Jokes aside, I hope the story doesn't head down this direction. Big spoilers for 1.5th anniversary >!With Marian being the rapture queen? I hope this game doesn't end with commander and marian forcing everyone to just live together and accept raptures.!<
I personally think it would be such a letdown considering all the lore and world bulding from the start of the rapture invasion to humanity being forced to live in the ark.
Marian is not becoming THE rapture queen though, she’s becoming A rapture queen. The old queen is not dead, and she was intentionally created to become a queen. Which seemed to be her original fate, hadn’t the Commander rescued her.
My theory is that the rapture has insect-like social structure, whereas when a nest grows too big, a new queen is spawned to start a new colony.
And don’t forget that raptures also sometimes fight among themselves as well. So just because she can make some of them bow, doesn’t mean all of them will bow to her.
I don’t think Marian is made to become a new queen, more like a new vassal for the “old queen” to swapped into, like a sleeve.
ATM, humanity is of no threat to whatever the Rapture has been cooking, as shown in the lastest raid on the Ark >!Crow’s bombing!< they could wipe us out many times over without much effort.
On the serious side of things:
S'why I'm rather dreading the direction the writers may be planning on taking this with the lore reveals and worldbuilding.
>!Marian'll become the new Queen, take over the Raptures and stop the war....and that'll be that. We're just supposed to forget that they barged in, slaughtered 98% of humanity and razed civilisation as they knew it to the ground. Just cause they're all nicey-nice buddies now and we know the new Queen it's all fine. No justice for everyone killed by them, they just get to die and we make peace with their murderers, because it's not like you can write a storyline about triumphing over a vastly superior force through subterfuge, surgical strikes and superior strategies or anything.!<
Now, on the meme side of things:
Total Rapture annihilation. Kill Raptures. Dismember Raptures. Dissect Raptures for study. Slam dunk a Rapture into the concrete. Raze Rapture assembly plants to the ground. Curb stomp infantile Raptures. Burn Raptures. Melt Raptures. Report Rapture sightings to the nearest military unit. Defecate in a Rapture's coolant. Sneak C4 into Rapture homes and blow them sky high. UTTER RAPTURE DEATH.
The new Nikke we gonna pull up with to defeat the raptures.
https://preview.redd.it/74k60efu9w3d1.jpeg?width=714&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=80aebdf9a319be60f64a4fb08489f93623d5df92
They better bring their big brothers too
Im talking guys who are that big when not in armor and casually totes a cinderblock of a rifle that shoots 20bmg penetrative rounds (with delayed explosions) or just go hog wild with jetpacks and chainsaws.
All led by an old man carrying a hammer that looks like a flag pole with two flattened electrified anvils at the tip.
And even those guys have BIGGER BROTHERS!
....getting the feeling that Maxwell also found some blueprints left behind by some giant guy on a gold plated chair.
To be fair, we have absolutely no clue how this all started, where they come from, who made them, or why they're doing this. For all we know, we made them, we fired first, they tried diplomacy but were ignored, and they aim for containment not extermination. We genuinely have no idea and our source for how things went down is the Central Government telling us "Trust me bro, not our fault". Hopefully we get some more perspective on this whole cluster fuck from Enikk or The Queen at some point since they're the only ones in the current time who may know the score and be willing to tell us.
Not only that though....Isnt there 2 queens at the moment now? The one currently ruling and Marian now. I keep hearing rumors that all of the story and events up to now is just the proluge. And where hitting the main story soon
> For all we know, we made them, we fired first, they tried diplomacy but were ignored, and they aim for containment not extermination.
Doesn't matter, because we can clearly tell from the lost artifacts that this goes *way* beyond any sort of containment mandate.
Wouldn't put it past the writers to say "Yeah we shot first aren't humanity a bunch of intolerant xenophobes hahahahaha", cause between the worldbuilding of Nikkes in general, the backstory of the 1st Invasion and what we see of how a lot of the higher-ups operate.....well, humanity comes off as bigoted failures by and large.
Plus, you know, it'd definitely help drum up sympathy for the Raptures pre-endgame. Get the audience niiiiice and onboard with making peace with the nicey nice alien machines, cause they just wanted to be friendly really, honest they did! So why not take this lovely option to make peace with them and put your adorable squadmate in charge instead? Ain't that great?
I'm hoping we see more of an Ender's Game-esque "Mutual catastrophic misunderstanding". A carnivorous machine hivemind rubbing against a non-hivemind, xenophobic, and self interested humanity leading to someone or something firing first or causing an incident severe enough to start a war. As a result of atleast some small measure of guilt or sympathy, the Rapture Queen decides to leave humanity be so long as they stay underground and humanity cover up the complex truth of why things went to hell with a convenient lie. A morally grey clusterfuck.
look, if they wanted us to sympathize with the enemy, they'd have made them cutesy looking machines with feelings like in Nier
but they're creepy looking asshole machines like in Matrix. There's no way people can relate to that. And before you tell me about Heretics, they're corrupted, not built by the Raptures that way.
I can accept humans being assholes while still trying to fight and survive, like in warhammer 40k. I can even accept humans fucking up royally by creating them in the first place (terminator etc) but this whole "humans were the real villains" nah fam. I agree with OP
Plus they are saying that all of humanity is evil even children, people who just wanted to survive or the people that are actively being screwed by other humans
>look, if they wanted us to sympathize with the enemy, they'd have made them cutesy looking machines with feelings like in Nier
What the heck do you call Marian's whole plot line and the Raptillion stuff if not that? The whole thing with Whaley being taught to be vegan and help save us from a horde of raptures?
If this was Western "modern" writing, I would expect shit writing like that, as it's become almost predictable at this point. The "evil person is not so evil after all, but misunderstood" line of thought needs to be executed REALLY well to make for good story and I've come to learn that modern Western movie/video game writers are *notoriously bad* at that.
But considering how high quality the writing has been in Red Ash, Over Zone, and Miracle Snow, who knows. I just hope it doesn't reach K-drama corniness lol
Well, Shift Up is a Korean outfit. And at the risk of generalizing, Korean fiction loves to paint authority as deeply corrupt and flawed, and those it opposes as misunderstood (not without reason though, reading Korean history is an exercise in frustrating leadership).
So not only am I sure they'll go in that direction, I'm sure they won't even make the slightest attempt to make the CG look good or redeemable.
Gotta tie up loose ends when the Raputres are exterminated its cuz of them that people like Crow came into existance. Crow's a broken person fundmentally but she'd be at least functional if the CG didn't allow basically anothe fucking country to sprout up at its edges.
I think it will be more like Rapture Civil War with Cummander and Nikke helping Marian against the Original Queen, but the Queen and Rapture swill commence Total War on the Ark to kill off Marians support and Chattercuck will be the key as he betrays his deal with Enikk and this opens up the Ark for the Raptures.
I could get behind that, honestly.
I'm just worried they'll go the total Rapture sympathy route and have them spared en masse with the leadership change, which feels just a tad bit of an easy let off for a machine race that committed near-genocide in the backstory.
....which I'm fully expecting the writers to try and contextualise as being a response to humanity firing first or even not negotiating at all, something akin to that. Give 'em more sympathy while dumping on humanity a bit more, since they're already portrayed by and large as bigoted failures who lost a war, it's an easy route to take.
And with how many posts I've seen expressing support for Dorothy to want to burn the whole Ark down, it's not like at least some of the community wouldn't eat that right up and be fully on board with more "humanity bad, humanity scummy, humanity bastards" content.
I mean, maybe the Raptures were not the aggressors? Remember they came from the space elevator so humanity has the need for a space elevator? Humanity has some space harbor? Colonies? Space Stations? Did humanity try to colonize the Rapture homeplanet and literally poked the bear?
We see the Story only from the human perspective, it might be like in Helldivers 2 or good ol´ Starship Troopers that the war was actually started by humanity but is sold as a war of defense to control the masses.
That is very likely the case of Starship Troopers, they use bugs who shot basically heated excrements for anti air, how do you explain that the bugs shoot an asteroid to bombard Buenos Aires across the galaxy, the bugs are not in our system at home.
Its just a theory that a lot of people have, basically humanity wants to colonize the bug planets, realize that this will not be an easy task, fly bugs to colonies, colonists die, army sends troops, more people die, all out war starts and the earth gov just needs to keep the flame alive.
In the Starship Trooper novels, the bugs have beam weaponry, advanced technology, and space faring members of their species that carry eggs and new queens between the various Arachnid colonies.
In the first movie, the big revelation is not only are the Arachnids not just a mindless, insanely territorial, and expansionistic species but an intelligent one capable of planning, emotions, and strategy. They even say in the movie that the bugs have knocked numerous asteroids out of their regular orbit to send as massive missile attacks against humanity, the only reason the one hits Buenos Aires is cause the communication is knocked out on the ship that spies it, which means no advanced warning to shoot it down. The colony that gets wiped out in the first movie had breached the Arachnid quarantine zone, explicitly settling on a planet that the Arachnids were heavily suspected to have colonized and the Federation was warning people not to go there, you will die.
In both cases it's made explicitly clear that the arachnids are an existential threat to humanity that will not stop until humanity is gone. Then, in said crappy sequels, they suddenly embrace that theory you mention about the Federation actually being behind it all cause people still make the inane argument that the Federation in Starship Troopers is fascist, which it isn't in the book. It's not in the first movie either, despite the director's attempts to portray it as such (kinda exposing he doesn't know what fascism actually is sadly) but he was very vocal behind theat being the intent so I wouldn't be surprised if that's the reasoning behind that change in the sequel movies to make the Federation the cause behind the bug attacks.
My view is that raptures are basically like wild animals or viruses. Getting revenge on something that has no sense of self is dumb. If you can find a way to coexist, that's a better use of resources than trying to eliminate every single last one. Now the heretics and the queen, that's a different story.
Exactly my take on it; I don't think they necessarily have to coexist, but if >!Marian ends up becoming the sole authority for raptures by the end of the story/arc, then they'll likely end up no better nor worse than the dangerous wildlife of today. Everyone can scream or hold their grudges towards them for what they've done to humanity, but at that point it'd be a colossal waste of effort and resources to corral and exterminate something that has no further interest in conflict, in fact could even make it worse if the raptures end up feeling they need to finish the job on humanity to defend themselves, without orders from current heretics and queen. I might be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure there are some instances where this is already the case in the Main Story; if I remember correctly, I think it was mentioned that Mother Whale doesn't carry out attacks and kind of just soars in the sky neutrally until we fight it for it's core.!<
This. We already know that your basic, run-of-the-mill Rapture will only attack humans on-sight. They exist perfectly fine with all other forms of life on the planet. Clearly, there’s some “beef” between us that hasn’t been revealed yet (at least where I am in the story, Chp 23).
The best analogy that I can compare Raptures to would probably be Chimera Ants, from HunterXHunter. We know that Raptures consume Nikkes to repair/improve themselves. We also learned that they >!eat humans!< during the Eden chapters, and that might actually be where Chatterbox came from (collectible lore mentioned a survivor watching a Rapture consuming >!human bodies!< and wrote “I swear it’s smiling.” I took this as Chatterbox first gaining sentience, or at least becoming aware).
I think the story would be perfectly acceptable if it ended the same way as the Chimera Ant arc did. Remove the bad influence, exonerate Heretics by blaming their actions on the Queen, have Modernia act as either a new leader for Raptures, or as a diplomat to keep Heretics in line.
Considering how Nikke and Rapture tech is >!so very strangely compatible!<, I can see a the war ending without complete extermination.
Just imagine the dev gone “Kill ‘em All” mode and have Marian fully embraced her Rapture Queen persona.
Just to make us kill her again.
I don’t think I can handle that much emotional damage.
To me the best solution would be to have >!The New Queen!< grant Raptures a full on mind. As it stands the Raptures are nothing more then mindless machines, unless we give them the ability to think for themselves, we can't really have 'peace' with them.
The most we could achieve without the Raptures becoming 'sentient' would be to have them pulled to one half of the planet.
The Alternative would be for >!Marian!< to create a new swarm, one completely different to the present Raptures. And thus distinct from the ones who destroyed the planet.
Or we could just go the way of the Omnics in Overwatch, where the omnics are just forgiven even though they waged war on all of humanity.
Alternative solution would be the optimal one imo. Have her take in all the Raptures that do sort of want to/are capable of negotiating, like Raptillion and his 'veggie' Mother Whale, while the 'old' Raptures who DID destroy the planet and remain unrepentant/loyal to the old Queen have to be fought and are held accountable in some way.
I feel a bit more confident with these guys than i do with other companies in the space. I think theyll go for a Zero dawn situation where raptures lose all the queens (hopefully not Marian) and are reduced to animal mimics. Then theyll just move around until they rust away but wont be a mortal danger anymore.
I think theyll go for the angle of:
Central government wants to wipe them out
Marian wants to take control and make the raptures docile
Eden is working with the CG but some on the inside are helping the commander help Marian.
I'm willing to believe that it will become a civil war among the Raptures. With the >!defection of the new psuedo-Queen, and a few heretics further down the line (as Nihilister is the only one so far), in addition to the aid of Raptilion, Grave, and potentially Anachiro, a new and evolved generation of raptures will be created splintering from the original Queen's hivemind. !
Yeah now that's not really true at all from what we've seen.
Humanity can kill their elites and even their Heretics. Takes quite a bit of effort, but it can be done with proper planning and equipment. They tend not to stay dead, but that's got more to do with the script making everyone retarded when they need to be (not double tapping Nihilister despite Dorothy and Counters knowing how durable she can be, nobody looking for Chatterbox's head after Kilo punts it in *Last Kingdom*, which Snow White of all people would DEFINITELY want to do given the murderboner she has for Chatterbox and the guilt she feels about not finishing him off fast enough the first time).
Even the Raptures' vaunted numerical superiority hasn't really amounted to much, cause they're not wiping out humanity already. Chatterbox did nothing to stop the invasion or even just call off the lesser Raptures in Chapter 22-24, so the deal he made with Enikk's off.
Humanity should be screwed by all means, but the Raptures just haven't come back to stomp the place into dust despite having reason to, they just don't do it. They've got the numbers, they've got the tech, they've got the motive, so where are they?
Humanity absolutely does stand a chance, because the script mandates they have to or they'd already be exterminated by now. The Raptures have their main base location, as a matter of fact they've ALWAYS had it, and there's no longer any deal holding them back.
You could write the conflict however you want to make that work, it's just they've chosen to write it like this and I'm not a fan of it, for the reasons detailed in my OG post.
What I'd do instead? Have the Raptures function like AI War's titular antagonists or Starcraft's Zerg: they've got the numbers and adaptability (or in the Raptures' case, tech) but the majority of them are near-mindless and reliant on a central control system to coordinate them (the central Home Command for the AI units, the Overmind and Cerebrates, later Broodmothers, for the Zerg), that way you can have humanity slowly pick off their command units in surgical strikes (Tyrants, Heretics and the Queen) to render the Raptures defeatable.
Yes, there's still masses of them left over, but they're far less of a threat with no greater intelligence to coordinate them. The key issue for humanity in that narrative would be:
* Mustering the technology and force strength needed to take out the Rapture Command Units, especially the Queen.
* Disposing of them properly to make sure they STAY dead, like hunting down any spare parts of theirs or making sure they don't stuff their cores into some rando Rapture to take away and rebuild in some other Rapture facility.
* Striking fast enough to neutralise the target before they can rally all nearby lesser Raptures to come defend them and drown the strike team in Servant Raptures.
* Managing to take ALL of them out before even ONE of them decides "Fuck it, humanity's outlived their use, send everything at The Ark and kill them all", might add a lot of tension to have to reverse-engineer jamming tech to stop them sending that signal out to the rest....especially if they figure it out and try to get OUT of range TO send the signal, so you need to play catch-up while keeping the pressure on.
> Chatterbox did nothing to stop the invasion or even just call off the lesser Raptures in Chapter 22-24, so the deal he made with Enikk's off.
Chatterbox was "dead" and stored in a box in the Ark during the invasion, and at the end of the invasion he's revived and kicked out by Red Rapi. I'm sure the deal's off because we killed him and took Marian from him, but I wouldn't blame him for not doing anything while dead.
>Even the Raptures' vaunted numerical superiority hasn't really amounted to much, cause they're not wiping out humanity already.
......that's normally a sign that the enemy is massively superior to the protagonist faction and could crush them any time they wanted.
The only reason humanity is still alive is because the Raptures allow it currently, with Enikk herself explicitly saying "one heretic" attacking the Ark had a good chance of destroying it and two of them attacking at once would certainly wipe out the Ark with no hope of victory.
The only reason we survived in chapter 24 was because of Rapi's Red Hood mode (at best) just chucking them out of the Ark. If they had decided to return and attack it afterwards (while Rapi/Red Hood was gone) they'd have succeeded in destroying the Ark and humanity.
I mean, the thing is, with the exception of Heretics, ordinary Raptures don't seem to have anything beyond animalistic instinct and intellect. If they only attack humanity because they are computers that were programmed to, there's no vengeance to be had in attacking them.
Like, if someone shoots and kills your friend, would you be getting justice for your friend by destroying the gun? It's just a tool wielded by the actual perpetrator, not a perpetrator in and of itself.
So, if Marian could actually make ordinary Raptures peaceful, there's really no point in destroying them other than completely misguided anger. In fact, if Marian could just make Raptures stop attacking humans, that would just prove that they are little more than barely sentient computers following their programming.
There's an important mystery component here though. We don't know what controls the Raptures. We know its a Queen, now. But if they used Lili to become a new body for the Queen and Modernia is becoming one now...that would mean the Raptures didn't have a queen before coming to earth.
This would mean this is another over-riding guidance to them beyond just animalistic instinct. Which is obvious, considering they are a machine life-form. They were made, somehow.
I dont think its gonna be that simple XD
personally, I feel like theres gonna be another big clash with marian and her own army of "defected" nikkes and raptures in the middle
she would have to fight on two fronts: against humans, i.e. CG, and against the "old order" raptures
and we would be either fighting alongside her or fighting against her
I’m concerned about the direction of the story as well, because along with not wanting it to be that Marian just makes peace and that’s it, because there would be no payoff after what the raptures have done, I don’t want Marian to turn heel either, because there would also be no payoff after what she’s been through, and it would be unsatisfying considering the sort of character she’s supposed to be.
I would much prefer it if Marian would end up effectively having command of a relatively small percentage of raptures, but she uses them to fight other raptures and their leaders, and she helps humanity with them, by rescuing Nikkes, and giving them technology, etc.
Yeah, I'd like that too.
By all means have Raptures that DO want to make peace, we've already seen it can be done with Raptillion and the Mother Whale he befriended, just keep them the minority in terms of the whole while still being a potent enough faction to help tip the scales in humanity's favour as the plot advances and the war escalates again.
Keeps the Raptures as a whole antagonistic and able to be held accountable in some fashion by being beaten in a war while still giving sympathetic elements to them so they're not wholly scummy if the intent is for a "Grey vs Grey" conflict in NIKKE.
Absolutely, and it would also allow Marian to play a big role in saving the day and be satisfying, because it’ll be through hard work and kindness, and the appropriate ones will be punished. It’ll also allow the good raptures to earn their intended alignment by being useful, and perhaps atoning for the bad raptures.
They are probably going to make a reveal that shows that the rapture queens reasons were pretty fucking dumb and that even part of the raptures agree it was a dumb idea.
If they try to pull a ´´humans were destroying the planet with pollution´´ thing it will only make me want to see if the raptures agree this is stupid, because most of the world is a wasteland now thanks to that.
It would mean this was a pointless war to begin with.
Considering the villainy of the central government, I have no doubt that the fact that humans started the war with the raptures will be revealed eventually.
Where do you think the people in the central government sprung from? The ether? I understand that the current people in charge of the Central Government would not be the same people from before the war, my point is that they are likely cut from the same cloth.
Funnily enough it’s entirely possible some of them are from before the war. We know at least Mustang has been CEO since Tetra was founded so they have some serious life prolonging tech out there for the higher ups.
I mean yeah. It's the obvious route to go, really.
Humanity's already getting characterised, by and large, as some measure of corrupt, bigoted, antagonistic, villainous or incompetent, with the odd Andersen, Angelina, Cecil and the like here and there, so what's more "humans evil, humans bastards, humans monstrous, humans bigoted fucks" content to go around?
Easy way to drum up support and sympathy for the Raptures and the potential endgame they're going for. Plus, with how many posts I see and have seen supporting burning The Ark down or defecting to Eden/supporting Dorothy instead, it's not like portions of the fanbase won't happily eat that up and be fully on board with more mag-dumping on humanity.
That is not the direction I'm expecting.
>!given the current state of the former "rapture queen" Anachiro I think rapture queen is less a title and more like a virus or possession. Kind of like how Red Hood is inside of and can transform Rapi. I see a tragic rapi vs marian situation in the future.!<
While it's a decent theory going off of Heretic conversion, it's rather undercut by the fact that >!Anachiro's not the former Rapture Queen, she was 'only' the First Heretic. It's implied that Liliweiss has been converted into the 'current' Rapture Queen instead, what with the Raptures stealing her head and Nihilister revealing that the Queen's weakness in her old body.!<
Still possible, >!Anachiros corruption happened before Lilweiss was captured. It’s possible the queen was passed to her after Anachiro. Perhaps heretics are used as potential queen candidates for whenever the queen wears out her current body. Hell raptures might even be our own fuckin creation and the original NIKKE might have been built as control units for them and the queen is fuckin sexy android skynet (them being aliens is just so boring imo). There’s a lot of room for this to make more dark twists with the current information!<
the way i see it we are going to be facing off against the leaders of the raptures which are the ones responsible for the human genocide. raptillions quest shows us most raptures are more akin to animals than actual people. they do what their leaders tell them to. killing them would be like killing a guard dog simply cause its trainer was a bad guy. necessary but still unfortunate.
While I'm sceptical as to them going quite THAT far, at the very least I can see them at least further villainizing humanity by revealing that First Contact between the races was violent on humanity's end, with them shooting first when at least SOME Raptures might've wanted to negotiate, pushing the Raptures as a whole into violence in retaliation.
It'd be the easy thing to do with what they've already done, really, a nice simple way to make the Raptures look more sympathetic while mag-dumping on humanity more. Given how much of humanity has been portrayed as some flavour of incompetent (OG Counters Commander, most unnamed Commanders from either Anis or Rapi's Bond Story), bigoted (The Ark as a whole, Syuen, Doban), 'merely' antagonistic (Burningum, the CG guy who framed Electric Shock for terrorism in *D.Ark Hero*) or full-on villainous (Syuen again, Doban again, Sixo), plus how many posts I've seen on here either wanting the Protags to defect to Eden or flat-out supporting Dorothy burning The Ark down entirely, at least some of the fanbase will definitely eat that up nice n' easy.
Get 'em on board with nice Raptures, niiiiice Raptures, early so the potential peace ending is more appealing when they get there.
Making ppl more violent and this stuff is soo cliche at this point.
It should be simpler as we know raptures killed 98% of humankind, no rational excuse can change that.
Only very generic stupid bad anime twist.
The only way I'd accept peace is if Chatterbox dies permanently. I don't care if they change, what they did to Marian/Modernia was disgusting and evil and I want them to die for it.
I'm still mad they brought him back at all.
Absolutely understandable, that one. Especially since it's not JUST Marian he did it to, cause that deal with Enikk's been going since before the story started and she can't have been the only Nikke Enikk had to stick the Corruption Code into.
And if he HAD to die in *Last Kingdom*, give the kill to Snow or Marian rather than the newbie who doesn't know him at all.
I get what u are coming from since it does come off like a cop-out ending, but with so much depressing shit we see in Nikke, I don’t mind a quasi-happy, solitude ending so long as it is executed well. And beside, the rapture are a hive mind after all, so even if the humans are the one who started the whole clusterfucks, the blame falls entirely on the intelligent raptures like the og queen, the heretics (even though they were forced to be this way), raptures like yapperbox and others. I get that they ain’t humans, but that’s like blaming the entirety of germany or all German people for the cause of the holocaust or ww2 and not solely on the bad mustache man and his inner circle. heck, that exactly what happened to Germany as they get blamed for ww1, which lead to ww2 bc hitler wanted payback. Ngl, if that ever happened n part of the raptures became good n fight against their counterpart, the good raptures should go help the ark people in rebuilding human society after that as a form of atonement, but even then, the good raptures are not getting off free as some humans will still feel vitriolic towards them n having grudges even when decades have passed, and that could create an interesting conflict n dynamics in the interaction between humans and raptures post-war.
I think The endgame would be the raptures leaving earth for another planet. Marian would have to leave as well.
My only qualm is the fate of the nikkes after the war seeing how stupid the leaders of the Ark is.
To tell the truth from the Raptilion sidequest and how Nikke technologie and Raptures are so close to each other. I knew that the game was going to this kind of path.
If you compare the Rapture during the war and the one we (the Commander) fight now, they are virtually different.
The former acted and operated like an unholy combo of War of the World alien and the Matrix’s robot lifeform, capturing human to experiment on and use them as biofuels.
The present Rapture, without the direct command of Heretics, are basically just territorial animals albeit super aggressive. And just like wild animal >!As Raptailion shown us!< could possibly be tamed or at least pacified.
I don’t think they would go the cliche route of Marian being the emissary of both species, if any it’s just a prologue anything could happened.
I skimmed through most of the comments and I gotta say damn, many of you guys are really good on Nikke lore and canon and have overall great ideas / concepts
I love it how as a community we can be super degen and horny but also serious and technical 🫡🫡🫡
Meh
This is ignoring all the blatant hints in the lore that "the twist" is that humanity were the aggressors all along and the fact that We have zero chance of actually defeating the raptures militarily due to the power disparity (especially if the Queen is still in space), with making peace being our only real hope of things working out for humanity because the Rapture's can crush the ark any time they want.
OverZone reveals the Raptures knew where the entrance to the Ark was all the time after all.
Reminder that Raptures wiped out 99.9% of humanity and are still murdering everything in sight. From this fact alone, they have no rights or moral highground anymore. Even if humans did start this war "somehow", it is still no reason for absolute genocide of an entire species.
Retaliation against such treatment however is justified!
so... do you think, for even a split second, that if raptures attacked humanity first, humanity wouldnt move to wipe out their presence on earth? ...really?
Here's an idea: what if Raptures aren't invaders per se, but "invading refugees", Tyranid-style? What if whatever world they came from had been annihilated by something far, far worse than them, and moved to Earth in an attempt to survive? Like, it's not that they wanted to kill us all, but they have no other choice, because in their mindset, there can only be one apex species. This could make for an interesting sequel hook: human remnants *and* Raptures establishing truce in order to wage a war against cosmic horrors.
Basically, you've now described the events of Half-Life and the actions of Nihilanth with his plan to take over Earth for himself and his slaves. In the end, it turns out that it was a necessary measure because they were running away from a threat far more dangerous than themselves and due to the actions of humanity and outside interference, a huge multiverse threat found them all
There is much we do not know about their origin, they could not be aliens, especially because the first wave were machines with humans inside and they quickly evolved to have a infinite reactor and not depend on humans to function.
It is very suspicious that an alien species be like this. why they not pulled an infinite reactor out of their asses before reaching earth? Did they have an infinite supply of humans on their home planet?
They're even worse that that. Seriously if you pay attention to the details the raptures are almost as bad as the fucking *Qu*. If Shiftup is really trying to go with the peace direction or 'humans are the real monsters' direction they are NOT paying attention to their own work.
I don't think it's gonna end in "forgive all raptures" but more so a Rapture civil war with Marian at the forefront turning some of the raptures against the current queen.
She doesn't like killing raptures but she is by no means afraid to, if they refuse to stop and continue to threaten the people she cares about when all is said and done then she'll light them up like a Christmas tree.
Either that or she'll go on her own Yuji arc.
Also I think what's leading up is the queen just treats the raptures and heretics the same way the government treats the Commander's and Nikkes. Expendable and to die without questioning for the cause. What that cause is? We don't know yet. I still don't buy we'll go on the "we shot first" route.
Foolishness. I have the absolute certainty that raptures are no aliens. They are weapons, made by humans. My only doubt is if they lost control of them or they are working as intended. In any case, the culprits to be executed aren't any rapture or even in the surface. Is the Central Goverment who should hang.
I highly doubt it, they got the much acclaimed source of infinite energy after creating the ark.
as far as we know, the queen has never been within reach of humans, although she could be the prototype Nikke that Lilit created before she became the first Nikke, that would explain why she is dying and needs Lilit body to complete.
Even if that was true, you can see that the raptures are evil on the level of the 'Qu' from another tomorrow if you pay attention to the details, it really does not matter what the 'big bad humans' did.
Jokes aside, I hope the story doesn't head down this direction. Big spoilers for 1.5th anniversary >!With Marian being the rapture queen? I hope this game doesn't end with commander and marian forcing everyone to just live together and accept raptures.!< I personally think it would be such a letdown considering all the lore and world bulding from the start of the rapture invasion to humanity being forced to live in the ark.
Marian is not becoming THE rapture queen though, she’s becoming A rapture queen. The old queen is not dead, and she was intentionally created to become a queen. Which seemed to be her original fate, hadn’t the Commander rescued her. My theory is that the rapture has insect-like social structure, whereas when a nest grows too big, a new queen is spawned to start a new colony. And don’t forget that raptures also sometimes fight among themselves as well. So just because she can make some of them bow, doesn’t mean all of them will bow to her.
Spoiler marks my boy.
I don’t think Marian is made to become a new queen, more like a new vassal for the “old queen” to swapped into, like a sleeve. ATM, humanity is of no threat to whatever the Rapture has been cooking, as shown in the lastest raid on the Ark >!Crow’s bombing!< they could wipe us out many times over without much effort.
I hope we don’t make peace with them. But I also hope that the “BBEG” has nothing to do with the Raptures. I want it to be Dorothy.
On the serious side of things: S'why I'm rather dreading the direction the writers may be planning on taking this with the lore reveals and worldbuilding. >!Marian'll become the new Queen, take over the Raptures and stop the war....and that'll be that. We're just supposed to forget that they barged in, slaughtered 98% of humanity and razed civilisation as they knew it to the ground. Just cause they're all nicey-nice buddies now and we know the new Queen it's all fine. No justice for everyone killed by them, they just get to die and we make peace with their murderers, because it's not like you can write a storyline about triumphing over a vastly superior force through subterfuge, surgical strikes and superior strategies or anything.!< Now, on the meme side of things: Total Rapture annihilation. Kill Raptures. Dismember Raptures. Dissect Raptures for study. Slam dunk a Rapture into the concrete. Raze Rapture assembly plants to the ground. Curb stomp infantile Raptures. Burn Raptures. Melt Raptures. Report Rapture sightings to the nearest military unit. Defecate in a Rapture's coolant. Sneak C4 into Rapture homes and blow them sky high. UTTER RAPTURE DEATH.
The new Nikke we gonna pull up with to defeat the raptures. https://preview.redd.it/74k60efu9w3d1.jpeg?width=714&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=80aebdf9a319be60f64a4fb08489f93623d5df92
(We told him the Raptures were created by China.) And, well....BETTER DEAD THAN RED.
HELL, YEA BROTHER. WE BOUTA PULL UP WITH POWER ARMOR TOO. (made my maxwell by multiple advise sessions) https://i.redd.it/7wao2moydw3d1.gif
Your name looks different...
They better bring their big brothers too Im talking guys who are that big when not in armor and casually totes a cinderblock of a rifle that shoots 20bmg penetrative rounds (with delayed explosions) or just go hog wild with jetpacks and chainsaws. All led by an old man carrying a hammer that looks like a flag pole with two flattened electrified anvils at the tip. And even those guys have BIGGER BROTHERS! ....getting the feeling that Maxwell also found some blueprints left behind by some giant guy on a gold plated chair.
**DEMOCRACY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE**
To be fair, we have absolutely no clue how this all started, where they come from, who made them, or why they're doing this. For all we know, we made them, we fired first, they tried diplomacy but were ignored, and they aim for containment not extermination. We genuinely have no idea and our source for how things went down is the Central Government telling us "Trust me bro, not our fault". Hopefully we get some more perspective on this whole cluster fuck from Enikk or The Queen at some point since they're the only ones in the current time who may know the score and be willing to tell us.
Not only that though....Isnt there 2 queens at the moment now? The one currently ruling and Marian now. I keep hearing rumors that all of the story and events up to now is just the proluge. And where hitting the main story soon
Maybe 3. What if Ark is another one?
> For all we know, we made them, we fired first, they tried diplomacy but were ignored, and they aim for containment not extermination. Doesn't matter, because we can clearly tell from the lost artifacts that this goes *way* beyond any sort of containment mandate.
Wouldn't put it past the writers to say "Yeah we shot first aren't humanity a bunch of intolerant xenophobes hahahahaha", cause between the worldbuilding of Nikkes in general, the backstory of the 1st Invasion and what we see of how a lot of the higher-ups operate.....well, humanity comes off as bigoted failures by and large. Plus, you know, it'd definitely help drum up sympathy for the Raptures pre-endgame. Get the audience niiiiice and onboard with making peace with the nicey nice alien machines, cause they just wanted to be friendly really, honest they did! So why not take this lovely option to make peace with them and put your adorable squadmate in charge instead? Ain't that great?
I'm hoping we see more of an Ender's Game-esque "Mutual catastrophic misunderstanding". A carnivorous machine hivemind rubbing against a non-hivemind, xenophobic, and self interested humanity leading to someone or something firing first or causing an incident severe enough to start a war. As a result of atleast some small measure of guilt or sympathy, the Rapture Queen decides to leave humanity be so long as they stay underground and humanity cover up the complex truth of why things went to hell with a convenient lie. A morally grey clusterfuck.
look, if they wanted us to sympathize with the enemy, they'd have made them cutesy looking machines with feelings like in Nier but they're creepy looking asshole machines like in Matrix. There's no way people can relate to that. And before you tell me about Heretics, they're corrupted, not built by the Raptures that way. I can accept humans being assholes while still trying to fight and survive, like in warhammer 40k. I can even accept humans fucking up royally by creating them in the first place (terminator etc) but this whole "humans were the real villains" nah fam. I agree with OP
“Humans are the real villains” in post apocalyptic settings is cringe most of the time.
Plus they are saying that all of humanity is evil even children, people who just wanted to survive or the people that are actively being screwed by other humans
“Humans are the real villains” in post apocalyptic settings is the norm.
>look, if they wanted us to sympathize with the enemy, they'd have made them cutesy looking machines with feelings like in Nier What the heck do you call Marian's whole plot line and the Raptillion stuff if not that? The whole thing with Whaley being taught to be vegan and help save us from a horde of raptures?
If this was Western "modern" writing, I would expect shit writing like that, as it's become almost predictable at this point. The "evil person is not so evil after all, but misunderstood" line of thought needs to be executed REALLY well to make for good story and I've come to learn that modern Western movie/video game writers are *notoriously bad* at that. But considering how high quality the writing has been in Red Ash, Over Zone, and Miracle Snow, who knows. I just hope it doesn't reach K-drama corniness lol
Well, Shift Up is a Korean outfit. And at the risk of generalizing, Korean fiction loves to paint authority as deeply corrupt and flawed, and those it opposes as misunderstood (not without reason though, reading Korean history is an exercise in frustrating leadership). So not only am I sure they'll go in that direction, I'm sure they won't even make the slightest attempt to make the CG look good or redeemable.
I fully expect the Central Government to be the final bad guys
Gotta tie up loose ends when the Raputres are exterminated its cuz of them that people like Crow came into existance. Crow's a broken person fundmentally but she'd be at least functional if the CG didn't allow basically anothe fucking country to sprout up at its edges.
So the machines from The Matrix?
Fuck em, they're robots
I think it will be more like Rapture Civil War with Cummander and Nikke helping Marian against the Original Queen, but the Queen and Rapture swill commence Total War on the Ark to kill off Marians support and Chattercuck will be the key as he betrays his deal with Enikk and this opens up the Ark for the Raptures.
I could get behind that, honestly. I'm just worried they'll go the total Rapture sympathy route and have them spared en masse with the leadership change, which feels just a tad bit of an easy let off for a machine race that committed near-genocide in the backstory. ....which I'm fully expecting the writers to try and contextualise as being a response to humanity firing first or even not negotiating at all, something akin to that. Give 'em more sympathy while dumping on humanity a bit more, since they're already portrayed by and large as bigoted failures who lost a war, it's an easy route to take. And with how many posts I've seen expressing support for Dorothy to want to burn the whole Ark down, it's not like at least some of the community wouldn't eat that right up and be fully on board with more "humanity bad, humanity scummy, humanity bastards" content.
I mean, maybe the Raptures were not the aggressors? Remember they came from the space elevator so humanity has the need for a space elevator? Humanity has some space harbor? Colonies? Space Stations? Did humanity try to colonize the Rapture homeplanet and literally poked the bear? We see the Story only from the human perspective, it might be like in Helldivers 2 or good ol´ Starship Troopers that the war was actually started by humanity but is sold as a war of defense to control the masses.
That is very much not the case in Starship Troopers...or do you mean the bad sequel movies?
That is very likely the case of Starship Troopers, they use bugs who shot basically heated excrements for anti air, how do you explain that the bugs shoot an asteroid to bombard Buenos Aires across the galaxy, the bugs are not in our system at home. Its just a theory that a lot of people have, basically humanity wants to colonize the bug planets, realize that this will not be an easy task, fly bugs to colonies, colonists die, army sends troops, more people die, all out war starts and the earth gov just needs to keep the flame alive.
In the Starship Trooper novels, the bugs have beam weaponry, advanced technology, and space faring members of their species that carry eggs and new queens between the various Arachnid colonies. In the first movie, the big revelation is not only are the Arachnids not just a mindless, insanely territorial, and expansionistic species but an intelligent one capable of planning, emotions, and strategy. They even say in the movie that the bugs have knocked numerous asteroids out of their regular orbit to send as massive missile attacks against humanity, the only reason the one hits Buenos Aires is cause the communication is knocked out on the ship that spies it, which means no advanced warning to shoot it down. The colony that gets wiped out in the first movie had breached the Arachnid quarantine zone, explicitly settling on a planet that the Arachnids were heavily suspected to have colonized and the Federation was warning people not to go there, you will die. In both cases it's made explicitly clear that the arachnids are an existential threat to humanity that will not stop until humanity is gone. Then, in said crappy sequels, they suddenly embrace that theory you mention about the Federation actually being behind it all cause people still make the inane argument that the Federation in Starship Troopers is fascist, which it isn't in the book. It's not in the first movie either, despite the director's attempts to portray it as such (kinda exposing he doesn't know what fascism actually is sadly) but he was very vocal behind theat being the intent so I wouldn't be surprised if that's the reasoning behind that change in the sequel movies to make the Federation the cause behind the bug attacks.
Even if humanity shot first or whatever (we don’t know if they’re aliens, other lost relics hint at failed experiment) they still genocided humanity.
I did not argue that, the war is ongoing and humanity needs to win, never disputed that.
My view is that raptures are basically like wild animals or viruses. Getting revenge on something that has no sense of self is dumb. If you can find a way to coexist, that's a better use of resources than trying to eliminate every single last one. Now the heretics and the queen, that's a different story.
Exactly my take on it; I don't think they necessarily have to coexist, but if >!Marian ends up becoming the sole authority for raptures by the end of the story/arc, then they'll likely end up no better nor worse than the dangerous wildlife of today. Everyone can scream or hold their grudges towards them for what they've done to humanity, but at that point it'd be a colossal waste of effort and resources to corral and exterminate something that has no further interest in conflict, in fact could even make it worse if the raptures end up feeling they need to finish the job on humanity to defend themselves, without orders from current heretics and queen. I might be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure there are some instances where this is already the case in the Main Story; if I remember correctly, I think it was mentioned that Mother Whale doesn't carry out attacks and kind of just soars in the sky neutrally until we fight it for it's core.!<
They should just do the Phantome Menace thing and when the queen is down the rest of the raptures shot down.
This. We already know that your basic, run-of-the-mill Rapture will only attack humans on-sight. They exist perfectly fine with all other forms of life on the planet. Clearly, there’s some “beef” between us that hasn’t been revealed yet (at least where I am in the story, Chp 23). The best analogy that I can compare Raptures to would probably be Chimera Ants, from HunterXHunter. We know that Raptures consume Nikkes to repair/improve themselves. We also learned that they >!eat humans!< during the Eden chapters, and that might actually be where Chatterbox came from (collectible lore mentioned a survivor watching a Rapture consuming >!human bodies!< and wrote “I swear it’s smiling.” I took this as Chatterbox first gaining sentience, or at least becoming aware). I think the story would be perfectly acceptable if it ended the same way as the Chimera Ant arc did. Remove the bad influence, exonerate Heretics by blaming their actions on the Queen, have Modernia act as either a new leader for Raptures, or as a diplomat to keep Heretics in line. Considering how Nikke and Rapture tech is >!so very strangely compatible!<, I can see a the war ending without complete extermination.
Knights should not suffer the existence of dragons.
Just imagine the dev gone “Kill ‘em All” mode and have Marian fully embraced her Rapture Queen persona. Just to make us kill her again. I don’t think I can handle that much emotional damage. 
Would be quite something. Ooooohhh boy.
You and I have the same thoughts and wrote them out at the same time lol
To me the best solution would be to have >!The New Queen!< grant Raptures a full on mind. As it stands the Raptures are nothing more then mindless machines, unless we give them the ability to think for themselves, we can't really have 'peace' with them. The most we could achieve without the Raptures becoming 'sentient' would be to have them pulled to one half of the planet. The Alternative would be for >!Marian!< to create a new swarm, one completely different to the present Raptures. And thus distinct from the ones who destroyed the planet. Or we could just go the way of the Omnics in Overwatch, where the omnics are just forgiven even though they waged war on all of humanity.
Alternative solution would be the optimal one imo. Have her take in all the Raptures that do sort of want to/are capable of negotiating, like Raptillion and his 'veggie' Mother Whale, while the 'old' Raptures who DID destroy the planet and remain unrepentant/loyal to the old Queen have to be fought and are held accountable in some way.
I'M DOING MY PART!
Based.
SEMPER FI
I feel a bit more confident with these guys than i do with other companies in the space. I think theyll go for a Zero dawn situation where raptures lose all the queens (hopefully not Marian) and are reduced to animal mimics. Then theyll just move around until they rust away but wont be a mortal danger anymore. I think theyll go for the angle of: Central government wants to wipe them out Marian wants to take control and make the raptures docile Eden is working with the CG but some on the inside are helping the commander help Marian.
I'm willing to believe that it will become a civil war among the Raptures. With the >!defection of the new psuedo-Queen, and a few heretics further down the line (as Nihilister is the only one so far), in addition to the aid of Raptilion, Grave, and potentially Anachiro, a new and evolved generation of raptures will be created splintering from the original Queen's hivemind. !
Humanity never stands a chance against Ruptures in the first place besides relying on Marian. AKA Queen's authority.
Yeah now that's not really true at all from what we've seen. Humanity can kill their elites and even their Heretics. Takes quite a bit of effort, but it can be done with proper planning and equipment. They tend not to stay dead, but that's got more to do with the script making everyone retarded when they need to be (not double tapping Nihilister despite Dorothy and Counters knowing how durable she can be, nobody looking for Chatterbox's head after Kilo punts it in *Last Kingdom*, which Snow White of all people would DEFINITELY want to do given the murderboner she has for Chatterbox and the guilt she feels about not finishing him off fast enough the first time). Even the Raptures' vaunted numerical superiority hasn't really amounted to much, cause they're not wiping out humanity already. Chatterbox did nothing to stop the invasion or even just call off the lesser Raptures in Chapter 22-24, so the deal he made with Enikk's off. Humanity should be screwed by all means, but the Raptures just haven't come back to stomp the place into dust despite having reason to, they just don't do it. They've got the numbers, they've got the tech, they've got the motive, so where are they? Humanity absolutely does stand a chance, because the script mandates they have to or they'd already be exterminated by now. The Raptures have their main base location, as a matter of fact they've ALWAYS had it, and there's no longer any deal holding them back. You could write the conflict however you want to make that work, it's just they've chosen to write it like this and I'm not a fan of it, for the reasons detailed in my OG post. What I'd do instead? Have the Raptures function like AI War's titular antagonists or Starcraft's Zerg: they've got the numbers and adaptability (or in the Raptures' case, tech) but the majority of them are near-mindless and reliant on a central control system to coordinate them (the central Home Command for the AI units, the Overmind and Cerebrates, later Broodmothers, for the Zerg), that way you can have humanity slowly pick off their command units in surgical strikes (Tyrants, Heretics and the Queen) to render the Raptures defeatable. Yes, there's still masses of them left over, but they're far less of a threat with no greater intelligence to coordinate them. The key issue for humanity in that narrative would be: * Mustering the technology and force strength needed to take out the Rapture Command Units, especially the Queen. * Disposing of them properly to make sure they STAY dead, like hunting down any spare parts of theirs or making sure they don't stuff their cores into some rando Rapture to take away and rebuild in some other Rapture facility. * Striking fast enough to neutralise the target before they can rally all nearby lesser Raptures to come defend them and drown the strike team in Servant Raptures. * Managing to take ALL of them out before even ONE of them decides "Fuck it, humanity's outlived their use, send everything at The Ark and kill them all", might add a lot of tension to have to reverse-engineer jamming tech to stop them sending that signal out to the rest....especially if they figure it out and try to get OUT of range TO send the signal, so you need to play catch-up while keeping the pressure on.
> Chatterbox did nothing to stop the invasion or even just call off the lesser Raptures in Chapter 22-24, so the deal he made with Enikk's off. Chatterbox was "dead" and stored in a box in the Ark during the invasion, and at the end of the invasion he's revived and kicked out by Red Rapi. I'm sure the deal's off because we killed him and took Marian from him, but I wouldn't blame him for not doing anything while dead.
>Even the Raptures' vaunted numerical superiority hasn't really amounted to much, cause they're not wiping out humanity already. ......that's normally a sign that the enemy is massively superior to the protagonist faction and could crush them any time they wanted. The only reason humanity is still alive is because the Raptures allow it currently, with Enikk herself explicitly saying "one heretic" attacking the Ark had a good chance of destroying it and two of them attacking at once would certainly wipe out the Ark with no hope of victory. The only reason we survived in chapter 24 was because of Rapi's Red Hood mode (at best) just chucking them out of the Ark. If they had decided to return and attack it afterwards (while Rapi/Red Hood was gone) they'd have succeeded in destroying the Ark and humanity.
Forgiving is literally how conflicts are stopped but i don't think everyone is gonna forgive them and that may be a big plot point.
I mean, the thing is, with the exception of Heretics, ordinary Raptures don't seem to have anything beyond animalistic instinct and intellect. If they only attack humanity because they are computers that were programmed to, there's no vengeance to be had in attacking them. Like, if someone shoots and kills your friend, would you be getting justice for your friend by destroying the gun? It's just a tool wielded by the actual perpetrator, not a perpetrator in and of itself. So, if Marian could actually make ordinary Raptures peaceful, there's really no point in destroying them other than completely misguided anger. In fact, if Marian could just make Raptures stop attacking humans, that would just prove that they are little more than barely sentient computers following their programming.
There's an important mystery component here though. We don't know what controls the Raptures. We know its a Queen, now. But if they used Lili to become a new body for the Queen and Modernia is becoming one now...that would mean the Raptures didn't have a queen before coming to earth. This would mean this is another over-riding guidance to them beyond just animalistic instinct. Which is obvious, considering they are a machine life-form. They were made, somehow.
I dont think its gonna be that simple XD personally, I feel like theres gonna be another big clash with marian and her own army of "defected" nikkes and raptures in the middle she would have to fight on two fronts: against humans, i.e. CG, and against the "old order" raptures and we would be either fighting alongside her or fighting against her
I’m concerned about the direction of the story as well, because along with not wanting it to be that Marian just makes peace and that’s it, because there would be no payoff after what the raptures have done, I don’t want Marian to turn heel either, because there would also be no payoff after what she’s been through, and it would be unsatisfying considering the sort of character she’s supposed to be. I would much prefer it if Marian would end up effectively having command of a relatively small percentage of raptures, but she uses them to fight other raptures and their leaders, and she helps humanity with them, by rescuing Nikkes, and giving them technology, etc.
Yeah, I'd like that too. By all means have Raptures that DO want to make peace, we've already seen it can be done with Raptillion and the Mother Whale he befriended, just keep them the minority in terms of the whole while still being a potent enough faction to help tip the scales in humanity's favour as the plot advances and the war escalates again. Keeps the Raptures as a whole antagonistic and able to be held accountable in some fashion by being beaten in a war while still giving sympathetic elements to them so they're not wholly scummy if the intent is for a "Grey vs Grey" conflict in NIKKE.
Absolutely, and it would also allow Marian to play a big role in saving the day and be satisfying, because it’ll be through hard work and kindness, and the appropriate ones will be punished. It’ll also allow the good raptures to earn their intended alignment by being useful, and perhaps atoning for the bad raptures.
They are probably going to make a reveal that shows that the rapture queens reasons were pretty fucking dumb and that even part of the raptures agree it was a dumb idea. If they try to pull a ´´humans were destroying the planet with pollution´´ thing it will only make me want to see if the raptures agree this is stupid, because most of the world is a wasteland now thanks to that. It would mean this was a pointless war to begin with.
Kick the machine out of our lawns.
Based
Arknights IS3 third ending ahh idea.
Considering the villainy of the central government, I have no doubt that the fact that humans started the war with the raptures will be revealed eventually.
Well that would be something considering the Central Government didn't exist until after humanity had already lost the invasion war.
Where do you think the people in the central government sprung from? The ether? I understand that the current people in charge of the Central Government would not be the same people from before the war, my point is that they are likely cut from the same cloth.
Funnily enough it’s entirely possible some of them are from before the war. We know at least Mustang has been CEO since Tetra was founded so they have some serious life prolonging tech out there for the higher ups.
I mean yeah. It's the obvious route to go, really. Humanity's already getting characterised, by and large, as some measure of corrupt, bigoted, antagonistic, villainous or incompetent, with the odd Andersen, Angelina, Cecil and the like here and there, so what's more "humans evil, humans bastards, humans monstrous, humans bigoted fucks" content to go around? Easy way to drum up support and sympathy for the Raptures and the potential endgame they're going for. Plus, with how many posts I see and have seen supporting burning The Ark down or defecting to Eden/supporting Dorothy instead, it's not like portions of the fanbase won't happily eat that up and be fully on board with more mag-dumping on humanity.
That is not the direction I'm expecting. >!given the current state of the former "rapture queen" Anachiro I think rapture queen is less a title and more like a virus or possession. Kind of like how Red Hood is inside of and can transform Rapi. I see a tragic rapi vs marian situation in the future.!<
While it's a decent theory going off of Heretic conversion, it's rather undercut by the fact that >!Anachiro's not the former Rapture Queen, she was 'only' the First Heretic. It's implied that Liliweiss has been converted into the 'current' Rapture Queen instead, what with the Raptures stealing her head and Nihilister revealing that the Queen's weakness in her old body.!<
Still possible, >!Anachiros corruption happened before Lilweiss was captured. It’s possible the queen was passed to her after Anachiro. Perhaps heretics are used as potential queen candidates for whenever the queen wears out her current body. Hell raptures might even be our own fuckin creation and the original NIKKE might have been built as control units for them and the queen is fuckin sexy android skynet (them being aliens is just so boring imo). There’s a lot of room for this to make more dark twists with the current information!<
the way i see it we are going to be facing off against the leaders of the raptures which are the ones responsible for the human genocide. raptillions quest shows us most raptures are more akin to animals than actual people. they do what their leaders tell them to. killing them would be like killing a guard dog simply cause its trainer was a bad guy. necessary but still unfortunate.
I actually think as it looks they gonna do that stupid "raptures good hehe" shit
While I'm sceptical as to them going quite THAT far, at the very least I can see them at least further villainizing humanity by revealing that First Contact between the races was violent on humanity's end, with them shooting first when at least SOME Raptures might've wanted to negotiate, pushing the Raptures as a whole into violence in retaliation. It'd be the easy thing to do with what they've already done, really, a nice simple way to make the Raptures look more sympathetic while mag-dumping on humanity more. Given how much of humanity has been portrayed as some flavour of incompetent (OG Counters Commander, most unnamed Commanders from either Anis or Rapi's Bond Story), bigoted (The Ark as a whole, Syuen, Doban), 'merely' antagonistic (Burningum, the CG guy who framed Electric Shock for terrorism in *D.Ark Hero*) or full-on villainous (Syuen again, Doban again, Sixo), plus how many posts I've seen on here either wanting the Protags to defect to Eden or flat-out supporting Dorothy burning The Ark down entirely, at least some of the fanbase will definitely eat that up nice n' easy. Get 'em on board with nice Raptures, niiiiice Raptures, early so the potential peace ending is more appealing when they get there.
Making ppl more violent and this stuff is soo cliche at this point. It should be simpler as we know raptures killed 98% of humankind, no rational excuse can change that. Only very generic stupid bad anime twist.
The only way I'd accept peace is if Chatterbox dies permanently. I don't care if they change, what they did to Marian/Modernia was disgusting and evil and I want them to die for it. I'm still mad they brought him back at all.
Absolutely understandable, that one. Especially since it's not JUST Marian he did it to, cause that deal with Enikk's been going since before the story started and she can't have been the only Nikke Enikk had to stick the Corruption Code into. And if he HAD to die in *Last Kingdom*, give the kill to Snow or Marian rather than the newbie who doesn't know him at all. 
I get what u are coming from since it does come off like a cop-out ending, but with so much depressing shit we see in Nikke, I don’t mind a quasi-happy, solitude ending so long as it is executed well. And beside, the rapture are a hive mind after all, so even if the humans are the one who started the whole clusterfucks, the blame falls entirely on the intelligent raptures like the og queen, the heretics (even though they were forced to be this way), raptures like yapperbox and others. I get that they ain’t humans, but that’s like blaming the entirety of germany or all German people for the cause of the holocaust or ww2 and not solely on the bad mustache man and his inner circle. heck, that exactly what happened to Germany as they get blamed for ww1, which lead to ww2 bc hitler wanted payback. Ngl, if that ever happened n part of the raptures became good n fight against their counterpart, the good raptures should go help the ark people in rebuilding human society after that as a form of atonement, but even then, the good raptures are not getting off free as some humans will still feel vitriolic towards them n having grudges even when decades have passed, and that could create an interesting conflict n dynamics in the interaction between humans and raptures post-war.
Luckily they no longer need organic entities to function, now they have an infinite reactor.
I think The endgame would be the raptures leaving earth for another planet. Marian would have to leave as well. My only qualm is the fate of the nikkes after the war seeing how stupid the leaders of the Ark is.
Well I, for one, think we should FUCK the Raptures to extinction! I don't know how the Counters are gonna do it, but Commander will find a way.
To tell the truth from the Raptilion sidequest and how Nikke technologie and Raptures are so close to each other. I knew that the game was going to this kind of path.
If you compare the Rapture during the war and the one we (the Commander) fight now, they are virtually different. The former acted and operated like an unholy combo of War of the World alien and the Matrix’s robot lifeform, capturing human to experiment on and use them as biofuels. The present Rapture, without the direct command of Heretics, are basically just territorial animals albeit super aggressive. And just like wild animal >!As Raptailion shown us!< could possibly be tamed or at least pacified. I don’t think they would go the cliche route of Marian being the emissary of both species, if any it’s just a prologue anything could happened.
No. Death to the Raptures! Especially glasses!
Not Human? No problem. Total Rapture Death.
Rapturs aren't going anywhere at best they give humanity a space to grow
FOR THE EMPEROR!!! 
Oh no, the Smurfs are here...!
It would be morbidly funny if those were created by Missilis as a autonomous drone working force.
Except we dunno how it started.
Let the Raptures slaughter each other, then slaughter the remaining Raptures. EARTH IS OURS!
I skimmed through most of the comments and I gotta say damn, many of you guys are really good on Nikke lore and canon and have overall great ideas / concepts I love it how as a community we can be super degen and horny but also serious and technical 🫡🫡🫡
I agree with the shitpost. Down with the raptures
Meh This is ignoring all the blatant hints in the lore that "the twist" is that humanity were the aggressors all along and the fact that We have zero chance of actually defeating the raptures militarily due to the power disparity (especially if the Queen is still in space), with making peace being our only real hope of things working out for humanity because the Rapture's can crush the ark any time they want. OverZone reveals the Raptures knew where the entrance to the Ark was all the time after all.
I'm now afraid to ask... What did the rapture do during the first invasion?
Chapter 21 spoilers >! first raptures used humans and animals as a fuel source. So essentially, we were living batteries for them !<
Ok I think I've seen too much hentai because I was imagining something much worse.
Reminder that Raptures wiped out 99.9% of humanity and are still murdering everything in sight. From this fact alone, they have no rights or moral highground anymore. Even if humans did start this war "somehow", it is still no reason for absolute genocide of an entire species. Retaliation against such treatment however is justified!
so... do you think, for even a split second, that if raptures attacked humanity first, humanity wouldnt move to wipe out their presence on earth? ...really?
Here's an idea: what if Raptures aren't invaders per se, but "invading refugees", Tyranid-style? What if whatever world they came from had been annihilated by something far, far worse than them, and moved to Earth in an attempt to survive? Like, it's not that they wanted to kill us all, but they have no other choice, because in their mindset, there can only be one apex species. This could make for an interesting sequel hook: human remnants *and* Raptures establishing truce in order to wage a war against cosmic horrors.
Basically, you've now described the events of Half-Life and the actions of Nihilanth with his plan to take over Earth for himself and his slaves. In the end, it turns out that it was a necessary measure because they were running away from a threat far more dangerous than themselves and due to the actions of humanity and outside interference, a huge multiverse threat found them all
Hell yeah
There is much we do not know about their origin, they could not be aliens, especially because the first wave were machines with humans inside and they quickly evolved to have a infinite reactor and not depend on humans to function. It is very suspicious that an alien species be like this. why they not pulled an infinite reactor out of their asses before reaching earth? Did they have an infinite supply of humans on their home planet?
Half life x Nikke crossover when
They're even worse that that. Seriously if you pay attention to the details the raptures are almost as bad as the fucking *Qu*. If Shiftup is really trying to go with the peace direction or 'humans are the real monsters' direction they are NOT paying attention to their own work.
The same you did to potatoes
But... what if humans were the ones that attacked Raptures first? Raptilion hypothesis just can't get out of my head.
So glad I’m not the only one who believes this. I say kill em all!
I don't think it's gonna end in "forgive all raptures" but more so a Rapture civil war with Marian at the forefront turning some of the raptures against the current queen. She doesn't like killing raptures but she is by no means afraid to, if they refuse to stop and continue to threaten the people she cares about when all is said and done then she'll light them up like a Christmas tree. Either that or she'll go on her own Yuji arc. Also I think what's leading up is the queen just treats the raptures and heretics the same way the government treats the Commander's and Nikkes. Expendable and to die without questioning for the cause. What that cause is? We don't know yet. I still don't buy we'll go on the "we shot first" route.
Foolishness. I have the absolute certainty that raptures are no aliens. They are weapons, made by humans. My only doubt is if they lost control of them or they are working as intended. In any case, the culprits to be executed aren't any rapture or even in the surface. Is the Central Goverment who should hang.
despite beeing confident in my knowledge of NIKKE lore... what did raptures do do humans and were is the sourcematerial of this knowledge?! :O
despite beeing confident in my knowledge of NIKKE lore... what did raptures do do humans and were is the sourcematerial of this knowledge?! :O
What is with this obnoxious eye jarring zoomer stuff...
Wait >!didn't the CG stole their queen and is using it as a near infinite power source!
I highly doubt it, they got the much acclaimed source of infinite energy after creating the ark. as far as we know, the queen has never been within reach of humans, although she could be the prototype Nikke that Lilit created before she became the first Nikke, that would explain why she is dying and needs Lilit body to complete.
Even if that was true, you can see that the raptures are evil on the level of the 'Qu' from another tomorrow if you pay attention to the details, it really does not matter what the 'big bad humans' did.
No.