In Nier, the protagonist, who is named by the player, is an aging single father caring for his sick daughter, Yonah, by performing odd jobs around his far-future, post-apocalyptic village. Everything changes when she runs off to a lost temple in the mountains, where she heard wishes can be granted. When he goes to find her, the the protagonist meets Grimoire Wiess—a powerful, sentient book, who has lost his memory—and agrees to help cure Yonah.
As the man and book together defeat the monstrous Shades of the land, they locate the Sealed Verses of magic, which allow Wiess to imbue the protagonist with great magical abilities, like spinning magical blades and glowing spikes from under the earth. In their travels, they fall in with Kainé, a skilled swordswoman, and Emil, a young wizard of great potential. As they seach for the way to cure Yonah, they begin to stumble upon clues to the origin of the Shades, and an explanation of what happened to the world 1300 years earlier, which caused the great cities to sink into the sea.
Great monsters are on the loose.
Pursuit
The really surprising thing about Nier is the variety to the gameplay. The core of the game is third person hacking and slashing, but it’s mixed in with a few other gaming staples. A few locations have some puzzles. Most of them are block pushers, but a few are more complicated, and require some creative thinking to get through. There are a few points in the game which rely entirely on NPC interaction and diplomacy. There are gardening and fishing mechanics that thread throughout the entire game. At a couple points there is even some text-based adventuring, though honestly, it’s not done particularly well.
Of course there is a lot of combat in-between these other elements, and while it looks as though it would be Dynasty Warriors-style button mashing combat, it has a surprising amount of tactics. Figuring out what combination of moves should be used against each enemy type as they are introduced forms part of the challenge, but the real variety comes from the boss fights. Each boss fight follows a basic formula, while also requiring innovation and differing strategies for each. At each boss, the player must discover which weapons and magics the creature is vulnerable to, and how to use them—which isn’t always a set pattern. As the monster’s life bar goes down, there occasionally appears a glowing clock with a single arm, somewhere on the creature’s body. This is where each boss is mostly the same—that glowing clock must be destroyed before the arm swings back around to the top. This is usually accomplished by rapidly striking it with a sword. If the clock is not destroyed in time, the creature regenerates, and that section of the fight must be restarted. When the life bar is depleted, a cut scene shows an epic, magical move that the protagonist uses to deliver the final blow to the weakened enemy.
Each Boss is dealt a cinematic fatality.
There are a variety of weapons to choose from, but the system is not particularly dynamic. For the first half of the game, the player only has access to one-handed swords, and the best one to use is always the one you have most recently found; there are no trade-offs to consider. In the second half, access to two-handed swords and spears is opened up, but I found them too slow and too narrow respectively, so I just continued to use whatever my most recent single-handed sword was. There is a system for upgrading the weapons, but it wasn’t really worth the effort to complete the required objectives, since a new, better sword would soon come along all by itself.
Each weapon has different stats, but the damage can be deceiving, as lighter weapons swing faster.
A bit of variety is added by the “Word” system, which allows the player to rename the spells, weapons, and abilities in the game with various words found on dead Shades. These words change the effects, and even grant new abilities, but again, whichever ones you’ve found most recently are always the best, and there is even a quick button to just assign the best words from your collection to each thing.
Words can change the power of weapons and abilities.
The story itself is unique and interesting. The mystery of the Shades, and the ancient apocalypse are enough to keep any fantasy fan interested. The mystery begins with the tutorial, in which the player controls the protagonist, protecting Yonah from Shades in the 21st century. Afterward, the game jumps ahead 1300 years, but the characters seem to remain the same. This sets the stage for a gradually revealing set of clues, which simply get more intriguing as the story progresses.
The opening scenes of the game take place 1300 years before the main action of the plot.
The side-quests, however, are repetitive and meaningless. Almost all of the non-story quests are requests for materials, which can be collected from animals and enemies around the land. In the first half of the game, I tried to do all of these side-quests, spending hours harvesting mutton or lizard tails or whatever the person needed, but in the second half of the game, I already had so much money (which was the only reward for such quests), that I simply couldn’t motivate myself to go after any of them. I still completed a few of them by accident, but for the most part, I ignored the collection quests in the second half, and still finished the game with more money that I could ever have spent.
The most effective way to collect wool for side-quests is to go out and slaughter some sheep with black spikes of pure magical energy.
Panorama
The scenery is pretty, but not anything to gawk at. The spell effects are well done, and the characters are well-designed, if a bit simplistic. For some reason all of the female characters have exactly the same basic facial structure, but at least the costumes are neat—especially the protagonist. The slickest visual elements are the monsters. The Shades are like evil Tron characters, with colorful, glowing lines etched into charcoal bodies, and each of the bosses is a completely unique construction.
The Shades are the most visually interesting element of the game.
Gimmicks
There is a gardening system, in which the player can grow crops. The crops can be used to make money or may be quest items. The gardening system itself seems broken, however. There is a garden next to the protagonist’s house in the village which can be planted with seeds found around the world. They must be watered right away, and then they can be harvested the next day. Unfortunately, if they aren’t harvested that day, they will die, and be lost. Every time I found some seeds, I planted them next time I returned home, but I was only able to harvest anything about a quarter of the time. Most missions would keep me away from the house past the harvest time, so I almost always came home to a completely dead garden.
The protagonist can find or purchase seeds for his garden.
One line of side quests involves becoming a skilled fisherman, which is just as boring as real fishing. Stand in the water, toss out the line, reel in the fish, repeat. It seems designed only to add to the play-time clock. In addition, finding locations is frustrating, since there is no help from the NPCs. The player has to figure out for themselves which baits to use in which areas, and what level they have to be to catch certain fish. Fishing in an advanced area will always result in no fish, while fishing in too low an area results in unneeded types of fish. It was worst right at the beginning, because not only is none of this explained, but the fishing spot right next to the man who gives you the fishing rod is way too difficult to catch any fish at first level. I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out what I was doing wrong before my wife walked in and asked if I had tried fishing at a different beach. I tried the one on the other side of town, and fish started jumping out of the water, eager to be caught. Unless you have a serious compulsion to finish everything in the game, skip the whole fishing thing. It’s just not that much fun.
Reigns
The controls are just as you would expect. The only thing of note here is that the magic system requires the player to assign the magical abilities to the shoulder buttons, meaning that of the ten abilities, only four can be in use at a time, and that’s only if you don’t want to be able to dodge or block, which are in the same list of assignable abilities. While blocking is not as important in the second half of the game (once the protagonist has collected all of the abilities), the dodge function is always important. For me, it was a major part of every battle from the very first practice enemies to the final boss.
Find which tactics are best for each enemy type.
Noise
Almost all of the music was performed by a choir, and met the mood of the game perfectly. The music shifted seamlessly from area to area, and scene to scene. The voice acting was also spot on. It’s a little jarring at first for long-time RPG players to hear so much modern English (including epithets) in a game of this type, where we’re used to hearing a sort of idealized speech, but it really works for the setting and characters presented here.
Encoding
I found no bugs or errors in the game, unless the gardening system counts.
Last Word
Nier is a fun adventure game with lots of variety for different play styles. The plot is interesting, and the characters are engaging. The game as a whole is a breath of fresh air in a genre dominated by button mashers and androgynous, angsty heroes. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly an example of great storytelling and game-craft.
Nier is available now
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