Nier is a Sad, Beautiful Game

Now that we’ve gotten this week’s exciting news out of the way, it’s time to discuss the game I finished over the weekend: Nier.

Yes, I finally played the original Nier, which I’d always intended to play ahead of Automata.

I barely knew anything about Nier going into it except that it was an action JRPG and everyone said it was depressing, so I didn’t quite know what to expect. I was rather surprised to find myself accepting little side quests from villages and planting seeds in my garden; somehow I expected Nier to be structured differently.

Nier has four endings. Originally I intended to get ending A, play the New Game+ for ending B, and then watch C and D online, but in the end I decided to get all four endings myself anyway.

As you might guess from that, I enjoyed Nier quite a bit.

Now, a lot of the side quests were fetch quests, and some got annoyingly grindy due to the items they required, and I gave up on one side quest completely, but the rest of the game made up for it. The story was interesting, especially in how it came together across the different playthroughs (particularly A and B), but the characters were what I liked the best about Nier.

I loved the cast of characters, their banter, and the way they grew closer over time. I did a lot of those grindy side quests solely to hear more banter between Nier and Weiss.

And as a result… I didn’t find Nier as depressing as I expected to from what I’d heard about it.

Don’t get me wrong. Nier is not a happy game. Some points on subsequent playthroughs are upsetting to the point where I felt like the game was deliberately trying to hurt me.

But when someone describes a story as “depressing,” I think about some of the things we had to read in school where the major point seemed to be that nothing good ever happens to anyone. I think about someone I once talked to who thought characters were only realistic if their motivations were completely selfish. There’s a soul-crushing sense of hopelessness I associate with these types of stories, and I never got that from Nier no matter how distressing its story became.

I’ve thought about this a lot since I finished, and I think it’s really because of the characters.

The characters in Nier generally have sympathetic motivations. They’re likable. I wanted things to work out for them, and they had a lot of nice interactions with one another.

Ending D was also so wild I was almost too excited to be sad.

Nier definitely is a sad game, but it’s also a beautiful one with a lot of good moments, and I definitely recommend giving it a chance if you haven’t played it.