Nice graphics, music and concept, but ultimately an exercise in frustration. There are a lot of good ideas but the whole thing is mired in bad design, things that I find hard to understand how they could have gotten past the testing phase on a game with this budget.

- Confusing environments. Foreground/background elements are often mixed together and things that look normal end up hurting you.
- Confusing enemy patterns and tells. I can appreciate that each enemy has set patterns, but they are not well telegraphed and their attacks are always just a little varied. They come at you so fast that you will get hit unfairly.
- Too many effects flying around. When the enemies shoot at you, their bullets all mix together. Sometimes things that can't hurt you look a certain color, but things that can hurt you look the same. Attacks mix together and you can't tell if you're attacking or being attacked.
- Bad sound design. When there's too much crap on the screen, you would expect to be able to tell when you're getting hit, but the sounds are all so similar that you can never tell if it's you or the enemy taking damage.
- No clear rules regarding damage. Some spikes will be one-shot kills, and others will only take some life. Enemy attacks often feel the same.
- The lifebar does not provide clear indication of health. There are three colors: a light green for your health, a darker green for the health that's just been taken off, and a greyed out green for the life you don't have. When you get hit, the light green turns darker green and SLOWLY begins draining downwards. Because you look at a lifebar out of the side of your eye, you can never TELL how much life you have exactly, because of how busy the bar is. To add to the visual clutter, there is a slight animated wavy effect BEHIND it, and a lightly animated glow IN FRONT of it. Just astounding how this can't be two colors, on and off, with a quick flash to indicate what you lost instead of it slowly draining down... This is so overdesigned that it loses sight of its main function.
- The controls don't follow clear rules. For example, when you jump holding RT, the glider will come out. But if you're coming off another action while holding RT, then the glider won't come out. You'll often die because you don't have enough time to react by depressing and pressing the button. There are other confusing controls as well, such as a charge jump done with LT: When you hold it it charges, and if you depress it cancels. But when you're climbing a wall, even if you let go of LT, it will stay active if you're holding a direction. Things like this break the flow and don't allow the action of movement to feel intuitive--they require too much though and calculating.

And these are just some examples.

Ultimately, the game is designed around the idea of trial and error, but the main problem is that the error is usually induced by questionable design decisions. I just couldn't look past these problems.

Nier is a game filled with unfun time wasters. It is a game that often seems to be actively questioning your motivation to keep playing. The NPCs send you on errands as they berate you for your subservience to them. Of course, you will likely hit the accept quest button anyway. Nier is a game with a five hours worth of small environments that repeat endlessly throughout it's thirty-to-forty hour adventure. You run endlessly back and forth through the same loading checkpoints, all of them taking a little longer than you might think they should.

By most people's benchmarks, Nier can sound like a bad video game when described. What sets Nier apart, then, is how inspired the whole thing is, despite it's problems. Or, more accurately, because of it's problems. The original Nier was an obviously low budget game, yet rather than feeling held back by it's low budget limitations, Nier embraced them and made these flaws thematically appropriate for the story it is telling. It is experimental and inspired in the way many of my favorite video games are. So the question is, can a remake capture the same magic as the original?

The answer is yeah, totally, it's pretty much the exact same game, except it looks better, is fully voiced, and has a little bit of new content, much of which blends so seamlessly into the old that I had to google to make sure it was something that was not in the original Nier. The additional content here I see as nothing but improvements to the original game, aside from possibly having a preference for the Father version of the Nier protagonist, rather over the Brother version we get here.

This remake's most substantial alteration is making the combat of Nier slightly less stale, but this mostly exists to give you more variety in attack animations, if you so wish to use them. Nier is not a game out to challenge your dexterity, and it never was. The result of the remake's combat still retains the repetitive and mindless loops of the original; to the point where "easy" difficulty and "auto-battle" functionality may very well end up being your favorite way to enjoy the game. This function gives the fights a good amount of visual flair, and honestly, not much engagement is lost in the transition between manual and automatic combat. Nier is not a game that anybody should play for the combat; and the improvements change less than you might expect. Ultimately, it might have been a good idea for the remake to not adapt the combat of Nier to be too engaging or mindful; mindless detached killing is very much a point here.

So if the combat, and general gameplay are boring, why should you play Nier?

For one, I think boring can be good. Boring can give you time to think, and boring can feel like home. Nier's aesthetic is a thoroughly cohesive one that is easy to soak yourself in. Nier is calming, comfortable, reflective, melancholy, haunting, and dire. Hanging out in Nier is like hanging out at a cemetery in the early afternoon.

The musical score plays a huge part in this; the cyclical tracks bury themselves into your subconscious to the point small variations on the songs can have a tactile impact. Koiichi Okabe's dreamy choral arrangements dynamically ebb and flow to the player's current actions, and in practice, it is simply one of the synergies between music and games to ever have occurred.

The other star of the show, then, is the writing and world design. Yoko Taro has always had a distinct charm to him that is able to be at once infinitely charming and devastatingly nihilistic. Nier might best be described as a farcical tragedy, it's misfortunes so bleak you sometimes have to laugh at the absurdity of the dark melodrama. Nier balances these dark moments with ones of genuine human kindness, balancing on a razors edge between mean-spirited and heart-warming, and it does this expertly; much credit due to Nier having one of the most likable cast of characters in the central party of any JRPG.

The one misstep of the remake, which is also a misstep of the original Nier, is the required third playthrough of the game, which adds almost nothing to the experience and could have easily been consolidated into the second playthrough; you could have put a save point right before the final boss, as well. It's strange to make some quality of life improvements in the combat, but retain this required five hour slog that adds nothing to the experience of the game. If the game is making a point about tedium and player-drive to push past it, I think it does this perfectly well through it's sidequest structure, I really just cannot be convinced the third run is at all necessary. Nier Replicant 1.22's additional ending fares much better, and I personally think it is a much more satisfying ending to the game than what the original had. This is especially true after having to power through the games patience-testing third playthrough.

Ultimately, it is surreal to play a remake of Nier in the year 2021, and I cannot be anything but ecstatic that video games this strange and unique can connect with a large audience in the modern day. Automata is probably a more accessible game, and one I might recommend over the Nier remake, but Nier Replicant 1.22 still absolutely has that lightning-in-a-bottle feeling the original had of a low budget game created by intensely inspired people. It's a story worth remembering.

Now let's bring this energy to Steambot Chronicles.