8 Video Game Easter Eggs That Smashed The Fourth Wall

7. Nier Forcing You To Make A Sacrifice

There's something very precious about our save-games, even if they are for games we've already completed and never plan on touching again. Nier taps right into our irrational attachment to save-games with one of its several possible endings. Nier was an underrated last-gen action-JRPG from Square Enix. It had a large open-world, a solid real-time combat system and an engaging plot involving an array of alternate endings before alternate endings became as trendy as cat cafés. One of these lets Nier "sacrifice his own existence" to save his possessed companion, Kaine. You think to yourself that that sounds like a more pleasant option than driving your sword through her heart, and so select the option. In an ingenious move, 'sacrificing yourself' entails deleting all your save data in the game, wiping everything you achieved so that it basically looks like you never existed in the first place. After going through a process that asks you several times whether this is what you really want, all the entries in your inventory, map and save-game screens start getting wiped before your eyes. It's kind of traumatic, and you wonder for a second whether you even get to see what happens to Kaine in the end. Thankfully, the ending is a poignant payoff, as Kaine wakes up from a daze, a Lunar Tear flower falls in front of her, then she sheds a tear before the game ends with her saying "It's like I just found something special". A beautiful ending that makes your very real-feeling sacrifice all worth it, and a great way to give closure to the game considering the save-game disappears forever.