NieR is a mess. To write about it coherently is to fail to capture its essence. NieR is operating on multiple vectors at once, but because they pull in so many directions, I ended up experiencing a kind of emotional stasis.

But overall I’m disappointed.

I don’t mean that NieR is not worth playing. It made me laugh. My initial impression was that I liked it. Unfortunately, the writing of the main plot is bad in a way that renders all of its neat tricks, meta-jokes, and potential commentary pointless.

Which sucks, because the character writing is so earnest. I resonated with our middle-aged protagonist trying to save his sick daughter. He is not ashamed of his desperation. I can believe that he would be known by every NPC in town because he takes on any side-quest task, willing to do anything if it means easing her suffering. Unlike other fictional dads that use “my daughter has a terminal illness” as an excuse to loaf about and have some man pain, he spends time with her. He reads Yonah stories, he buys whatever food she wants, he checks in for no other reason than to see her face.

I liked that Yonah was at home for me as a player to check in with whenever. It kept the emotional core of the game centered. Yonah was not some abstract idea built up in his mind, but a living grounding of why sad dad acted the way he did. Having lost a wife, watching a daughter suffer, sad dad over-empathized with every person he met. He could not stand the thought of children going hungry, or being alone. He could not stand for questioning the value of life while he fought so hard to save his daughter’s. So of course sad dad’s party consisted of teens he adopted without thought.

I connected with sad dad enough that I didn’t mind how slap-dash and incomprehensible the setting of the story and its monsters were. Adventuring with sad dad and his adopted teens in a bizarro fantasy land was A-OK with me. Everything was so over the top, stylized, and highly abstracted that for a while, I thought I was operating on NieR’s wavelength. Where questions of “how does this magic system work?” were completely secondary to such aims as “let’s do a Zelda dungeon!” or “let’s do a Resident Evil mansion!” It was delightful!

I wish that was all the game had been about.

But at some point, the game took a hard pivot. It stopped allowing itself to be free flowing jazzy nonsense, grounded only in its emotional sincerity, and instead zero-d in on the mechanics of its Lore™. Not just a little, but hinging the plot and the themes of the main cast, and the game as a whole, on how the Lore™ worked. Suddenly NieR became obsessed with having “twists”, to answering questions I really didn’t want to care about. And the answers were bad.

I don’t mean the answers were shocking, or morally controversial, or evil - I mean they didn’t function as answers. Mostly because the “questions” were half-formed to begin with. The world was too ill-defined for new information to fundamentally change my perceptions. Because there wasn’t enough foundational content or context in NieR to make any of these “twists” mean anything.

During the course of the game, sad dad and his merry band killed a bunch of Shades, the game’s catch-all term for every fantastical bad guy creature. Some were monkeys. Some were lizards the size of buildings. Many walk on two legs like humans, animated comically like floppy puppets. Gameplay wise, they appear out of thin air and attack everything that moves. Context wise, NPCs only have stories of Shades invading towns and killing people without reason. Every action set piece has Shades permanently destroying parts of the structures for familiar gameplay areas. For all appearances, they are the most generic monsters born of bad-vibes miasma smoke as you’d find in any JRPG.

When I said “at some point,” I meant a particular set piece. Sad dad and friends visit a town where some of the villagers start turning into Shades. As the scene progresses, it is unclear whether there were ever any humans present in the village at all, or if every townsperson was a Shade pretending to be human the whole time. Then it is unclear if there are still real humans in the village who are horrified by all their neighbors turning into shades. Then all the creatures that are Shades form a collective magic 8-ball of bullshit and start firing laser beams at me?

Before any of this can get sorted, one of sad dad’s adopted teenagers goes berserk (?) and nukes the whole town.

Teenage son is now very sad that he killed a bunch of innocent people, and sad dad says “it’s fine you nuked the town, you saved our lives.”

I did not know what to feel, but not in the way the game wanted me to not know what to feel. I was not conflicted about the morality of teenage son’s actions, or sad dad’s reactions. I was just confused as to what happened. Because at the same moment that the game was trying to make me question for the first time whether Shades could become human, or vise versa, it also showed me that Shades could become legion and fire laser beams. And that they would do so with little to no provocation.

I was especially confused because immediately prior to this, the last Shade boss monster I had fought was… a wolf.

Shortly after this scene, during the final palace, some previously-friendly NPCs turned to sad dad, handed out some Lore™ pamphlets, and said “You’re not a human, the Shades are the true humans! From our perspective, you’re a genocidal murderer bad guy! Muahahahahaha!”

All I could think, instead of surprise or horror, was… “but the wolf???”

I didn’t understand much by finishing the game, but then NieR teased some answers in a second playthrough. Alright, I’ll bite. When I went through NieR’s second half again, the game gave dialog to every boss monster. It tried to paint these violent confrontations as being different somehow, now that the beasts could talk.

But I did not think any differently. My heart remained cold. Their motivations for murder made less sense if they were sentient, self-aware beings capable of communication. Because letting the monsters talk did not add some new nuance that was missing from how they moved. They were still animated like beasts.

Like, the boss wolf Shade led a pack of regular-ass wolves. The wolves were eating people! Upon the second playthrough, boss wolf’s internal dialog was all “why are the humans hunting us? Why is our once resplendent forest a desert? What did we do to deserve this?”

I don’t know what happened to your forest, boss wolf, but the fact that y’all are eating people makes me not feel bad for killing all your regular-ass wolf friends???

Then the game goes the extra step of showing that boss wolf was once a regular-ass dog!

So if Shades are the true humans, how the fuck did a regular-ass dog become a Shade wolf???

I don’t want to care! Don’t make me ask questions like this! Because now everything about the theming for the main cast doesn’t make sense!

Forget that gay teenage son Emil nuked a town of ambiguous human population. Intersex teenage daughter Kaine is half-possessed by a Shade. It seems to make her borderline immortal. We see her get run through with lances and swords like three times in hilariously bloody fashion. We fight her a couple times when the Shade takes full control of her body. In the second playthrough, he gets a name and internal dialog, though it mostly consists of senseless bloodlust.

So was her possessor previously a human? Could he have been a regular-ass dog at one point? Why can’t they negotiate cohabitation?

There are no answers to these questions that will ever satisfy me, if they even exist, because they would by necessity make the rules of this world even more convoluted. But more importantly, that kind of extraneous information would not improve the moment-to-moment experience of what this game presented - it could only improve the kind of game I could imagine I had played.

Like, the context of teenage daughter being intersex makes all the relationships in the game more interesting! Kaine dresses in scanty clothing, but bandages the marks she bears of possession. There’s something interesting to the thought of her wanting to take pride in her body, something she was ostracized for as a kid, but ashamed of how her marks reflect her past. But the experience of playing the game does not emphasize this.

What the game does emphasize is that she has an ass crack clearly visible through the ribbons of her lingerie. Shoved in my face across multiple cut-scenes. Subject of discussion between party members multiple times. The backstory explaining her ostracization is so subtle in-game that I missed why she was bullied in the first place.

I did not play a game with thoughtful symbolism. I played a smirking game betting if I learned Kaine had a dick through supplemental material that I would have a think about my sexuality.

Like, grow up?

NieR is so bursting with ideas it feels wrong to write them all off as a waste. But like the thoughts I arrived at with Drakengard, I don’t want to confuse how much fun it would be to tear apart every element of NieR with how quality the game is overall. NieR makes this even easier for me by showing explicitly how much it is banking on my imagination to make up for its short-comings.

Of the environments in this game that you return to multiple times, (which is all of them, and they are easily countable), one is entirely a text-based adventure. As in, instead of going through a dungeon and fighting a boss monster, you read white text on a black screen. The ideas presented inside are cool! It would have been a neat game level! As a one-off, it fit in with the smorgasbord of gameplay concepts NieR delighted in dabbling.

But it wasn’t a game level. It was text. It was a lack of game content filled with my imagining that these characters had done something cool.

All this writing, everything I’ve said about the characters and story, betray that the actual gameplay of NieR is pretty lame! Combat is slow and weighty, which I don’t dislike, but there wasn’t a single enemy gimmick that couldn’t be powered through with basic light attack combos. Even enemy projectiles were no match for my spear’s dash attack! But most importantly, what the game asks you to do requires running back and forth across empty fields, multiple times per playthrough, more times for side-quests, and many more times to get all four endings. The town Emil nuked earlier was designed as a mean joke of wasting my time, with ladders several floors tall and bridges that looped back and forth as the only means of getting to the only place where the only NPC that mattered lived.

I want to talk about the writing of the side-quest with the old woman in the lighthouse, but honestly I can barely remember it more than the number of times I went up and down those lighthouse steps. The constant back and forth from her place and the post office and the post office’s sliding puzzle to get to the storage room in the back.

Everything I praised about Yonah and her dad’s relationship, that feeling of how the game was grounded and meaningful, actually represented a very small portion of my playtime with the game. At the midpoint of the story, Yonah gets kidnapped, and there’s a timeskip. Every “replay” after the first ending to get the others put me back after the midpoint, after Yonah had been kidnapped. So actually most of my time with the game was with Yonah gone, a memory in sad dad’s mind, allowing him to become a sad, violence-first man-pain man like I’d praised him for not being initially.

It’s disappointing. NieR has ideas, but it doesn’t have meaning. If the only clue that Emil is gay is in a line so non-descript it got censored out of the English translation of this game, then it doesn’t matter. If a developer interview says he’s gay, and has a crush on the main character, that’s gross! But also doesn’t matter outside of metatextual fan engagement! Which I really, really don’t want to do!

I mean, if I went that route, what did I learn about this team’s views on women? Yonah’s dying, her mom’s dead, Kaine’s possessed, (simultaneously hated in-universe and lusted after by the camera for her body), Emil’s sister has her body turned into a monster before she gets consumed, old lighthouse woman dies, head librarian and bard woman die - whoo boy, there’s a whole essay in there for someone to write! And probably a few more very similar to it!

But it ain’t coming from me, because this game ain’t worth it.

2.5 stars, C+ rank, doesn’t deserve its musical score.