GOTY 2021 mini-review: Nier Replicant (Patreon)

Continuing the series of mini reviews I (brandon) had to do for competition judging for games of 2021. Now we're getting to one I liked! It's Nier!!

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Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139...

Okay, so this is a remake, and a pretty straightforward one at that. There's no way around it. But this is a game I beat on the 360 and then again on PS4, so clearly it does something for me. My focus will be on whether it's worth reconsidering in 2021.

For those who haven't played either version, Nier is a game about a brother (or father) whose sister (or daughter) gets the black scrawl, a disease that inevitably kills. We do mercenary jobs to keep her in medicine and keep us in a house. We gain powers through a magical book named Weisse, meet a friendly foul mouthed hero named Kaine, and a troubled boy who has deep ties to the Nier series overall.

The game is a hack and slash at its heart, with 3D combat that I personally quite enjoy, drifting warthogs, fishing, farming, and fetch quests.

What was good about the game originally was its approach to story, its subversion of fetch quests, its general vibe, and its music. I still think it's one of the greats. It also just gave a really neat and different vision of a post-apocalyptic world that felt vibrant and alive, rather than drab and terrible. Sure, bad things happen, and the world IS dying, but everyone is trying to live their life in the meantime, with disparate cultures and unique architecture and neat places to traverse. You really feel like you're visiting somewhere when you go from the docks to the desert town. One area and boss battle is entirely told through a text interface, like a Twine game. Love it!

Meanwhile some fetch quests will be so intentionally annoying as to have you question what the heck you're even doing, running back and forth across the entire world for someone who treats you like dirt and just wants you to do their work for them. But then you realize that's the point of the whole thing, and it feels appropriate.

What's new then? There's a new area, a haunted ship, which is pretty enjoyable. Some quests have been tweaked, and dialog been added, but not so you'd notice if you'd never played it originally. Music has been poked at a bit, with what I consider pretty classy arrangements, but some folks aren't as into it.

This game has gotten renewed interest after Nier Automata came out, and the two games heavily reference each other, and you're rewarded for looking deeper into both games narratively. You don't have to, but if you want to you get a deeper insight into the world, which is pretty mysterious to start with, there's a lot there to look into.

So, should it be on our top 5? It's a tough one. Personally, I love this game, and I would love to see it on the list. At the same time, I acknowledge that it is a pretty straight remake of a game from 2010, with a few extra narrative bits woven in. My bid for why this should be in the top 5 is that the game never got its due in 2010, and the press was not particularly favorable to it at the time. It was the final game from one of my favorite devs of "imperfect but interesting" games, Cavia, and I'd love to see it get acknowledge now that the game has been lifted into cult status, and now everyone's pretending they liked it all along.

Your mileage may vary, but it's in there for me!

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Note: it did not make the cut ;_;