this isn't really a review so much as it is an emotional plea as to the value and worth of NieR Gestalt. i feel compelled to talk about what made this game so special to me when I played this over 10 years ago now, before NieR becomes completely subsumed underneath the shadow of its vastly more financially successful follow-up. the original nier is an important game to me, and I refuse to let it be forgotten or replaced.

------[a] requiem for smokin' sick style------

the combat is good, actually. and i'm tired of pretending it's not.

maybe it's just because I've spend a disproportionate percentage of my time online hanging with people who think KH2FM and DMC4 are the peak of video games and anything that isn't trying to emulate them is a fundamental failure, but it feels like this is the one stick absolutely everyone beats this game with and it's disappointing.

when Nier hits someone with his sword in this game, there's almost a full second of frame pause as the weapon cleaves into a shade and lets loose abject fountains of blood that paints the environment around the now dismembered spectral body. when he uses magic, he summons a horde of blood spears that obliterate anything they hit. it is one of the most casually violent feeling things in the entire world and it absolutely owns. when this game recontextualises it's violence (refreshingly without falling into "you enjoy the killing" played-out shite), it lands harder than so many other games because of how genuinely violent all this feels, and manages to accomplish it without the cartoonish viscera of something like The Last of Us Part 2.

yes it is stiff and clunky. no, you will not make skillvids of this online. i beg of you, expand your definitions of what makes combat in a game good beyond that narrow field. no other game can be Devil May Cry 4, not even Devil May Cry 4.

------1,312 years [b]efore its time------

representing the satisfying midpoint between the interminable bansky-esqe "makes u think..." philosophy 101 drivel of Automata's lowest points and the insufferable edgelord tendencies of Drakengard 1 & 3 that tended to bury the things about those games that were genuinely interesting, Nier is everything I find enthralling about the DrakenNier games without the things that have ultimately led to me walking away from every other Taro joint feeling disappointed and unfulfilled.

2010 was a really long time ago. NieR came out before The Last of Us, before Bioshock Infinite, before Spec Ops: The Line, before the explosion in indie scene that led to more diverse voices getting a platform on itch.io and steam. maybe taking that into account can help explain why NieR completely changed the way I thought about games. it challenged what i thought video games could be. the way it flirted with different genres and forms was utterly captivating. nier felt like a game from the future or a different dimension. and now it isn't nearly as impressive, sure. it's been mapped out and explained and recapped by people trying to hurry you onto the next, less interesting game. everyone knows about ending D, everyone knows about the drakengard connection, everyone knows about the other routes. but I didn't. when I first played this game, and finishing it unlocked a new game+ that let me hear what the enemies had to say? my tiny 14-year old brain just about exploded, and opened a third eye to just what video games could do. maybe for you the game that did this was killer7, or deus ex, or undertale, or breath of the wild. for me it was NieR.

in a way, this is the real shame about automata, and the way square enix responded to its success. the game itself is fine, good even. but the way in which people have used it to turn this game into a footnote that should be skipped, skimmed, or otherwise treated as a mere prelude to the game about the robots in fetish outfits saying "wot if ur mum ran on batteries and went on about the ship of theseus" is profoundly neglectful.

yes i am being reductive and mean about NieR: Automata. if squeenix wanted me to not do that, they should have been less reductive about this game.

------the [c]ase for papa nier------

when people talk about the story of NieR, it's often the subversive or Lore aspects that are talked about the most, about the details of Project Gestalt and it's implications for the themes and what the ending means and things like that. which is all fine and good. but i think it's worth noting that NieR also just has one of the best parties I've ever seen in a JRPG. weiss. emil. kaine. kaine, most of all. they're all wonderfully well-drawn, complex, and deeply human characters, complete misfits that find a place to fit in each other. it's one of the core appeals of the entire genre and NieR just knocks it out of the park, and (setting aside the fact that I think the game has much more engaging things to say on the subject of parental love and it's toxicity than sibling love) that's why Father Nier matters so much.

because brother nier? he fits. he's a young jrpg hero on his way to save his sister with his party in tow. this is a darkness to him, but he is, overwhelmingly, the normalcy at the heart of the cast. he fits in as a JRPG hero. father nier, though? father nier doesn't fit. nothing about him fits. he's a hideous trollman who makes incredibly earnest speeches about friendship. he is a world-weary and cynical man who takes time to garden and help everyone in his home village. he is just as much of a misfit as the rest of this party, and thus, fits in with them perfectly. he makes this collection of off-the-wall characters, these people that fit absolutely nowhere else in this world, into a family that finds themselves, a place to belong, and people they love, in each other. he is what drives this party dynamic to heights that spoke to me in ways that i didn't really understand at the time, and that is why he will always matter to me.

brother nier is fine. he's cool. he's got some of his own stuff that's interesting.

but he's not my papa nier.

I am in awe at how much they fucked it. Lorne must have taken a bump to the head or something.

Abe was good because of its precise controls. The humour. The feeling of absolutely nailing a difficult section through timing and figuring out the puzzle set before you. It wasn't crafting, looting bins, or watching a gut-shot Mudokon fuckin' bleed out as Abe stares at his dead eyes.

I cannot believe this is by the same folk who made the originals. It reeks of a beloved IP handed to a new company years down the line. At one point I entered an area that sealed me in and I had to engage in some kind of battle arena shit possessing Sligs and trying to dispatch them as waves of Mudokons got mown down. It feels antithetical to everything Abe was about.

Sloppy controls, loose platforming, and dogshit AI. Lost count of the amount of times I had to kill myself because a Slig just stopped its patrol and stayed facing the locker I was hiding in. God, I really wanted to give the game a fair shake. Even though I knew in my heart what it would be from that initial presentation Lorne did showing the plans for it. I wanted to believe there might be something here for me. But all that was waiting was a character I love reduced to a crafting bastard rummaging through bins and missing jumps. Flaccid attempts at set pieces and weird overly long conversation cutscenes of static characters shouting at each other across level geometry.

I got six levels in, and near the end of the sixth one the game let me accidentally loop back through a previous area with no way to get back without just restarting the level again. Oh aye, there's no "Are you sure?" choice when you select Restart Checkpoint/Level or Quit. Careful you don't hit those by accident. Would be a shame if you had to stop playing like I did.

Cunt game.