Nier is a contrived, rough, somtimes crude and low budget game with substandard graphics and an indulgent, melodramatic story that frequently tests the patience of the player. It is also one of the greatest games of all time.

The story opens with the titular (but unnamed) Nier taking refuge with his ill daughter in a supermarket during a blizzard before having to engage monsters seemingly composed of glyphs imitating the human form. Before coherency can be established, the game shifts forward a thousand years in time to an uncanny post-apocalyptic setting where the same two characters seem to exist and their plight (Nier's ill daughter) also seems present. Life has reverted to a mix of medieval technology amongst the ruins of modernity. Casual architecture through erosure has rendered buildings monolithic and their purpose mysterious to the denziens. The exact connection between these two settings is slowly revealed through the story, defined through a series of shocking revelations and twists.

The game thematic focus is concerned with the power -- and disenpowerment -- of linguistics rendered often quite literally but also subtextually. The game revolves around a grand archive as a sort of meditative convalescence with the game's main explorable areas positioned in a circle around it. Nier is accompanied by the Grimoire Weiss, a talking book claiming to have knowledge of all world history should his missing pages be retrieved with the hope that a cure to his daughter's illness be found within them. Weiss is voiced magnificently by Liam O'brien, talking in recieved pronunciation and speaks with the arrogance and condescending tone you would expect of a long volume. The pause screen is presented as the pages within in him, abundant with papercliped handwritten notes, scrawlings and documents which metaphycially projects the game's events as having happened through this book and not the game. Nier's obtacle in his mission are the shades, beings seemingly composed of language taken corporeal form whose violent actions are proven ironically illegible to their victims. It is later revealed to the player (but not Nier) that the shades are the souls of the humans who inhabited the apocalypse a thousand years prior, seperated from their bodies of whom now walk the earth with their own consciousness and their intention is to "possess" their former bodies before their shade form collapses, rendering them feral and violent.

The game is neither about good and evil but how how two perspectives can never be learnt and how Nier's actions --though selfless and moral as seen through his lens-- brings about the ultimate existential catastrophe: the extinction of the human race. Ignorance is not seen as a personal failing but an inevitability. The game's true ending is acomplished by Nier sacrificing himself by erasing all evidence of his existence which is shown as the pages of the Grimoire Weiss being wiped before your eyes: your equipment, spells, items, records and even your save data. Though the game aestheticises linguistics its final act is to erase itself, in an ironic twist of fate Nier becoming unreabale like the Shades he has dedicated his life to destroying but never to understanding.

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