mistressofmuses | Thoughts on Nier: Replicant

Taylor and I finished Nier: Replicant (for real this time!)

I was going to write a fairly quick "here's what I thought of the secret ending" thing but then I kept talking!

This is basically just a whole wall of spoilers and a few of my thoughts about it.

Quick summary - the first playthrough of the game is split into two large sections. In the first, you play as a younger version of the main character, with a fairly ordinary JRPG feel. You do a lot of sidequests to help other characters out, with the overarching plot being an attempt to find a cure for an as-yet incurable disease that your sister has. The primary antagonists are monsters called "shades". The first half of the game ends with the Shadowlord, an extremely powerful humanoid shade, kidnapping your sister. One of your party members, Kainé, temporarily sacrifices herself to confine another shade that you're unable to defeat.
The second half of the game picks up years later, with you having grown stronger, now able to rescue Kainé and defeat the shade she'd sealed away. Now your quest is to find and defeat the Shadowlord, in order to rescue your sister.

I mentioned before that the setting is quite interesting and cool, imo. After a prologue that happens a thousand+ years before the game proper, set in an abandoned-looking city, it becomes clear that yes, your fantasy setting for the game is definitely actually set in a post-post-apocalypse. Rather than crumbling castles as enormous setpieces for an area, you find overgrown crumbling... office buildings. Collapsing highway bridges glimpsed far offshore. ~~Horrible mad science lab.~~

Also, the music is fucking phenomenal.

The big reveal at the end of the first playthrough is that the shades are the actual remnants of the human race, souls detached from physical bodies in order to protect them from a fatal disease that swept the world. This was what caused that past apocalypse glimpsed in the prologue, and seen in remnants of the world. Most of the characters you've been playing as and interacting with are "replicants"; supposedly soulless bodies intended to keep the genetics of humanity alive until the disease could be cured, at which point the shades will reclaim new host bodies. Unfortunately, it appears the replicants have souls now, too! Oops!

The second playthrough of the game picks up after the timeskip, but now you get a Secret Character Was There All Along reveal about Kainé - she's partially possessed by a vengeful shade named Tyrann, who kept her alive so she could seek her revenge against the shade that killed her grandmother, in exchange for her giving him access to feed on and encourage all of her worst emotions. He's a shade... so now you can understand what shades are saying. (It's clear Kainé has always been able to; now you as the player can as well, though the other characters cannot.) You also hear all of the things he is saying to Kainé, when before you just had sometimes-strange bits of dialogue on her part when she'd respond.
The game plays almost identically (with a couple extra cutscenes) but it really drives home that hey - you guys are NOT GREAT. You've been fighting these generic JRPG monsters that you now know are human souls... and that have dialogue often revealing how they're desperately trying to defend themselves and their friends from YOU. (The scene toward the end where you unleash a horde of super low-powered cute little shades by opening a door, and the other shades start begging you to stop because you just *broke into the nursery* and "they're just babies, they don't know any better, they aren't trying to hurt you!" fucking guts me every time.)
Not all shades are innocent - there ARE ones that seem to be genuinely evil, or at the very least are perfectly content to kill a lot of people... but plenty aren't trying to do you any harm. Others are only attacking and killing people because they're on their OWN quests for revenge after having been hurt or having had their own friends and family killed.

The third and fourth endings require getting all the weapons in the game in order to unlock. These two continue on as the second playthrough does, picking up after the timeskip, but with an extra fight followed by a moral choice at the very end after you defeat the Shadowlord.

Kainé becomes possessed by her shade after helping you defeat the Shadowlord, making her the big optional boss fight after the final boss.
After, you're given a choice (by Tyrann, who seems to be in genuine crisis over the fact that he actually wants to help Kainé now, lol.) First option: you can kill her, putting her out of her misery in order to finally get the rest she's been longing for, and ending her perpetual struggle against her past and her possession. (Ending C)

OR: You can choose to sacrifice yourself in order to save her - though it means sacrificing every trace of your existence. No one will remember you, including your sister and Kainé herself. (Ending D)

The game does fun meta stuff with Ending D. It's primarily represented by the game deleting all of your save data, which it asks you repeatedly if you're *sure* you want to do. But after that, when the credits roll, all of the different voice actors for the protagonist are credited as "???" instead of Nier. And if you attempt to start a new game, you can't choose the same name you selected in the now-deleted playthrough.

The game does not ever allow you to change the broad outcome - even knowing what the shades are saying, even having been through the big tragedies that occur, you have no opportunity to prevent them or change the outcome of the game. You will always insist that shades are mindless evil; you will always do all you can to kill them; you will never save the people they kill.

That definitely serves the meta theme about the futility of hatred and revenge. The game makes it clear in other ways as well - a character that serves as a foil, obsessed with killing the robots he (incorrectly) blames for his brother's death, and he is shown to be *unhinged* about it ["I just want to ~KILL ROBOTS~!"], but the protagonist isn't aware enough to recognize that he sounds exactly the same way in his single-minded desire to kill shades in revenge for one that took his sister. You get stories about all of the weapons you collect, and if you read through them, almost all of them are about terrible slaughter and tragedy. There are a lot of seemingly simple fetch quests that take dark turns, where even if you "succeed" in the quest, it ends badly. You learn that many of the shades that attack people are only doing so because they've already been attacked; the violence perpetuates because each side is seeking revenge.

And then... the secret ending! This was not originally in the game, but was originally a sequel novella that they made into a playable scenario for the re-release. I find it interesting that there is NO hint that this ending exists. The others, you're told about and given a hint as to how to unlock them. This one does not give you that, and in fact steers you AWAY from it, by telling you that [that thing you do for Ending D] is THE END. That's what leads me to wonder how many people stumbled upon it with no idea that it existed, ha.

So... you start a new game. You can't name your character the same thing as your previous, now-deleted file. But you start from the very beginning, as the younger version of the protagonist, going through the game exactly the same as the first playthrough. (And endings B, C, and D all have you start after the timeskip, so you likely haven't played this section of the game for a while, even.)

You make it through meeting Kainé, and then the first really big boss that you have to fight as it destroys the city she unhappily grew up in.
Except this time, after Kainé is nearly killed and hears the protagonist calling her back... she briefly sees the *older version* reaching for her.
And you wake up as her, recalling this repeated nightmare where you've forgotten someone important to you.

The load screens - which have always been letters and diary entries from your sister about or addressed to you, the protagonist - now has her writing letters and diary entries about Kainé, who took over Nier's role as her friend/protector after the events of ending D.

You-as-Kainé get waylaid on your way back to town, and sent on a quest to visit one of the other areas that's been out of contact.
You arrive and the area's inhabitants have been killed... and you have the chance to enter their tree of knowledge. (Which you encountered before via a sort-of text-based RPG section. It's strongly implied that the tree is in some fashion a computer.) Entering it reveals a set of creepy maybe-android twins called "The Administrators" that confront you and force you to fight monsters they create. [In a fun pseudo easter-egg, they look vaguely similar to 2B and 9S from Nier: Automata, and are voiced by the same actors.] Battling your way through reunites you with Emil, and ultimately causes you to fight digital versions of your worst memories and battles, very much designed to appear similar to bits of Nier: Automata and I love it. You reunite with Weiss, and defeat your personal boss fight... and finally are given the chance to restore your memory of Nier, and bring him back to the world. (Which requires you sacrifice the NEW game you'd started in order to restore your old save files.)

I think that this ending is often considered to heavily be a fanservice-y thing, but I loved it. Getting to play as Kainé, even if it was a somewhat brief experience, was rad as fucking hell, and it's in keeping with her character. She would HATE (and does hate!) the idea that someone else made the choice to sacrifice themselves for her. She DEEPLY wants to control her own destiny, and would hate that anyone else got to decide what her life was worth. Letting her be the one to ultimately make that choice - to the extent of thwarting something akin to a god, that has recorded every iteration of the characters repeating this story - feels extremely *satisfying* to me.

And I love Kaine. I feel like she might be a divisive character? I don't know? Honestly, most of the reactions I've seen to her have been positive, but I haven't sought out Discourse or anything. She's Taylor's favorite, hands-down, and is mine as well. (Though I also love Emil.)
Her design is REAL fanservicey, as she wears lingerie for the whole damn game. She also uses extremely creatively vulgar language, which I constantly find funny and excellent and in wonderful juxtaposition to her appearance, but is probably a bit Much for some people.

The reason I can see her being divisive is that she is canonically intersex. It's mostly hinted around and implied (there's angst about how there's something "not normal" about her body; some of that initially seems to be her loathing of the fact that she's possessed by a shade, but then you find out that she's felt that way since she was a child, long before the possession. Part of her closeness with her grandmother - the only loving and supportive figure she ever had - was that her grandmother didn't treat her as strange, and encouraged her expressing herself as feminine. Because Kaine - despite her vulgar language - is very much a woman. In appearance yes, but also in how she thinks of herself and wants to be thought of.

From bits I have read about the game, the creator confirmed that yes, she is intersex (canonically due to an error in the process that created the replicant shells), but that it was very important that it never be treated as something to be ridiculed by the protagonists, and that she never be treated as anything other than a woman. Even when Weiss is antagonistic toward her and the two bicker and fight, it was made explicit when the game was being written that that it was something never to be used as an insult.
I'm sure there are a thousand ways to say this is "bad representation" (because she looks so hyperfeminine, or because she uses foul language, or because she was treated poorly as a child for it, or because she's morally grey on an unasked-for improvement arc, that the whole protagonist party is not 100% morally right), but it doesn't strike me that way. She's a unique, individual character more than anything else, and other than the main player character, she by far has the most development of any of them. (Though Emil is a pretty close third for backstory and character exploration.)
And tbh, I don't think I've EVER seen an intersex secondary protag and implied-maybe-love-interest in a game before (and particularly a non-indie game), and it surprises me a bit that the original incarnation of the game came out more than a decade ago.

As a sidenote, even though I didn't talk about him much - in another mild surprise for a 13-year-old game, Emil is canonically gay. Two queer-in-some-fashion characters out of a party of four (the other two characters being the protagonist and a talking book that's maybe an advanced computer) is surprising in a good way to me. With one of the additional themes of the story, especially for Kainé and Emil, being the ways in which they've been mistreated by people they have actively tried to help, and combating the ways and reasons they're excluded by "normal" society, it seems like it was a thoughtful decision.

So yes. I enjoyed the game, even when it spends most of the later playthroughs really driving home that you're not really the good guy here, you piece of shit, ha. And even *that* aspect isn't dealt with in a way that turns it utterly lopsided... because you're genuinely trying to protect *other people that you also care about*. You aren't really the heroes you think you are, but you also aren't utter villains either. I LIKE the fact that there is no side that's utterly correct! I mean, in games that have a moral choice system, I almost always play as the most obnoxiously good character possible, because I'm such a "Being Mean Is Not Nice" player. So it is a little uncomfortable to have to do things I hate that I'm doing because I have no plot choice. But it doesn't feel overbearing... and it feels like understandable characterization of the protagonist, who is not a blank slate for the player, but is a character who feels strongly about certain things.
Plus the meta commentary on futility and such, ha.

I'm glad it got rereleased, and I'm glad that the rerelease seems to have fixed at least a few of the things that Taylor was bothered by in the original incarnation (Nier: Gestalt.) We did opt not to 100% the quests, because fuuuuuck that flower quest, lol.
I love that basically the entirety of the original cast were willing to come back (especially Laura Bailey as Kainé, considering how much more high-profile she is now!)
I enjoyed the characters. I enjoyed the lore.
The music really is SO good.