if you're keeping up with the new games you've probably heard about a certain little MMO called once human but unlike most MMOs this one pushes the new weird genre to its limits throwing you the player into a confusing dreamlike and on the surface oddly intriguing world what's the deal with this world I mean the lore isn't exactly throwing itself at you to easily understand and even if you do get to it is there even anything of substance today I'll be answering that question and More in an attempt to explain the full story of once Human season 1 in as succinct of a way as possible so that whether you play the game or not you can understand everything important there is to know about this apocalyptic freeo play Survival MMO who were you when you were once human if at all why are these strange blocky things mining or at the speed of light and for the love of God what is this bus doing welcome to the story of once human [Music] long before you show up like over 20 years long before Humanity was seemingly fine things were normal like the perfectly normal insane political and economic systems of our modern day except Humanity was about to meet some new friends seemingly not by choice Rifts between SpaceTime opened up creating small portals between our world and a place called Rift space some kind of new weird eldrich horror pocket Dimension and through it came this weird substance called Stardust as well as these things called deviations but what are deviations well they are objects that are formed as a result of people's strong bonds or connections with said objects in other words if someone had an attachment to some metal toy that happened to look like this dude and if both were affected by Stardust this could have been the potential to turn the two or maybe just the object itself into a deviation kind of bringing it to life in a sense although characters like low make it clear that deviations don't seem to have a sense of moral agent and thus cannot be judged on their actions like a person could though if my definition for a deviation isn't suitable the game actually defines them as being the materialization of human thoughts caused by Stardust Decay further adding that whatever is on your mind no matter what a flying horse or a pig on a unicycle once the Stardust decays inside you that horse or that pig will materialize in front of your very eyes behaviorally deviations act however they want in at times very unpredictable ways along with Stardust Decay creating deviations there are also deviants which the game constantly refers to the enemies by whether they're the human enemies like the vultures or the zombie looking things deviants unlike deviations just seem to be kind of generic negatively affected humanlike creatures that were corrupted or tainted by Stardust in some way while deviations deviants and the overall effects of Stardust weren't too bad at this stage it didn't take long for corporations to take notice which as it always does in these sci-fi stories inevitably led to catastrophic events [Music] Rosetta was a research company that started examining deviations in Stardust they began to contain them role playing like they were some kind of Walmart SCP Foundation but if it was made in China experiment after experiment led to Rosetta investing more and more into studying and containing these peculiar deviations and building their facilities on the continent of ncot which is where you play on in season one of the game Rosetta eventually created monoliths to contain particularly dangerous deviations which seem to manifest their own also very dangerous creatures in pocket Dimensions sort of these Rift spaces for example in game there are various deviation related bosses called great ones or Transcendence that you fight at said monoliths but let's not get ahead of ourselves thousands of monoliths were actually built around the world but for some reason ncot was the place that deviation started to appear outside of containment and the monoliths there were specifically more heavy duty thille to the north has detected at least two deviation incidents in the last month the strange thing is the Stardust concentration is just the same as ever and still far below the safety threshold so if it's not that our equipment is malfunctioning then the so-called safety threshold is [ __ ] is there a pattern to all this who are we kidding ourselves or everyone else thousands of monoliths have been operating all across the mainland for many years without a single deviation reported why is everything happening on ncot Rosetta was using these monoliths to seemingly sacrifice human lives to the great ones there to strengthen and test them the extent to the sacrifices is not fully understood and kind of depends on the great one itself but it's observed in many of the cut scenes for each of these bosses essentially Rosetta may have started out with good intentions but it obviously turned into an extreme utilitarian Corporation and its effects on the environment by helping to spread pollution of Stardust and use the deviations for their own means including literally consuming the deviations to create ascended beings meant that eventually all of this was going to have some really negative consequences a kind of boiling [Music] point and it did because out of nowhere an eldrich horror of arms hands and fingers entered our reality through the rift space and started fingering everything this spaghetti monster here is called the manibus and it brought on an event known as Starfall this Starfall was incomprehensibly bad for humans because Stardust began massively proliferating and spreading over the planet or at the very least the continent of now caught and wait Stardust kind of reminds me of another funny little substance in a not so distant Survival Game I can recall anyway Starfall was basically an apocalypse level event for Humanity and from there on everything went to sh I'm not crazy the data is real the concentration of Stardust near here is increasing exponentially I don't think Rosetta's research Department can control the current situation maybe they never wanted to people were infected killed and morphed into deviants deviant ation themselves manifested and wandered around and Rosetta was just like oh no but unlike that adorable Ape from Planet of the Apes which by the way was voiced by Greg hefley's dad in Diary of a Wimpy Kid these [ __ ] couldn't fear aoris because they went and started developing artificial humans called metahumans and I'm not talking about the Unreal Engine 5 ones I love you guys I love you too I love you too these are basically deviations that are like humans and have sentience I guess they created two main on that end up being pretty relevant characters in the story LD 081 who was named Mary and given the surname of Ames after the head of the gene research Department Marcus Ames and then there was DVT 011 which was named mitsuko Mary was a dangerous thing she killed all of her siblings in the human test tube and went on to be raised as a killing machine basically she entered the chain of command at Rosetta itself and then just at some point became chief of command of the entire continent of now of the specific like elit of Rosetta she also went on to basically lead the evolutionist movement which had the goal of consuming deviations and becoming gods or evolved humans mitugo on the other hand was quite a different story she had a very unique ability to sense tiny fluctuations in Stardust and even to create deviations of her own she was pretty special for being able to do this and Rosetta wanted to exploit the [ __ ] out of her because in gamer turns they got pretty lucky with their mystery MMO loot box and happened to create mitsuko which then meant they could use mitsuko to create infinitely more mystery loot boxes is kind of a win-win right well except for the human rights being subtracted from that equation oh yeah and Mary wanted to feed mitso to her dad so he could become a god with her I guess what but with all of that said not everyone at Rosetta was a bad person some people believed that metahumans deserved rights and that deviations deserve to not be exploited as if they were nothing more than a pure resource to be extracted one of these activists you might say was this guy named Victor Hammet he cared for mitso a lot and after trying to reason with Rosetta and even Mary which didn't really get him anywhere he came up with the plan to fight back against the corporation Victor encouraged mitsuko to either create or sort of free the metahumans which she was able to do cuz well she could create deviations and metahumans seem to at least be some form of deviations so from there Victor helped mitso escape and together they formed a group of metahumans called the mayflies their whole stick being small yet Invincible built to endure yet ironically this was quite the opposite of what the mayflies would ultimately become with the mayflies goal being sort of to stop rosetta in order to do that wanted to kill the great ones that Rosetta had basically created in their super mega monoliths on ncot cuz they were obviously really dangerous I'm not entirely sure if they succeeded in doing this considering that these great ones are still around in the game when you find them but otherwise the mayflies weren't just a militia group their goals reached Beyond just fighting Rosetta because with Victor's help they built new technology to harness and work alongside deviations without harming them instead of you know just using them as fuel Victor came up with this cradle thing taken straight out of death stranding which mayflies could wear it to basically team up with deviations feel like it's missing the baby that gives you a thumbs up though but the mayflies also made use of securement facilities to keep deviation safe so that humans could live alongside them without like getting cancer the mayflies were doing all this great stuff but unfortunately that part about them being built to endure was only a little bit true because eventually Meo led the mayflies into battle against a rosetta base and about like 90% of them were killed then Victor turned into a crow for some reason I've seen edge of the sky I've met the lady with the wings I've traveled to the nest not by choice but by Cowa you don't want to I don't know what you're talking about God this is where we fast forward to 20 years after Starfall had first taken place so when I said like 99% of the mayflies died that was like all of them except for you and this guy he ran away but you well you suffered some Mortal wound with this strange knife plunged into your chest and Rosetta took you and put you in your own little container they studied you for a while until one of mitsuko's lovely little deviations this butterfly showed up and holy [ __ ] did the butterfly do that you escape after this guy gets completely and then this is where the game starts we finally get to talk about where you come into all this see the idea was that you know back in the day you would fought alongside the other mayflies before you got super injured captured and literally lost all of your memories of like your entire life before hence why you seem a bit confused when you finally escaped you get your hands on your cradle which had been found next to your body by Rosetta however long ago and bird Victor just shows up who now just goes by V he kind of ambushes you and he's like yo we need to go find mitso and like scattle out of this place so you leave the facility find Mito and start to piece together the story which they throw at you like immediately us to and you're not a monster in fact you're very very special after you start skipping the incessant dialogue between mitso and V who are trying to explain the entire L of the universe to you you can finally play the game after killing a sort of Dorial great one but before then you get voed by this door which V already told you is safe so I don't even know why you're resisting it so much and then you're basically on your way out of the interdimensional Pocket [ __ ] a battle bus and this is where your journey truly begins that is an unhinged fing sentence what the and this is where your journey truly begins now I want to make a disclaimer while this isn't exactly lore I'd like these videos to include useful information outside of the story so just so you're aware it took me almost as many hours as it took me to play through the entirety of Elden ring and Shadow of the UR tree just to get far enough in once human which was like 99% through the first season to get to where I was confident enough in all the evidence I had collected about the lore to make this video you're watching now and I tell you this because I just want you to know what to expect with this game and how much of a Time sync it is I say that not in a negative way though because when you fall out of the sky and decide where you want to start holy [ __ ] does this game grip you harder than a church pastor who just spotted a minor with that said you may fly scour over the decrepit and apocalyptic Landscapes of ncot as you uncover what happened to this place slowly pieing together the history of Rosetta Starfall the people their governments and your own story you find settlements again and again that are basically each time connected in some way to the monoliths and the great ones inside of them while the NPC's mouths sometimes don't move while they're talking you begrudgingly accept their quest to go and slay the great ones and through these experiences you realize holy [ __ ] these cut scenes are actually pretty [ __ ] cool complete as you're breezing by these bosses like your Chris hands and telling them to have a seat please have a seat they event start getting a little harder and then suddenly it jumps to like impossible difficulty with this tree dude but most important of all for the purposes of this video you might be asking Ned why don't you tell us about their lore you know I'd love to do that but the cutscenes are about the only thing to do with these bosses that have any amount of substance Because the actual Back stories of how these great ones were created and how usually the leader of the given settlement you're required to talk to was wronged or had some weird relation to said great ones have about as much depth as the script for the Borderlands so I think it's best we just skip that part they're really not important to the overall plot I'm just here to feed my [Music] dog on the other hand what is important to the plot is Mary at least at first because see when you first meet her she actually pretends that she's a mayfly and not literally the [ __ ] commander of the elite soldiers of Rosetta that could basically crush your balls faster than you can ask to if she really wanted to but for some reason Mary doesn't she just puts up this act and eventually surprise surprise betrays you and instead of snapping your neck like a twig because she probably could easily considering this [ __ ] can fly she just summons this grossly anticlimactic anime to finish you off what the [ __ ] now the okay I'm going to it's balls after she totally owns you with this epic betrayal you continue progressing in the game grinding it out for hours and hours Stop what does that mean until stumbling upon a rosetta facility that gives you some lore dumps that you learn and read or just close it immediately and play the game cuz that's the only fun part and eventually hey would you look at that it's time to fight the final boss you show up at this final dungeon place and why why is me too in the middle of the road so you enter this facility fight through a bunch of guys then you find this thing which is immune to damage and kind of just nonchalantly chases after you at the pace of a brisk walk and you find out that this is actually a deviation minion thing that is being controlled by Mary's dad Marcus Ames and in order to stop this thing you need to kill his body whoa so you get to his body he's just chilling here and you just you just shoot him this isn't the final boss though I mean obviously we're going to go and fight Mary of course which is what the story has been leading up to this entire time and oh okay she's she's just going to walk into the sh the doors closed is that what you think why are her lips not moving so instead of giving him a satisfying boss fight of Mary to conclude the main story of season 1 she kind of just villain monologues to you and then gets fingered by the thing I briefly mentioned way back when the manibus which if you don't recall this is the sort of original entity that caused Starfall see the manabus really really likes these things called starid what are starid I don't know maybe some big old chunks of Stardust no clue because it doesn't even have an item destion but my theory is that Rosetta through everything they had done attracted the Manus through Rift space and he was like oh hey there's steroids here and he just started slurping them up and then Rosetta was like hello good sir we have a business opportunity we would like to share with you and okay this theory is kind of ridiculous but you know what I mean basically the manabus is here and it's trying to end the world and [ __ ] I guess Mary wants to use it to become a God and like take over the world and I'm going to be honest if this cut scene has taught me anything it's that Mary's ass has more substance in this entire game story ass ass booty to conclude what comes next will season 2 be a new map will it be an expansion of the current one what's going to happen with the lore will it get better or will it get worse we're only going to know in time but what I do know is that this game while having a pretty poorly written and executed story is a lot of fun and this video doesn't really do it justice as a whole while I can make fun of the game's attempt at a narrative all day I assume as someone who honestly hasn't sunk that much time into MMOs overall all that once human having a lackluster story isn't exactly uncommon in this genre MMOs are designed to create addicting and engaging gameplay loops and having a compelling story that doesn't tick every single cliche sci-fi box is not Central to said gameplay but hey maybe I'm being too hard on the game I want to know what you think leave your thoughts down below this video Took a ton of research so please do click the Subscribe button below for more videos where I explain the stories of your favorite games also let me know what you think I should cover next and as always thanks for watching [Music]