Hello friends. When I started writing for (well, *on*, if we're being technical) this website five years ago, one of my earliest "experimental" pieces was an incredulous list of observations (man, how times have changed) based on a recent playthrough of Cavia Inc.'s Nier. Nier's an interesting game for a great many reasons - you can choose to interpret my selection of that particular adjective however you wish - and I found myself quite nonplussed at the multiple directions Nier was pulling me. One moment it angered me, or disappointed me, or bored me (that was more than one moment), while at other times I was either surprised or impressed by a stylistic or gameplay decision it chose to make. I've long ranked Nier with the likes of Psychonauts or Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines or Deadly Premonition (though I only played those last two relatively recently) as the type of unique if flawed game that any video game fan who considers themselves patrons of the medium ought to check out, for educational purposes if nothing else.

During E3, we were met with the announcement that a new Nier was in production. There were a number of surprised reactions, and with good cause: The original developers Cavia had shut down since Nier, and Nier was pretty much the game that killed the studio; the last post-Cavia game based on a Cavia property, Drakengard 3, failed to set the world aflame with dragonfire; who the fuck even played Nier?; and why announce something this niche at the US-focused E3 rather than wait until the much more amenable Tokyo Game Show in three months' time? Sure, it could be Square Enix being Square Enix and just tossing out everything they're cooking up to fill time in their increasingly irrelevant conference, but there's gotta be something going on if they think a Nier 2 teaser is a big deal for the US market.

Which, of course, leaves the many folk who have no idea what Nier is in the dark, their general knowledge beginning and ending with "It has a good soundtrack", "It is sad", "don't fish here, fish there" and "Moon face?". What is Nier, really? Why should anyone care that a sequel is being produced? Well, I'm here to elucidate, as best as I am able.

So Nier and Yet So Far: I Try to Explain What Nier Is

Nier is an action RPG. For the most part. The eponymous protagonist runs across various overworlds and through dungeons in pursuit of his kidnapped daughter and most of the gameplay is similar to something you'd find in, say, Dragon Age: Inquisition or Final Fantasy XII, only not quite as tactical due to there being only a single playable character. Nier has a standard assortment of combos that rely on light attacks and heavy attacks, and he'll acquire new spells that help clear rooms of enemies for those moments when they start to swarm him. While the overworlds are fairly open, the dungeons have a mostly linear layout that funnels you through puzzles and the boss fights.

The boss fights are where the game can often deviate a little from the mold. Many boss attacks resemble a third-person variant of a bullet hell shooter, firing multiple glowy balls in every direction. The player, true to the shoot 'em up genre, has to weave through the things and look for an opening to attack. It's an odd variation on the "wait for your moment" boss fight conceit, though it works fairly well if you don't think about it too much.

Then you have what I consider the game's "detours". Nier's not content with sticking to its chosen genre the entire game, and will find ways to subvert the gaming experience for sequences that are deliberately meant to be a little discombobulating for the hero. An extended sequence where Nier explores a mansion to look for a biological superweapon, for instance, is a deliberate Resident Evil homage with key puzzles and fixed dramatic camera perspectives. A "choose your own" text adventure fills in for a dream sequence, told abstractly with descriptions and occasional interjections of your fellow party members. It's these aberrations that people tend to remember most fondly about the game; while the core action RPG gameplay is adequate, it can also be a little underwhelming and repetitive.

There's also the cast of characters: The gruff Nier is a protagonist that's single-minded to a fault in his attempt to find a cure for his daughter (and then the subsequent pursuit when she is abducted). It becomes a major plot point that the game continues to expand on; Grimoire Weiss is a talking book that offers the lion's share of the game's sardonic quips and exposition, to counter Nier's stoic reticence; Kainé, an extremely hostile (and profane) young woman who follows Nier around despite the duo's equally standoffish demeanors; Emil, a compassionate young boy cursed with a petrifying gaze that wears a blindfold and lives secluded in a mansion with other similarly afflicted children; and Yonah, Nier's daughter and the most important person in his life, who is dying from the "black scrawl" - a disease with no known cure.

Nier and Dear: Nier's Strengths A.K.A. Why Any of This Matters

Nier had some core structural problems, but what persists long after the dull "standard mode" gameplay and the overemphasis on fetch quests and grinding weapon experience for the "true ending" (a carryover from Drakengard that no-one asked for) are the game's myriad strengths as a truly creative (if partly insane) singular experience. I'll list a few of these below (and I've spoiler-blocked a few that deal with how the game concludes):

The game's music. The game's most prominent feature to the general gaming public, whether they actually played the game or not, is its mellifluous, melodic, melancholy soundtrack. Not just your usual assortment of JRPG violins and orchestral scores, each song in Nier received an incredible amount of attention, with each sporting a fictitious singing language that is part-romance language, part-Gaelic and all-wonderful. It effectively punctuates the dramatic scenes, the sad scenes and the quiet scenes and gives the game a gravitas it perhaps wouldn't otherwise deserve, given the amount of tonal shift from one scene to the next. I'm sure everyone's familiar with it already, but here's a sampling: Hills of Radiant Winds, Song of the Ancients, Shadowlord, Kainé Salvation, Grandma. Heck, just go listen to the whole thing.

The game's originality. Bouncing between genres and homages, twisting and subverting the archetypal "hero looks for kidnapped girl" plot, the way the game subtly messes with the player's expectations throughout. The developers never had any intention of creating a straightforward action RPG, as evinced by the bullet hell bosses and the detours into other genres. Drakengard, conversely, was a game that was structurally very rigid; though it certainly didn't have a cohesive plot, the game would jump between Dynasty Warriors style hack-and-slash and Panzer Dragoon shoot 'em up stages and stick to those two models closely throughout the game's runtime, with the exception of the very final boss. With Nier, it felt like Cavia wanted to expand on what they did with that irregular final boss fight by creating a game that was just as narratively wild as Drakengard but also structurally disparate as well. This perceived "statement of intent" might also explain why Nier chooses to follow the very non-canonical ending to Drakengard that occurs after the aforementioned abnormal boss encounter. It's odd to think of a thirty hour long JRPG produced by Square Enix as also being an experimental game of the sort the Indie market is always producing, but that's essentially what Nier is. It's a kick in the pants the JRPG genre sorely needs to reinvent itself, or at the very least a demonstration that possibilities exist outside of the hoary tropes of androgynous teenagers and anime boob jokes, even if what you get is a confused mess in many respects.

The game's storytelling devices. [We'll be getting spoiler-heavy here, because it deals with the game's original ending and the subsequent playthroughs that lead to the various other endings.]

In the Nier Future: What This Sequel Should Do, If Square-Enix Has Any Sense

It's hard to say where Square Enix will go with this new one. The veil's long been lifted on what Cavia were secretly attempting to pull off, as Nier's been given many years with which to garner enough cult appeal to facilitate a sequel in the first place, and when you're attempting to follow a game this avant garde with a follow up there's some inherent difficulties with capturing that same sense of pioneer spirit a second time around. You can't invent the wheel twice (though maybe "invent the pet rock twice" would be a slightly less hyperbolic way to phrase that sentiment).

The Nier sequel should surprise us. It should use the advantage it has over its forebear with all this extra promotional steam and kudos to raise the bar with its narrative and gameplay revelations, reaching heights the original could only dream of demonstrating. It could also use some significant restructuring for its core game; whether the dull, repetitive nature of the gameplay was all part of the game's later subversions is essentially moot, because you should never expect a larger audience to want to suffer low quality gameplay for the sake of it being germane to the narrative. Fix that side of it up and make it more palatable, ideally by leaning more heavily either into the character action aspect (more combos, more distinction between weapon types, more speed) or the RPG aspect (more strategy, more equipment, more skill trees or some other way to customize closer to one's preferred playstyle). It goes without saying that the soundtrack should be as equally fantastic, but given that the same composers are behind it that's probably a safe bet.

I have a lot of expectations for this sequel. Nier felt like it could've been a true trailblazing masterpiece with a little more polish, instead of the bizarre, cultish curio it ultimately became. There's room to grow with a sequel, but only if they manage to nail that gonzo spirit again. While a bigger budget might result in a more competent action RPG, that money might also force Square Enix to temper the game with "safer" decisions governing its structure. I can't imagine the resulting product would please anyone.

Fingers crossed, eh?