Look Back: Nier (Patreon)

I already reviewed Nier back when I first played it, but I wanted to look back at it as part of the wrap-ups I was doing in the AGWS videos. I was really happy this game held up and was as good as I remembered it being. I love the game's writing. All the characters have personality. It can be funny when it needs to be and heart-breaking when you need a little despair. And this time around I know that Laura Bailey was Kaine! I need to work Nier into my grand RE6/SR3 fantasy now... Nier's gameplay isn't overly complex, but it has just the right amount of depth to the combat, weapons, and magic to keep it fun. The music is still as great and evocative as I remember it being too. All the resource collection, farming, and fetch quests are still terrible, but the nice thing about having played it once already is that I can skip all the boring stuff this time around. I still have nothing but hatred for Facade and how much of a blatant time waster that chunk of the game is, but then they have their Zelda moment and that gets a laugh and the emotional arc of the second journey... and I begrudgingly accept its existence. Both of those moments would be so much more fantastic if the town, its dungeon, and all the pointless tasks they give weren't such a waste of your time, but it's nothing you can't just put your head down and power through to get back to the rest of an amazing game. Gamestop appears to have done a reissue on the PS3 version of Nier, so now is probably your last chance to pick it up for less than obscene amounts of money. I absolutely adore this game, but I can see where others might balk at it. It's a game you have to accept and give it time to explain its mysteries and justify seemingly bad choices. It's a game where you can dismiss a character after its introduction but then your heart breaks when something bad happens to it. Nier does “despair” better than almost every other game I've ever played. But what makes it fantastic is that the game earns every ounce of its sadness. It's a game where you take on a quest to find a kid's lost mother, knowing that she's probably dead, but when you find out the truth behind the situation, it's even sadder than a child losing its parent. It's game that kills a lovable dog not because it's a cheap way to tug at your heartstrings, but because it's how the world works and you need to face that. So while I accept that it didn't go over well with everybody and it bums me out that somebody I recommended it to wasn't a fan, ye gods I love this game.