I'm a couple of hours into this game (I'm at the dungeon with all of those rule puzzles) and I'm, let's say, intrigued at the amount of times this game tends to make fun of its boring/bad design. When given a fetch quest for example, your book sidekick Weiss will say something along the lines of: "Another fetch quest, why don't we do something interesting?" This is just one example of many. The game tends to do it a lot and I don't know whether or not I should laugh at it.

It's like Duke Nukem Forever when Duke says: "Valve puzzles suck" and yet the player is forced to do it.

Any other examples of games that do this?

That game has a great story, but it is awful as fuck and nothing can make up for that.

Not exactly. if the game establishes something as bad game design and then practices said game design without a hint of irony, humor, or sarcasm, then that's a problem, but Nuts & Bolts wasn't a bad game because it made fun of collect-a-thons in its first minute.

Saints Row the Third makes fun of itself. it is a good game.

also, I like Nier :/. it is flawed, but it has some interesting things going on.

Nier is awesome and I will fight all that says otherwise! But yeah it had some problems but I don't think it being self aware at times is one of them.

Bard's Tale was stuffed with that kind of shit.

Nier I found was just a really "mellow" game. The art and design was not totally exuberant and the combat I found to be really easy (dark fist all day every day). I despised some things about the end chapter, though.

Nier is one of the best games this generation, keep playing, it has a slow start.

Also a second playthrough is required to understand anything that's going on, don't stop after the "final" boss.