Call her back... with the power of words.
So what is "Nier"? It's the name of the main character, if you want it to be. Nier begins by allowing you to name the character. You can call him Nier, you can call him Bob, you can call him anything really. Traditionally known as "the father" Nier is a 39-year-old single-father of a young girl named Yonah. Together they live a humble life in a small medieval-looking village. It doesn't all begin there though. Nier actually begins in the year 2030 with Nier and Yonah seeking refuge in an abandoned grocery store in a post-apocalyptic world. After defending Yonah against a mob of unidentified creatures we end up in the aforementioned humble village with the exact same characters, only, the clock's been moved forward roughly 1300 years and no one seems to remember anything about what you had just witnessed in modern-day time.
Sound confusing? Well, it is, for a while. Nier deliberately shifts drastically initially explaining little, because, well, that's kind of the whole point of Nier. To learn what happened. All you know is that Yonah suffers from a deathly illness known as the Black Scrawl, and as a stubborn middle-aged man Nier does anything in his power to save the one thing that matters more to him than anything else in the world.
Nier's a humbling experience; it's not simply about "saving the world". The world in Nier is already gone, all that remains is what little is left of it. Humanity only exists in small fragile pockets that struggle desperately to survive against the menacing shades: creatures that roam the majority of the land. The world may have recovered from the tragic apocalyptic events of 1300 years ago, but humanity hasn't, and pretty soon it probably won't exist at all. But that's not the point of Nier: saving Yonah is.
Nier begins his quest by taking on odd jobs around the village in order to make cash and to support his life with Yonah. Most of these jobs take on the form of side-quests, and granted, most of them aren't particularly interesting since they more often than not revolve around fetch-quests, but the main quests themselves are definitely interesting. Fetch-quests may not be your thing, but the side-quests in Nier are entirely optional, and they provide extra content for those that want them. and the best part of all is that they are in no way required to beat the main game.
The interesting thing about Nier is that it's split into two distinctive halves: the first half is a humbling experience that revolves around a man's everyday life in a dying world to provide for his daughter. The second half of Nier is yet another humbling experience about Nier and his band of misfits as he tries to save the only thing that makes his life worth living.
It's true, Nier is accompanied by a bizarre cast of characters: during his journey he'll form friendships with Weiss, an excessively prudish and snobbish magical book with a British accent; Kainé, a foul-mouthed scantily-clad young woman; and Emil, a young boy with a world of issues that can only be witnessed first-hand in-game to be fully understood and appreciated.
All this talking and I've still barely mentioned anything about gameplay. As I've said previously: Nier is about the power of words, that's not to say that gameplay in Nier is non-existent, on the contrary, rather. Nier's gameplay is remarkably simple but does have some depth to it. It functions as a simple hack and slash RPG with some interesting spins on it for good measure. With the power of your talking book, known as Grimoire Weiss, Nier can learn a variety of devastating magical powers. Not only that, but he can literally strengthen his weapon and magic through the power of words; as enemies are slayed, words are gained, and the words can be assigned to different functions to add a variety of properties, such as extra attack power or magic regeneration. Nier's gameplay can essentially be summed up as the following: it involves the mass killing of a lot of shades, and a lot of running around. That might not make for the most interesting game gameplay wise, but the journey of Nier more than makes up for the average, if somewhat mediocre gameplay.
The one standout gameplay feature of Nier is its boss fights. Boss fights in Nier are huge, crazy, and memorable. The creatures are gigantic and imposing, and will even laugh in your face from time to time. Best of all is that at key points during the boss battles Nier will execute devastating magical attacks using the powers of Grimoire Weiss, very reminiscent of another game you may have heard of featuring a witch... and a lot of hair.
Perhaps strangely, Nier borrows from and pays tribute to a wide variety of different games and genres. At times throughout Nier there were moments where I felt in equal part that I was playing a side-scrolling platformer (Super Mario Bros), an isometric PS1-era RPG (Final Fantasy VII), a survival horror game with pre-rendered backgrounds (Resident Evil), and of all things: a top-down shoot 'em up (Bullet Hell). There's even several text-based dreams reminiscent of Lost Odyssey's "A Thousand Years of Dreams" and a blatant homage to The Legend of Zelda's famous "ITEM GET" sequences. Deliberate homages and clever camera angles abound, Nier spices things up in unpredictable ways that make it if anything, a compelling experience to play through.
There's an overabundance of weaponry available in Nier, and while you're restricted to one-handed swords during the first half of Nier, you'll eventually gain access to both giant two-handed swords, as well as spears. Throughout your adventure you'll come across a wide variety of raw materials and items, and eventually you'll be able to put these seemingly useless items to good use, and forge new upgrades for your arsenal. Gaining the required items is difficult though, and while it can sometimes be a grind to acquire all of the required items to upgrade each of the 30 weapons 4 levels, the payoff is definitely worth it if you invest the time to get the upgrades. Perhaps the coolest thing about this feature is that the appearance of your weapons will actually gradually change, as they become larger and more vibrant as their power increases.
The amount of things you can do in Nier is borderline ridiculous though, at one point in Nier I felt like I was playing Harvest Moon, since there's a fully functioning garden system where you can plant and grow your own crops, and you can even waste hundreds upon hundreds of hours fishing, if you so choose. Nier may start off slow, but eventually you'll realize that the scope of content in the game you're playing is absolutely huge. This is particularly noticeable in the second half of the game when things truly open up to you.
Unfortunately Nier does have some issues though. You'll be spending a LOT of time backtracking through the same areas over and over again, significantly more so if you decide to undertake the games numerous side-quests. Thankfully you'll eventually gain access to a fast-travel system, and while it doesn't completely cut-down on the backtracking it can eliminate a large portion of it.
The words of Nier's soundtrack are powerful; even if you don't understand their meaning - and to this extent, Nier's soundtrack is perhaps one of the best things about the experience. The majority of the soundtrack contains vocal harmonies, but nearly all of these contain incomprehensible singing by a female vocalist who created a made-up language for Nier's soundtrack. The remarkable thing is that it actually sounds like a real language even if you can't understand a word of what's being said. Nier's soundtrack is simply remarkable, and it's impact and power literally can't be expressed by anything but the power of the incomprehensible words that accompany it.
Nier's voice acting is also remarkably excellent. Nearly all of the main characters are voiced surprisingly well: the voice actors for Nier, Weiss, Kainé all deliver stellar performances and truly make the world of Nier believable. Perhaps the most surprisingly excellent performance comes from the most unlikely source: Yonah, Nier's young daughter. Let's not fool ourselves here, children are more often than not portrayed terribly in games and are usually insanely annoying, but Yonah is easily the best child to ever appear in any game, if only for the fact that she's played so perfectly.
From the opening moment of Nier you're using the power of words, and in the closing moment of Nier you'll be doing the same thing. Thankfully, Nier's journey doesn't end after your first completion of the game. Nier contains four endings the latter three which can be accessed through using the game's new game plus feature. Fortunately you don't have to play through the entire game again, as Nier's NG+ feature actually starts you at the beginning of the second half of the game. If you've ever played a Cavia game before though, you'll be thankful to know that Nier is exactly like its predecessors in that as you replay the game previous events and scenarios reveal additional information and dialogue that was not available the first time. In Nier's case you'll be shown nearly all of the events from the second half of the game from the point of view of the shades. Unlike Drakengard however, Nier's multiple endings expand on the original ending rather than provide alternate ones.
When it's all said and done, Nier is not a game for everyone. It's easy to see why it was critically panned by a lot of reviewers, but it's also easy to see why it's gained a cult following. Nier is for the old school RPG gamer. It has a lot of grindy gameplay, but thankfully nearly all of that is entirely optional. Yes, it's true that Nier isn't the most graphically pleasing game in the world, but its artistic design makes up for a lot of the dull visuals. Nier's story and music are definitely worth experiencing though, and if that's something that draw's you into a game then Nier is definitely something you'll want to play, because you just might end up finding something very special.