NieR Replicant is what I’d call a flawed masterpiece. It's a game that is endlessly cool, but just unfortunately runs into a lot of little issues that drag the whole experience down a fair bit. I love the characters and the story to death, the core squad of this game absolutely makes the experience. The combat definitely gets a bit monotonous at times, but I think it fits thematically very well, much like in Drakengard. While the combat is certainly more engaging than DoD, the repeated playthroughs for all of the endings really drive it into the ground. I think the added playthrough for route B was phenomenal– even though I was expecting the twist, the complete reframing of the plot makes you look at Nier in an entirely different way. While he starts as a well meaning, “pure of heart” protagonist, by the end Nier is a shell of his former self. He’s not an explicitly bad person like the protagonist of the game before him, but what he is is willfully ignorant. There are clear signs that what he’s doing isn't as noble as he would've first thought, but he continues doing as he was. If he were to stop to think about it, he would lose sight of his goal– protecting his friends and saving Yonah. Besides that, it also offers more insight into both Kainè and Emil, and both of their stories are just fantastic. But route C? Totally not worth an entire replay. Don’t even get me STARTED on collecting all of the weapons. It’s nowhere near as bad as in Drakengard, but i swear to god this guy Yoko Taro only has one gimmick. This is not to say you shouldn't experience it for yourself, being honest replaying the second half again isn't too much of a big deal, it's just really grating when you just want to see the 10% of the game that's different. I do think the end of the game is very strong though, not only with ending D but with the shadowlord as a character. I think the lore for NieR is EXTREMELY cool (especially with its connections to Drakengard), and I spent hours upon hours looking into this stuff after piecing together what I could from what the game gives you. I love that although the Replicants weren’t supposed to have personalities due to their lack of souls, Replicant Nier takes on the exact same character flaws as his Gestalt counterpart. The Shadowlord was so dedicated to saving his Yonah that he spent over an entire century carrying out an elaborate plan only to get impatient at the end and ruin everything for himself. In the end, he is brought down by someone with the very same goal as him– saving Yonah. It’s poetic, and also extremely depressing, because it’s hard to say who was wrong in that scenario. The answer is that from both of their perspectives they were completely just, which is why I love that dynamic so much. Ending D really is the perfect ending to the game, Nier is so dedicated to protecting his friends he erases himself entirely…
Ending E was alright but I don’t really have a lot to say on it. I just don't particularly feel like delving my feelings on it too terribly much. It’s really cool you can play as Kainè though, I wish more of the game let you do that.

The music is some of the best I’ve ever heard in a video game. It's seriously an all-timer for me, I love every song to bits. There’s an interview between some news outlet site and the main vocalist Emi Evans, and it's some seriously interesting stuff. When I first heard the vocals for Song of the Ancients, I spent at least like 10 minutes just standing there trying to figure out what language it was in. I eventually just decided on “oh, this is definitely made up”, and while that's true, there's really a lot more to it than that. Evans was told to make these songs sound as if the languages we have today changed and evolved over a century, and I really think she succeeded. Song of the Ancients is a bit more nebulous in its specific language inspiration but “Grandma” is clearly French inspired, “Kainè” has Gaelic inspirations and The Wretched Automations is based on English. She did a really great job of identifying what makes these languages sound the way they do while also changing them subtly enough to sound completely foreign to everyone and anyone listening. What’s even more interesting is that she seemingly did this without any formal knowledge of the international Phonetic Alphabet, which is crazy to me because if it were me that would be where i started first. Not to mention the intense time constraints! It’s endlessly impressive to me and it's the kind of thing that makes me love music even more than I already do. I'm a music major with a concentration in voice myself so this stuff is just endlessly interesting to me. What’s even more insane about all of this is that judging by the interview, she had to make up the melody lines for these songs by herself, and most of the songs were written around the vocal parts she wrote for herself since she was only given a barebones version of each track to work with. This isn’t even mentioning the vocal performance itself– which is obviously some ridiculously great stuff. Outside of the stuff that Evans was involved in the rest of the OST is great too. I don’t know if the choir arrangements were written with the same kind of philosophy as the tracks Evans worked on, but they’re definitely not in any specific language either. They all sound vaguely Latin to me, and if I ended up finding an interview that said all the choir pieces were based on Latin I wouldn’t be surprised. These are all great too, but what I find interesting is that a lot of these songs don’t have any pronounced tenor parts. Snow in Summer is obviously all treble voices but most other tracks that do have basso voices forgo the tenors entirely from what i can hear. The Incomplete Stone definitely has some splits in the basso voices but it's low enough and where I could reasonably consider the top split a bass I part rather than an entire separate tenor part. I think Shadowlord might have some and I definitely hear short segments with tenors in Cold Steel Coffin but in general there's rarely Tenors in this soundtrack. I’m not claiming this as 100% fact because it's really just based on what I can hear, but it's really interesting at the very least. I don't consider it a bad thing at all, just interesting. I tried to think of a reason for it to be like this that tied into the story but I really couldn’t, I just wanted to put this here because this is my very large excuse to talk about the music in this game in an extended format.

This review was supposed to be a lot shorter than what I’ve been doing recently on here but I ended up getting carried away pretty quickly. That’s just the kind of effect that NieR has on me, much like Drakengard before it, once i start thinking about it i just can't stop. I didn’t give a comprehensive analysis of it but I do really love sharing the things I love about these games that I review. I told myself that I should try and make my reviews a bit more serious and less laid back like the past couple have been, but I just can’t really have the same amount of fun with it when I do it that way. I tried it for this one at first but it’s just too daunting, and if I’m doing these reviews for any other reason besides personal enjoyment then I’ve really lost the plot. That’s part of the reason it took me so long to write a review of this game after finishing it. A lot of it was the semester wrapping up but I would be lying if I said that the former wasn't a big reason. To give a quick TL;DR, I really love NieR Replicant in spite of its faults. I think it definitely drags its feet a little bit at the end but I don’t think that lets it ruin itself for me at all. I think it's got its fair share of flaws, but if someone told me that NieR was their favorite game of all time I wouldn’t bat an eye. It’s seriously something special and I loved it a lot. I look forward to trying out the original 2010 version sometime down the line. I’m going to drop a link to the interview that I was referencing early on, but fair warning it's not working for me at the time of me writing this. This could just be on my end entirely though so it might still work. Here's the link pasted as text: https://www.originalsoundversion.com/deep-into-nier-interview-with-vocalist-and-lyricist-emi-evans/. That's all I have thanks for reading