NieR — Fathers Be Good To Your Daughters
A snowy landscape, an empty and ruined city, a father protecting his daughter. Amazing ethereal music. The opening of the game made it seem like I would be playing in a near future setting with a bleak atmosphere contributing to the desperation of the characters. In a world brought to the brink of despair and destruction, how far would one man go to save his ailing daughter? The love of a father shines through in NieR.
Right after the tutorial-style scene was over, my character suddenly woke up in a typical fantasy setting, and although he was still taking care of his ailing daughter, I felt ripped off. Where was my snowy, bleak apocalypse? What happened to the cold, the despair, the desperation? How can you ever duplicate that kind of atmosphere in a fantasy setting?
NieR is a game about a man whose daughter has come down with a mysterious illness, and as any father would, he’s ready to tear down heaven and hell to make her well again. Along the way, he helps out the villagers whenever they have a problem that they can’t handle on their own.
During the course of the story, NieR… well, I’m assuming he’s called NieR, since you get to rename him and he has no default name, and the instruction manual only refers to him as The Father. Anyway, during the course of the story, NieR… well, I lost my train of thought now. Don’t you hate that, when you’re on one track of thought and suddenly you go off on a tangent and you lost what you were originally doing? NieR is like that. There are so many different elements of game play, depending on where you go in the game, that it feels hard to classify it as any one genre. It’s generally an RPG, but there are 2-D platforming elements that occur seemingly at random in the game, a text adventure that comes out of nowhere and takes over the game like a virus, a rather deceptive survival horror section, even a section of the game that seemed to play similar to the top-down RPGs from a decade or so ago… it’s like each member of the development team had their own idea of what the game should be and when they brought it all to the table, the director just said “Yes” to everything.
Oh, and did I mention the bullet hell portions?
Most of these ideas were implemented well. 2-D platforming helped the character navigate through sections of the game where the standard behind-the-character perspective would’ve only hindered progress. The text portion of the game seemed to actually fit the story this time around, rather than feel shoehorned in by an inadequate budget. Square might have learned from their mistake after they robbed Xenogears to pay for Final Fantasy VIII, but I suppose it’s possible that NieR was also underfunded and the developers just aren’t saying so.
Well, for better or for worse, Emil’s mansion adopts this control scheme, and it’s awful. I especially hated when the game switched to a different still and I adjusted my walking angle out of reflex and ended up going back to the previous still, then adjusted again and went back to the next, and so on for a few seconds. I’m awfully glad that there weren’t any enemies that needed to be killed at the time. (I had that same problem in Heavy Rain, but neglected to mention it.) If there had been, I probably would’ve burned through all of my herbs and other healing items while trying to sort out the horrible controls.
Boot to the head!
And that’s another thing. Inventory limits are severe in this game, and it makes the early portions of the game especially difficult. The game actually gets easier, the longer you play, That in itself is ridiculous. Once you get past a certain level, your HP will suddenly increase in leaps and bounds, and will render the end game pretty easy. Generally, this isn’t supposed to happen. Games aren’t supposed to get easier as time goes by, they’re supposed to get more challenging. It still sucks, no matter how high a level you are, when you can barely carry more than ten of each healing item with you, and you already have as many as you can carry but keep finding more in the field. Not only can you not take the extras with you when you need them, but you’ll end up running out in areas of the game where they’re scarce. At that point, the only way you’ll survive is if you’ve gained enough levels so that your HP will skyrocket and you won’t need to heal for a while. To add insult to injury, any other item you can acquire in the game, you can carry 99 of them. So 99 nuggets of Gold Ore, 99 Tree Branches, 99 Dented Metal Bats, 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, 99 Red Balloons* …and 10 Medicinal Herbs. What, are you yanking them out of the ground by the roots? Do you have to carry herb trees around? Is that why you can only carry 10 with you? I had no idea a Medicinal Herb was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Bottom line: certain portions of the game handled like drunk monkeys due to a poor decision by the developers. They also accidentally turned the difficulty curve upside down. The game promised one setting, then switched me to a generic-type setting for the remainder of the game. The inventory system was inconsistent. Oh, and I absolutely loved the game.
What’s to love about it? The battle system is quick and easy, to the point where you could probably just run around killing things for hours and not feel like you wasted an afternoon. Another point in its favour: you don’t have to spend thirty hours learning everything about the battle system (Final Fantasy XIII and Resonance of Fate, I’m looking at you). The music set the mood well, especially the sleepy town-style music in the village of… Village. It really is just called The Village. Anyway, I loved the music in the game, and once the first half of the game ends (rather spectacularly, I might add), the feeling I got from the start of the game came back and stuck with me until the very end.
The story is also well written and rather daring for an RPG. This is the kind of story I never thought I’d see in a video game. It’s deep, it’s just… deep. I wish I could tell you how it’s deep, but I’d be spoiling the game somewhat fierce. Let’s just say that you need to play the game twice, then let out a good “My God, what have I done?” Then play again, because there’ll still be more to see. I just want to give special mention to the side quests featuring the old lady in the lighthouse. I think that was the closest I’ve come to cr
ying over a video game since the “You’re Not Alone” scene in Final Fantasy IX.
This game contains more blood than God!
In the end, I’m going to go as far as saying that NieR deserves to be known as this console generation’s Xenogears. I certainly can’t think of any RPG of the current generation that even came close to what NieR has done. Depending on what’s left this year, and depending on how good Dragon Quest IX and Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep are, NieR might end up being my RPG of the year.
*At least one of these items is a joke, and doesn’t actually appear in the game.
About The Author
Joseph
Panthera Editus | In the great frozen land in the north known as Canada, a little to the east of that other frozen land in the north known as Alaska, resides the gaming enthusiast whom most people know as Joseph. When he’s not gaming or writing about gaming, he likes to enjoy life’s little ironies. Twitter