Nier

Nier is a melancholic Action RPG that succeeds in developing a fascinating cast of tragic characters, who are trapped inside a ruthless cycle of senseless violence and death. Sadly, the game is also marred by some baffling design choices that aggravate its most serious problem: repetition.

Nier opens with a desolate, snow-laden post-apocalyptic world. An old man is hiding inside a crumbling mall with his daughter, while shade-like creatures roam the streets. He’s powerless against them and, to make things worse, his daughter is suffering from a strange affliction. The man, however, has a special book with magical powers, which offers him a Faustian bargain: the book will grant the man the power to save his daughter in exchange for his soul. The man agrees and the narrative jumps more than one thousand years into the future, when our urban, industrial cities are just desolate ruins, remnants of an old, forgotten world. People gather in small villages and, in one of them, a similar old man – you can name him – faces a similar problem: his daughter gets sick as well and he wants to save her at all costs. With the help of a magical talking book, called Grimoire Weiss, the protagonist ventures into the world in search of a cure.

Despite taking place in the distant future, Nier’s setting shares a lot in common with medieval fantasy. Characters wield swords and use magic, there are talking books, strange monsters roaming the lands, a town constructed around mountaintops, with buildings suspended on wooden bridges – reminding the Eloi village in the 2002 movie adaptation of The Time Machine – and another city built around rivers of sand, with a labyrinthine layout and an eccentric people bound by a huge amount of arbitrary laws.

The protagonist is a single-minded character, whose goal is very simple and clear: to save his daughter, Yonah. “My daughter is sick and my only concern is to give her a better life,” he says. Despite his grumpy voice, he has a kind soul and is also eager to help others in need – which is useful to explain his reasons to accept every side quest. This contrasts him to Grimoire Weiss, who is self-centered, cynical, and considerably pessimistic. Their banter during sidequests delineates very well this clash of personalities: when a villager asks the protagonist to deliver a letter to the girl he loves, who lives in another city, the protagonist thinks everything will go well and that love will prevail, while Weiss points out how the girl was left alone waiting for too long and that she could have very well moved on. But what they discover is even sadder than Weiss predicted,

Nier has a predominant melancholic tone. In one of the early missions, the protagonist sets out to find the mother of two children who went into some mines to gather materials for them to use or sell – they’re a family of blacksmiths – and was never seen again. While both the protagonist and Weiss imagine she’s dead, when they discover that she didn’t go there to find materials but to do something else entirely, the truth hurts even more, since it’s thematically related – and opposed – to the protagonist’s drive to save his daughter. Most side quests are tinged with pessimistic sadness: the characters often find that true love is not real, that people are egoistic and self-centered, and that missing people are usually long dead. This atmosphere is further reinforced by the game’s brilliant soundtrack, with the music being sung in a fictitious language, which gives the locales and events an otherworldly feel.

The main characters all have a tragic backstory and a striking design. There’s a boy, Emil, who petrifies everything he sees, which makes him live a reclusive, lonely life. There’s a similar character with a truly disturbing and terrifying body who is forbidden to enter places because of his monstrous appearance. One of the first main characters that the protagonist finds in his adventure is a young woman called Kainé. She’s in a quest for revenge, hunting a big monster who stole the voice of her wise grandmother – wise enough to once say, “Death is the best cure for stupid,” to frighten a bully – and uses it to taunt her. Kainé immediately stands out because of her strong, fierce personality: “I’ll tear out your eyes and piss on the sockets,” she threatens the monster. The main party is a group of outcasts and misfits. Only the protagonist is effortlessly accepted by those around him: it’s particularly sad each time he has to leave his friends on the outskirts of a town because their presence would upset the people.

The overarching story is a simple one. The game’s divided into two very similar parts. In the first one, the protagonist must find some magical powers to save Yonah, while in the latter half, he must find five tablets to – you guessed it – save Yonah. His drive to rid the world of shades, however, eventually becomes problematic. He accepts missions with a smile on his face, gladly saying “It’s killin’ time.” But that killing never brings true satisfaction: the characters you meet will always end up heartbroken, mad, or dead.

The shades themselves often display signs of emotion and intelligence – there’s a side quest where you must find and kill a friendly one that likes to hang around in the protagonist’s village, for example. The signs that there are more to the shades than it meets the eye are visible for everyone to see, but the main characters dismiss them because they want to cut the shades down mercilessly. If they are one-dimensional monsters, the characters have reason to use them to vent out their frustration and anger: they want the shades to remain monstrous so they can feel the catharsis of killing them.

The protagonist’s goal may be a simple one in nature, but the narrative pictures his single-mindedness as a complicated problem. On the one hand, it really puts him one step closer to saving his daughter and makes him meet some new friends. On the other, it also causes pain to others and, more often than not, it accomplishes little. The main antagonist in the game is a similar character with a similar goal, representing the problem inherent to the protagonist’s actions: sometimes, to help oneself is to also do damage to countless others. Therefore, the protagonist’s goal to save his daughter, which could have been framed as altruistic, is instead painted as a selfish act.

The New Game+ doubles down on this theme, revealing a new perspective on the events, which adds to the harm the protagonist has done in his journey. This element of the game, however, is a bit problematic. It’s nice to have something to gain by playing Nier again – and the NG+ starts in the game’s second half to remedy the issue of the player wasting too much time to gain access to those new bits – and this new perspective really adds depth to the story, making every event a tad more tragic. But it’s also artificial in its design, as nothing shown in later playthroughs couldn’t have been there since the beginning: the additions are simple cutscenes and lines of dialogue that the main characters still remain unaware of.

It’s not the case of something like the Zero Escape games, in which the characters manage to learn something from the first endings and somehow go back in time and use that information to change the course of the story. It’s just information that remains hidden from the player the first time around to force them to play at least two more times. In other words, it’s not a reward: the game keeps part of its story hostage. One could argue that the first playthrough is better without this added information because this way it locks the player into the single-mindedness of the protagonist, but the trade-off – having to play through the second half again and again – is hardly worth it. And to make matters worse, there’s also a “true ending” locked behind a third playthrough, which requires the player to collect all weapons in the game: although this is hardly a difficult task, it remains an artificial requirement to the ending since there’s no logical link between the weapons and the final events – the weapons are never even mentioned by the characters.

This repetition is a serious problem in Nier because during the first playthrough you already revisit the same places all the time, including the dungeons, which can make everything get old fast. And to add insult to injury, the side quests – which are usually fetch quests – also require constant back and forth between locales.

To try to remedy this problem, Nier offers great variety in the main quest design. There’s a dungeon where you get locked in special rooms where the protagonist has some basic abilities stripped away from him – like attacking or even moving – and suddenly combat or simple traversal of the environment becomes an engaging puzzle. There’s a region that strips away from the game every visual element> the goal is to reading text on a black screen while paying attention to the words used, as the protagonist will be questioned later. The game often plays with perspective and game genres as well: sometimes, the action will be seen from a top-down perspective, while some bosses transform the game into a bullet hell with the huge amount of energy balls they release.

The game has a simple overworld, with a big plains area that has a similar size and function to Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time, connecting the other small regions, which will be revisited time and again. Although the modest size of the maps helps the constant backtracking – and you can even ride a boar to speed things up if you complete an early side quest – the inability to fast travel in the early game is felt, leading the player to waste some time just going from place to place again and again. And when fast travel is unlocked it’s also not as useful as it could have been, since the player still needs to waste some time going to the place that functions as a warp point – and the desert city doesn’t even have one inside it, with the closest one being in the middle of the desert area next to it.

Some side activities are also badly designed. The fishing minigame, for example, is an abomination that manages to be also terribly explained: the tutorial tells you to press a certain button to start to reel the fish, but that often leads to the fish immediately escaping. What you should really do is pull back the analog stick and pray to whatever god you believe for it to work. And to makes matter worse, the game is rife with fetch quests of “catch ten of this type of fish or of this very rare material” – although they can be easily ignored. There are just a few side quests that stand out: there’s one related to an old woman that lives alone in a Lighthouse, waiting patiently for the coming of her husband, which is divided into several parts that all contribute to painting her as a sad, lonely figure.

And, while you can upgrade your weapons, the grinding to do so is also tedious and very time-consuming. There’s a material called Eagle Egg, for instance, that only rarely appears in just one resource point in the entire game, and is a material to upgrade three different weapons. Just like the side quests, however, weapon upgrading can be easily ignored since you do tons of damage with your base weapons alone. In later playthroughs, for example, you can beat bosses in less than fifteen seconds.

Nier is an Action-RPG with real-time combat, which is very simple: you have just one attack button, which you can press for regular attacks or hold for strong ones. You have two buttons for magic attacks, a dodge, and a block. There are no complex – or even flashy – combos. You just mash the attack button and enemies will be defeated in seconds. Some of them are armored, which require strong attacks, or the use of magic, which is the easiest, fastest option. Some bosses focus on magic – and there’s an early one that requires precision in your shooting of lances or balls of energy – but most of them will fall to regular sword slashes. You have the option to use two-handed swords and spears, which have their own attack animations – but they are also slow and heavy to use – and, again, later in the game even the basic one-handed swords can dispatch a boss in a matter of seconds. In short, Nier’s combat system is shallow and uninteresting, but it doesn’t get in the way because the focus is elsewhere.

Nier excels in building a melancholic atmosphere and developing tragic characters. Despite the ingenuity of some of its dungeons and bosses, however, it can get repetitive due to its shallow combat, time-consuming side quests, and the decision to lock some narrative bits behind several playthroughs. In the end, it provides a fascinating if problematic experience.

July 07, 2020.