NieR Chronicles 23 — Emil’s Lunar Tears and the Friends Left in Memory

Emil’s Lunar Tears and the Place His Friends Left Behind Even When Forgotten

Spoiler notice: this chapter covers Emil’s Memories, the hidden battle at his underground residence, Emil’s Determination, and Ending Y. These three incidents open under different conditions. The final request requiring all weapons to be upgraded does not share the conditions of the first flower search in Routes A and B. Companions from Replicant are also discussed.

1. The Owner of a Shop That Drives Along Playing Music

After returning from the Forest Kingdom, Emil can be encountered as a traveling shop driving around the City Ruins. A vehicle with a round skull face passes while playing music loudly. Stop him and he trades materials and equipment-related goods. To the two soldiers he is a useful merchant and a strange, cheerful resident. Without knowing the Replicant era in which that face first appeared, it is hard to immediately grasp how much time lies behind his words and appearance.

In that earlier era, Emil was a boy afraid of turning people to stone if they met his eyes. After receiving his sister’s power in an underground facility, he changed into a skeletal body, feared his appearance, and worried whether his friends would accept him. Yet his companions treated him as their friend, and he sacrificed his body at the Shadowlord’s Castle to save them. Time in the world continued even after his surviving head set out to rejoin his friends.

During the alien invasion, he made copies of himself and fought to protect this world. Countless bodies and memories scattered in the process. Presenting the Emil now met in the city as the single original who perfectly remembers every experience of the first game would erase his current circumstances. Within his cheerful voice is a gap in which even where he came from and whom he lived alongside are unclear.

2. A Small White Flower Touches an Empty Memory

Finding and examining a Lunar Tear at the commercial facility begins the request to recover Emil’s memories. The flower is not merely an expensive plant or merchandise for his shop. It stirs a sense of something precious, though he cannot immediately explain the whole reason. He asks for help finding other flowers.

2B and 9S search for Lunar Tears around the world. There are five locations in total, including the initial commercial facility. The other four are at the amusement park, forest, desert, and Flooded City. Each region already holds memories of battles and investigations for the soldiers. This time, instead of seeing only enemy reactions and mission targets as they pass, they seek small white flowers. Corners of roads once traveled to bring down gigantic weapons become places connecting one person’s past.

Each flower brings Emil a little closer to that feeling. What arrives first is not a report systematically restoring every name and date. It is a succession of feelings evoked by the flowers and traces that something precious once existed for him. The quest shows that affection for something connected to a memory can remain even without possessing the memory in full.

The desert flower is not necessarily somewhere they can walk straight to just because they can see it from afar. Reaching it can require following terrain and passages around. The soldiers seek different routes through places they have repeatedly visited. Rather than a separate errand to fill space, the movement asks them to look again at a supposedly familiar world in order to reach Emil’s precious past.

3. Below the Elevator, a Place Resembling Kainé’s Home

Once all the flowers are found, Emil gives them a key to open the commercial facility’s elevator. The soldiers descend underground through a normally blocked route. Inside are many Lunar Tears and a small house. For those who remember Replicant, its appearance recalls Kainé’s home. Through the shape of the place and its music, Automata connects distant companions to this present underground space.

This place should not be understood only as the original house coincidentally remaining unchanged for thousands of years. It recreates the home of the friend Emil remembered. Growing flowers and preserving that form express a wish to protect the world of those who were with him. That past is unclear to the current Emil, but the place left behind has held the memory longer than he has.

Emil explains that he does not possess all the same memories as the earlier Emil. There were countless copies created to fight the aliens and a long passage of time. His current self continues caring for a place the original Emil cherished and feels the resonance of that affection. Identifying which one is the original cannot, by itself, fully explain the feelings present here.

2B and 9S see the space together. It is a different kind of preservation from a server retaining human records in a world without humans. The shape of a particular home, surrounding flowers, and affection for that place remain. Even without knowing all the surface’s history, they can understand that someone made it to remember one person. The location later gains significance again in an optional request where 9S honors 2B.

4. An Underground Residence Separate from the Flower Field

Emil also has a separate underground home. The flower field recreating Kainé’s house and the residence leading to a hidden boss battle are not one elevator and room combined into a single place. Another underground route and the deep cave beneath the city lead to where he lives. Even the body driving around as a shop has somewhere to return and possessions to store.

At that home, the player can take Emil’s mask. It is a choice to take property without permission even after the Pod’s warning. Speaking with Emil afterward, he says his home was robbed and tries to store his belongings more securely. The first act makes him respond by changing how he handles his property and life. Taking something does not cease to exist within the world merely because its owner is a shop NPC.

Visit again as 9S, hack the locked chest, and take the equipment shaped like Emil’s head; Emil appears on the way out and a battle begins. This is not a fight to break through an enemy fortress and save a friend. It follows Emil discovering that the familiar soldiers stole from his home. The ability to hack is not separate from responsibility for how they use it.

Emil is powerful in this battle. If all we have seen is his smiling sale of materials around the city, the power remaining in that small body gives a different impression. The soldiers must endure and fight through repeated attacks. After the hidden battle, they receive Emil’s weapon, needed to complete weapon collection. This fight does not, however, also finish the final battle with the giant copies in the desert at once.

5. When the Same Faces Can Endure No More

The final request, Emil’s Determination, opens after conditions including collecting the weapons and upgrading all of them to level four. Emil’s weapon from the earlier hidden battle is included. Upgrading beyond level three requires Masamune in the Forest Castle. Unlike the first flower search that explores a friend’s memories, this story requires a long collection process and hidden combat. It is not a mandatory showdown every player necessarily sees at the same point after following the main story once.

Emil, met at the commercial facility, moves in response to abnormalities among other copies. Heading into the desert reveals giant Emil faces. They resemble the little merchant’s face, but their scale and attack power are entirely different. They are copies remaining after long ages of fighting and loss. Although they share one name, what they have endured and the direction they now choose are not identical.

In pain, the copies move toward ending the world. The world they originally tried to protect has become somewhere they can no longer bear to live. Repeatedly copying a name and body to increase their numbers did not bring back friends who could share their losses. Multiplying the same face is different from restoring a lost relationship.

The small Emil tries to stop them. He too bears the same losses and faded memories, but has relationships formed anew with those helping him now. People who found flowers for him and heard his story exist in the present. Against the other copies’ destruction, he answers through action whether the disappearance of past friends also makes every being he might meet in the future meaningless.

6. Stopping Self-Destruction and the Failure Called Y

The player fights the giant copies. Facing enormous faces and attacks filling the desert makes Emil’s endlessly copied time appear as the danger of one battle. The enemy wearing a familiar friend’s face does not remove the need to stop its attacks. Left alone, the copies can carry out their intent to destroy the surrounding world as well.

At the end of the battle comes a moment when self-destruction must be stopped. Failing to halt the threat in time leads to Ending Y, a separate failure branch showing the outcome of Emil’s despair sweeping across the world. It is not an obligatory next canonical scene required to see the main story’s Endings A through E, nor an outcome that subsequent chapters must treat as something already happened.

Prevent self-destruction and the request closes differently. The copies’ attempt to end everything through destruction is thwarted, and the little Emil collapses, his strength spent. At the end he remembers his old friends. Relationships precious to him become clear again within the center of his hazy memories. The reason he tried to protect the living world instead of erasing it all connects to those memories.

His final recollection of Kainé calls the boy of Replicant to mind again. He feared he might be unloved because of his appearance, but his friends accepted the Emil within that body. Across a long time and countless copies, the relationship did not disappear completely and reaches his action now. Perfect restoration of every past event is not a prerequisite for care once felt for someone to come alive again.

7. One Body’s End and a World That Continues

This battle cannot be expanded into comprehensive confirmation that every being named Emil has disappeared from the entire universe forever. Its scope is the copies the player met and the little Emil, the friends he remembered, and a world threatened and protected. The game gives no basis for counting every instance of an endlessly copied being offscreen and declaring this the last one.

The human world he tried to protect did not return in its original form. His Replicant companions do not gather unchanged to wait in front of his traveling shop. Yet androids and machines learning traces of humans live in that world, and newly met people found his flowers and memories. A possibility remains that love for those lost need not lead only to hatred of the entire present world.

The main story now moves beyond the victories of A and B. 9S survived within the machine network and returned, and YoRHa judges that the enemy’s key individuals have been defeated. An all-out offensive after the great victory is being prepared. The memories and relationships Emil struggled so hard to protect will return in the next events as conditions of survival for the two soldiers and their Bunker comrades too.

Sources and Scope of Verification

This commentary separates Emil’s optional game quests and hidden battles into three stages. The flower field recreating Kainé’s home is distinguished from the separate underground residence, and preventing self-destruction in the final request is separated from the failure of Ending Y. Novel and concert afterstories are not merged into a definitive game ending, and original recollection passages and songs are not reproduced. This is AI-assisted editorial material. Sources checked: 2026-10-18.

NieR:Automata — Steam

Emil’s Memories — NieR Wiki

City Ruins/Kainé’s Shack — NieR Wiki

Emil (Unit) — NieR Wiki

Emil’s Determination — NieR Wiki

Emil — NieR Wiki

City Ruins/Emil’s Residence — NieR Wiki