I've just completed a game that, in normal circumstances at least, wouldn't generally be my cup of tea. A game remastered and released in 2021 but which originally arrived in 2010 in a somewhat 'adjusted' manner shall we say?. A game I meant to get around to back then but never did and now that I have finally gotten around to both playing and completing it, I'm not entirely sure if I liked it or not. That game is Nier Replicant or to give it it's full re-released title: Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139... because clearly the game alone wasn't baffling enough....
FYI: Outside of the beginning I will try and keep this a relatively spoiler free zone and place appropriate warnings in place if needed.
Described by Wikipedia as an 'action role-playing' game and not a JRPG or Japanese role playing game, it borrows a lot but thankfully not everything from the genre of Final Fantasy and the like. The immaculate hair, ostentatious clothing and oversized weaponry are all here on full display. Then there is the somewhat erratic story developments as well as the amazingly over the top battles against oversized overpowered adversaries. Thankfully for my patience it doesn't bring over the huge time sink requirements I generally associate with JRPG's and is generally a pretty snappy experience I completed in about 25 hours or so. That bit there I definitely liked.
The characters and plot eventually won me over but for a large part of the play time I was absolutely in the dark about what exactly was happening in this time and place. A word of explanation perhaps? You are, at first, an unnamed character in a dystopian near future. You're fighting off bizarre shadow monsters and protecting a sibling slowly succumbing to some bizarre self-writing text spreading over her body. You get your standard intro tutorial and then suddenly the plot shoots you forward 1500 years ahead where you are now a different but very similar self-named character looking after a similar but different sister dying of the very same thing in a world that's still a little dystopian but also very medieval fantasy as well. A world that has both moved forward from dystopia and yet back at the same time.
You get all of that? Because for quite a few of those 25 hours I spent that is all I got. Don't get me wrong I like a good jarring cut that puts you on the wrong foot or subverts expectation. That one time they skipped a year in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica was a great example of this but here it was a little less successful. An evocative but slightly generic near future nightmare is swapped for a generic somewhat rural fantasy setting with some surprises in store but it takes a little while to get to them.
SPOILERS: So you're in this town generally running errands for the locals and the leaders of the community. You slowly get a feel for the shape and feel of this world, a world built upon the ancient remains of another and you incrementally unravel the mystery at it's heart. Sinister agents of the shadow things attack and the sister is taken and you now shoot forward just a couple of years. Oh and there's a character who looks like a child in the garb of a lord of the manor who can't look at anyone lest he turns them to stone, oh and at some point it turns out he was a weapon from the ancient times and in an anachronistic weapons laboratory beneath their manor you fight their sister alongside them who you beat and then the two siblings merge or something and the lord becomes something like a character out of The Nightmare Before Christmas and there's another companion who dresses like a burlesque dancer but swears like a sailor and... END SPOILERS.
So plot-wise its essentially long periods of going back and forth carrying out jobs for the locals with an occasional deluge of major plot development taking place. It gets a bit jarring, often a bit boring and rarely quite interesting. I guess that's ultimately my impression of it, a potentially quite interesting game that spends much of the running time being quite uninteresting. Your main character is pretty dull but this is offset by a varied and interesting set of supporting characters, the main highlight being the magical talking book that serves as your main companion for most of the experience. The finale delivered too, providing adequate closure to a plot that could have easily gone off the rails with less of a guiding hand. It ends on a strong note and it doesn't take ages to get to the end either as stated above. Certainly if this had been one of those games that required a time investment of hundreds of hours I would be less charitable to its failings but here it just about all works for me.
Mechanically its slick and the combat system is intuitive and responsive. The crowning highlights of the game are pretty much the boss battles, challenging but not crushing in the vein of a Dark Souls or its ilk. None of them took more than a few attempts to clear and none of them depleted my will to live so again, top marks for that. The presentation can feel a little sparse and plain but much like the plot if often taken to unloading some real visual madness on you when you least expect it. Ultimately it comes across very much as was it is, which is a game originally from 2010. A game that has been remastered, reworked and tweaked from it's various versions back in the day.
So where does that leave me on this game? Truly I am now somewhat curious about the well-received sequel Nier: Automata so this re-release certainly piqued my interest in a game and genre I don't usually spend much time with. So yeah it has that going for it in the larger scheme of things, when I will get around to that one is anyone's guess of course. I still don't know if I am a huge fan of the aesthetic, not that everything should be gritty, industrial and grounded but the sheer amount of hair spray these characters must use manages to somehow be the least realistic aspect of this game. Maybe its just a difficulty to believe that the long slowly drawn out end of humanity would be so finely tailored.
So what shall I give it? Let's say its three baffling plot developments out of five! A luke warm recommendation all said. Until next time!
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