‘NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139…’ is an Exhausting Game That is Worth Finishing

It is Flora’s recommendation that you listen to “Song of the Ancients / Fate” from the NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139… soundtrack while reading this article. We will also immediately be dropping “ver.1.22474487139…” when referring to the game’s elaborate title, because, to cite Julie Muncy’s PC Gamer review, “good lord.”

When a video game makes me cry, I can’t help but forever cherish it. In that regard, NieR Replicant is something I will forever cherish. It is tedious and exhausting, it is the definition of repetitive, and it feels in many places like the proverbial first draft of what inevitably became NieR: Automata. Replicant is also laced with some impressively designed narrative payoffs that I suspect will age like fine wine as I sip on its memory over time. Replicant isn’t the masterpiece of Automata, nor was I expecting it to be, but you would be forgiven for periodically thinking so at pivotal emotional moments throughout the story.

NieR Replicant earns a kind of catharsis that I don’t often encounter in games. Part of this catharsis is earned through the tedium and exhaustion of unfortunate aspects of outdated game design. Another, more gratifying element of this catharsis is earned in terms of a sprawling narrative that unravels like a spool, gradually rewarding you each time the credits roll. In many ways, I was always bound to love Replicant — flaws and all — but I was still underprepared for the emotional highs and lows of the completion experience. 

Some of the narrative conclusions in Replicant are devastating. It’s easy to understand why a certain main character dies, how that can be emotionally affecting as a revered bond is severed, but Replicant succeeds at imbuing any such tragic moment with a kind of gravitational seriousness. Due to the nature of the game’s repetitive structure and accompanying narrative design, it feels like no exaggeration to suggest that I know these characters and this world. Consequently, I feel like I have partaken in the sacrifice alongside some, nearly all, of the game’s protagonists. I have, however vicariously, shared in the suffering of these characters. And for a game to make me feel like that, it’s simply astounding. 

Elements of Outdated Game Design in Replicant

At this period in the game’s critical reception, it’s almost trite to lament the outdated nature of Replicant’s design, but that discussion is importantly intertwined with the narrative. Replicant is filled to the brim with fetch quests, some more lamentable than others. For the sake of narrative completion (i.e. playing through the five main endings), you must studiously complete a considerable number of side quests. Many are simple errands, parceling items to and fro, while a select few are written quite compellingly. I can only describe many of these quests as chores, but I think my favorite chore was an elaborate series of fishing errands — eight, in fact. I sank an entire afternoon into fishing without progressing the main narrative whatsoever.

Despite the side quests creaking like ancient floorboards, some of the more demanding errands like the Fisherman’s Gambit make me feel like I’ve earned a membership to a special inner circle of Replicant fans. The Legendary Gardener achievement, in particular, had me patiently cross-breeding flowers like an apprentice of Mendel. Seeking after the fabled white moonflower, also known as a Lunar Tear — a flower of major symbolic significance for the fate of Replicant‘s core characters — I bred hundreds of flowers while seeking after my desired specimen. (In Replicant, you must wait 24 hours of real time to check your save file and see if your seeds have cross-pollinated in the intended way. After days of breeding, I eventually tampered with my system clock; even then, it took far more diligence than anticipated.) With something like a 1-5% chance of success, I was able to procure a delicate white moonflower from the garden outside the main character’s house. You can imagine my relief.

Replicant’s narrative structure is bizarre, as videogames are concerned. Not only do you replay the game multiple times in order to finish the narrative, but the game is completely split in half. Following a guide, I prioritized a number of quests that are followed by a five year time jump. (There is also an unrelated 1,412 year time jump, which is frankly ridiculous. I laughed.) This time jump serves a number of narrative purposes, but it bizarrely locks you out of certain quests that are practically required for completion. Replicant serves, however ominously, as confirmation of my belief that it’s always a good idea to glance through a walkthrough while playing a game. That belief served me well, reducing some inevitable frustrations while playing. 

The Risks and Rewards of Requiring Replays in Replicant

I have described my reluctance to replay games before, and I feel like Replicant was a deliberately stubborn counterexample to my reluctant tendencies. By the end of so many replays, I had adopted all the habits of a speedrunner — dashing everywhere, skipping familiar cutscenes, accidentally earning time-restricted achievements during various boss encounters, and other refined approaches to gameplay that are otherwise uncharacteristic for me. I have flippantly attempted speedruns of Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, a childhood favorite, and Untitled Goose Game, a quick game to glitch through, but I was often contemplating the possibility of adding Replicant to my list.

Especially when embarking on Ending E, the final replay where your save files have just been wiped, I had a peculiar realization about the game while watching (fellow Epilogue staff member) Emilia Rose’s first playthrough of Route A. As she began navigating through the labyrinthine Junk Heap for the first time, I booted up my final new save file. Before she left the area, I had reached the ending in which you attempt a boss rush with a newly playable Kainé. Suddenly, the reality of my altered approach to gameplay clicked, and the prospect of earning the previously intimidating Lightspeed Fighter achievement felt like child’s play, so to speak. 

Replaying Replicant, I became intimately acquainted with the boss characters in a way that is rarely accomplished by other games. I don’t intend to suggest that games would be improved by recycling their enemies — far from it — but there is something to be said of repeatedly encountering an enemy as they narratively develop. Gretel is one of my favorite boss characters for this reason, not solely because of the interactive fight itself. With Gretel, there is loss and tragedy and madness, completely empathetic motivations that I sincerely embraced even as I slaughtered it with record time. There is a nobility to many of these enemies like Gretel that I respect because that nobility is incrementally earned through the writing. 

The Unsung Hero of NieR Replicant: Auto-Battle

The gameplay of Replicant also bears its age with mixed results. Some of the gameplay systems have apparently been overhauled to feel more in line with the extremely slick and stylish animations of Automata. Playing this for the first time in 2021, however, I wasn’t often considering the game’s age as much as I was speculating what narrative twist was coming next; to that end, standard enemy encounters became a Zelda-like hindrance rather than an interesting variation. Though I think of Replicant‘s often repetitive design as inelegant, the benefit of this approach was the simple but prolonged pockets of contemplative space that each playthrough encouraged. I cannot certainly say this creation of contemplative space was intentional, but the inclusion of the Auto-Battle accessibility feature somewhat confirms my suspicions here. 

The Auto-Battle feature in NieR Replicant is basically my favorite thing to happen to action games in years. I have battled a repetitive stress injury with my hands and wrists since I was a teenager, and games like Replicant with heavy combo patterns, especially button-mashy ones, completely exhaust and pain me. Replicant’s Auto-Battle feature helped me mitigate my pain, an incredibly important feature that I was actively grateful for at many points. 

Auto-Battle, as it exists in Replicant, is almost self-explanatory. You can toggle which aspects of battle that you’d prefer to automate, specifically when to use healing items (thereby avoiding a menu), when to attack, and when to dodge. The easily toggleable system was something I consistently switched on and off at various points where the repetition, or simply the pain in my hands, was discouraging me. Through this simple accessibility feature — which took absolutely nothing away from the experience — I was able to extend my gameplay sessions quite a bit further than many other games in the genre allow. 

Replicant’s combat animations and boss encounters are remarkable and I don’t think their visual finesse ever grew stale for me. In addition to standard sword-swinging attacks, timed dodges, and other standard action gameplay, your main character is accompanied by Grimoire Weiss, a talking book imbued with charisma and wit. Weiss floats around your character in combat, firing off projectile pellets of blackish-red energy, as well as some more exaggerated attacks like Dark Whirlwind, which was my favorite attack to use for crowd control. Whether it’s a massive fist punching the ground or a defensive wall temporarily erected, I had a lot of fun experimenting with all of Weiss’ attacks, known as Sealed Verses or “Words.” (I also had fun simply automating them at various periods.)

An Incredible Cast of Vibrantly Written Characters

Speaking of Weiss, I think he might be my favorite non-human character in recent gaming memory — a superlative but well-considered opinion. Voiced in the English version by Liam O’Brien, there is a sagacious sassiness to Weiss that completely endeared me from start to finish. Weiss’ pomp and pretension never failed to crack a smile on my face, and his eventual back-and-forth rows with Kainé are some of my fondest moments of Replicant’s idle gameplay sections. His role as a talking book is admittedly a bit unorthodox, but the ever-strong writing of Replicant always positions Weiss as both a useful and amusing companion. 

The characters of Replicant cement this game as an instant personal classic of mine. Weiss is a brilliantly devised character all the way through, as are the other two companions to the protagonist’s party, Kainé and Emil. Just typing out Emil’s name has the potential to make me well up with tears, so I won’t linger on his story too long. But with Emil’s story, I don’t think a game has brought me as much emotional devastation since I played The Last Guardian, the game that sparked my games writing. As a result of playing Replicant, I feel like I finally understand why Yoko Taro chose Emil’s head for the mascot of his public appearance. Emil represents a character written with unending amounts of love and compassion. 

That word, “compassion,” feels literal and appropriate to Emil’s place in Replicant. Etymologically, compassion means to suffer with — and that is where Emil’s story lives, breathes, and dies. His whole life is marked by suffering, almost always on behalf of others. Worrying how other people perceive him, not in a vain manner, so many of the important decisions made throughout his story arc involve suffering with and for others. Suffering on behalf of them, Emil makes the world of Replicant — however desolate — a better place. Emil symbolizes something greater than himself, namely the ability to demonstrate one’s boundless care for people above oneself. And that, I think, is beautiful. 

(I also can’t help but express my excitement at the newer Replicant localization articulating Emil’s sexuality, one of the many unfortunate editorial decisions of the original Western release that has been revised in the 2021 version.)

And then there’s Kainé, whose hilarious and colorful swear lines are surprising to hear in the otherwise serious story. I don’t often include profanity in my writing for Epilogue, but I think most of you will feel enlightened to hear me transmit one of her lines, “You’re going to die today, shit-hog.” Almost Shakespearean at times, Kainé. She swears like this in practically every other sentence, and you can tell that both the writers and localizers involved with Kainé’s character had a blast with her lines. She’s also an intersex character, which, as with Emil, is so encouraging to see. Not only is she hilarious with her creative expletives, she’s a powerful and beautiful character whose identity is simply refreshing in a game. I was completely giddy when the game offered me a small window with which to play as her character. 

The NieR Series’ Greatest Strength: Music

Kainé’s character is accompanied by my favorite musical track in the game, “Kainé / Salvation.” Written, as all vocalized NieR songs are, in a “chaos language,” the lyrics are essentially indecipherable. If you read the following transcribed lyrics while listening to the song, as I have often done, I think it enhances the emotional affect that the song so masterfully commands: 

Shul parel moihim
Ar, jaruk noisin
Dah galach dalfouir
Malech foir dir azlad erenj boir
Hiuo tantiera hadreikun harech falale ya boi
Hiuo migenda yakachren nohei kaine rekara
Hiuo tantiera hadreikun harech falale ya boi
Hiuo migenda ya kochren nohei yalma
Tei koimiren tara bairatru

Obviously, there is little linguistic depth to be explored here — but there is absolutely an emotional depth when you hear the language performed, certain lines wavering and repeating. And as you may have noticed, the word “Kainé” seems to appear even in the chaos. As you listen to “Kainé / Salvation,” the piano loops and intertwines itself with an emotionally charged vocalist. I would sooner point you to Alex Moukala’s infectiously enthusiastic interpretation and breakdown of this song than attempt to explain the music theory myself. Suffice it to say, however, that this song — every single time — never failed to make me cry during my numerous playthroughs. 

A few other songs had me in tears, but I don’t honestly think I can make it through “Kainé / Salvation” without welling up. Songs so rarely bring me into that emotional state that Replicant’s constantly expressive soundtrack has become a new reference point for all other game music. I think “Kainé / Salvation” is beautiful on its own, but I think the layers of story lending context to the song and its titular character Kainé have only magnified my appreciation for the emotions it provokes. Don’t even get me started with the song, “Emil / Karma.” (And if you took my recommendation at the beginning of this review to listen to “Song of the Ancients / Fate,” I think you will marvel at the epic nature of the song as it appears in combat.)

The Inevitable Comparisons Between Replicant and Automata

I often describe NieR: Automata as my favorite game of all time, but I do think the music and the characters of Replicant outshine that of Automata ever so slightly. I prefer the explicitly literary storytelling of Automata, and I still feel like that game was written for someone exactly like me — it literally names characters after philosophers! But there’s no question that I was emotionally impacted by Replicant more often throughout the actual game. Whereas I have thoroughly explored my reaction to NieR: Automata’s final ending (“E”), I think its greatest narrative strength lies in its series of conclusions. Replicant operates with similar narrative conceits and structure, but its emotional impact was much closer to a constant roller coaster than a fireworks display like Automata’s ending. 

Maybe the emotions stand out so severely when reflecting on my Replicant playthrough because of the downtime in between story variations. As mentioned, there were absolutely some dull moments along the way. Such moments are worthy of critique. When the story hit, however, it cracked me open — repeatedly. 

How to Avoid Burning Out With New Games

I made a mistake when playing NieR Replicant, which is the same mistake that led me to writing a rather jaded analysis of Death Stranding — a game that I otherwise love. That mistake was binging it in 12-hour sessions. Before I knew it, I had amassed over 40 hours in Replicant by the end of its release weekend. I was obviously excited, but this behavior is unhealthy. From the moment I awoke to the moment I slept, I was playing or reading or thinking about Replicant. Suddenly, by Monday, I was feeling depressed and genuinely wondered why. Obviously the game trades in depressing themes, as evidenced by the superfluous memes to this effect, but I felt a lasting emotional hangover from my marathon weekend with the game. 

I realized that I made this mistake with playing Replicant around the time I nearly burnt out on it. This realization happened somewhere at the end of my third playthrough, as I unthinkingly muted the game so I could attentively listen to a podcast while cleaning up various achievement-related tasks. As mentioned, this game’s soundtrack is unrivaled by nearly every other game I’ve played, so my decision to mute Replicant caused me to pause and reflect. I realized I was burning myself out — probably burnt out already — and that, if I was going to complete this game and still enjoy it, I needed to start imposing breaks on myself. I wish I had reached this realization sooner, but I’m equally glad that it happened at all. In those final, more slowly paced few hours, I preserved all of the positive feelings that I have for Replicant. 

At the moment of this writing, I have not finished my pursuit of all of the game’s achievements. I nearly lost all accompanying enthusiasm for this achievement pursuit when I realized that one achievement did not unlock upon completing the third ending, ending “C.” For whatever reason, the fourth and fifth endings, “D” and “E,” respectively, unlocked without a hitch. But especially because ending D wipes your save data — after asking you multiple, multiple times — I realized my missing achievement too late. (Luckily, the game will restore the save file as a result of ending E, but I am still a little drained to immediately finish mopping it all up.) I intend, however, to dive back in after publishing this article; out of 47 total, I can count the number of missing achievements on my fingertips.

Who Are The NieR Games Ultimately For?

I mentioned that playing Replicant is like reading the first draft of someone’s ideas, but luckily the writing never feels that way. Replicant is clearly an orchestrated experiment in game design, and the risks taken generally work rather well. Even expecting narrative deceit, given my experience with Automata, I was surprised as the narrative gradually unraveled. Whether I was understanding the inner complexities of a specific boss, seeing the protagonist character in a new light, or understanding the nature of “shades” (enemies) in the game, there was always something around the corner to chew on. Even though it might easily be argued that Replicant doesn’t respect your time, I look back on my playthrough and deem that extra time necessary for my appreciation — and this is especially true of the narrative themes. 

Some of those narrative themes involve bravery and sacrifice, while others are more covert, like betrayal and recalcitrance. I think the game so effectively delivered on these themes because they were almost always subtle, meaning that each playthrough helped me tease out additional interpretations of scenes that I had previously witnessed. I was armed with new knowledge, causing me to see a sequence of events with a fresh, additional lens. Like Automata, the epistemological basis of Replicant is always under scrutiny. 

Playing NieR Replicant feels, in many ways, like reading a dense work of literary theory — and I mean that as a compliment. I was practically annotating the text as I parsed through each story beat. The aforementioned Kainé swear was something I literally paused to write down because it made me laugh, but there were other lines — usually by Weiss — that were stunningly articulate, at least in terms of what games cause me to expect. I often hold the Yakuza games as my quintessential example of praiseworthy localization efforts, but NieR Replicant deserves an equal spot at the writer’s table for how effectively the story translates into English. There’s always the risk of a disconnect when at the mercy of a translator, but I never once felt that with Replicant. 

Replicant is a game that I will vicariously enjoy while watching others play, the kind of game that is exciting to imagine others experiencing for the first time. With the NieR games comes a degree of cult enthusiasm, a sense of anticipation and eagerness to share one’s love of the work. Not everyone will love the NieR games — including our own writer, Barry Irick, whose disagreement we often tease each other about — and I think there’s a case to be made that critics of Automata will not find much value here either. But I just want to proselytize this game to as many people as will listen, to anyone who wants a game that will spiral them into a meta-analysis of storytelling in videogames, generally speaking. NieR Replicant deserves a sincere and urgent critical reappraisal, to my mind, for it’s doing something that so few games do: subvert. 

But unless I truly embark on some casual speedrunning, I don’t know if I will replay NieR Replicant. Like Automata, I feel that the game wrings itself out like a sponge. I agree with Rami Ismail that the world is used to “preposterous effect,” in that somehow just a handful of physical environments now feel more familiar than the freckles on my arms. And by the end of the experience, several credit-rolls deep, I feel like I have learned the lessons, narratively speaking, that the game intends to teach. And, like Automata, I feel at risk of cheapening the emotional impact of the game by wringing it out any further. Replicant has earned my respect, even if it exhausted me in the process, and I’m glad I made it to the end.

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