Let me be clear and say that Nier was a game that I pretty much never wanted to play after reading the reviews. Even though it came out in 2010, years after the JRPG salad days of the PS2, I was still one to read criticism of games on the internet and balk at them expecting much better stuff to happen along sooner or later anyway. Being a lapsed-JRPG fan in the current generation, though, had become awfully hard, and even though Nier wasn't entirely stepping to the beat of a Final Fantasy drum, at some point I decided that, well, there just aren't that many JRPGs coming out, and what is coming out is absolute shit, so I may as well play Nier if it happens to fall in my lap. And fall in my lap it did.
I could be playing BioShock Infinite right now. I should have gone through Tomb Raider. I have Etrian Odyssey IV staring me in the face. Instead, I played through this busted mess of a game three times. Three times. Do I love it? Not even close; all of the trash that reviewers were rightly saddling on the Cavia-developed game were absolutely done with merit. First, it has a lot of great ideas, and it tries to blend a whole lot of genres together (It's an action RPG! It's a bullet hell shooter! It's a text adventure!), none of them work to the point where if we were to make singular games from any of these elements would they be fun to play. The fetch quests are absolutely gawdawful, and it turns out that they really are totally worthless to the game unless you're gunning for two of the four endings. It's also about as attractive to look at as a sewer grate. I'm almost certain that it was developed for the PlayStation 2 and was just left lying around until Cavia could convince Square-Enix to publish it during the particularly dark time that took them 5+ yeas to shit out Final Fantasy XIII.
But it is absolutely fascinating. First, I have never played a game as oppressively bleak as Nier. I don't know what the statute of limitations for spoiling 3 year-old games might be, but here's the gist: In the far future, humanity was dying of a plague (apparently caused by one of the endings of another oppressively bleak Cavia game: Drakengard) so scientists decided to split peoples souls from their bodies to give the earth time to overcome the plague and do away with the villains causing it. Since this took maybe thousands of years (I have no idea), the wandering souls became sentient. Their human forms eventually came to collect in form of shambling yellow Tron throw-aways called Shades. At this point, though, the souls thought that Shades were trying to kill them, so they hire guys like the preposterously ugly Nier to fight, kill, and generally keep them in line. Nier, through a series of wacky slapstick adventures, kills hundreds or thousands of Shades on the way to rescuing his daughter, and ultimately runs into his own Shade, the cleverly named Shadowlord. The thing is, Mr. Shadowlord was the only thing keeping Shades in check, and by killing him, MENSA member Nier sends humanity toward a slow, certain extinction. All in a day's work, I guess.
Yes, I know I'm leaving things out, but what's really interesting about this game isn't the fact that everybody dies (seriously), it's the the way that Nier unfolds its plot. After finishing the game and getting the "good" ending (Nier saves the kid! Aaaaand humanity is doomed...), you unlock further narrative for the second playthrough of the game. That isn't exactly new, but this new story content is specifically for the skanky foul-mouthed sidekick Kaine (filling in the whore roll to Nier's daughter Yonah's Madonna). After brief text introducing you to Kaine's back story as the second game cycle begins (mercifully starting at the second half of the game), which is also pitch black as per Nier's morose standards, you find that Kaine has been possessed by a Shade for at least the entirety of the first game, and now, lucky person you are, are treated to their internal dialog as she massacres her way through the game. Strangely, this doesn't offer insight into her deep interior scars as much as it shows how cruel a symbiotic relationships eventually become. Kaine is always protrayed as a bloodthirsty psychopath, but this doesn't come from Tyrann, the symbiote, he just perpetuates it, and psychologically taunts her way past the breaking point. The dialog that we hear out of it is a little hammy, sure, but still chilling, especially since it comes out of basically nowhere to the player used to only hearing the voices of her, Nier, and Grimoire Weiss and Emil, the two other companions. Worse, subsequent playthroughs of the game offer insight into what the greater shade enemies are up to before you mercilessly slaughter them. Kaine, merged with a Shade, can hear the thoughts of other Shades, and makes a point of disregarding their pleas for mercy while she continues to maul her enemies into pudding. It's as messed up as it sounds.
The coup de grace of Nier, though is Ending D. While the first three endings offered some solace in the fact that just about every character except one doesn't make it out alive and that the world as we know it will drift toward extinction, Ending D, offers you even less of a way out by --brilliantly--DELETING YOUR SAVE FILES. In most games, the heroic decision to sacrifice yourself for the greater good typically gives you either the supremely happy ending or an eventual resurrection to wrong the rights of the trouble world we blah blah blah. Not Nier. When offered a chance to save Kaine and turn her back into a human, you could either mercy kill her, thereby giving her release from a seriously terrible existence (and thereby granting you probably the most satisfying ending), our you can give up Nier's existence so that she might live some sort of normal life. But the cost of doing this is a total Mephisto deal; the game will actively try to talk you out of it by making it plain that all of your save files with this character will be deleted. Gone. Lost in ether. The characters in the game don't even remember you in the ending that you thanklessly chose, other than a quick flash of recognition by a now-human Kaine. It is, more than any other game I've ever played, the ultimate sacrifice.
But that's the twist. I wasn't so affected by this that it kept me awake last night, but it's stuck with me enough that I'm telling you all about it, and that's the idea. Nier as a character might be lost forever until the day comes (it won't) for you to start a completely new game, but as far as I'm concerned, he won't be forgotten. This is a twist that I'll probably tell my friends about, and if they decide to save Kaine one day, they may tell their friends, too. That's how games become cult favorites, much like what Nier is becoming. In his way, then, that butt ugly old man is just going to live. I'm ok with that.
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