For Fans of NieR

Most games end with triumph. Ending E of NieR: Automata ends with the game itself asking you whether you want to keep going, then having completed strangers sacrifice their save files to help you through the hardest sequence. It is not a trick or a gimmick. It is a meditation on collective empathy built directly into the game's systems, and it lands because everything preceding it has methodically dismantled any certainty you had about what the characters or you exist for. Yoko Taro designed it as the only emotionally honest conclusion to hours of questions about meaning and sacrifice.

The original Drakengard (2003) is deliberately unpleasant to play. Its protagonist Caim cannot speak and does not want to; he simply wants to kill. Yoko Taro built the repetitive hack-and-slash loop to make the violence feel oppressive rather than entertaining. That discomfort is the point. The Drakengard and NieR universes share a timeline, and understanding Caim and the Watchers makes the NieR games hit harder. You do not have to love Drakengard as a game, but knowing it as a text changes what comes after.

Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995) asked whether a being made of code and synthetic tissue can have a soul, and it answered with a haunting ambiguity that shaped almost every serious piece of post-human fiction that followed, including NieR. 2B and 9S are asking the same questions the Major asked thirty years earlier, in a different register. The film's visual stillness, philosophical monologues and willingness to leave the audience without comfort make it the cleanest single recommendation for any NieR fan who has not yet seen it.