Part 123: NIER Backstory: White Chlorination Syndrome

NIER Backstory: Part 1 - White Chlorination Syndrome

Right then. I'm sure you all are a bit confused as to what the hell that was all about. That is literally all the backstory the game offers about the time before the events of NIER. But, let's clarify a bit of the info we've already received and break down a few parts as we go along...


If you've paid attention to the Black Journal pages that have occasionally cropped up alongside our dead friends Caim and Red, you might have noticed a few mentions of a "White Chlorination Syndrome" with no real explanation as to what the hell that means. And indeed, none is given in-game. As it stands, it doesn't matter to NIER's overall plot narrative, but it is really pivotal to understanding the backstory.


So...you know how at the end of Drakengard the Queen Beast mama Grotesquerie broke apart and disintegrated after its defeat from a high stakes rhythm battle? Well, it didn't burn away and turned into ash like I assumed. It was actually made completely out of salt. Extra-dimensional salt that lacked any sort of mass. Crazy magic salt that had just carpeted Shinjuku, Tokyo like a fresh snow. There's also the dragon that got blown the fuck up with parts of its charred remains spreading all over the place. And Caim's stock of weapons went flying everywhere. I'm sure that killed more than a few folks. But, the big thing is that a bunch of particles from magical beasts from another dimension just got rained all over the better part of a densely populated urban metropolis.


Fast forward half a year and people in Tokyo start getting sick. Really sick. It's rare at first, but within a few months there's a full blown city-wide epidemic. The disease has a 100% mortality rate. You catch it, you're fucked! The disease basically makes the cells in a person's body break down into sodium chloride - salt. You basically turn into a big ol' stack of salt. Hence the name: White Chlorination Syndrome. Pretty shitty way to die, I'm sure.


As you can guess, the remains of the Queen Beast raining down over Tokyo was really, really, REALLY bad for humans and the cause of the disease. Several thousand people were dead within a few months of the first case. The rest of the world is kind of freaked out as to what in the hell is going on with Japan. Within a year things had gotten so bad that a huge ass wall was erected around Shinjuku and the place was cordoned off Escape from New York style while scientists worked on a cure. And that was all fine and dandy for a while...


Until people started surviving White Chlorination Syndrome. Not in the "cancer in remission" sense. But the magic disease was starting to...change people... Not into Shades. Those are their own thing. There used to be something much worse roaming the world...

Edit: Outside the Black Journals, White Chlorination Syndrome was directly alluded to in the main plot briefly. Remember the Memory Tree and the Envy memory...?