you know, i understand now why we're twins. it's because... because we were born without souls. this world is too lonely for one without a soul. there's too much... emptiness. our souls are missing, but our tears still work.

devola’s last words are a resume of the entire game. vessels without souls and souls without vessels. they fight, but they have something in common: they are empty. they, in theory, need one another. but they can’t. replicants now have sentience, they see gestalts as menaces, they fight them, they kill them. the two of them, however, have one more thing in common: they get together to fill themselves. the conscious beings in nier replicant’s world all have their own problems that go beyond the “replicants vs gestalt war”. they suffer, searching desperately for acceptance, for meaning in their lives, for identity - and this search is seen by the game itself, constantly changing its shape, as if something was missing (it's the game body or the game soul?), but in the end, this search is what brings hope, is what brings meaning. the characters in nier replicant may be selfish (i mean, the boy kills the shadowlord and basically the entire humanity together), looking further into their own objectives without thinking in the whole picture, but, at the end of the world, would you try to save it or just be together with the ones you love?

About four years ago, I played the original Nier while diving through the drakengard series to get to Automata. I played the game early in the semester that I started learning game programming and coding for art in general. I experienced it at a very formative time, when I was just becoming interested in creating multi-genre video games in the spirit of multi-medium art and film grammar. I believed, and still believe, that in the same way that individual film scenes are composites of shots, edits, and intersections of various art forms creating a single larger narrative, the narrative games of the future would be changing their equivalent elements scene by scene to compose the building blocks of their own narratives. Those equivalent elements rather than being shots and edits and such instead being systems of loops and mechanics and control that are narratively driven to convey themes and personal experience, and that the games of the future I describe would be shifting their mechanical genres and play systems as the narrative shifts tones and ideas to convey the story and message. Basically creating environments of rules and systems around the player to communicate those themes psychologically rather than through primarily literary and visual means (although literary and visual means play a large role).

Nier showed me a blueprint for something that attempts something like that with its genre-bending and narrative recontextualization. But at the same time, I was deeply disappointed with the game, because it did not quite live up to what I had in mind once the promise of such a game was shown to me. This was a game I had been dreaming of for so long, a game so ambitious in style and structure that when I heard it had text adventures and resident evil sections I couldn’t wait to play it. Once I started playing I was so in love with the concepts and world it presents at the start, and had burned out in Route B so hard that I realized this wasn’t quite the game I wanted it to be. I couldn’t bring myself to finish it at the time, and I believed that Routes B and C not changing much of the moment to moment gameplay, and the requirement for weapons collection being too much of an ask of the player for me to be able to recommend this game to people I knew. I youtube’d the rest of the narrative content and watched a separate full playthrough to try and get some other perspectives on the game.

At the time I was writing a small game design blog, and I wanted to write about Nier, but I never did. At the time, I had no idea the original Nier had such a massive following so attached to its minute details and parts that I see now on this website, so try to cut me some slack for the arrogance I might display saying this, but I was going to write a piece kind of like “fixing Nier”. Basically, I was so in love with the promise of the game but felt so disappointed by how I felt it didn’t live up to its potential, that I started thinking what kinds of changes I would’ve wanted to see if they ever got the chance to recreate it with more budget and time. I will summarize what I was thinking at the time quickly here before talking about Replicant Vers. 1.22 to critically interrogate my own conceptions of the game and how they’ve changed over time and with the new version.
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What I loved most about the original Nier, was the metaphor of the final boss. That through the products of a failed world and people, the only attempt at salvaging what was left of the world was once again dismantled by human miscommunication enforced by violence, and apart from all the social and meta-level commentary of the violence of Nier, on the individual and spiritual level of the protagonist of Nier, the metaphor is that when a person is propelled to violence guided by self-justification and a lack of communication or misguided communication, the body becomes at war with the soul.

When a person is pushed to curl a fist and strike until their beliefs no longer remain evident and need constant further force to convince itself to keep striking, the war between body and mind has already begun, and whatever the fist is hitting no longer matters. The vehicle for violence has become its own purpose and it will strike with no end as long as the body believes it to be true.

That was my reading of Replicant Nier fighting Gestalt Nier for the objectified dream of a Yona, and I was going to write an article about ways I thought the game could live up to that kind of thesis more. Here are the changes I was thinking:

1) Route A would be Replicant Nier’s story as we see in the game now, but with Route B the protagonist could switch to Gestalt Nier. It would be him on his quest to get Yona’s body from Replicant Nier and eventually reunite all getsalts with replicants. And every so often in that route, there would be a playable flashback sequence to Gestalt Nier’s experience prior to becoming the original gestalt, and bits of what happened in laboratories with scientists and what the earth was like before the bodies and souls were separated would show up, kind of teasing the player along with more of the type of stuff that was in the Gestalt documents that you get in shadowlord’s castle.

2) After this proposed Route B, Route C would be a redo of Route A but you play as Kaine, dealing with her own grief of having to be an accomplice to a quest only she knows the truth of, as well as having to deal with her crumbling morality and having to constantly redefine herself and her identity against the dehumanizing voice in her ear. This would give more weight to the choice of ending c/d and what the player truly values, saving a damaged person that you’ve gotten to know the real plight of, or being given the chance to search for new meaning in a post-damaged world, a world whose destruction you’ve become the accomplice of by enacting your quest of purging.

3) Misc changes: I felt the combat was actually pretty good for the most part, but I would’ve wanted to see some more variety and options, especially past route A. For example, buffs to some of your spells that go underused,and a slower 1 on 1 form of combat with even more weight. I was mostly let down by what felt like undercooked systems in the weapon upgrading system and the word system. I almost never felt like the words changed much in the original game and felt superfluous, when they should’ve been a much bigger part in a game about language and communication as violence. The weapons not having weapon stories also felt like something was missing, and a lot of the time it felt like the new weapons I was getting were worse than the upgraded ones I already had, and it was annoying going back to the same place to upgrade them and didn’t really feel like it meshed with the game structurally.

There! Those are the feelings I had about what I would’ve wanted to see changed in the game. Truth be told, when I got to automata I felt a little vindicated when I saw how they handle that game’s routes B and C and the character switching. When they announced this remake, I was really excited to see what changes and additions they would make to the original game, the game I felt would’ve benefited the most of any game I had from a remake since to fill up to that potential I saw in it at first, now that they have more budget and time.

I was actually surprised to see that Routes B and C were still mostly the same as before, with some added scenes, of course, but that REPETITIVENESS was still there. The realization that this repetition must be by design and not a method of lengthening game time or making up for lack of budget/time, as well as seeing the love for this game online has forced me to re-examine this game from the ground up.

I will now begin this endeavor.
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First off, what struck me here lately about replaying this game is that the game seems to not care for the most part that the examples it gives of the many genres it contains aren’t really all that good. The text adventure is not that great of a text adventure, the block puzzles are alright, the diablo section is cool but shallow, the riddles are really basic, platforming is mostly the same, and the resident evil section camera angles aren’t even that cool or interesting. Plus the boss fights really have only a few gimmicks that they show you and then they kinda end. The point is that these genres are merely present, and that they’re all calling back to the history of games itself, rather than to make individual statements about the scenes they are in, or at least that’s how I came to read them now. More on this later.

The combat is still fun, and moreso now than before, but it always ends up superfluous by Route B and borderline mindless in Route C. Even playing the game on hard mode just turns the game into a huge repetitive exercise that takes a lot of your energy by making you press the buttons more from how much more health enemies get, as well as making those timed weak points really hard to nail, forcing you to repeat sections of long fights. And this happens no matter at which Route you decide to turn on Hard mode, because it makes all the enemies scale to your level, when on normal, they do not.The point is that even trying to make the game more fun for yourself by trying to make it more demanding of the player to learn the systems only still ends in tedium.

This game is a systematic dismantling of the concept and structure we as players know of as the “Quest”. The quest that puts into motion that journey of heroes through the history of the (violent) participatory fiction we call video games. It is constructed to force the player to alienate and distance themselves from the quest of the hero’s journey and reexamine it. I believe this is the goal of the multi-genreism found in Nier. So let us examine that quest.

The first route of the game is when the game is truly fun. It pulls you in with the sickest cold-open bait and switch in games and makes you wanna know just what the hell is going on. The quest is begun via dramatic irony even without the character knowing; the player wants to know what the relationship between two characters are across 1412 years. The entire first half of the game is a really engaging first act of a hero’s journey, with fun fantasy banter, new characters showing up at a brisk pace, adventures and locales galore. It’s essentially a remix of game genres spliced together to create a familiar but fun adventure with some self aware humor.

By the second half of the first route, the game becomes twisted, but only subtly. The player doesn’t recognize it at first. The characters are motivated by bloodlust, the air is sour, the ecosystem has declined, and the tone is bleak. Revisiting those locales and genres now feels less propelling and more dire, but the player pushes through and despite odds and sacrifices, he takes down the baddy only to discover that, well, you already know.

Route B:
For me, Route B was the point where all the fun had vanished. I already knew the twists and that the voices would get added, so I just ran through it as quickly as I could, making a few side stops on the way. By the end, I was exhausted and took a break. However, I found myself hesitating in boss fights. Waiting to hear their lines end before striking them down. Not striking as self-righteously as I did before. Even though I know beforehand the changes, I still felt a little bit of that “should I really be doing this” feeling. But overall, I can’t say I was emotionally affected by much of what happened.

I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me for this. I had seen so many others praise these characters and gut wrenching moments so much, but I couldn’t find myself attached to the cast. Sure, they were cool and I enjoyed being with them, but I felt like there wasn’t enough of it. Enough time, enough conversations, enough moments to truly get attached. I felt closer to Kaine after reading her dreams, but she was still distant. The camera is always pulled back in most scenes, and her struggle is only told to me via voice lines and text, not given to me as the player to understand and fight with. I found it really odd that Automata had really emotionally affected me by having characters that were more like objects and concepts, while Replicant had what felt more like real characters and relationships but didn’t really grow on me. Perhaps that’s just me though.

However the new campfire and other group scene honestly did give me a feeling of warmth amid the slow and boring. I was wishing for more of that, but I had to savor what little I got.

I finished the fight and got the ending. I was honestly getting sick of hearing Emil’s theme every scene. It was like constant misery theatrics and was starting to desensitize me to the events of the game. The weapon stories I was grinding through on the side were further alienations. My tools of (in)justice were tools of cartoonish slaughter or horrible misdemeanors of the past.

Route C:
With the requirement for weapon collection, I decided to take Route C slower and take in the sights more. Do side quests. Get to know the world. A few things on this route changed that made me take a step back.

First, I began to actually resent the main character. I had heard his tirades and justifications long enough. I wanted to leave him behind.

The complete eradication of difficulty or danger turned the game from an action roleplaying game to a game about gaming. The weapon stats didnt matter anymore. I had been changing my equipped words and engaging with the system a lot prior, but at this point there wasn’t any reason to. Words lost their meaning. I was skipping through most of the text anyway, since I had read it all before. I was going through the motions. I was just using whatever weapons looked cool. Upgrading only gave me more information about what kind of fucked up people were using them before.

The change to the ship section actually really surprised me, and I realized that defeating the shade before kaine was forced to use the postman as a hostage allowed her to read her the shade’s letter to him, and that both the communication of truth, and the communication of a lie refuse closure to trauma, and that was one of the main themes repeated in a lot of sidequests and events. Tell the truth to the junk heap boys, the lighthouse lady, the red bag wife, etc or lie. And neither one actually creates a “good” resolution. It’s in the doubt of such actions after the fact that we can mull on and come up with a meaning of our own to be able to deal with trauma and loss.

Emil’s text scenes I really enjoyed. I felt that he was a natural kind of foil to the main character and in fact it made me realize all the part members bar weiss have some sort of single other family member they are dealing with trauma over. It made me reconsider some of the characters and events even though I had seen these cutscenes so many times over. I actually was starting to feel a little more attached to them. The emil sacrifice scene got me more emotionally invested, and the scene where Kaine just wails on protag right after that elicited a more complicated response and appreciation from me.

The new devola and popola scenes gave some needed context for their perspective on this whole affair. Their own grappling with their existence, as I was with my own and so were the other characters. Their insistence of themselves and the protagonist as tools of a separate goal began to make me feel like the alienation I was feeling from the characters was intentional, and these characters really are sort of objects spun by relationships.

I eventually got all the weapons. I think my desire for more from the characters could have been aided by the sidequests if they were better, but aside from a handful of good ones, a lot of them were silent and didn’t give more banter and were generally unpleasant to play.

By the end of Route C I began to get a rhythm for the monotony. The genre sections were more like exercises I had memorized. It honestly began to remind me of the feeling of Tarkovsky’s “sculpting in time” idea. The way his movies would drag on and on with scenes of nothing happening and people’s faces in a single moment. The way he believed that something special would happen when the audience had begun to FEEL the time they were spending with characters on screen, literally feel the time go by. A place you can only reach once you’ve become bored, and can engage with the material in a new way, transcend the boredom with your own participation once something really does happen. I think in its repetition and sheer time/boredom spent, Nier manages to come as close to that philosophy as it can, arguably closer than Tarkovsky did in the film medium.

The game began to fully destruct the quest for me at this point, it felt pointless. Meaningless. Route A left me with an ambiguous flashback, Route B left me with a scene behind vaseline of the other halves of my characters.

I began to really think about how Yona isn’t even considered important by endings C and D. She’s not even present in the scenes. And I realized that Yona is one of the most objectified characters I’ve ever seen in a game, and I mean that in the way that the main character and narrative intentionally objectify her. She starts the game as a character, but by the second half, she is not really a character anymore because she is not allowed into the relationships of the game. She is the quest. Her image is the quest. The protagonist doesn’t truly know her. He cannot know her, because he doesn’t spend time with her.

The only way the protagonist and by extension the player can know her is through loading screen text, letters, words, a distant way of understanding someone you won’t really ever meet. The protagonist uses her as a means to justify his actions because without her serving that role he would live a meaningless existence, in a meaningless world of game genres. He wants to cure her and save her, but he never talks to her. All Yona really wants from him, the entire game, is for him to be with her, and he denies her that for the quest to save her.

We are complicit in neglecting her for the first half because we believe in the quest, we believe in the illusion and facade of the fun times and adventures and macguffins because we have former experiences of these things turning out fruitfully. But by the second half, we are complicit in allowing her character to become an objectification for the main character to slaughter on her behalf. Now, of course, this complicitness is not to say the player is at fault, the player is merely performing a role, and the role is not just to enact violence, but to build a gradual understanding of that violence, why it happens, what it means, and how to go from there.

So the game shifts to instead suddenly becoming very concerned with the relationship of the player and Kaine, with the final choice presented. I thought for a while what to choose and what’s at stake, and I chose choice D.

But then I backed out, because I had flashes of all he drudgery and time I spent going all over the place and through loading screens of letters and skimming the stupid forest of myth text section for the color of the girl’s eyes and of fighting the same enemy types and falling into water or sand and suddenly the feeling of all records of my time in boredom and repetition being erased felt bad. So I killed Kaine. And saw what unfolded.

And, seeing him kiss her and her thank me for putting her out of life and ending her constant grappling with her own morality and conscience. Well, it actually made me feel sick. Like really sick. I felt gross at the thought of taking a life that was so troubled and close to mine, someone who had become my “weapon”.

So I reloaded the save and did the whole song and dance and skipped the cutscenes to redo the choice. I had mixed feelings of Ending D. I felt it was certainly interesting, as I had back when I played the original, but I don’t think it feels substantive enough an ending to finish off the core themes of the game. Was self sacrifice to the one character who we were really trying to save and who we were actually spending the most time with the only way out of the cycle of misguided vengeance and violence? Actually pretty buddhist, when you think about it, a release from the cycle of pain and suffering in the form of non-existence.

Route E:
I don’t know why the game doesn’t tell the player how to get this ending when it tells them about all the other ones. Is it meant to be something you experience by accident upon returning to the game years or months later? Is it meant to be some kind of secret? Are we meant to engage with discourse online about the game to discover there was more to it?

I don’t know, but I do know that to go back to the first half of the game again after experiencing only the second half 3+ times over was a shock to the system. I had forgotten how much I missed the real quest. The good times, the first time I met my friends, the locales I visited, the bright outdoors and the sheep and wildlife. I had been so adjusted and used to the monotony, the stubbornness, the tragedy, that I forgot this game was fun to play back then. I was rolling through the game in anticipation of what Ending E could possibly be, but it was a fun speedrun. I had forgotten about the bridge to the lost shrine, the bright sunlight and warm tones, the funner songs and being around a happy town.

Becoming friends with kaine hit me a little bit more now that I had known her through the time I spent with her, and gotten to know her more through that sheer time, and the splitoff happened. Playing as kaine was amazing, she controlled excellently and it was so refreshing to do something new, and hear her react and talk about new stuff. It felt like reuniting with an old friend. The tree machine stuff and its role in the puzzlebox of this world was intriguing as I pushed on, and seeing emile and her reconnect (and why does he have 4 arms!!!) and all that stuff was just a treat. Seeing the tiebacks to automata was for sure interesting but what got me the most was seeing her finally come to terms with her loss, wrestle with her past, and realize what gives her meaning. Kaine was the real protagonist all along, and her wrestling her destiny from the hands of the protagonist in the form of a subversion of Ending D was truly amazing. What if you sacrifice your existence for someone, and they do it right back? You delete ANOTHER save file to get the older one back. The world you know is over, and above the large blooming flower between us she is finally reunited with the people that mean the most to her, not the quest they had been obsessed with, but with the family she had finally been given. And I love that emil says it outright, that maybe what they had been doing wasn’t good at all, and Kaine sees the meaningless of the world around them, compounding on the constructs of mindlessness and repetition the player had experienced, she holds young, innocent Nier in her arms. Not the older, bloodlusted, murderous Nier, but the young boy-on-a-quest nier.
The final lunar tear in a series using the flower symbolizing a violent end of the old and the start of something new, even if it results in violence and meaninglessness again, a last wish blooming into reality, and the title screen is replaced from the flower to the weapons of the party, discarded and left behind.

At the end of the hero’s quest, as haunted and fucked up as it gets in cycles of repetition and violence and justification all that jazz, the true hero, Kaine, still actually reaches the final stage of the Campbellian hero’s journey. Of all the stages in that monomyth structure, my favorite was always the final one, and if you had to discard all and leave one, this would be the one I would salvage: the freedom to live. All nier endings turn from prose into a kind of visual poetry, and I believe this one is thematically consistent with that stage: no longer regretting the past, no longer anticipating the future, living in the moment is the only place left to live now for Kaine, and that’s where she finds her meaning.

I think I learned a lot more about what this game was really going for now, not just the body and soul bit I had mentioned before, but also the deconstruction of the quest, the violence of power, the desire for justification, finding meaning in the meaninglessness, the objectification of the one you love for the sake of your own desire for a purpose. It’s all there, even if the game made me have to get bored to finally see it. I still think Automata is the better game, and it still got me more emotional (the suicide attack line fucking kills me every time when the pod says it in that game), and I still think the credits scene in Automata’s ending E is my favorite ending to any game ever (right up there with Earthbound’s), but this game does kind of go into the cycles of violence a bit more incisively than that one on a psychological level to the player.
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If there’s one thing I hope for in the future, this may come as a surprise, but I would really like Yoko Taro to create a new game and story that doesn’t have any violence in it. He’s made so many deconstructions of violence and types of violence, between communication in violence, justification in violence, cycles of violence, insanity of violence, sex and violence, and especially, the role of violence in video games.

I would like to see him make an experimental genre-defying game without any violence, to go beyond his norm and try something new and challenging. And I want to see the promise of Nier, of that magic game made of other games, be pushed further and further even beyond these genres into something even greater.

“Nothing is as it seems…”

The concept of truth is a relatively simple one - something that is “in accordance with reality” - in other words, something as it actually is, rather than a fabrication of the truth or a lie.

This concept is explored in great depth by NieR Replicant, and takes what would be a mere lie or a mistruth and extends it to the point where the entire game hinges on this “truth”.

At various points in the game, be it in the main campaign or in side quests, the player is asked whether or not they want to reveal this “truth” to characters after being sent on a quest to find someone, only to find them dead (at least most of the time).

The revelation of “truth” is something that is intertwined with the game’s core narrative. By the time you finish your first playthrough of the game, the game reveals to you that you can play the game again, and learn more, and come closer to obtaining the “truth” that the game dangles in front of your face throughout your time with it.

Upon entering the Shadowlord’s castle, the player learns that the twins from his village have been working with the kidnapper of his sister. The twins reveal to Nier that he, and everyone he knows, are not human. The twins reveal to him that all throughout your journey, you’ve been killing the actual humans themselves.

Ending A and the route itself will leave a lot of questions in the player’s mind.
And that’s just how the game wants it.

Your curiosity will prompt you to play the game through one more time, but it comes with a twist - now, on your second playthrough, you can understand the words of the true humans, the Shades, and you cannot stop Nier from progressing, and slaughtering the souls of the humans.

The ending B route is essentially a torture device, and a brilliant one at that - I doubt any of you reading this would actually want to commit mass genocide - but how ending B is utilized to convey the “truth” of the world of NieR to the player is absolutely incredible.

It doesn’t stop there - the incomprehensible speech of the shades is not. The only thing that changes upon a repeat playthrough - but now, the game gives the player extra cutscenes revealing the human nature of these shades (more specifically the bosses you fight throughout it), twisting the knife in the stomach of the player.

This route also sheds extra light onto the backstories and gives more intrinsic details into the rest of the party. Emil’s status as an experimental weapon is elaborated upon, but Kainé’s tragic backstory and her relationship with Tyrann fully cement her as the best written character in the game.

Of course, this relationship with Tyrann is another “truth” that, unlike some more explicit ones, is one that is implicit but horrifying nonetheless to figure out. Kainé, unlike Nier, Emil and Weiss, can actually understand the Shades, and is the reason as to why the player can understand the Shades this time around. And she can’t even do anything about it, as Tyrann would simply kill her if she even stopped the massacre of the Shades.

The Black Scrawl, the disease actively hurting Nier’s sister, is caused by the death of that Replicant’s respective Gestalt. You run around, killing Shades. And what are Shades? Gestalts.

You, the player, kill the Shadowlord. Do some further digging and you will find out that the Shadowlord is Nier’s Gestalt, and that Gestalts cannot function without the Shadowlord, and they would simply relapse and die without the Shadowlord. In killing the Shadowlord, you have effectively doomed the human race, and yourself.

All of this is revealed to the player, quite simply, because they chose to venture deeper into the game and world of NieR. And it hurts. How NieR Replicant utilizes New Game Plus as a mechanic for exploring the game’s narrative is one that emphasizes the concept of “truth” and its significance in the story that Taro wants to tell.

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In a world where around every turn there is more than meets the eye and where the truth hurts, is there truly a right option as for what to do?

Do you face the truth head on, even if it hurts?
Or do you reject it, and believe in a lie?

The lies told by Devola and Popola were told for a purpose. There is no “evil” in the world of NieR, as everything has some justification or another. The separation of the soul from the body was done as to prevent the White Chlorination Disease, and it just so happened that the Replicants gained sentience by accident. The twins are carrying out their purpose given to them by the foundation that initiated Project Gestalt, and so too is the Shadowlord. Nier isn’t the villain either, even though he committed mass genocide, he did it under the belief that the Shades were monsters.

The main conflict in the world of NieR simply happened by accident - Replicants vs. Gestalts.
The Replicants weren’t supposed to gain sentience. The twins had to lie to all of the Replicants so to maintain order.

In this, you could interpret NieR Replicant as Taro’s cruel joke - it certainly seems like it - the cast undergoes no shortage of trials and testing of their beliefs and motives.

Alas! The world of NieR is a truly beautiful one, flaws and all. As the Replicants gained sentience, their world and culture began to develop, from Seafront to Façade. The people banded together, and built villages and towns, despite the constant threat from relapsed Gestalts.

On one hand you have the people of the Aerie, a place where Gestalts inhabit Replicants and shut themselves away from the world, embodying a miserable place devoid of this culture, a place where the inhabitants lament their woes to the player in passing.

On the other, you have truly beautiful places like Façade, a place where hundreds of years of collective desire for a society of order has manifested itself into this place where people obey rules, a place where "rules do not exist to bind you, they exist so you may know your freedoms", a place improved by Nier and company’s visit to the place, upon which Rule 0 was made - you may disband a rule by vote - ultimately showing an example of the player’s ability to do good in this world, as when the player visits Façade after the five year time skip, things have changed for the better.

In this world, a world that is relentless in tormenting the characters, there is beauty to be found in the culture and the evolution of man through hundreds of years of being left to their own devices.

These moments in which the player experiences the beauty of this world, accompanied by an astounding soundtrack that is as memorable as the game itself, are emblematic of hope for mankind, a hope that mankind can do good, despite the mistakes we may have made along the way.

And that is beautiful.

In spite of its design flaws, Nier Replicant offers a brilliantly executed narrative experience by devoting itself entirely to what it seeks to accomplish.

Our time with the game is dedicated to showing us that our meaning in the world derives from our connection to one another. Even if humanity is to perish, preserving that meaning is what we live for. This idea is established within the opening hour through Nier's monologue, claiming that, despite the world dying, his only goal is to ensure that he and his sister survive. What becomes of humanity is nothing more than a distraction to that objective. Replicant builds on this through the structure of its storytelling, subverting the archetypal hero's journey in favor of a more intimate goal. Emphasis is placed on this concept by utilizing perspective as a tool. We initially perceive events through a lens that portrays Nier and his companions as the heroes fighting against an unequivocally evil threat, Shades. Toward the end of our first playthrough, a twist reveals that the beings we've been mercilessly slaughtering are actually humans that currently exist in the form of 'Gestalts' and that we, 'Replicants', were conceived as nothing more than shells for them to survive in. With that knowledge in mind, the second playthrough builds on this by forcing us to revisit the same scenarios with newly added scenes that show us the Gestalts perspective, humanizing what was seemingly evil through familiar acts and motivations. This functions to recontextualize how we view our actions in this world and what changes once we're made aware of the harm we've brought to humanity.

Ultimately, none of this has an impact on how Nier proceeds toward his goal. The final battle with Shadowlord continues to drive this point when he is revealed to be the human version of Nier that we witnessed in the prologue, sharing the same goal of saving their respective versions of Yonah. Ignoring these parallels, Nier's response to this information remains abrasive. "You want me to understand your sadness? You think I'm gonna sympathize with you?" His only promise was to protect my sister, cutting down anyone that gets in the way of that. If there is a difference between Nier's goal at the beginning and ending of his journey, its the addition of people he holds dear in this world and resoleves himself to protect even if the circumstances involve existence itself. In defeating Shadowlord, an end was put to Project Gestalt, which effectively dooms humanity to an inevitable extinction. The consequences of this can be seen in another Yoko Taro works, further emphasizing what is being sacrificed for Nier's goal.

A knot is tied onto these themes through its implementation of metanarrative. Ending D, what was considered the true ending for 11 years, closes the game with Nier's sacrifice of his own existence to save Kainé's life, one of the people he swore to protect. The impact of this sacrifice is conveyed through the erasure of our save data, associating the player's personal experience to depict this. Exclusive to ver.1.22474487139... is Ending E, featuring a continuation of this ending where Kainé fights to undo what was lost through D, which restores our previously deleted save file. While this may seem to undo what was originally bold about the previous ending, it functions to provide a more thematically cohesive statement toward what Replicant has been attempting to tell us. Kainé's struggle to restore this world is pointless in the grander scheme as nothing will be fixed. Gestalt Nier and Yonah's deaths still lead to humanity's extinction and Replicants are no less of an errored existence than they were prior. Similarly, restoring our save file does not serve much purpose as our time with the game is still reaching its end without any change in the events that will follow. Instead, what Kainé's actions accomplish is bringing back the world where she experienced acceptance and learned the value of connecting with others. The game closes its narrative with one final scene that Kainé and Emil communicate to us as Nier's existence is returned to their world.

"Our journey may have been meaningless. Our past may have been a mistake. But... we're not going back. Even if this world... comes to an end. Because this... this is the world with the people we cherish."

The conceptual execution of Replicant's message is strengthened by extending itself onto other areas of the game's design, providing consistency that goes beyond the narrative itself. It shouldn't take long to notice that letters are strangely prominent throughout our experience. Symbolic of the themes surrounding human connection and intimacy, is is often depicted through various elements of its visual presentation, such as mailboxes serving as save points or the menu's UI being styled as a postcard. The loading screen comprises of letters written by Yonah, frequently reminding the player what they are fighting for. Several quests either feature or are centered around letters. One in particular plays into this concept by bringing us to an old lady whose happiness derives from receiving letters from her lover. Unbenounced to her is that this man is no longer alive and the person writing her has been the postman delivering the letters as a means of preserving that happiness. Offering consistency in this regard is a showing of how much thought goes into the themes.

Of course, this isn't the only aspect of its presentation that functions to provide a more effective experience. Accompanying all of this is the sound of Replicant, a facet of the game that is integral to the holistic execution of Taro's vision. From the haunting vocals opening the game in 'Snow in Summer' to the to the melancholic tone of 'Grandma', Replicant's ethereal atmosphere serves as one of the biggest contributors to its identity. Common collaborator Keiichi Okabe and his studio, Monaca, compose the OST with assistance in the form of Emi Evans's voice. Okabe's compositions allow for a distinct harmony to exist with her vocals, blending them into tracks as another layer to the production. This is partially accomplished through the utilization of Evans' Chaos language, which is made up of sounds that derive from 6 different languages, making the lyrics incomprehensible without being jarring. According to Taro, he wanted to avoid using recognizable lyrics to prevent distracting the player, serving more appropriately as background music. Track placement is also given emphasis to enhance immersion throughout the playthrough. Certain sections of the game splits tracks into multiple layers, introducing a new layer as the player continues to click through the dialogue. This is a technique that is utilized to synchronize a track's placement with what is being shown on screen more accurately without stripping away the player's agency.

This isn't to say that the game is flawless. It continues to function off one of Taro's most infamous quirks in forcing redundancy on the player in order to experience all of the content. At least three playthroughs of the game's second half are required for this, the third barely adding anything prior to reaching Endings C and D, which may result in a fourth playthrough if the player neglects to save before the final area. As the most criticized aspect of the experience, its reasonable to understand why several people may not come off Replicant with a positive impression. However, those who can tolerate these inconveniences will find themselves experiencing one of the most carefully crafted experiences the medium has to offer.

decided to rewrite my review and do it a little off the cuff (i.e. not typing it in a word processor and drafting it before putting it in the text box here)

whatever i could say about either version, they're both beautiful games. i'm not sure if it's understated or just something i haven't personally seen, but kainé's backstory is legit one of the few things in media that make me cry uncontrollably. without hyperbole it makes the game for me, and it's crazy that such a beautiful and validating pro-intersex (and by anatomical adjacency, pro-trans) message came from a AAA publisher in the year 2010 (and without feeling patronizing, it's visceral and should be a punch in the gut to anybody with a shred of empathy)

since i've decided to spoiler this review i also wanna go ahead and defend ending e. it's a bit indulgent, especially in terms of being an adaptation of what i believe to be a decade old short story that taro wrote, but it's hard to imagine a better "secondary" "true" ending. i feel like ending d doesn't lend kaine her own agency, and ending e is her fighting to get both her agency and the only family she had left back. aesthetic or worldbuilding incongruencies aside, nier is an emotional work first and foremost, and ending e is a story about a stubborn woman who loved her friends fighting back against the unjust world that robbed her of them

it's also just refreshing to see a piece of media give a queer found family a relatively happy ending, but maybe it's just cuz i've had multiple queer "sisterhoods" that really resonate with kainé and emil's relationship, so it hits really close to home for me. it's already implicit by the existence of nier automata that said happiness will eventually end, so ending on a bittersweet note that's maybe a bit more sweet than bitter feels earned to say the least