NieR Replicant™ ver.1.22474487139...

[b]One thing should be said upfront: this game will claw right through you. Quite hard.[/b] [i]NieR Replicant[/i] begins as a familiar JRPG about saving a sick loved one, then gradually dismantles the assumptions supporting that story. The protagonist follows the expected structure: [list] [*]collect keys; [*]defeat monsters; [*]rescue a loved one; [*]trust the quest objective. [/list] The player slowly learns that the labels behind that structure are catastrophically incomplete. [h1]FEATURES[/h1] [list] [*]A tragic, layered story about identity, violence and recognition. [*]Extraordinary music that carries much of the emotional weight. [*]Memorable characters, especially Kainé, Emil and Weiss. [*]Documents, weapon stories and repeated routes that change the meaning of earlier events. [*]Interesting magic and Word systems. [*]Uneven side quests, repetition and some badly explained lore. [*]Terrible fishing. Project Gill-stalt failed. [/list] [h1]A HUMANE GAME WITH A CRUEL METHOD[/h1] At its best, [i]Replicant[/i] is humane and piercing and leaves players to decode meaning over time. It asks you to listen before reacting, question the comfort of enemy labels and recognise that what looks monstrous may have just as much heart, fear and love as you do. At its worst, it delivers that message through weaponised emotion. The central question is not simply whether altered beings can become people. It is whether anyone will recognise them as people before fear, classification and violence make recognition impossible. In this game, you will only ever meet monsters. You are one too. That is both the brilliance and the problem. [h1]FORCED COMPLICITY[/h1] [i]Replicant[/i] often withholds its victims’ personhood until after the player has harmed them, then uses delayed recognition as punishment. I understand the intended effect: act first, understand later. Once, this can be devastating. Repeated too often, it begins to feel less like insight and more like manipulation. The game gives victims voices, friendships, remorse, growth and moral awareness only when it is too late to save them. Their inner lives become fuel for the player’s anguish, while the protagonist remains protected by the heroic quest. [b]The victims pay for lessons the protagonist never learns.[/b] I wanted more hesitation, listening, confrontation, refusal, negotiation or even an attempted coexistence. A tragedy can be intentional and still distribute suffering unfairly. [b]Provoking pain is not the same as earning it.[/b] [h1]THE TAROLOGY PROBLEM[/h1] The game also has a serious exposition problem. [i]Replicant[/i] hoards essential causal history outside itself, forcing players to research other games and supplementary material to understand machinery that should have been legible within the remaster. New player: “Why did humanity separate souls from bodies?” Game: “Read these cryptic reports during the final dungeon.” New player: “What caused all this?” Franchise: “Please locate a particular ending of a 2003 PS2 game and then consult external material.” Franchise:...also that snow at the start is actually important. [b]Some apocalypse occurred. Anyway, here is a goat.[/b] And yet, despite all that, the game stays with me. [h1]MUSIC AND ATMOSPHERE[/h1] The soundtrack is extraordinary: sweeping, choral, mournful and often more emotionally articulate than the script. [b]Ordinary gameplay happens inside music that already knows the world ended.[/b] Places like Emil’s mansion are not just eerie locations. The music gives them the weight of buried laboratories, abandoned projects and suffering hidden beneath domestic architecture. Kainé’s theme especially hurts because its tenderness refuses to treat her as only rage or tragedy. It sounds like someone reaching her gently: a flower offered to a person the world has mostly met with fear, disgust or violence. [h1]MECHANICS AND STRUCTURE[/h1] Mechanically, the game is uneven. Sealed Verses and Words are interesting systems, documents often function like evidence, and the Forest of Myth is excellent. There, reality collapses into text, narration becomes instruction and the world begins to fail through broken language. [b]In the Forest of Myth, apocalypse begins as a failure of grammar.[/b] Side quests vary wildly. The best ones ask difficult moral questions without clean answers. The Lighthouse Lady quest is the clearest example: is it kinder to preserve hope through a loving lie, or to respect agency through painful truth? The world itself is small and repetitive, and later routes require repeating material. This can be frustrating, though it also reinforces the protagonist’s momentum: he keeps following the quest long after the player has begun questioning its morality. Also, the fishing is terrible. [b]Project Gill-stalt failed.[/b] [h1]PROJECT GESTALT[/h1] The heart of the story is Project Gestalt. Humanity separates body and soul, expecting souls to remain stable, Replicant bodies to remain empty, administrators to maintain the process and eventual reintegration to restore humanity. None of that holds. [list] [*]Gestalts relapse. [*]Replicants develop personhood. [*]The system creates two populations with valid claims and only one future. [/list] [b]Project Gestalt created two people and assigned them one life.[/b] The original humans have a legitimate claim to survival. Replicants also have a legitimate claim not to be erased. The tragedy is not “real people versus fake bodies.” It is an inheritance war between two forms of personhood. The project’s fatal assumption was that bodies could remain neutral infrastructure. They did not. [b]The vessel woke up.[/b] [h1]SHADES[/h1] The Shades are not a uniform monster species. They retain language, love, memory, community, fear, loyalty and grief. Some are degraded or violent. Others beg, protect children, form friendships and attempt to communicate. Yet the interface presents all of them as enemies. [b]The scariest thing is not the monster. It is the interface translating someone into one.[/b] [h1]PAPA NIER SHOULD HAVE BEEN PLAYABLE[/h1] I wish Papa Nier had been playable in the remaster. The original Western release, [i]NieR Gestalt[/i], featured a father trying to save his daughter, and that version of the rescue structure has a different emotional weight. Brother Nier is human, loving, limited and disastrous, but a weary father trying to save his child would have made several turns feel more coherent. A remaster should preserve a game’s history more generously than this. [h1]WHY IT STILL STAYS WITH ME[/h1] Brother Nier is hard to leave behind. Not because he is right, but because he is human. His love is real. His tenderness is real. So is the destruction he causes. The cruelty of [i]Replicant[/i] is that catastrophe does not come from emptiness or malice, but from recognisably human devotion trapped inside ignorance. [h1]VERDICT[/h1] [list] [*][b]Music:[/b] extraordinary. [*][b]Atmosphere:[/b] mournful, strange and unforgettable. [*][b]Kainé, Emil, Nier, and Weiss:[/b] deeply memorable. [*][b]Themes:[/b] humane, piercing and morally painful. [*][b]Project Gestalt:[/b] fascinating and horrifying. [*][b]Exposition:[/b] badly handled. [*][b]Repetition:[/b] meaningful, but still tiring. [*][b]Fishing:[/b] criminal. [/list] [i]NieR Replicant[/i] is beautiful, humane, manipulative, badly explained, musically extraordinary and difficult to forget. I object to many of its methods. I will still miss it. It's stronger than automata because it starts a catastrophe. Automata continues personhood themes, asking whether machines/androids can become human if humanity is gone. The games are very intellectually engaging.

Kahroldum.

Goat

peak

Comparado con Automata en narrativa y gameplay se queda corto por poco y sacar los finales fue algo tedioso al inicio que a diferencia del otro juego que la segunda vuelta no era igual aqui el final B casi me hizo dejarlo pero no me arrepiento. Realmente lo disfrute!

A genius prequel to Automata. Played Automata. Can recommend both of them fully. I've maxed out automata and i will max out replicant soon. But i think i wil need like 60 or 80 or so hours to max it out. It's so much fun for maxing and for normal playing. I love all the main characters: the Nier, Popola, Devola, Emil, Kaine and the floating book, Yonah is cool as well i guess. The plot is great, most of the side quests have interesting or mysterious plot that can make you surprises. Recommend doing the fishing quests and the pink flowers quest even though they are both grindy. The optimisation is really good as well. My 11gen I5 and gtx1660 and HDD disc let me play really smoothly on highest graphics and with short loading screens. Playing on linux with xbox 360 controller with no issues. The game is really immersive as well. The boar quest is so worth it, do it asap :).

one of the best games

:O holy moly

21년도 당시를 가정해도 시대를 역행한 편의성과 60fps 고정 그리고 망할 회차 시스템 때문에 플레이 타임 질질 끌기 그래도 스토리는 재밌었다. 근데 회차로 엔딩 쪼개는건 26년 감성이랑 맞지 않는듯