Neir Replicant
NIER REPLICANT is a welcome second chance for a singular action-RPG.
If you didn’t know that Nier was the final game from studio Cavia Games, you might be able to tell from playing it. The action RPG feels like a final act: a swing for the fences characterised by anger, tragedy, and a desperate sense of sincerity. And like most desperate swings, it failed at the time: sales were poor, Cavia Games was absorbed into its parent company, and Nier’s creative director, Yoko Taro, moved on to ply his craft elsewhere.
If Nier was characterised by desperation, Nier Replicant
(technically named Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139… but that’s just silly) is an act of love. Created by developer Toylogic and publisher Square Enix with the direct involvement of Taro and his regular band of collaborators, this remaster feels like an attempt to make good on the ideas and promises of that original game. After its sequel Nier Automata
became an unlikely hit in 2017, the team is betting that now is the right time to reintroduce broader audiences to the charms of the original game. Maybe this time they’ll be more receptive.
I honestly don’t know if they will: even in its remastered form, Nier
remains a singular and at times tedious game, a piece of art eager to try everything and constantly seeking out the hardest notes to hit. But it’s one of the most memorable games I’ve played, and the remaster ups its greatness in just about every way.
If you come into Nier expecting a direct prequel to Automata’s cyberpunk-and-thigh-highs existentialist action, you’re going to be disappointed. Taking place literally thousands of years before that story, it’s set in a post-apocalypse that’s swung right back around to pastoral fantasy, following a boy and his sister in a world of magic diseases, monsters, and at least one talking book. As that boy, you’ll be questing around a dark fantasy world while trying to cure your sister of a terrible disease, joining up with some of the best outcasts in gaming: Grimoire Weiss, the book; Kainé, a halfmonster warrior woman who casually drops words like ‘shitpurse’ into combat dialogue; and Emil, the sweetest little boy you’ve ever met who also happens to have terrifying magic abilities.
The game plays out like a sort of dark pastiche of standard fantasy adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, delighting in videogame conventions while also subverting them and turning to deeper thematic territory, meditating on violence, human cruelty, and what it means to persist in a world that wants you dead and is probably dying itself.
NIER ENOUGH
You’ll be spending most of your time running around lush fields and dank dungeons, doing quests and fighting ethereal monsters called Shades. Taking after Automata, the combat is significantly more dynamic and fluid than it was in the original, with combos and dodges that feel graceful and responsive. Magic, once clunky and slow to use, is now integrated neatly into combat. Parts of the game that were obtuse before are more clearly explained, like a notorious fishing minigame that now is less of a roadblock. Nier’s genre shifts pop more, too, now that the core combat mechanics are so much more fun.
The graphics are more advanced now, not quite cutting-edge but at least on par with Automata. And many of the visual touches that were key to the original Nier are recreated in a more advanced fashion.
There’s new material here, too, a smattering of new quests and story beats that don’t change the narrative so much as they deepen it.
Ultimately though this is still Nier. Like the original, it relies on repetition, layering narrative over multiple playthroughs, which is inventive, but also tiresome in later stages. Like the original game, it has never even heard of subtlety. But like the original, it’s also heartfelt.
I don’t know how people are going to respond to Nier in 2021, even with all the new bells and whistles. It’s far from perfect. But I’m telling you: it’s worth it. The original is one of my favourite games ever made, and the remaster improves it. Nier is special. This is a new chance to try it out. I think you should take it.
The combat is significantly more dynamic and fluid than in the original.