splendidland is so very good at condensing specific feelings into all of her art. Franken perfectly surmises the classic RPG experience into a breezy hour and a half journey. The art is fantastic, whether that be adorable overworld sprites, the dialogue portraits which bring to mind Leiji Matsumoto's work, or the battle art, which is simultaneously intimidating and cute, and all of this is delivered in a style that is unmistakably splendidland.

The gameplay surmises the content of an RPG in a manner reminiscent of one of my favourite Game Boy games, For The Frog The Bell Tolls, and much like that title uses every mechanic it has as a vehicle for telling jokes and had me smiling the whole way through. Highly reccomend.

An updated version of my favourite game ever. Despite combat that flows much smoother than the original game and character models that don't all have literally the exact same face, I still prefer the original game. Brother Nier is not a bad protagonist, but ultimately has so much less flavour in his writing compared to Father Nier. The relationship between him and Grimoire Weiss as a sort of struggling father/son dynamic is enjoyable but nowhere near as charming as the married couple bickering of Father Nier and Weiss in the Gestalt version of the original game. Almost all of the annoying elements of the original game (repetitive sidequests, annoying drop rates, overwhelming area reuse) are still present here with nothing really done to remedy them.

But true to the original, even when Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139... shouldn't work, it ends up shining. When the new story content of this release shows up, it shows up in full force. The new characters slip in so seamlessly into the original plot that it's difficult to imagine them not being there. And the games new conclusion hit me so unbelievably hard that I cried. An utterly phenomenal game.

The amount of time I've spent thinking about this game is honestly ludicrous. A game that is truly more than the sum of its parts. The combat is overly mashy. The character models are downright ugly. The quest design is overly repetitive (hope you enjoy clearing out the Junk Heap) and the drop rates for items are abysmal (hope you enjoy killing the same three goats over and over because they only spawn in one spot in Act 2) and the by the second half of the game you can really tell how much the team was stretching out as much use they could out of the existing areas they had designed. (I don't want to think about how many times I've run through the block pushing puzzle rooms of the Lost Shrine.)

But Nier is probably my favourite game ever. I've 100%d it multiple times. I adore almost everything about this game. The fantastic voice work with Jamieson Price, Liam O'Brien, Laura Bailey, Julie Ann Taylor, Heather Hogan and Eden Riegel all giving what I would argue are the best performances of their careers. The feeling of casting magic spells punctuated with fantastic sound design that make it seems truly otherworldly and alien. Keiichi Okabe and Emi Evans's fabulous soundtrack that has been a mainstay of every MP3 player I've owned since playing this game. My absolute favourite party in any JRPG, with every single character being so well defined by the end of the game it was hard to say goodbye to any of them.

Nier is a game about love. A self destructive love. A love that is paradoxically neglectful. Love so strong that you're willing to destroy the world for it.

I love Nier, and it destroyed me. I destroyed Nier, and it loves me.