Transcript
Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique of Nier. Just a friendly reminder that I will be discussing the game for those who have played it. If you haven’t and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.
One of my favourite writers on the internet is Film Crit Hulk. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, he’s primarily a movie critic, but usually uses the film or media in question as a jumping off point to dive into a deeper discussion. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about effective storytelling and drama from his essays, let alone all the other points of interest he touches upon. The reason I’m bringing up a film critic in this video on Nier is lately Hulk has spent a few articles talking about a movies’ essence. I’ll link a couple of these essays in the description. It’s how beyond every aspect of the film, from its story to its cinematography to its acting, despite how successful or unsuccessful each of the these elements might be, there’s a core to a film. Almost a soul, and this essence can run counter to the positive or negative qualities that the rest of the film exhibits.
Nier got me thinking about the essence of games. Why is Nier the game to bring up this idea? Here’s the answer I have come up with. I don’t think Nier is a very good videogame. Now I expect to get criticized for that statement alone seeing as the game is a beloved cult classic, but I will do my best to explain my stance. See I also think Nier is a great videogame, but it’s a great game whilst being a terrible game. I think it’s because a game is actually two distinct parts. There’s the gameplay, as what you are doing with the game should always be one of the most important things about a game, but then there’s the whole; what we call a videogame. This is where the essence enters into it. The minute to minute gameplay of Nier, I find highly flawed. I will not say it’s irredeemable. It has its high points, and I hope to touch on some of them, but by and large, running around that world and slashing enemies was in itself not enjoyable. Especially when the game asks you to play through half of it again three times after you’ve completed it once if you want to see all the endings.
Full disclosure, I only played the game twice. I completed it once and the game asked me to play again to uncover Kaine’s story. That highly interested me so I ran through the back half of the game again. It was of course much easier as I kept my level and weapons, but I will say looking back, I don’t know if the extra revelations that second playthrough presented were worth engaging with that combat system a second time, especially when there’s no new gameplay content to be had. Then when the game ends the second time, it asks you to collect all the games’ weapons for the final ending. I couldn’t see myself doing that a third time and certainly not a fourth (because this final playthrough gives you a choice), so I youtubed those final two endings, and I am content in doing so.
See, the positives of Nier are its sense of spectacle and its earnestness. I find the combat to be sloppy. Some of it is getting the angle right on the camera as you’re locked into whatever strike or magic you’ve thrown, and usually committing to an attack and having it play out can lead to a sense of tension, timing and complexity (see: Dark Souls), but here it feels more like flailing around at the enemies surrounding you. I’ve been reading a lot about game feel recently, and Nier is a perfect example of how it can misused or isn’t automatically a magic bullet to make a game better. The spectacle I mentioned at the start of this paragraph is on full display during the combat and interlocks with the way Nier feels to play. There’s this little pause upon a successful hit, and it certainly makes the magic fist one of my favourite moves in the game as that pause is followed by a meaty thunk tossing the enemy into the distance. That never got old. The boss fights are especially about spectacle. When you’ve harmed them enough a timer appears on certain body parts, and if you destroy this timer before it makes a full rotation you’re usually treated to Nier (the default name of the main character) completely cutting loose with a highly satisfying magic attack. Some fights have a few of these as the monster is tough enough to withstand the first and even the second, so the spectacle keeps rising until the end of the boss encounter.
You’ll notice that this sense of feeling and spectacle is always the end point of a fight, or at least is most prominent when you’ve dealt the fatal blow. When you’re in the trenches so to speak, surrounded by enemies, there’s little strategy or enjoyment. At least that’s how I felt. Replaying through the game that second time in New Game Plus made the boss fights easier because they hardly lasted anytime at all, but the swarms of enemies were still an annoyance, even more so seeing that they could knock you down but did jack all to your health. Speaking of spectacle, it’s the game’s music and washed out lighting that lend most of the environments a sense of beauty and delight even if you’re wandering through them for the upteenth time. The fights tend to get in the way of this.
So let’s discuss the second positive I listed, Nier’s earnestness. Most games with stories try their hardest to get the player to like the characters and feel emotion based on where the story takes them, but so few succeed. Why is that? It’s difficult to answer because so much of the success of a story is subjective. For every player who felt sad when Aeris died in Final Fantasy VII, there are those who were indifferent about it, or even laughed. Nier walks an even finer line because I would say its emotional moments are quite melodramatic. The emotional struggles of Nier, Kaine, and especially Emil seem to build to these large monologues backed with impactful music. I’ll show you an example early on in the second half of the game when Kaine has almost died. That’s the basic tone for most of the game. Melancholy, despair, and a glimmer of hope. It’s that last one that really plays with your expectations.
Meanwhile Nier’s emotional throughline is overt, and his motivation is at the forefront of the entire game. His daughter is sick, and then in the second half has been kidnapped. It’s funny how in the last few years, the “dadification” of videogames has been a topic of amusement looking at games like The Last of Us or the upcoming God of War, but Nier was using this emotional bond of father and daughter to push the player forward in 2010. Well at least in the west. Japan has two versions of the game, and in one of them, you play as Yonah’s older brother instead of her father. There’s still a familial connection, but I think you might agree that the protective quality of a father over his daughter is greater than that of an older brother. I guess the term “dadification” was created because some feel this type of emotional motivation for the player is a little too cheap. I think that might be true or false on a game by game basis. I do think in Nier it was pulled off rather well, but your mileage may vary.
But ultimately it’s this weird cast of characters who are each dealing with their own inner turmoil that I think pushes the player through the lackluster combat. The spectacle of the boss fights and their demise makes this easier, but these characters are so different from your standard troop of Japanese RPG party members, that you hope that by the end they can all find peace. That they don’t can deepens the connection that the player feels towards them. Even side characters like the young king of facade. His story was tragic enough the first time through, but that extra cutscene in my second playthrough really drove the knife in a little deeper. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how the second playthrough allows you to see cutscenes of the bosses you fight talking. This is meant to make you as the player feel like a monster for engaging in their slaughter, or at least feel sad that there has been such a fatal misunderstanding based on not seeing things from a perspective other than your own.
This deepened sense of perspective is why when the game said that the second playthrough would unlock Kaine’s backstory and let us learn more about this angry, foul-mouthed mysterious woman I jumped at the chance to play through the game again, despite my grievances with actually playing the game. Oh, and since I wanted to find a way to insert this into the video somewhere, here seems a perfect opportunity. This is more for those of you watching who haven’t played Nier, but the following footage is the first thing you are exposed to upon loading up the game. It’s an odd choice but sets a tone for what follows. Kind of enticing, isn’t it. There are plenty of laughs and great lines along this journey, and I loved the voice actors of all the characters, especially as they bantered back and forth as you’re wandering the world. The verbal sparring of Kaine and Grimoire Weiss was a highlight.
Now for those of you who were able to form a connection with the characters (and as I said, it can be quite subjective), I think you might understand where I’m coming from when I talk about Nier being a great game despite itself. This emotional core mixed with a certain amount of spectacle (in both the audio and visual department) overrides the lackluster combat, the terrible fetch quests and upgrading monotony that comprises the actual gameplay of this videogame. I think that’s why it’s a cult classic. I wonder if it is actually possible to explain the essence of a movie or a videogame because that intrinsic quality might mean different things to different people. Lacking the language to really get to the core of describing the experience of playing a game is certainly one of the greater challenges in regards to this idea being tenable. I hope I’ve been able to convey some of what I was feeling while playing through this game, and you understand the points I’m trying to make, even if I feel I didn’t quite succeed in doing so. I’m fully aware that this lack of language may just be a personal failing. Let me know your thoughts on this video, Nier as a game, and the idea of a game’s essence in the comments.
Thanks for watching.
