WazzupGenius00 posted... Im still not sure what Popola and Devolas endgame was though, aside from getting Shadowlord his body back eventually. A few scenes in the third playthrough suggest that they werent fully on his side? If any of this is revealed/implied through weapon stories let me know, theres no way I was going to grind for any of that shit and the few parts I read didnt seem to have any plot significance anyway.
It's literally their job. They're androids put in charge of overseeing the project. I forget how clear this is made in the game itself - it might have been in the extra materials which was like a LN released after the original Nier way back when.
Basically:
Humanity got fucked up from that one crazy Drakengard ending that serves as the distant prequel where some of the characters ended up getting isekai'd into Japan and killed by fighter jets. They came up with a plan to separate souls from bodies and to create replacement bodies for all humans that wouldn't be affected by the weird shit that was destroying humanity at the time but for reasons I don't remember off the top of my head the Shadowlord was the key to all this (bonded with the Grimoire in the intro? Like I said, I forget lol)Anyway, the projected needed time to develop but while they were waiting for things to be ready to shove all the human souls/shades into the replacement bodies/replicants... the replicants accidentally gained self-awareness and started living their own lives. IIRC this caused Devola and Popola to become conflicted as they came to bond a bit with the replicants.But everything goes off the rails when the original Yonah decides she doesn't want to possess the Yonah we know for most of the game that was meant to house her soul and decides to just die to keep the Shadowlord from just forcing it to happen anyway. At which point he just gives up entirely and basically lets himself die to his own Replicant. With the project core destroyed, humanity is doomed to go extinct because it was only through his existence that Shades could retain *any* humanity.There's actually some follow-up on this in Automata if you end up playing it one day. But the above isn't it, I just put it in tags in case it was in the extra stuff and not the game proper if that distinction matters to you.