If NieR loses you in its first ten minutes, the developers only have themselves to blame. It opens as a hack-and-slash tutorial, wave after wave of enemies, mashing an attack button with a metal pipe against creatures called Shades — ethereal messes of shifting black and gold matter. Hitting them amounts to the satisfaction of slapping a pillow with a wet sock. The game hasn't been turned off yet, somehow. Maybe it's the battle theme thumping in the background that buys enough time for curiosity to take hold. I played the original PS3 version in 2010 and the Replicant ver.1.22 remake in 2021. Both times, the same pattern: a terrible first impression followed by a game that earns its place among the most emotionally devastating RPGs ever made. The trick is surviving the first five hours.
The Village, the Music, and the Slow Burn
Fast forward 1,300 years from the prologue's post-apocalyptic ruins. The game restarts in a feudal-age village surrounded by grasslands, and the father and daughter remain as they were — as if the same characters but in a different book. Yonah is sick with the Black Scrawl, a life-snatching disease with no known cure. Her father takes fetch quests to survive: smacking sheep for wool, digging up shimmering objects, delivering letters, and a godforsaken fishing mini-game. The mediocrity apparently continues. Then the music hits. The sleepy lullaby that drapes over the village — vocals in a fictional tongue borrowing the prettiest phonetics of French and Japanese — changes into an uplifting drum when stepping onto the surrounding plains. With music so grand and tasks so mundane, environments so barren, and a jumping animation that looks incredibly stupid, it's hard not to feel the beautiful voice deserved a different game.
But NieR earns the music. Not immediately, not gracefully, but with a persistence that mirrors its protagonist's refusal to give up on his daughter. The game opens up slowly: a talking book named Grimoire Weiss joins the party with dry wit and devastating magic. Kaine — foulmouthed, grief-stricken, wearing an outfit the game itself acknowledges is absurd — brings an intensity that the father's stoicism needs. Emil, a boy who petrifies everything he sees, carries the game's most heartbreaking arc. The party assembles not through destiny but through desperation, and that's what makes them feel real.
Combat: Functional, Not the Point
NieR's combat is its weakest element and it knows it. The hack-and-slash foundation is basic — light attack, heavy attack, dodge, and Grimoire Weiss's magic which ranges from projectile lances to massive fists that slam the ground. Boss fights occasionally demand pattern recognition, but regular encounters rarely require more than mashing square and occasionally holding R1. The game compensates by constantly changing genres: one dungeon becomes an isometric Diablo-style crawler, another turns into a text adventure with nothing but words on screen, a mansion section plays like Resident Evil with fixed camera angles and puzzle keys. These shifts are jarring the first time and brilliant in retrospect — NieR is a game that refuses to stay in one genre because its story doesn't stay in one emotional register.
The real "combat" in NieR is the second playthrough. Route B replays the second half with Kaine's perspective, adding subtitle translations to the Shade enemies' dialogue. What were faceless monsters become people — begging, mourning, protecting their loved ones. Every enemy you killed in Route A was someone. The combat doesn't change mechanically, but its meaning inverts completely. Hitting a Shade after hearing its child call for it doesn't feel like slapping a pillow anymore. It feels like murder.
The Soundtrack: Keiichi Okabe's First Masterpiece
NieR's soundtrack carries the entire game on its back for the first ten hours, and then the story catches up and they carry each other. "Song of the Ancients" — the vocal piece that plays in the village — exists in multiple versions: the peaceful Devola arrangement, the combat Fate version, and the devastating finale version that strips the instrumentation back to a solo voice. Keiichi Okabe composed a score that sounds like mourning even in its most upbeat moments, as if every melody knows how the story ends before you do. The fictional language the vocals are sung in adds to the otherworldliness — you can't understand the words, but you understand the emotion, and that gap between comprehension and feeling is where NieR lives.
Routes C, D, and E: Where NieR Becomes Unforgettable
Route C adds scenes that recontextualize the entire game. Route D asks you to make a choice that costs something real — not a game over, not a bad ending, but a genuine sacrifice of your save data. And Route E (added in Replicant ver.1.22) pushes further still. The multiple playthroughs aren't padding. They're the entire point. NieR is a game about perspective — about how the same events look different when you know what the "enemy" was thinking, what they lost, what they were trying to protect. The father's devotion to Yonah doesn't change across routes. What changes is your understanding of what that devotion cost everyone else.
The Verdict: A Masterpiece in a Broken Shell
NieR is ugly, clunky, and actively hostile to first impressions. The environments are barren. The side quests are tedious fetch errands. The combat is functional at best. The jumping animation is an embarrassment. And none of that matters, because what NieR does with story, music, and multiple playthroughs is something no other game has replicated — not even its sequel, NieR: Automata, which is a better game but not a more devastating one. Rotating the flawed shell NieR encased itself in won't make its problems disappear, but it provides angles that look past them, putting a game worth playing steadily into view. Play the Replicant ver.1.22 remake on PS5 or Steam. Survive the first five hours. Don't stop at Route A. What waits in Routes B through E will change how you think about games, violence, and what it means to be the hero of someone else's tragedy.
All images are official screenshots from their respective publishers. Originally published 2016. Updated March 31, 2026.