Bear with me for a second as I set the scene. It's a summer day in Tokyo like no other. The year is 2049. Buildings and streets are bereft of all life as a snow-like substance rains down from the sky. It is as if the apocalypse had hit and we had entered a nuclear winter. This scenery, shown by a camera beautifully establishing the bleak view, is accompanied by an equally bleak and haunting choir. If the scenery didn't sell you, the music did. After some establishing shots, the camera shows a convenience store, in which a hooded man with an iron pipe is asleep while sitting, most likely keeping watch against an unknown threat. He goes to check on his daughter (or little sister, I'll explain in a second), who is ill. They talk for a bit, arguing over how much food the father needs. However, their conversation is cut short when they are under attack by a horde of demonic creatures. The father goes to fight them, hell bent on keeping them away from his beloved daughter. As he fights, the choir from before, which had continued this whole time, crescendos while being joined by a plethora of instruments that make the song sound desolate, but also a tad desperate. This music continues while you spill the blood of these unknown creatures in droves with little resistance.

That song, titled Snow In Summer, resounds in my memory a year and a half after I first booted up Nier. What I just described to the best of my ability was the opening section to the game, and while I did my best to convey how it felt for me, it is much better to experience it for yourself. Needless to say though, I was hooked, and would probably call that one of the best openings to a game I've ever experienced.

Nier is my favorite game of all time. A creation from the beautiful and twisted mind of Yoko Taro, these games were the studio Cavia's swan song. The game's sales would make Cavia's swan song their death knell though, as the game sold poorly worldwide, mostly in the west, where it was crucified in reviews, receiving a middling 68 on Metacritic.

The game originally released as two games, Gestalt and Replicant. I will be reviewing Gestalt, as that's the only version released in the US and the one I played. The only difference is the relation of the main character to his only family member, Yonah. In Gestalt, the main protagonist (who I'll be referring to by his canon name, Nier) is Yonah's father. In Replicant, Nier is Yonah's older brother. That's the only difference. At times it's clear that Gestalt's Nier was a bit of an afterthought, but I still think he fit into the story just fine. We'd never get Replicant in the west in its original form, only receiving it when Nier Replicant 1.22... came out for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on April 23, 2021 (The lack of a Gestalt remake helps further the theory that Gestalt was an afterthought). Personally, I prefer the father-daughter dynamic, as it makes Nier's tenderness towards Yonah hit a lot harder.

Now on with the review itself.

The game is set 1300 years after humanity was wiped out. Society basically reset, being mostly medieval, but with some mechanical elements (like the existence of robots in an area of the game). However, shades (the demonic creatures from the opening) run rampant and terrorize the humans. Nier, a stubborn mercenary with a soft spot for his daughter Yonah, takes on jobs killing mercenaries to make ends meet and care for Yonah, who is ill with a disease called the black scrawl. Nier is also looking for a cure to Yonah's malady. After meeting the floating, sentient, and sarcastic tome Grimoire Weiss in a shrine east of town, Nier learns of eight sealed verses that may hold the key. He searches the world for these verses, meeting Kaine, a crass and bitter young woman who cheated death due to being possessed by a shade (on repeated playthroughs for endings B, C, and D, you can hear the dialogue of said shade, a sadist named Tyrann who loves to torture Kaine, as only she can hear him) and Emil, a gentle boy who's gaze turns anyone it meets into stone. Together, they travel the world (save for Emil, who stays in his home for a majority of the early game) to find a cure for Yonah.

The main characters are all likeable (save for Tyrann, but that's his schtick), and play off of each other very well. Kaine's short fuse and Weiss' witty jabs put the two into states of bickering more than not, and it's glorious. The main four characters all interact with each other, and while some moments seem a tad rushed, they show who they are, not as functions made to emulate people, but as living, breathing characters.

The premise is intriguing, and as the game goes on and more layers are thrown on, the story becomes very captivating. It also requires multiple playthroughs. After you beat the game once, you have to beat the second half again to get ending B, and once you get ending B, you have to collect all the weapons to choose between ending C and D at the very end (choose C [a.k.a. the top one] first). This may seem like an issue, forcing you to replay the game to get the full story, but the segment you have to replay can be beaten in 2-3 hours if you know what you're doing. I got B, C, and D all in the same day.

The combat is also really fun. Attacks feel weighty and being swarmed by little shades is not overwhelming in the slightest. You have 3 weapons, swords, greatswords (which you get in the second half of the game), and lances (which you also get in the second half of the game). You can switch between them on the d-pad. They all have weights, which affect attack speed, and attack stats. When you get Grimoire Weiss, you can also use magic, which you unlock one by one by getting the sealed verses. You can assign spells, alongside a block and a dodge roll, to the LB, LT, RB, and RT/ L1, L2, R1, and R2 buttons. Sadly only 3 are really useful, Dark Blast, Dark Hand, and Dark Lance. They are extremely versatile and powerful, and make the other 5 spells pretty useless.

Another thing Weiss gives you the ability to do is use words that you get off of enemies to modify your weapons, spells, even your block and dodge roll. They can have many effects, like HP drain, MP regen, and knockback resistance, alongside more basic stuff like attack and defense buffs. They aren't the most necessary thing in the whole world, but they're extremely fun to mess around with.

Side content is alright. You have lots of side quests to flesh out the world. I've never been one for side quests, so I skipped a large majority of them (note that some will be impossible to complete after you find the final sealed verse). There are some that are mandatory to completing the weapon collection, and aside from one that I was recommended to do, I only did those. However, unlike the resource gathering of most of the other side quests, the ones I did were very substantial and had interesting objectives to do.

There's also fishing (which I heard is fun but didn't mess with outside of one fish you NEED to catch very early on), and planting seeds which I didn't even know you can do when I played the game. The side content is alright, but not my cup of tea.

Finally, I had to address the one positive aspect of the damning western reviews of yesteryear, the music. Keiichi Okabe and Emi Evans made an amazing OST that remains my favorite to this day. I already gushed about Snow in Summer, but Grandma, The Wretched Automatons, Shadowlord's Castle - Memory, Deep Crimson Foe, Emil, and the keynote song, Song of the Ancients, are all heavenly. There's only one track I don't care for, that being Hills of Radiant Wind, and one half of a track I hate, that being Cold Steel Coffin, but not the roar variation. The OST carries a sense of despair that resonates through the soundtrack beautifully. This world isn't really happy. It's actually very depressing, and the music fits the atmosphere to perfection. I'm just upset my baby was tampered with in the Replicant remake.

Nier is not just a game to me. It's an experience. The captivating story, the breathtaking music, the amazing characters, and the fun, albeit a tad simple, combat click together in a way no game has ever done for me. As the Nier subseries moves on to greener pastures following Automata's success, it's a shame to see Gestalt get overlooked.

10/10 - This game, while in my book is near perfect, is amazing and I would highly recommend it to anyone with a PS3 or Xbox 360.

EDIT: One flaw I didn't think about until now is the C and D endings. Outside of an extra boss and the way the endings are presented, they didn't really contribute all too much to the story, unlike the B ending, which added lots of development for Kaine and many of the game's bosses. I wish a tiny bit more was done with the C and D endings.