NieR Chronicles 19 — Through 9S’s Eyes and the Memories of Defeated Enemies
Chapters in this story
- The War Revisited Through 9S’s Eyes and the Memories of Defeated Enemies
- 1. A Small Body Carrying a Bucket Instead of a Sword
- 2. 9S on the Other Side of the Coastal Factory
- 3. How Beauvoir Changed Her Body
- 4. The Memories a Kingdom Entrusted to an Infant
- 5. Loneliness Too Great Even for a Giant Body
- 6. Does Learning Mean Immediate Change?
- Sources and Scope of Verification
The War Revisited Through 9S’s Eyes and the Memories of Defeated Enemies
Spoiler notice: this chapter covers Route B’s opening and hacking viewpoint, Beauvoir’s memories, and the pasts of the Forest Kingdom and Grün. Route B is not a new war in which every event repeats inside the world after Ending A. It revisits earlier time from another perspective and adds information.
1. A Small Body Carrying a Bucket Instead of a Sword
Continuing from save data that has seen Ending A does not first put the player in control of either 2B or 9S. A small machine moves. Another motionless machine lies nearby, and the small one calls him his brother. He tries to fetch and carry oil to make his brother move again. After a story in which we have just defeated Eve and lost and regained a companion, the viewpoint turns to the task of a little body that had seemed an unnamed enemy.
Carrying oil in that small body is harder than expected. He must find a bucket, fill it, and return, but trying to jump lightly over obstacles as an android usually does spills the oil. A small height that seemed passable becomes a major obstruction. The player must stop the habit of racing to complete a target and find a route back using the body this machine actually has.
For Friedrich with his bucket, what matters is that his brother Auguste gets up again. He is not an expert who knows precisely why his brother will not move and follows a perfect repair plan. He tries to offer the help he understands in his own way. Spilling the oil means repeating a troublesome journey, but abandoning that action also means stopping what he believes he can do for his brother.
Even when Friedrich brings and pours the oil, his brother does not rise. Help believed in and repeated by the small body does not restore the broken brother. 9S witnesses it and shows an unwillingness to accept a brotherly relationship among machines. The player has already walked slowly in that body, trying to return to the brother, but 9S enters the scene looking at the attempt from outside. The object of his cold words is the being the player just controlled. His explanation of enemies collides from the outset with a small action performed in another body.
2. 9S on the Other Side of the Coastal Factory
Control then shifts to 9S. Time returns to the coastal factory operation with 2B, but now we see his route: where he was and what he did before their first meeting. As a scanner, he analyzes and hacks equipment and enemies on site. While 2B lost her comrades and broke through the factory, another combatant was independently gathering information and providing support elsewhere.
9S does not fight only in 2B’s way. He uses physical attacks, but entering enemy systems and disrupting their control is an important tool. The player aims at an enemy body, then enters a data space to overcome obstacles and defenses. A successful hack can destroy an enemy or, under certain conditions, control its body in another way. The same machine appearance changes between a target to destroy and a body that can briefly be borrowed.
Hacking does not serve solely as a quick way to finish battles. It opens access to records invisible from outside the body. Opponents whose attacks and voices were all 2B saw now reveal that time passed before they came to act that way. Learning a cause does not undo the harm or deaths of battles already fought. It changes the information with which the player receives that outcome.
The black-box explosion and Bunker reunion also continue within this perspective. 9S’s choice to send 2B’s memories first while failing to send enough of his own recent data is not an act of pretending not to know her. Seeing what came before and after the scene from his side explains why he cannot carry those memories forward. A gap remains: there was no way then to simply return the experiences 2B remembered to that 9S.
3. How Beauvoir Changed Her Body
Fighting Beauvoir again at the amusement park now opens specific memories of her attempts to gain beauty. She wanted someone to love her and sought a way through a beautiful appearance. Following ideas heard from another machine and materials about humans, she changed her exterior. She was not a being who stood onstage already holding a complete answer to what beauty was.
She acquired jewels and ornaments to decorate her body. Even damage suffered while taking risks to obtain them did not stop her efforts. She clung to a rumor that eating androids could make her beautiful, and consumed other machines too. Enduring her own disgust, she continued those acts as efforts toward beauty and even learned to sing. Yet none of the changes won the other’s heart. The ability to transform oneself does not make it possible to alter another being’s interest the same way.
As her expectations of Sartre collapsed, she accumulated still more changes. The massive body finally seen onstage carries both the gaze she wanted and the relationship she never obtained. In Route A, that body was a dangerous enemy that even captured dying androids whose black-box signals remained, using them for lures and attacks. Route B does not erase the danger, but later shows why she became such a body.
The desire to be loved and acts harming others cannot be justified as one indivisible thing here. The androids she damaged and used had lives of their own. It was not only a matter of those already dead: living bodies were also held in suffering. They were used as means to obtain one desired gaze. On the other hand, dismissing her suffering as meaningless output error would leave nothing of the experience of reading memories opened only after defeating her. The game asks us to hold both facts together.
4. The Memories a Kingdom Entrusted to an Infant
On the return to the Forest Kingdom, added scenes show machines building their community. King Ernst and his followers made the land their place and continued living there. The soldiers who held shields and spears before the two androids were not merely anonymous components placed into a completed castle and army from the beginning. Before their present loyalty came a history of living together.
After the first king disappeared, the remaining machines tried to pass that memory to the next being. Making little Immanuel king and protecting him holds a wish to keep remembering the one they lost. His size or ability to fight now does not alone establish why he should have the greatest authority. What mattered was the past they believed that small body should inherit.
The soldiers’ cries to defend the king therefore carry a different weight from the first visit. They seek to protect not only a current command, but a future in which their community continues. When A2 brings her sword down in the royal chamber, the object of that promise disappears instantly. The player has already seen the same death once. The second time, they also know the waiting time of the soldiers before it.
Knowing this background does not erase the past explaining why A2 has killed machines. It is a scene where an android who lost comrades destroys the future of beings she sees as enemies. When both sides raise blades because of their own losses, new loss is created on the other side. Like learning Shades’ memories later in Replicant, the action is already over when understanding of it arrives afterward.
5. Loneliness Too Great Even for a Giant Body
Route B’s Grün battle in the Flooded City follows 9S’s work. He helps 2B’s cannon fire and, after Pascal’s rescue, separates to secure a missile. Support first heard as a successful result now becomes the process of approaching and creating a route directly. During the battle’s separated time, the other side’s mission was continuing too.
After Grün falls, its past is added in a fable-like form. The giant could not properly handle its power, harmed even its own side, and was ultimately separated from other machines and abandoned in the sea. A huge body did not grant the omnipotence to do everything alone. Because its strength hurt those nearby, it first lost a place to be with others.
Within remains loneliness calling for a mother and searching for somewhere to return. The mother it calls is not identified here as a specific human woman or someone already introduced. What is clear in the story is that an abandoned being seeks care and an answer beneath the sea, but its voice does not reach them. The player first saw a weapon that destroyed naval forces and threatened the two soldiers’ bodies. The later story does not erase that harm, but says the weapon also had a past of abandonment by others. Into a body that looked like a giant target from above comes loss likened to a much smaller child’s heart.
The scenes leading from Friedrich’s bucket to the Forest King and Grün do not all have the same shape. One tries to raise his brother; another entrusts a dead king’s memory to a new body; another loses a home because of his strength. The human words machines repeat operate within different relationships and events. To a player who learns this, individual failures and wishes remain beyond the broad category of enemy.
6. Does Learning Mean Immediate Change?
Seeing more of these memories does not make 9S begin treating every machine exactly like his comrades. He still performs YoRHa missions and uses an explanation that identifies machines as enemies. Seen examples and ingrained judgment do not change at the same speed. Access to more information does not instantly free him from his prejudices and affiliation.
The player’s information and the characters’ information are not entirely identical either. Seeing an inserted scene does not mean 2B and 9S explained its entire contents to one another on site and agreed together. Some memories unfold outside their viewpoints, while some systems are accessible only to 9S. Rewalking their shared roads makes differences in knowledge clearer.
Those differences grow especially after they separate in the Flooded City. 2B searches for her companion’s body and escapes the factory, while 9S encounters other information through his captive consciousness and the Bunker’s systems. Two people fighting together for the same goal do not always make the same decisions while knowing the same truth. Sometimes the next event arrives before a fact is spoken; sometimes a question conflicts with the organization they belong to.
Route B’s next major discovery is not limited to enemy memories. The 9S who analyzed machines also gains access to YoRHa and the lunar system said to house humans. After reading relationships with gods, kings, and brothers believed in by enemies, he now receives information questioning the actual state of those he was taught to fight for. Learning about the other side of the war now enters the center of his own side.
Sources and Scope of Verification
This commentary focuses on the added playable viewpoints and machine memories in the game’s Route B. Beauvoir’s records are newly explained through causes and consequences without reproducing their text. The kingdom’s past interludes belong to Route B; explaining the founding background in chapter 14 is distinguished from the route that actually reveals it. Grün’s history is likewise not presented as a complete explanation the two soldiers heard together on their first visit. This is AI-assisted editorial material and does not reproduce original dialogue, lyrics, or novel text. Sources checked: 2026-10-18.
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