The Copied Cathedral: NIER
In September 2022, something odd happened.
A group of talented NieR: Automata modders released footage of a church they added to the game on reddit and twitter. It was a pretty big accomplishment - Automata’s engine is difficult to work with, and many players with a cursory familiarity with it felt that this kind of addition to the game was unfeasible, so for something of this scale to be created represented a shift in the landscape of NieR modding. However, this achievement was practically rendered irrelevant by the way in which they chose to reveal their work: an arg/”hoax” wherein they pretended to “discover” the mysterious church in an unmodded copy of the game, presenting it as a long-hidden easter egg.
This gained unusual traction. This kind of thing happens a lot, but I’ve rarely seen it gather the kind of steam the copied cathedral did. The collective practiced cynicism of the internet, as well as the increasingly white-box nature of our favourite games, reliably helps quash the kinds of rumors that would easily gain traction on the playground, when it was much harder for someone to definitively prove you a liar when you claimed to have climbed aboard a rocket and shot off into space to find Deoxys in Pokemon Emerald. And I think there’s a pretty clear reason for this: anytime anyone expressed scepticism over the church and its impracticalities, they were met with the same refrain.
“It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would do something like this.”
This refrain remained intact even when how people engaged with the modders’ work changed. In the beginning, it was “It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would include an easter egg that people would only find 5 years later!” When it became clear that the cathedral did not, in fact, exist in the game, it became “It’s Yoko Taro. Of course he would craft an ARG to tease future NieR content.”
As someone who has had a relationship with Taro’s oeuvre since playing NieR at 14 years old, this was all very confusing to me. Because the Yoko Taro that I thought I knew didn’t do stuff like this. None of his games were ever advertised with any kind of obscure ARG disseminated through social media. His games didn’t really have obscure secret content that remained secret for years after the fact. I thought Yoko Taro was a guy who directed games with sweary, murderous protagonists connected to each other through intricate lorebooks that never left Japan…and showed up to promote Drakengard 3 as a sock puppet. Without my realising it, what “Yoko Taro” was had changed, and he had become, in the eyes of many, a kind of mystical trickster, whose mad genius was simultaneously incomparable and unpredictable, whilst also falling into neat patterns that were easily and instantly recognisable.
Did I miss where these collectively agreed readings of Taro and his work came from? And if not, where did this perception of Yoko Taro come from?
When did Yoko Taro become Yoko Taro?
BRANCH A: ANARCHY IN THE UK (Drakengard)
BRANCH B: BAD MOON RISING (Drakengard 2)
BRANCH C GESTALT: COME TOGETHER (Nier)
BRANCH C REPLICANT: SCIENCE FICTION (Grimoire Nier)
BRANCH D: -------------
BRANCH E: -------------
In The Copied Cathedral
Branch C:
Come Together
Content Warning: Sexual assault, child murder
In a 2014 GDC talk discussing his process, Yoko Taro described what he dubbed "backwards script-writing", his method for coming up with the story of the games he directs. It's something of a misnomer - not least because we've yet to reach a game in this series that Yoko Taro actually has a writing credit on - being more accurately described as "backwards plotting" or perhaps "writing an outline". Yet, compared with the other method he articulates in this talk, which he describes as "photo-thinking" but I would describe as "a tech bro attempting to trademark the concept of imagining a scene", it is, at the very least, a method that one can coherently examine.
By way of example, Taro offers a scenario - the death of a girl - and explains that this, in and of itself, will not provoke a particularly strong emotional impact. From there, he adds additional contexts to this scenario in order to provoke a stronger reaction: she is mute, she is kindhearted, she's still young, she dies on her wedding day. Then, each of these contexts is established earlier in the narrative, so that by the time the player reaches what Taro dubs the "emotional peak", they are primed to experience the optimal emotional impact from the event in question.
Laying it all out like this, it's hard not to be disappointed by the naked cynicism inherent to the premise. It's a method of writing that prefaces not the intention of the work but its capacity to provoke emotional responses, exploring tragedy through an assembly-line structure where each moment is simply part of the setup to a final punchline. It's also hard to read Drakengard through this lens, given that that game regards sincere emotional investment in the characters often as faintly ridiculous. And yet, it remains one of the few instances of Yoko Taro discussing how he conceptualizes his own process, with little irony, misdirection, or outright dismissal, the way he so often is when discussing Drakengard. I find myself drawn to it when discussing the game which contained Taro's example: Cavia's swansong, 2010's NIER.
Once again, then, it feels appropriate to begin at the every end. If this is truly an accurate reflection of how these games are conceptualized, that each aspect of the whole is in some way a a pretext to this final moment, then from that moment, we can look out and see the entirety of the game stretch out in front of us, and consider what it means if we can't.
The final act of the player in NIER is a choice between one life and the other: in one, the protagonist - named by the player but whom I will call CumBoy69 Nier for the sake of expediency - grants a mercy killing to their companion Kainé, and in the other, they sacrifice themselves to free Kainé from the curse that is haunting her. However, in this ending, it is not simply the character that will be erased from the world of the game, but the player's save file itself, the record of their accomplishments across the dozens of hours it would have taken them to reach this moment. They won't even be able to name another character the same as the one that has been erased, should they wish to play the game again - on this instance of the game, the name CumBoy69 Nier is lost forever.
This, objectively, shouldn't have much weight: to reach this point, the player will have seen almost everything in the game that they care to. They'll have collected every weapon, seen every cutscene, completed at least a sizable portion of the game's sidequests. If the player were to come back to NIER at a later date, it likely would not be to run around in the empty fields and towns of barren of quests that now comprise its world: it would be to experience the story again, to meet Yonah, Grimoire Weiss, Kainé, Emil, and everyone else, to see their quest for survival through to the end one more time. The sacrifice asked to save Kainé in this moment is little more than the inevitable moving on that the ending of every game prompts.
And yet, improbably, the choice does have weight. Every completed sidequest, every fish caught, every weapon collected - the record of these experiences has tangible emotional gravity, enough that many players went out of their way to wriggle out of it's consequences: to back up their save data elsewhere so that they would never have to part with it. Each page torn from Grimoire Weiss in that final animation feels like a tangible loss that represents something more than integers in an array.
This erasure represents something other than a collection of memories and experiences that a player has had in the game. After all, the player is unlikely to remember where they caught every single fish, but they are likely to remember the cumulative time spent fishing, the effort and time that went into it. Erasing it doesn't mean erasing the act itself as long as you remember it, but it does mean erasing the game's memory of it, the context that provided meaning to that time spent pulling back on the left analog stick in response to Nier's movements onscreen.
Fishing in NIER is, largely, pointless. Aside from its introduction, where the player must fish in order to progress the main quest - though this did provide a memetic roadblock that served as the introduction to the game for many online - there's no real reward for fishing. It doesn't feed back into a reward structure that enhances the powers of the player, and almost every sidequest that requests a fish is comprised of the "Fisherman's Gambit" line, which only ever rewards the player with increased fishing ability. Nier can't even eat the fish he catches for health and stat boosts, like later Square Enix fishing-based RPG Final Fantasy XV. All he can really do with the fish is sell them. Fishing, is done either as a means to grind for spare cash, or simply for the pleasure of the act itself. Labor, leisure, or a blend of the two where it is difficult to discern where one begins and one ends.
Contemporary traditional wisdom in video games holds that a player should be sufficiently rewarded for time spent engaging with it, but even though sidequests are abundant in NIER, experiential rewards commensurate to the time spent completing them are far less so. Some, most notably the Lighthouse Lady questline, have a narrative within them that unfolds over the course of the quest offering a context that both motivates action and also rewards the player experientially with an unfolding story. Yet much more are thoroughly transactional, a simple, menial task performed for the sake of money. Buying some seeds from the next town over for an older woman who can't hope to fight the Shades that now prowl between there and here in this post-apocalyptic earth, or hunting for goat meat out on the steppe. And then there are those whose rewards are intangible, like getting Devola and Popola together to play a show at the Rivoli one last time, or offer no reward at all, monetary or otherwise, simply representing your time and Nier's blood, sweat, and tears being offered for nothing in return but words of gratitude, or a laugh in your face for having wasted your time on something thoroughly pointless.
Why bother with such things? What's the point of going out of your way to do something boring when there's no guarantee of reward? It's clear why Nier the character does it: as one of the few able-bodied people with fighting experience remaining in his dying village, hunting, gathering, and delivery work represents a labor that he is both uniquely suited to and is of mutual benefit to himself and the community.
One sidequest in the second half of the game tasks Nier with bringing the client ten pink moonflower seeds. This is notable because you can't buy pink moonflower seeds: the only way to obtain them is by crossbreeding two different species of flowers together in Nier's garden. So, you planet the seeds side by side, hoping that random chance will favor you and give you the seeds you need.
This takes days. Not figurative days; literal days. Unlike every other thing in NIER, plants grow in real time, and the seeds you're looking for in this quest can take around 48 hours to manifest. And if you leave them for too long, then they will wilt and die without offering the seeds you need. It demands the player carve out chunks out of their own, real life, for the sake of cultivating these flowers. If you're lucky, you might have your seeds within a week. If you aren't lucky - as, after all, the flowers only have a chance of crossbreeding - then it might take weeks. For my part, when I tried this quest, my own rate of success suggested that I would still be crossbreeding pink moonflower seeds as I write this.
It is, by any reasonable metric, an absolutely absurd thing to ask of the player, especially when absolutely nothing else in the game demands anywhere close to this kind of commitment. The player has no way of knowing what they're getting into when they begin this quest - there's nothing from the client to suggest that this will be anything other than a rote collection like any other in the game. Only by doing the gardening yourself will the full scope of what you've gotten yourself into unfold before you, like a moment of cosmic horror and understanding found in the vegetable patch. And, in a move that would make Ending E of Drakengard 1 proud, the entire thing ends with on a punchline at the player's expense, as it turns out the client wanted the seeds for some undefined nefarious purpose, and hands over a paltry 10,000 gold. Good job, buddy! Thanks for spending a month of your life watering moonflowers. Here’s your reward: a confirmation that you wasted your fucking time.
This is the only quest in the game that requires gardening. Most every other quest allows the player to simply buy the food from the shop to deliver to the client - at a loss, inevitably. That this is the only quest that demands the player engage with this system underscores that there is no point to it: Much like fishing, there is no reward structure to justify the time gardening takes, and any tangible output from it can be more easily and efficiently acquired elsewhere. You fish to fish. Contemporary commercial game design would take one look at this whole system and deem it utterly superfluous. And yet, here it remains in NIER, and the game would be measurably lesser without it. Not just because it's funny and absurd and offers a great, textured memory in exchange for investment, but because I like the gardening.
When asked by a quest to acquire items that could be obtained through gardening or by shopping, I found myself drawn to the former over the latter. It wasn't efficient in any way, and it didn't yield any more effective results than simply buying some melons at the shop and handing them over. There was simply an appeal and a satisfaction in growing these things myself. Like with the fishing, and the menial sidequests, I found that stripped of all incentive to do these things, I found myself doing them anyway, a rediscovery of the pleasure of the act itself brought about by the reducing them to the barest essentials that calls to mind less Drakengard 1 and more 2001's utterly seminal Flower, Sun, and Rain. Like that game, NIER lays bare the artificiality of video games and in so doing, invites the player to reflect on why they choose to spend their time with them, what about the basic actions of interacting with their virtual worlds is compelling, if it is at all.
Over the course of the adventure, NIER will frequently shift its own form, emulating a distinctly retrograde video game form that stands out as distinct at a point in time where video games were increasingly interested in verisimilitude and consistent, filmic presentation. Sometimes this manifests in a crass form: Grimoire Weiss remarking on how an enemy directly evoking the classic Nintendo boss form of a giant head with two floating hands has "such an obvious weak point", or a 1:1 recreation of the treasure animation from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker both stand out as being eye-rollingly direct, as if the game was nudging the player to see if they get the reference. They are more successful when they are left unadorned and unremarked upon, like the mansion basement shifting to the form of a top-down isometric game like Diablo, or the way enemy magic manifests in the form of slow-moving coloured orbs that evoke the bullet hell patterns of shoot-em-ups like DoDonPachi or the Touhou series.
Rooms that evoke 2D side-scrolling stages, a forest of text adventures, a mansion with detached camera angles; not only do these stylistic reconfigurations add a great deal of individual character and texture to these locations that neither Drakengard game was interested in or even capable of conveying, but the conscious, post-modernist use of classic forms of video game artifice that the medium was attempting to "grow past" in pursuit of ideals of immersion is compelling in and of itself. It invites us to consider the forms themselves in the mundanity of their configurations, a work that invites appreciation of the stage as much as the players upon it, rather than straining to make the audience forget the stage entirely. And if the player hasn't got the message by the end, NIER makes sure to cap itself off in the Shadowlord's Castle. Already, the name "Shadowlord's Castle" is aggresively generic to a parodic extent - one could comfortably imagine it as the final dungeon of a JRPG generated by algorithim. But it isn't a castle - not really. Instead, it is the architecture of presentation itself, moving from a ballroom, to a stage, and finally, to an auditorium behind the stage, where the final battle with the Shadowlord is destined to take place.
NIER is often called a deconstruction, of role-playing games and video games more broadly. The difficulty of precisely defining that word makes me hesitate in invoking it, but at least in how it is defined by de Man's interpretation of Derrida, I think there is a grain of truth there, but it doesn't capture the whole picture. NIER, more often than not, does not seek to undermine itself or its genre by drawing attention to its artifice and contradiction, but simply to lay them bare, with an ambivalence that is more compelling than if it were to simply throw rotten vegetables at the stage it stands on. The combat - though almost outrageously bloody - marks engagement in it only in the number of hits landed on an enemy, a number presented in plain text without ceremony, without the style meters or combos any more complex than what Drakengard offered, but does that mean there's nothing compelling about it? The side-quest may be stupid and pointless and you might be an idiot for doing it, but does that mean you shouldn't do it? The classic Nintendo Head-and-Hands boss might be familiar, but does that mean there is no worth in it? Farming might be a huge waste of time, but can you still find meaning in it? After all, the characters certainly find meaning in it.
The Lunar Tear is a flower that appears throughout NIER, used as poetic shorthand for strong feelings of affection. Most strongly associated with Kainé and her relationship with her beloved Grandma, their rarity in the fiction is reflected by being an unbelievable pain in the ass. To grow one requires a crossbreed between two plants that themselves can only be grown via crossbreeding, equaling to days of real life investment in order to possibly cultivate one. So when Kainé is protective of the wreath of Lunar Tears given to her by her grandmother, you know what meant for her grandma to collect those, and you know what it means that Nier himself gives one to Kainé when she awakens from a 5-year long slumber.
It's so easy to imagine a version of NIER that proves unsatisfying and shallow in the way Drakengard so frequently could be, a version that loses what makes so much of the genre it evokes through it's distillation. And, certainly, there are moments where it is unsatisfying and shallow, moments where the metatextuality becomes too direct to compel, concepts that simply do not land. Every game in this series has moments like that: it's just that NIER has something new, something that neither prior Drakengard game does: a crew that I would die for.
Like so many JRPGs, NIER's cast is an eclectic bunch that shouldn't fit, either in themselves or together, and yet, impossibly do, each one defined by elements that are diametrically opposed but paradoxically harmonious. Grimoire Weiss is the first member to join Nier on his quest to find a cure for his daughter's illness, a slut-shaming magical book with amnesia, evil powers and an arrogant streak a mile long that is also observant, emotionally intelligent, and genuinely funny. He is Nier's most constant companion, and the two are a perfect fair, highlighting each other's best and worst qualities in equal measure. Emil might be a weapon of mass destruction in the body of a skeletal puppet, but once he joins the party, his relentlessly chipper attitude that endures despite overwhelmingly tragic circumstances perfectly balances out the surly remainder of the ensemble. My own personal favorite is Kainé, who we will discuss in greater detail and remains somewhat at arms length from the player on the first playthrough, and who etched herself into my heart the instant she opens the game.
Kainé is chuuni royalty. She affects a level of confidence that can only truly be pulled off by the profoundly insecure. She swears like a sailor, but in a distinctly adolescent kind of way, where she's trying so hard to swear and sound tough that she frequently overshoots and makes clear just how hard she's trying. Rather than regarding her as absurd for trying like she does - in the manner Drakengard 1 did for its female party member - her self-expression is correctly observed to simply be fucking cool. She's an edgelord who's definitely still listening to Limp Bizkit and skipping every cutscene in every video game she ever plays. She's also more capable, physically and mentally, than the rest of the group combined, yet is prevented by her own self-loathing from turning that uncommonly observant eye on herself until the game's final moments.
And then there's Nier himself. Much is made of Nier as an unconventional protagonist for a JRPG, a grim late middle-aged man designed for an American audience. I think there's a certain degree of racist condescension with the way this facet of the game is often discussed in the western press, and largely ignores the existence of Guts Berserk, but it is true, at least, that Nier does look more like The Nameless One from Planescape: Torment than he does Squall Leonhart from Final Fantasy VIII. Yet, Nier is compelling as a character as much because of the ways he does invoke the classic tropes of a JRPG protagonist as the ways in which he doesn't.
His moments of pessimism are twinned with moments of wide-eyed naivety, moments in which he . One of the best moments of the entire game is when Kainé joins the party, and he, this ogre-faced man who talks about how, in this dying world, all that matters is the safety of his daughter declares "Yes! You and I are friends now!" It's adorable, and childish, and it doesn't fit, and I love it for that. Nier would be less interesting if he was exactly the kind of gruff barbarian hero his design evokes, or entirely the heroic protagonist of these moments: it is these things together that make him such a wonderful character. It suggests a deep personal history, a lived life where perhaps Nier was once the wide-eyed pretty boy protagonist of the genercisied idea JRPG, now grown into one of the few physically able adults that remain in a dying world, yet still retaining that spark of hope and classic heroism, who is still able and willing to embark on any quest or menial task for the sake of another, even if it means neglecting his very own daughter to massacre hundreds in her name. And if NIER has a core, a heart that the game entire circles around, it is that cruel contradiction.
Like other RPGs, NIER's relationship with time is abstract - there is no day/night cycle, no suggestion of days passing into one another. You can complete a dozen sidequests and the sun will never set. But there remains the palpable sense of time being lost - the sense that moments that Nier and Yonah could be spending together, that he could be spending raising her rather than searching for a cure for her condition, are slipping through their collective fingers, just as quickly as when farming for rare materials from animals in the wilderness to give to a stranger as when wading through a world of text in the Forest of Myth in search of a cure. Loading screens take the form of pages from Yonah's diary, which reveal that not only is Yonah more aware of and at peace with the nature of her terminal illness than her father will ever be willing to confront, but that she wishes, more than anything else, to spend time with him. Should Nier ignore all the people who need his help, then, and focus solely on his daughter? Maybe. That's certainly a choice you could make, as a player: to ignore all the side content and focus entirely on the critical path. But this too is an act of selfishness, a manifestation of the same impulses that drive him to thoughtlessly murder everyone standing between him and the vain hope of his daughter's salvation.
Nier's single-minded devotion to Yonah is both profoundly empathetic and deeply troubling. For all that he is always motivated by her safety, Nier regards her emotional needs the way he would a pet - welcome, but often burdensome, and grating when they manifest in such a way that distracts from the greater task of "saving" her. This doesn't mean that Nier does not love Yonah - he very clearly does. But rather, that he does not regard her as a truly complete person, with her own thoughts, feelings, and desires separate from and possibly even conflicting with his. Even when this manifests in cute ways, like his fear and anger when he discovers that Yonah has been exchanging letters with what he believes is a boy her own age, and the fear of her growing up and having feelings for another comes crashing into him in a comical moment, Nier's treatment of Yonah is that of a commodity that he controls. When she is kidnapped by the mysterious Shadowlord, setting in motion the game's second half, it is notable that Nier's behavior is largely the same as in the first half. He visits the same places with the same driven, all-consuming attitude to save his daughter, whether or not his daughter is actually in his life. She exists as a totem, an item to motivate action, and not as a human being. It's a distinctly parental relationship that is cutting and specific, and thoroughly justifies the decision to make Nier an older father, if such a decision need be justified. As Engels observes in The Origin of the Family, the patriarch is the position from which power in a familial relationship is organized, who owns the children under him as property.
"The word 'Familia' did not originally signify the ideal of our modern philistine, which is a compound of sentimentality and domestic discord. Among the Romans, in the beginning, it did not even refer to the married couple and their children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus means a household slave and familia signifies the totality of slaves belonging to one individual. The expression was invented by the romans to describe a new social organism, the head of which had under him wife and children and a number of slaves, under Roman paternal power, with power of life and death over them all.” - Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
All of this culminates in the final battle, when it is, of course, finally revealed that the Shadowlord - who is another Nier - kidnapped Yonah in order to save his own daughter, his own Yonah. Really, there's no other way it could have gone. Nor is there any other place it could go from there than that same daughter, unable to cope with the knowledge that her existence requires the death of another, tearfully apologizing to her father as she sacrifices herself for our Nier's Yonah. The strain between what Yonah wants and what Nier wants finally reaches its tragic breaking point, and e There's an in-universe sci-fi explanation hastily thrown out by some "Project Gestalt" documents obtained just before the confrontation, but the game wisely avoids getting bogged down in the minutiae of how the relationship between the cast and the shades came about. The sci-fi conceit only exists so far as it serves the poetry of the image, that of the same father fighting himself over the same daughter against both of her own wishes. It's an image that speaks for itself and would only be undermined by further explanation.
The prospect of further explanation offered by subsequent playthroughs, then, may be cause for concern. Thankfully, in this regard, at least, Route B has its priorities in the right place. It describes itself as "Kainé's story", not in the sense that you play as Kainé, but that you become privy to the things she understands that Nier cannot. The first of these things is her backstory, conveyed by a short prose story rather than cutscenes of gameplay. In it, we learn how Kainé met the woman who raised her and their developing relationship, how she learned to swear like a sailor from her and in turn, how her grandmother took greater and greater pride in the woman she was becoming even as she tried to steer her away from becoming like herself. We learn how her grandmother was eventually killed by a Shade, how Kainé came to be possessed by a Shade herself, and we learn that she was ostracized from the Aerie and forced to live outside it because she is intersex.
(Note: It is worth noting that Kainé is never described as intersex in the game, indeed, when NIER was released the word "intersex" was not in common parlance, and almost every contemporary discussion of NIER uses different terminology when discussing Kainé. Purely on the basis of a naive reading of the game's text in the english translation, one could easily come to the conclusion that Kainé is a trans woman. However, for the sake of accuracy, I will in this one instance bring paratextual information into this discussion to make clear that she is intended to be intersex.)
This could so easily have been like nails on a chalkboard. If you asked me to rate how the average Xbox 360 game in 2010 would do when it came to exploring gender nonconformity, I'd probably ask you if there's a number lower than negative infinity. Even if you take a step back, the contradiction that each party member manifesting in Kainé as being a beautiful woman in a negligee who has "masculine" traits like a foul vocabulary, violent impulses, and a penis is, speaking frankly, utterly crass, the same manner of conceptualizing characters that gave us the embarassing Arioch in Drakengard 1. Like everything else in NIER, it is so, so easy to imagine how Kainé would have gone utterly wrong.
And yet, she doesn't. However dreadful the basic concept they were given is, the writing team of NIER - Sawako Natori and Hana Kikuchi - not only manage to make this work, but manage to make Kainé the shining light of a great game. Your mileage may very, of course, but speaking personally, this entire sequence, the way the adults of the town regard this as a shocking secret that they are kind not to mention, or the way Kainé's male childhood bullies' disgust is linked inexorably with their fetishization of her, was deftly written and felt deeply resonant with my own experiences as a trans person. It helps that it's not something the game lingers on overmuch: there's no, to invent a completely random hypothetical example, achievement for trying to look up her skirt. The game largely avoids leering at her in the same way that her abusers do, which is something that works in 2026 would still struggle to claim.
The same cannot be said for the ending of her story, where her possession by a Shade is played as a rape scene that, which is lingered on in a way I find broadly unsatisfying throughout the rest of Route B in a manner we will discuss shortly, but for the record, I do still find this as affecting and resonant as the rest of her story. I don't mean this as the backhanded compliment that it might seem to be, but this short sequence of simple white text against a black screen accompanied by Keiichi Okabe and MONACA's wonderful score might be my favorite thing in the entire game. Kainé might be my favourite thing in the entire game, in this entire series. Whatever I have to say about this game or any other, whatever I have to say about this team and what they do, they gave me Kainé. I'll always be grateful for that.
Of course, this is only the beginning of Route B. Once Kainé's tale is done, the back half of the game repeats itself, only with new cutscenes and dialogue that explore the perspective of the Shade bosses you've been fighting, and it's here that the delicate balance that keeps NIER together begins to falter.
Replaying through the events with greater clarity on the motivation and character of previously silent monsters is, in aggregate, deeply compelling. Some moments are undoubtedly granted new life by the addition of the Shades' scenes. However, for others, adding another tragic context upsets the balance of the emotional peaks of Taro's reverse screenwriting structure enough to topple the entire thing. It's hard not to roll one's eyes at the surviving brother of the Junk Heap yelling about how much he loves murder while literally saying "MUAHAHAHAHA!", or how the game will time and time again pull the "you were actually killing children the whole time!!!" card in increasingly ridiculous circumstances. Even Taro's example of the method in practice, the red wedding of Facade, buckles under the weight of the giant wolf shade lamenting what his clad did to deserve such a fate, collapsing one of the game's strongest sequences into pure bathos in the final moments of its reprise.
That said, maybe even these moments would work if it wasn't for Tyrann. NIER's party comprises some of my favourite characters in the entire medium, but on Route B, they find themselves joined by an utterly loathsome hanger-on: the disembodied voice of the shade possessing Kainé's body: the same one that raped her. This, itself, is not a necessarily bad idea. Kainé being forced to endure the presence of the man who assaulted her, a presence that those around her are incapable of perceiving except when it breaks through in her darkest moments, is one that, in the abstract, compels me. But as with anything in art, an idea is only worth the paper it's printed on. This is, ultimately, the critical flaw of Taro's reverse screenwriting concept: it isn't actually scriptwriting, it's a list of bullet points, and the burden is placed on the actual writers to make it work. Luckily for Taro in this game, Natori and Kikuchi are, broadly speaking, up to the challenge…except here. After an entire game of the writers ably selling suspect concepts, here, they are finally defeated by the sheer unpleasantness of Tyrann.
Put simply, Tyrann's a Drakengard 1 character in a game where everyone else is a Drakengard 2 one. His dialogue consists, in its entirety, of him cackling wildly and yelling at Kainé about how sick and awesome murder and bloodshed is. He is so profoundly insincere that any impact of Kainé being forced to bear the burden of this rapist is completely lost underneath just how annoying he is. Like the DM's manosphere little brother who still thinks dead baby jokes are the height of comedy showing up at the tail end of the D&D campaign, he is simply anathema to the health of the vibe.
If this wasn't bad enough, in a game with otherwise uniformly exemplary performances - particularly Laura Bailey's Kainé - Spike Spencer plays Tyrann without a hint of nuance, relishing in the opportunity to chew the scenery as the most over the top caricature you could possibly imagine, a decision that becomes particularly disastrous when he is suddenly and unexpectedly asked to sell a last-minute earnest turn from the little shit. I've played every Kingdom Hearts game, often multiple times, and seen the most overbearingly sincere speeches on the power of friendship you could possibly imagine, and enjoyed every one of them without a hint of irony or pretense, and I am incapable of getting through Tyrann talking about how there's "something strange going on inside [Kainé's] heart" without cringing.
Three games into the DrakeNier series, and much of their defining features feel at odds with the parts of these games that really work, millstones kept around for the sake of brand identity even though it hinders as much as they help. Each of the successive endings is good, and in aggregate the perspective of the Shades does make the game feel more complete. I would never want to play a version of this game that does not have the Kainé short story in it. But Tyrann? At least in how he is written and portrayed, he feels surplus to requirements, a hangover from a more immature sensibility that still hangs in the air, like lynx africa in a teenage boy's room, even in the game's final moments.
Tyrann ends up being the medium through which the final choice in the game is made: to offer Kainé the mercy killing she asks for, or to give up your save file - your and her Nier - to save her. As utterly facile as I find Tyrann's final turn to sympathy regarding the woman he abused, there's something about someone who so thoroughly violated her agency in the past being the vector through which she can be saved against her wishes that remains significant to me, a context that makes the emotions more complicated and textured rather than straightforwardly impactful. It underscores that this is not a completely selfless choice, not one that simply helps another, but one with baggage and complexity all its own. Because to save Kainé is to abandon Yonah, to choose a friend over a daughter.
Or maybe, there isn't any difference at all. Maybe this is just Nier making the same decision he made dozens of times across his adventure, to help when asked to help, even when there is no promise of reward, even if he's being tricked or taken advantage of. To run through the Junk Heap yet again searching for one more Memory Alloy, to run across the desert for fifth time because those scorpions that jump out of the sand without warning broke that pot you were carrying again, to spend days of your real life cultivating flowers in Nier's garden hoping to cross-breed just the right ones to hand over for a paycheck that you could earn in around 5 minutes at the Junk Heap. Whether it was done for personal gratification, a sense of completion, a need for a personal timesink, or out of a desire to feel altruistic, to help another…how much does it matter, when Nier did it anyway? And all the while, he does it while Yonah waits at home, accepting what has happened to her with a maturity that far outstrips her father, wanting to spend time with the person she cares for most in the world, while her life vanishes in the same dollhouse diorama. You gave up an hour with Yonah to farm those goat hides. What's the 40 you spent with NIER to save Kainé?
And in this ending, when father and daughter finally reunite, he vanishes again, in a matter of moments. One final abandonment, one final abdication of the responsibility of being a father. It doesn't really matter if Nier does it to save Kainé; it remains, inescapably, what it is. He saves Kainé and abandons the daughter that needs him. Like snow in summer, these contradictions don't cancel each other out, condemn or absolve each other. All people, all communities, all systems and works, cannot be defined so linearly, where each element naturally extends from the one before. They are a spiders web of connections and feelings, each one contributing to a kaleidoscope of human relationships and emotions. They aren't a collection of points that lead to one singular moment, one singular feeling. They just are.
In the end, Nier is gone. All that's left is the absence, a line traced around an emptiness inside and out, made of an unshakeable feeling that whatever was lost, it was something very special.
