NieR Replicant ver. 1.22474487139…

Nier came out the month after Final Fantasy XIII. Fifty days after the holy emissary of Japanese role-playing games would finally rescue the Square-Enix from its awkward transition to the HD era and mark the path for the next generation. Final Fantasy XIII didn’t do that. Nier didn’t either, but its contempt for genre norms and defiance of expectations won over a niche audience and did the heavy lifting for Nier: Automata’s surprise success in 2017. Four years later, sandwiched between remaster and remake, it’s NieR Replicant ver. 1.22474487139…that has to answer expectations and from one audience that knows it well and another that doesn’t know it at all.

All of this attention would have all seemed very funny in 2010. Nier was the final product of Cavia, a mercenary Japanese studio best known stateside for creating Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Bullet Witch, and other earnest-but-obviously-budget-minded console games. Nier was directed by Yoko Taro, a delightful and weird individual, who insisted on connecting Nier’s narrative to the wildest ending of the only other game he had directed, Drakengard. Nier followed The Last Remnant and Infinite Undiscovery, two of Square-Enix’s most featureless contributions to that generation. Nier didn’t have to worry about defying expectations because it didn’t seem to have any. Nier, at times, behaved like a game that could do whatever it wanted.

Coming to terms with Nier required an acknowledgement of risk and a test of patience. It opened as an ordinary, fetch-quest driven action-rpg. It frequently steered off course, at ninety-degree angle, off a cliff, and into disparate genres. Nestled in Nier’s opening half was an isometric dungeon raid, a lavish and vivid visual novella, a fixed-camera exploration of a haunted mansion, a rudimentary shoot ‘em up, and a top-down brawler. The modern indie scene genre-hops with alarming frequency, but this rarely happened eleven years ago. Nier, rather than treat its divergences like minigames or sideshows, regarded these sequences as integral components of its mad scientist machine. Every module was fabricated with an explicit purpose.

Anyone who has played through Nier will tell you about the difficulty involved in making this machine work, even if the only fuel it demands is time. Nier, like its sequel, gained some notoriety by requiring players to play through it several times in order to complete its narrative. You finish the game once and get Ending A. You load that cleared save file and restart Nier at the second half, with your loot and character level intact, but receive subtle and distinct injections of new narrative pieces along the way. Reaching Ending B opens up the route for Endings C and D, which, yes, require the player to play from the second half until the finale. Again. Even if you skip everything inessential, it’s still a six hour process. This is the toughest pill Nier asks its players to swallow.

Those who enjoyed Nier will tell you it’s worth the trouble. Some others will either suggest watching the stuff you missed in a tightly edited video compilation or ignoring it completely. There is no wrong answer, however, Nier’s remake, produced by ToyLogic and branded as NieR Replicant ver. 1.22474487139…has done its best to make Nier more approachable and accessible for 2021. Combat has been reworked. The visual presentation has been adjusted. 8-4’s localization has seen refinement and the voice work appears to have been completely re-recorded with most of the original cast. Even fishing, Nier’s most infamous asset, is easier. A new scenario fills a curious gap in the original game and more new content is buried inside Nier’s depths. On the mystifying chart of remakes and re-releases, Nier Replicant best slots under the banner of Enhanced Remake.

The most obvious change between Nier and Replicant lies with the identity of its protagonist. An unexplainable marketing decision dictated Nier’s titular hero as a 39-year-old man caring for his daughter in the North American release and a teenager looking after his sister in the Japanese release.  Replicant chooses Brother Nier as its canon protagonist. While this technically changes the entire story it also, fundamentally, doesn’t change much. Nier still spends the majority of the game looking after or trying to find sister Yonah. Her wellbeing remains his unrelenting focus.

The world Nier inhabits remains a desolate and bizarre post-post-apocalyptic arrangement of nature and community. A cataclysm occurred some time ago. What remains of humanity is dealing with monsters called Shades and combating a mysterious disease called the Black Scrawl. When Yonah becomes afflicted, Nier travels from his village to several nearby communities in search of Sealed Verses that may be able to cure Yonah. Along the way he meets Grimoire Weiss, a sardonic talking/floating book, Kainé, a fountain of rage and profanity outcast from the reclusive Aerie, and Emil, a young boy who is quite obviously more than he seems. Only Nier is controlled by the player, leaving his comrades as ornamental co-conspirators.

Nier’s reliance on collecting and delivering loot is a product of its time. Its glut of sidequests demand the player visit of the neighboring villages and either acquire items from an exclusive shop or slay robots, animals, and varying degrees of Shades to secure loot of variable rarity. It’s a grind, and while securing every weapon—Drakengard and Nier are infatuated with making sure players horde every tool of violence in order to access all of the endings—only asks players to complete a half dozen of its 70 optional quests, they’re usually exercises in surviving monotony. The line between genre commentary and genre obligation frequently blurs.

Combat is the most immediate and noticeable area of where Replicant showcases its power. The original Nier behaved like a haphazard action game. There was no lock-on mechanic, magic spells randomly demanded the player stand in place, and action had the sloppy rhythm of a musou game.  Replicant retains all of Nier’s weapons and spells, but adds a much needed lock-on, utilizes an awkward but practical 180-degree dodge spin, and allows the simultaneous use of magic and physical attacks. The flow of combat isn’t as inventive or intuitive as the PlatinumGames-produced Nier: Automata, but it does shift Nier’s performance closer to modern character action than its decaying roots in Drakengard’s blundering melee.

Replicant’s presentation has also seen improvement. The PlayStation 4 version, running on a PlayStation 5, appears to maintain sixty frames-per-second at a higher resolution. Load times still separate the invisible space between village gates, but at six seconds they’re drastically curtailed from the PlayStation 3’s 40 second loads. The dreamy haze that highlighted every inch of Nier’s environments has been replaced with divine clarity and the amber filter that gave Nier its signature aura has been diffused. Replicant looks uncomfortably desaturated. While this brings it more in line with Automata’s clinical sheen, it strips Nier of the character and charm that defined a world without a visible sun. It’s all a matter of taste, but I miss the way it used to look.

The amount of work that went into the localization update, citing anecdotal data from my tiny brain, is unprecedented. I played chunks of Replicant alongside a Let’s Play of the original Nier. When Dad Nier first meets Kainé, he originally said “that’s quite the outfit.” In Replicant, Brother Nier will ask Weiss, “why’s that lady in her underwear.” It’s the same sentiment from a different perspective. While much of the dialogue remains identical, other examples include shifting “how the hell should I know” to “what the hell is this,” and other minor rearrangements like “it’s…it’s the twins from your village” moving to “hmm, it’s the twins from your village.” Kainé has resisted sanitization and still dispenses “shit on a shingle,” and other staples from her adventures in profound profanity. Replicant’s changes are slight and feel adjusted for clarity. Ten years ago I thought my original review of Nier was fine. It’s extremely bad! I feel fortunate to have a do-over, of sorts, with this one. I can imagine the localization team and the voice cast feeling the same way, even if players found no fault in their original work.

Replicant also offers some additional content. In the second half of the game, Nier is compelled to revisit every biome except Seafront. That’s no longer the case, as the appearance of a crashed mercantile ship (one that looks curiously like this discarded piece of concept art) suddenly appears on the beach. The investigation of its origins rolls out a slow two-dimensional haunted house, of sorts, and, in typical Nier fashion, it’s not a complete experience until its narrative is fully unraveled in subsequent plays. Everything presented in Seaside fits neatly into Nier’s model of violence and despair, and new players likely won’t notice it wasn’t a part of the original game.

The greatest addition to Replicant is its embrace of accessibility. The auto battle option, exclusive to the easiest difficulty, can be adjusted to handle attacks, magic, and other combat options for the player. Auto battle makes it almost impossible to die. This allows players who don’t care for Nier’s combat—or simply get tired of it—to bypass barriers in the interest of seeing Replicant’s story to its conclusions. I tested it on my third trip through the game and it’s marvelous. I approached enemies and Nier beat the shit out of everything, even juggling different magics at appropriate times and knocking out quick-time finishers on bosses. I was never sure if Nier actually respected my time (some of the sidequests are pointless), but Replicant offers a meaningful gesture at making it all count.

Other minor knits are worth picking. I have no idea how to descend ladders. Most times I tried, Nier would wind up climbing back up the stupid thing. I resolved to jump off of most of them, which Replicant allowed. It’s also impossible to pause cut-scenes. An option to skip them completely is available (and was greatly appreciated through my path to Ending C), but you’re out of luck if the phone rings or your cat starts vomiting on the good rug. I don’t actually care about any of this but felt the need to mention it in the interest of creating some kind of informative document.

Replaying Nier for the first time since 2010 was a process. On my way to the first ending, where I collected all of the weapons and completed a bulk of the sidequests, I judged Nier’s mundanity as a product of its budget. Its deviations into different genres were attempts to rock it off the rails of its fixed path. I concluded the cumbersome layout of the desert village Facade, the insistence that I walk up the hill to Popola’s library a hundred times, the limitless fetch quests, and the surprise poison of the desert scorpions all to be irritating obstacles with no observable bypass. Nier was screaming to be anything outside of what it had to be.

The second playthrough to Ending B changed my perspective. Without specifically citing what happens, Nier recontextualizes the actions of its protagonist and flips the world upside down. The mad dash of my first run turned me into an efficient and productive killing machine. I annihilated everything and justified my actions as my objective, mirroring the will of my character. I never saw another way forward despite its presence in front of me. Path B, and later elements of Path C and D, revel in Nier’s cascading waves of subversion and revelation. And I still had to kill everything to make progress. I had more information than the character I was controlling but I was powerless to do anything to stop him. I murdered Beepy and Kalil and I felt rotten. In a world where everyone’s an antagonist, who’s the villain?

Nier’s treatment of violence draws an easy comparison to The Last of Us Part II. Naughty Dog’s miserable twenty-five hour rumination on bloodlust and nihilism was embarrassed to be a videogame and used its resources to feel like an interminable movie divided into two halves. Nier embraces its status as a game and weaves the player and the avatar together in a complex, albeit inefficient, exploration of humanity and their menacing contradictions. The repetitive third-person combat that I had considered a crutch was revealed as a mechanism to facilitate my descent into hell. Nier’s revelations grant catharsis to its characters but avoids resolution for its players. It remains neutral when it captures the player in  cycles of despondence  and hope and avoids direct judgment of action.

This is not exactly Radical Shit in the realm of literature or cinema, but in a medium obsessed with player empowerment—and where every edge is sanded down to a smooth, focus-tested amorphous blob of “content”—Nier’s fondness for subversion and its disregard for convention stands proud as a genuine risk in a conservative platform that doesn’t usually gamble with $60 products. Nier is frequently a little busted. Its obtuse demand to repeat its story can feel alienating. And while Nier’s not consumed by its lore, its bizarre cast can grate on players better equipped for more natural human characters. Ironically, Automata’s fondness for repeating a lot of Nier’s tricks and motifs may better equip today’s players to deal with Nier’s eccentric deviations.

A universal point of praise and agreement lies with Nier’s original soundtrack. I listen to Hills of Radiant Wind and imagine Nier racing across open green fields. I can hear both arrangements of Kainé’s theme and see the tragedies that formed her severe exterior. When This Dream plays I’m magically transported to The Forest of Myth and soak in its storybook meditations. Painting Emi Evans’ vocals (in a language she contstructed) over poignant melodies makes me feel like I’m absorbing the folklore of an alien culture. It works as a surreal reflection on regret and an empowering call to adventure.

Nier is something I recommend with clenched teeth, fully open to the possibility that it may change the way you think about gaming and/or render my opinion about games suspect and unreliable. I’ve given into astonishment, which is a sin, but it’s impossible not to remember the way I felt when I played Nier eleven years ago and when I finished every ending Replicant yesterday. Nier is something special. Replicant is an opportunity to explore more of it.

Nier presented as an action role-playing game. Nier was actually a controlled demolition of genre conventions driven by a taste for subversion and a desire to explore emotional boundaries between mild sorrow and hysterical despair. Replicant ver. 1.22474487139… keeps Nier intact with distinct improvements to its operation and accessibility. It remains an eccentric, effective, and occasionally inhospitable member of its medium.