Next, now that events are out of the way, we'll be taking a look at something very important; Dark Memories, also known as EX Stories.
Dark Memories are stories that every character in the game has, and give the character a unique title, weapon, and design. It is often tied to a very important or major part of their background and each memory will provide much more insight on said character. Some vary from being additional backstory prior to their tale to even epilogues after what you'd see in the main story. They're all extremely important, so we'll look at them here! After we see the Dark Memory for each character (aside from Levania), we'll be able to move onto the next six chapters of the story.
To unlock Dark Memories was... a very difficult thing. You had to firstly clear major parts of the main story, and then you would be given a 3-star weapon (the tiers are two, three, and four stars). This weapon would then need resources from grinding a dungeon called a "dark lair" for resources. The most noteworthy resource? Zenith's Brilliance.
Zenith's Brilliance was one of the most miserably difficult items to obtain in the game. You could buy it via grinding in a gameplay mode called "Arena," but that mode required just fighting other people's loadouts with asynchronous PVP. It was one of the few places a meta existed for the game. There were other areas like a gameplay mode called "Subjugation" and you could also get it as a gift for various game events (such as NieR Day, the 28th day of each month), but every route would be hard to go with.
Another option was getting it off a gacha from grinding those Dark Lairs as one of the lairs provided tickets to use in the gacha. It was the easiest way, but it was limited to a singular one per month. The Dark Lairs also had a very low chance to drop a Zenith, but the chances were abysmal.
There were quite a few other ways to get Zeniths, but all still were extremely low odds or required a long grind and most was not very fun. As of such, if you ever are looking up old posts about the game and see mention of the "cube," this is what it was referring to. Blessed be those who receive cubes early.
At launch, you would often get only one or two Zeniths a month if you weren't grinding hardcore (and even then, this required a lot of work).
You needed 12 of them to actually completely unlock a story, however...
If there is one thing that isn't missed from the game, it's the grind for these cubes. May these cubes be forever laid in the ground, alongside the misery they spread.