Staring at the login bonus screen realizing I have not engaged with any "gameplay" from this game for two weeks and have to admit to myself that I'm out. I was in the hospital. I have been sick. I have had no brain. I have been, in retrospect, in the perfect situation to get the most out of this game. It doesn't ask much of me, and I don't have much to give at the moment. A match made in heaven! But my behavior has shown that even when at my lowest, I would rather do literally anything else, and oftentimes nothing, than ever "play" this game again.

For additional context, I am at a hurdle in Chapter 10 that would require level grinding. Except, this game is getting discontinued, so I am awash with resources. "Level grinding" would take literally 2 minutes of me going into a menu and making some numbers go up while some consumables go down. I could make like 5 mistakes investing in the wrong stuff and it wouldn't matter. I could probably max out one dude and solo the story mode of this game. I could probably take 10 minutes to read how the combat system of this game actually works and trivialize it.

But thinking about doing any of that makes me seriously consider with recent experience if I would rather have an IV reinserted in my arm than ever touch this game again. Which is probably the clue I need that it's time to write this out of my system and move the fuck on with life.

I can't help but think of my review of DLC for the original NieR and how language gives substance to vapor in the realm of ideas. Here, NieR Re[in]carnation is NieR: The World of Recycled Vessel, but blown out in every dimension, wrapped around itself, an ouroborus eating the tail of its future child. It is such a profound perversion of gaming as an entity that I sound hyperbolic to accurately describe how incredibly awful it is. Because when a game concept gets a couple things right, there’s a handhold from which the pain of its existence feels novel, fixable. But when something is truly flawed at its core, in every structure of its being, is evil in its conception, execution, and existence, it becomes dreadfully dull.

I've played a couple mobile games now, and apart from some of the Netflix offerings, they've all been evil. But the ways they've been evil have been... mixed? Like they have a touch of humanity in them that got corrupted somehow. Like there could be a version of them that was capable of loving me. But NieR Re[in]carnation hates me in a multipronged attack that is simultaneously so inert I almost didn't recognize it as violence. I wish I had written about all of its follies and injustices when they were fresh, instead of writing about them now, after I've let them wash over me, let myself marinate, let hope turn my anger into indifference. It perfectly matches the pattern of an abuse victim becoming complacent as they learn to be helpless.

NieR Re[in]carnation game has a 3D world. You can walk around in it. It doesn't matter. It's a hallway. Like literally is only a hallway. No gameplay happens there. It has an "auto" button that has your character walk down the hallway by themself. Do you know for how many hours I resisted pressing that button? That I wanted to have some gameplay in my game? I clung so desperately to the hope that there would be a maze, something, anything to justify the existence of this fully realized HD world of hallways and my ability to control my movement in it. But no. Trying to play the game was only a waste of time. Not pressing the auto button was a waste of time.

So, wherefore art thou hallways?

When I wrote about Cats & Soup, I was jolted when I realized that the game world was not the cats, but the menus overlaid on the cats. That the cats were a pretense and the game was the menu. I could buy that the world of the hallways was the pretense of NieR Re[in]carnation, and in a way they are, but then where is the gameplay?

In truth, NieR Re[in]carnation is layers of pretense that never gets to anything.

I have to marvel at the ingeniousness of the triviality. At the same time, this is not the work of a human being. This is the inhuman efficiency of attention hacking only possible by multiple passes within an organization that has memetically learned from other organizations.

Let’s start at the surface. There are hallways. The hallways are a pretense to getting to “levels”. These “levels” have stories in them with light interactivity, very simple visual novel elements. The stories in the levels largely have nothing to do with the world in the hallways. Maybe they converge later than when I stopped playing, but I’m hours in and my god can I not care if I’m wrong. But all of these stories can be skipped, because there is combat. So all the storytelling is set dressing to the combat, itself a pretense.

I have to interject here that the stories are bad. They are vague, simple sketches, nothing more than premises and flavors. But separate from their vapidness, they are bad stories. They are mean, they are droll, they are dour, full of cruelty and irony and melancholy. There is no love. Relationships exist only to exert pain on others. It will say “these people loved each other” only so it can relish in someone’s death and maiming, in the survivor’s suffering and guilt. They are uniformly dreadful in tone, only broken up by the spice of convoluted incomprehensibility when sci-fi and magical elements are introduced. I could spend paragraphs tearing apart each and every one if I was live blogging my experience with them, but thankfully they have been culled from my memory banks. Imagining anyone sees these stories as “rewards”, or worse yet, “incentives”, to engage with this game - I can’t even imagine watching these on youtube without finding the autoplay ads more interesting.

Then we get to the combat, and realize how much the storytelling doesn’t matter, because whatever you fight is abstracted into black blob monsters that have no physical presence or reality to the story of the level. So you might think, ok, this is it. Everything else was a pretense for this combat system - until you see that this game is an autobattler. Combat can happen entirely without your input. In fact, you often get rewards for pressing an attack button ONCE during a battle. Because the game needs artificial incentivisation for you to engage with the only game-like gameplay the game has to offer. Even as it also has a fast forward button, and an auto-battle button. And if you get far enough into the game, you get things called “Skip Tickets”, that let you repeat a battle for experience points / rewards for leveling up your dudes without having to actually experience the battle again at all.

Early on in the game, when I was still in tutorial land, and hadn’t even gotten to the gacha system yet, the tutorial character said “Don’t worry, this game plays just like most others.” I at first thought that phrase was hilariously useless to me, trying out one of these gacha games for the first time - it told me jack shit! But the more I learned about this game, the more that phrase has just borrowed deeper and deeper into the pit of my gut, blossoming into a kind of disgust that would melt any business executive that came into contact with it.

Because the combat system itself is a pretense for - the gacha system. Spin a roulette wheel and get weapons and characters to use in combat. Some are shiny and have big numbers that make combat easier.

Now, I tried this game after the premium store was closed, because the game’s end is imminent. So I have no idea what the monetary value of any of this bullshit would be. Nobody tell me or I might become a terrorist. But. I just have to say.

The gacha pull animation is … kinda lame?

Abstract boxes turn into coffins that slam down and turn into .jpg’s of Ebon Spears and Emerald Bracers and everything about the colors and the environment and the music is just so… without gravitas, without playfulness, without anything that I can imagine incentivizing another pull. I have enough premium currency for like, 10 or more gacha pulls, and separate from the decision paralysis of there being a million events going on the for the game’s end, after my free daily pulls, it’s been such a boring experience that I’ve actively ex’d out of the summoning menu and often logged off of the game because its so dull. I cannot believe this is where the money is supposed to be made.

And that’s when I realized the gacha system itself is only a front for where the true addiction is supposed to lie - the character upgrade menus. You upgrade characters. You upgrade weapons. You upgrade skills. You upgrade teddybears. (That is not a joke.) You upgrade instances of characters. All that take varying amounts of money, experience, currencies, resources, and most importantly, time.

I thought I’d be mad that the gacha system has ridiculously low percentages for getting the good shit. I thought I’d be mad that getting a cool character is only the beginning - that you need to get their low drop rate multiple times to fully upgrade them. And like, yeah, that’s pretty evil, even without considering the compounding evil of charging real world money every time. I don’t want to underserve that. It is morally indefensible. Maybe I’m only less worked up because I have no idea how much any of it used to cost. But I can relate to the time. The insane amount of time that is required to fiddle with all these numbers to get past combat encounters to clear story episodes to walk down more hallways. All journey, no destination, but you’re not traveling with friends, and you’re not going to make any. This is a journey that can only be completed with misplaced investment into a beautifully drawn delusion.

I feel so incredibly dead inside thinking about how there are people who like this game. I read about this game’s existence and thought, “oh neat, I’ll get to play a gacha game without all the gacha elements hanging over the experience, and in the NieR series that I’ve been playing through!” And it had fans, and they loved it, and expressed so much concern for this game’s preservation. How there was so much art, so much story that needed to be preserved for the future. And a part of me really wanted to experience something magical about a shared experience with a piece of art that will never be possible again.

But after trying, sincerely trying, I’m just scared. Because this game fucking hates me. It hates you. It hates everyone. I can’t even tell how personally it hates people, because I don’t know how much it can even conceive of humans as people. It hates me for wanting to find an experience worth having within it, even as its loading screen begs me to appreciate the vistas of its hallways and listen to its soundtrack with headphones. Why does it do that? Why is it so desperate for me to think of it as art?

Because it is not. It just fucking isn’t. Artists worked on this, but this is not art. This is not even video game as product. This is not even video game mechanic as health insurance website design. This is a concentrated psychological attack. It has many beautiful elements to it wrapped up in an IP that begs you to think about the interestingness of its ideas more than its content, begging you to find value in what it has to offer as well. All a trick, a ruse, to get you nice and inoculated to being dead inside to get stuck in its number go up factory work.

I can see the thread for how investment happens. The visuals for walking through the hallways are interesting enough you want to keep going. The stories are delivered piece meal, so you might as well see what the next section looks like. The combat doesn’t require much mental effort, so you might as well grind for a bit. Any individual element sucks, like really sucks, but not in a way that hurts, that causes pain. So if you’re used to getting something out of one of the forms of engagement being teased here, you press on. And then you’ve made a habit, and then you’ve learned some of how the loop works, and then you get curious what kinds of side quests you could do, because you want some control over this experience again. And choosing to do a side quest over a main quest is really the most purposeful engagement you could hope to get out of this app. And then there are enough resources and numbers to manage with art that’s just pretty enough to look at that it keeps on happening.

I hated Cats & Soup and thought it was evil, but I could get it. I could have sympathy for the societal forces that could make one want to give that game some time. But this one? Naw. Playing this game, loving this game, you have been hacked. I want to give you hugs and milk and cookies and a 3DS and / or PS Vita so you know there are good things in life.

If anyone defends this game because it has Lore™ pertaining to the DrakeNieR universe I am going to implode.