Hiyori Mokami Plays Part 1 of NIKKE’s 4th-Anniversary Event Live, a Story of Repeated Deaths

GLITCH STARS — Hiyori Mokami streamed the first part of NIKKE’s fourth-anniversary event, “Maria N,” for nearly five hours, working through a story about a doctor who sends copies of herself to die on the surface so their combat data can be collected. Mokami said it was the first time they had streamed a new event this close to its release, and reacted to each turn of the plot as it arrived.

Before starting the story, Mokami had read summaries of the two most recent side stories to catch up, and had reached chapter 48 of the main story. The first gacha pull, the game’s draw system, brought Rapunzel, which Mokami celebrated as proof of “undeniable luck.” The luck did not last: after about 100 pulls aimed at Marian, the event’s central character, there was still no SSR, the top rarity, and Mokami put off the rest of the pulls until the end of the stream.

“I thought this was going to be a happy wedding story. We haven’t gotten to the happy wedding part.” — Hiyori Mokami, midway through the story

The story follows Dr. Maria and a series of Nikkes made in her image, each numbered and each sent to the surface toward a target location she will not explain. Mokami was struck that every copy keeps the memory of how the earlier ones died, and the story’s body count climbed past a thousand; at one point Dr. Maria tallied 1,187 deaths. A squad of three copies fighting together was undone when they watched one another die, which brought back a fear of death that Dr. Maria could not erase.

The event also delivered a run of lore that Mokami called “huge.” The AI Enoch gave Dr. Maria a one-month deadline to show results, and it was said that Dr. Maria’s mother, Dr. Alva, was behind the cause that led to the rapture queen. Chatterbox and Mirror were shown corrupting the copies, and Enoch later turned the project toward making a heretic. Dr. Maria was then assigned a series of human commanders, and Mokami and chat sorted the first six by their flaws before reaching the seventh.

That commander, who offered Maria N a blue rose and bandaged her ankle, was killed shielding her, and the report that followed said the seventh would be deployed again and again. A branching mini-game came next, in which nearly every choice ended in Maria’s death and only a hidden ending let her run beyond the mission area. Mokami also detoured to the main story’s chapter 15 to look at a diary page that chat had linked to Dr. Alva.

Chat kept up a running joke that Mokami had “prewatched” the event whenever a guess came true, which Mokami denied. Near the end, Mokami pulled Marian on the last pulls of the night, then signed off by thanking viewers for “suffering together.”