but its residents do not welcome strangers warmly. Even conversations with people behind their doors establish a sense of distance. Meeting Kainé makes it clearer that living in the settlement does not mean everyone receives the community's protection equally.
Kainé has long been ostracized there. Violence directed at her body and appearance, the grandmother who cared for her, and anger toward the Shade that took that grandmother from her are all part of her past. Its full weight emerges again when her perspective is added later. The protagonist does not know all of this when they first meet and then become friends. He first encounters her through her present actions: her harsh words and fighting.
Their first meeting does not begin with a friendly greeting. Investigating the Lunar Tears at a shack outside the village brings the protagonist and Weiss into conflict with Kainé, whom they fight first. When the enormous Shade Hook appears, their attacks turn toward a different opponent. The protagonist and Kainé drive the same enemy away, but do not finish Hook in this first battle. They carry the fallen Kainé to her shack; even when she wakes, she does not immediately welcome everyone as old friends.
A Shade called Tyrann inhabits Kainé's body. She is therefore both a companion who hunts Shades and someone sharing a body with the beings the villagers fear. This is more than a premise in which she suddenly becomes an evil enemy at some arbitrary moment. She fights and lives by her own will while carrying Tyrann, and is excluded because of her body and that relationship. The protagonist and Weiss treating her as a companion unsettles a judgment based solely on the word Shade.
Even after she later joins them, Kainé cannot enter the siblings' home or the villagers' lives without barriers. The protagonist accepting her and the villagers abandoning their prejudice do not happen together. Trust formed in battle persists alongside the distance exposed when people need somewhere to rest and stay. After their first encounter, the protagonist leaves for other regions with both his relationship with her and the escaped Hook still unresolved.
4. Another Younger Sibling Waiting at the Junk Heap
At the Junk Heap, he meets the older brother Jakob and younger brother Gideon. They live near a vast old machine facility and repair and upgrade weapons. The protagonist needs equipment that will withstand combat before entering the next region; the brothers need parts and materials for their work. Entering the facility is therefore connected to their labor and livelihood, rather than being a simple treasure hunt.
The first material required is titanium alloy. The protagonist fights robots inside, collects three pieces, and returns to the workshop to upgrade his weapon. But receiving improved equipment does not finish his involvement with the brothers. Gideon cries for their mother, who has not returned, and Jakob asks him to search. Taking the now-accessible elevator to a deeper floor begins a second exploration, looking for a person instead of an object.
Underground, Defense System Geppetto blocks the party's way. To reach the place their mother went, they must cross a battlefield of enormous mechanical hands, gunfire, and small robots. The protagonist avoids attacks and targets the hands, then breaks through the defenses that continue after the hands withdraw. Beyond them, he discovers two dead people rather than a mother waiting to be rescued. Another man lies beside the brothers' mother.
From the evidence at the scene, Weiss concludes that she intended to leave with her lover. The expectation that she, too, was simply seeking a chance to return while her children waited is broken. Learning the truth leaves the protagonist with another task: communicating it to a child waiting for her. Returning to the workshop and speaking to the brothers cannot bring their mother home alive. Gideon in particular is left with the reality that his waiting must end.
Remembering the Junk Heap's problems as entirely finished here would obscure the weight of the return in adulthood. Time does not stop for Jakob and Gideon because the protagonist departs for another region. Their workplace and the experience of losing family connect to another loss and further anger as years pass. Among the facility's robots, currently treated as enemies, a different perspective later reveals another relationship. The present party, unaware of those circumstances, must be distinguished from the reader who learns them afterward.
5. Medicine at Seafront and Letters to the Lighthouse
As Yonah's condition worsens, the protagonist heads to Seafront to obtain a fish for medicine. The possibility Popola has mentioned is a way to help his sick sister now, rather than a complete cure that removes the Black Scrawl's underlying cause. He needs both to collect the legendary Sealed Verses and to care for Yonah so she can endure today. Arriving in a town with a harbor and market does not mean someone immediately hands over the fish. He must first learn to catch it himself.
An old man by the sea teaches him to fish, and he catches the medicinal fish at the beach toward the lighthouse. The protagonist and Weiss's travels depend on more than the strength to defeat enormous Shades. What his sister needs may be one small fish, requiring him to learn another practical skill. During this visit, he also becomes involved with the old woman at the lighthouse. An encounter beginning with letter delivery leads into the life of someone who has grown old waiting for a person in this port town.
The Lighthouse Lady's story develops further if he continues the optional quests after that first errand. She has tended the lighthouse while waiting for letters from a lover who has been away for a long time. Now suffering from the Black Scrawl with little time remaining, she wants to leave rather than stay there any longer, so she can meet him. The protagonist carries her request to the postman and discovers inconsistencies in the explanations about her letters and departure. Letters in the back of the post office reveal another reality behind her long wait.
Her lover died more than fifty years ago. The letters since then were written by townspeople to preserve her hope, rather than sent by him personally. The deception extends back to an earlier generation; it is no sudden prank begun solely by the current postman. The protagonist must choose whether to keep delivering letters and saying her living lover awaits, or to reveal the death and forgery. What becomes troubling is the kind of waiting to which this well-intentioned arrangement has bound someone's entire life.
If he reveals the truth, the old woman says she had long suspected something of the sort. She understands the care behind the letters and asks him not to tell the townspeople she knows, so their efforts for her will be preserved. If he passes along the false letter, she continues to express joy at receiving news from her lover. These cannot be combined as events one person experiences in succession through both choices. The protagonist's words and her response differ according to the decision.
In the concluding quest, another visit to the postman brings news that she has died. The Black Scrawl takes her life regardless of whether he revealed the truth. His choice was not a device for curing the disease or bringing her lover back. It changed the words and feelings with which she lived her remaining time. Coming to the coast to help Yonah recover, the protagonist encounters the waiting of people who could not ultimately save another patient. Bringing his sister's fish home and learning the old woman's story overlap in the same town.
6. Hook Returns, and Kainé Joins the Journey
When the protagonist and Weiss return to the Aerie, Kainé is fighting Shades again. The battle with the Hook they previously drove away also resumes. She pursues this enemy for reasons beyond a village commission or reward. Hook killed the grandmother who protected her and gravely mutilated Kainé herself. That attack also stands at the beginning of her acceptance of Tyrann's power.
During the battle, Hook destabilizes Kainé by making her hear her grandmother's voice. It attacks using the image of the person she wants back. Kainé must separate the grandmother she knew from the illusion her enemy presents, while the protagonist continues fighting beside his shaken companion. Later, when the Shade's words become intelligible from another perspective, the cruelty of this scene becomes clearer. The present protagonist does not understand every voice or know all the history behind them.
Even after Hook finally falls, Kainé is not ready simply to accept her wounds and her life and keep walking. Someone who endured by clinging to revenge needs a reason to live after revenge is complete. The protagonist and Weiss ask her to come with them. It is after this second battle that she joins the journey to save his sister. Neither the Shade within her nor her history of rejection disappears. But she now has people to travel with, and another path beyond pursuing vengeance alone.
7. Fyra Opens the Way Through the City of Masks
Crossing the desert brings the party to Facade. Its people wear masks and follow a great many rules. Unfamiliar with its language and customs, the visitors cannot understand everything or behave freely from the outset. The city's rules can block their way, while help from people living within those rules makes movement possible. Fyra is the person who connects with the party amid these barriers.
Fyra does not speak, but communicates through gestures and helps the party understand and move through the city. The lack of spoken explanations does not place her outside the events. Instead, her gestures and actions connect an outsider like the protagonist to daily practices and relationships he could not discover alone. There is also a preexisting connection between Kainé and Fyra, keeping Facade from becoming merely another unfamiliar landscape through which they pass.
The city's prince has gone to a desert temple and failed to return. The protagonist enters to find him. Its trials cannot be passed simply by swinging a weapon until every enemy is gone. Each room restricts certain actions, and he must move according to its conditions. The city's attachment to rules becomes an actual method of reaching the next space, rather than just a curiosity to observe.
Being the prince or Kainé earns no exception. Both violate prohibited actions and are carried away by the temple's cubes, leaving the protagonist and Weiss to clear the remaining rooms. One room forbids jumping; another forbids standing still. Repeating habitual combat movements can itself obstruct progress. The protagonist must understand each changing prohibition, negotiate projectiles and obstacles, and destroy the key cubes as he advances.
The guardian deep inside, Shahriyar, is an enemy assembled from many cubes. As its form changes, the party must target the glowing cubes, using magic against its weak points while avoiding projectiles and rotating attacks. Taking on an enormous humanoid form does not make indiscriminate attacks against its whole body the solution. Only finishing this battle allows the captives to be rescued and the party to return to the city. Finding the prince is the outcome of clearing both the rules and their guardian.
Rescuing the prince changes the party's relationship with Facade. Its residents, initially separated by language and custom, are now people they have helped; the prince also remains part of the later story. For Kainé, this city does not merely repeat the relationships she experienced at the Aerie. Moving through places that treat people differently, the party encounters both acceptance and exclusion.
Wolves live in the desert, and their presence continues to conflict with human life. The boyhood visit does not settle every disagreement so completely that nothing happens afterward. When the protagonist returns as a young man, the prince's growth, Fyra's life, and the relationship between the city and the wolves will lead to a much larger event. Saving the prince now is help offered to someone who has failed to return, rather than an action taken with full foreknowledge of that tragedy.
8. In the Forest of Myth, Fighting Becomes Reading
A problem unlike those of the earlier regions holds the party in the Forest of Myth. Its inhabitants are trapped in the Deathdream, and the protagonist must confront stories within dreams to awaken them. Waiting for an enemy to appear and attack, or opening a path with a stronger weapon, cannot solve this alone. Reading words and sentences, understanding the situation, and choosing answers become central to progress.
What the protagonist experiences unfolds differently from paths reached by moving a body around the screen. Solving the problems of dream-bound residents requires following situations presented in prose. The player shares the responsibility of reading and judging the story he has entered. This reveals a world that cannot be explained through combat alone. Language and memory can become ways of approaching the reality another person is experiencing.
The mayor they first meet has investigated the sleeping illness and concluded that it spreads through words, but has become trapped in the dream himself. Listening to his account draws the protagonist and Weiss inside as well. Awakening him requires solving three riddles emerging from the forest's sounds and sentences. Their answers are a secret, sunlight, and a human being. Choosing the answers and escaping wakes the mayor, and Weiss gains another Sealed Verse. Instead of attacking an ill person with a sword, they have found an exit from the story holding him.
The main story can continue after rescuing only the mayor, but the other two residents can also be helped. In the woman's dream, the protagonist must choose routes through a flooding castle and escape. Another man's dream requires assessing statements about the beings involved and deciding which is real. Sharing the Deathdream does not give every prisoner the same means of escape. Awakening them too earns further thanks and a weapon from the mayor. This is optional progress for those who stay to help, rather than a sequence everyone automatically experiences after the mayor's rescue.
After leaving the village and visiting these regions, the protagonist no longer has merely a piece of spell-firing equipment in Weiss. The book reacts to new people, exchanges words with the protagonist and Kainé, and shares what the party experiences. Cooperation begun to rescue Yonah in the shrine becomes companionship across repeated journeys along the same roads. Beings with different purposes form a relationship through the events they undergo together.
Yonah's illness remains the journey's origin. Yet outside the home awaiting the protagonist are other waiting brothers, a village that excludes his companion, and a prince who received their help. Kainé is someone who has not been able to enjoy that world on the same terms as others. While seeking a way to save his sister, the protagonist encounters these relationships one by one. Meeting Emil at the manor next brings another person, whose body makes closeness with others difficult, into their lives.
9. The Red-Bag Man and a Home to Return To
The 2021 edition adds a main-story encounter with Seafront’s Red-Bag Man before the manor visit. When the village’s canal renovations stop because the person responsible has missed work, Popola sends the protagonist to Seafront. He finds the man weeping, unsure where his wife has gone. The protagonist and Grimoire Weiss ask about her around the tavern and tackle shop, then head into the Southern Plains, defeat a Shade, and recover the red bag she lost. Returning it makes the man fear that something terrible has happened to his wife, but just then she comes back alive. She had been visiting her parents and lost her bag during that time. Even after the relief, an argument starts again over matters including her husband’s failure to remember that visit, leaving the protagonist and Weiss caught between them. Only after the couple calm down can they remind him of the canal work, which he agrees to resume.
Responses differ depending on whose words he supports, but siding with husband or wife here does not branch the world's eventual ending. This immediate commotion brings someone who left back home and connects the couple so they can resume living together. The man will return in a role important to travel between regions. Their argument and reconciliation are not a recollection by a couple who have already experienced Seafront's later tragedy: they show a living household before that event.
After the protagonist reports to Popola and meets Yonah, her next request is that he help a pen pal at the manor. Connections stretching from the siblings' home are not made only through people her brother brings back. Yonah's correspondence also opens a meeting with someone new. The road ahead leads to the much-rumored manor. The boy they will meet inside fears even looking someone in the face without harming them.
Sources and Scope
This account follows the main progression of NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139.... Background revealed later, including Kainé's childhood, is distinguished from information the protagonist possesses when first meeting her. The order of certain regional visits and optional quests can vary with the player's approach. This is TroubleMaker's story commentary with AI-assisted editing, rather than a translation of dialogue or official novels. Checked on October 18, 2026, Bangkok time.
The Lighthouse Lady's story distinguishes the first main-story letter errand from the subsequent optional quests. The Red-Bag Man's marital dispute during the boyhood section was added in the 2021 edition. Different responses resulting from choices have not been merged into a single fixed action.
NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... — Steam
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