![]() At its core, it’s an action RPG that sees you running around a fantasy-ish world, hacking and slashing your way through monsters… until a camera shift to a side-scrolling perspective means you’re suddenly playing a platformer. In the same vein, NieR Replicant rejects a lot of the assumptions we have about videogames as a medium. (Granted, “fake endings” somewhat synonymous with the name Yoko Taro now, but the impact of them is no less for it.) Not just “what does it mean to be human”, but “what does it mean for me to be human, in this very specific time and place in which I exist?” It’s a rejection of assumptions about the very nature of existence, given weight by the way those questions take form in the rejection of assumptions about how a story should be told. Fascinating though that is to ponder, it’s just a starting point for far more interesting questions than “what”: the whys and the hows and the what ifs. NieR goes beyond the question of “what does it mean to be human?”. “Complete” the game again, and you’ll dig deeper, throwing ever more spanners into the “truth” that you thought you knew, questioning the questions that came before as much as the answers you thought you had to them. But upon “completion”, you’ll continue from part-way through, only this time with the shocking revelations from the first ending and some additional scenes adding new context-not just a different perspective, but one that fundamentally up-ends everything that came before. In the first run through Replicant, what you get is that familiar confronting-the-darkness adventure-a particularly well-told version of it, full of complex characters in a rich, unique setting, but a familiar tale all the same. The genius of NieR Replicant lies in how it slowly peels back those layers, setting expectations and then breaking them, over and over again, in a way that questions the very nature of existence. There’s more to humans, too, and more to the very fabric of this post-apocalyptic setting. But that’s the first of its many tricks: this is just laying the groundwork for what amounts to bold subversion of the most common narrative setups in videogames.Īs you can probably guess, there’s more to Shades than first meets the eye. You might even say predictable and tired-and indeed, NieR Replicant starts out walking down exactly this well-trodden path. The premise of a young hero travelling the world, going head-to-head with creatures of darkness on a quest to save a loved one is a familiar one. “The Black Scrawl”-called as such for the black letters that appear on the skin of its victims-is a deadly illness with no known remedy, but Nier will do anything for his sister, even if that means walking head-first into the lair of the Shades. It’s a world where humans scrape by in small, primitive communities, and where deadly monsters known as Shades roam the wastelands. Taking place in the distant future, amid the ruins of a long-lost civilization, NieR Replicant tells the story of a young man on a journey to find a cure for the mysterious illness that ails his younger sister. 1.22474467139… is an absolute masterpiece in the truest sense of the word, and you need to play it immediately.” If you want a 100% spoiler-free review, here it is: “ NieR Replicant ver. Off the back of Automata, I don’t think it’s necessarily as shocking to play now-what I wouldn’t give to be able to go back in time and play the original at launch, without any knowledge of what to expect-but it’s every bit as impressive, thoughtful, and beautiful as its sequel.Ī note on spoilers: This review will be as spoiler-free as possible, especially with regard to plot details and such, but the nature of NieR-when even the most superficial discussion of something like how much fun it is to press buttons is inherently tied to the themes and narrative-makes it near impossible to avoid spoilers entirely. ![]() ![]() A “version upgrade” of the original NieR, it comes with a suite of technical improvements and new features, but its biggest achievement is simply in making NieR readily available, and giving it another shot at the success it so richly deserves. If you’re in my shoes, NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139… is a chance to see where all those ideas took root. It blew me away, more than any other game ever has. But most of all, it’s the philosophical musing that runs through all of that: nuanced, deep, complex, but approachable explorations of existentialism, of revenge, of humanity, of the unique perspective that each individual sees the world from. It’s no exaggeration to say that it quickly earned its place as my favourite game of all time, with its beautiful, heartbreaking story, its sense of humour, its subversive approach to the videogame medium as a whole. ![]() Like a lot of people, NieR Automata was my introduction to the world of NieR and the works of Yoko Taro.
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