For the past few days Patrick and I have been playing through a pretty unique game. It tries to do a lot of things, and for the most part succeeds. It has an amazing soundtrack, it is somewhat self aware, and it treats its characters and narrative with a kind of respect I honestly did not expect of it. The game is Cavia’s 2010 gem, Nier.

The best advice I can give someone about Nier is that people just don’t seem to get it. I don’t really blame them for this — Like Deadly Premonition, Nier is secretly an incredibly good game bundled in an aesthetic that is so overpowering that it’s hard *not* to get caught up in it. I won’t deny its strangeness: The game can best be described as an Action-RPG Farm Simulating Bullet Hell Visual Novel criticism of narrative and the methods with which narrative is conveyed. It’s complicated. But it does have very good music composed by Uematsu Nobuo. Here, listen to some of it. I’ll wait.

Slight spoilers for Nier follow.

Nier is just about the last game I’d expect to be, well, about games. Billed as a fantasy RPG published by Square-Enix, I’d assumed it’d be something like… well, a Square-Enix game. But quite frankly, Nier is a rare experience in constructive criticism about games. That is to say, it lampoons the very elements that Square-Enix has taken for granted and makes something refreshing and new out of them. It’s unexpected, but well deserved. Nier‘s tone is not reprimanding. Instead, it’s a game that embraces the things it wishes to criticize and does them right by constructing its narrative around them. As much as I love games like The Stanley Parable, there’s something to be said about the tone and presentation seen in games like Nier and Deadly Premonition. That is to say these games prefer to lead by example.

This is sort of where the issues many people have with the game appear. Nier is, fundamentally, a game about narrative. Specifically about how games and narrative interact. It’s characters are, depending on what version you play (more on that later) a band of misfits who struggle with making ends meet and fitting in with society. Every single one of them has ridiculous silver anime hair, making them stand out from every other character in the game world. I mean, just look at the box art:

Nier is complicated. It’s hard to understand and difficult to unravel. This, tied with the expectations myself and, presumably, many others had for the game most likely lead to its widespread dismissal. It’s a video game filled with character archetypes, a JRPG plot, and a relatively impressive pedigree that, when you booted it up, wanted you to focus on something else entirely. Nier builds its aesthetic out of video gamey elements, and for most cases this would be a terrible, awful thing. Fortunately Nier acknowledges its characters video game-ness. The game addresses its characters, contextualizes their designs, and brings to question how genuinely absurd and strange it is to live in a world of arbitrary plot and thoughtless world building. So while it’s understandable that people found it difficult to chew on at first glance, it’s a game that uses its aesthetic in such a powerful way that those who gave it the benefit of the doubt came away from it with an incredibly memorable experience.

The main crux of Nier’s story is the relationship between the titular Nier, known in game as “The Father” (or “The Brother” — again, more on that later) and his first companion: A sentient “Arcane Text” named Grimoire Weiss. Weiss is where the game pulls off all the stops; after obtaining the talking book, The Father can suddenly collect “Words” (sort of like weapon augments) and utilize “Sealed Verses” (essentially spells). Enemies start filling the screen with vast quantities of magical energy bullets, and The Father suddenly must go on a ridiculously overwrought quest around the world to save his silver haired daughter (or Sister), Yonah. All the while a smart-talking book follows you around to glibly declare his feelings about the world around you. It’s around here that the player begins to make their way across the world (conveniently world building simultaneously) befriending the Resident Eccentric Weirdos, Kainé and Emil. Both characters have unique special snowflake powers that make them recluses. Kainé is herself particularly unpleasant and aloof.

And that’s when things start to get “weird”. There’s a whole section of the game where a memetic curse called the “deathdream” puts an entire village to sleep. Due to the curse being spread through spoken word, Weiss takes over narration. I don’t mean that he talks to the people for you or talks over cutscenes. Weiss literally, actually, becomes the format for which the story is told. A talking book, telling you the story of the game you’re playing.

In the form of a freaking text adventure.

Nier develops further from that point. It goes to great lengths to give real life to its characters and provide context for their actions. The Father, who starts as a typical video game protagonist has to genuinely struggle with the fact that he, as a character, is only motivated by his Daughter (or Sister’s) kidnapping. He constantly questions the state of the world, and why they are doing their quest. He questions why he is the way he is. Nier has plenty of subtlety and nuance, but the value of its statement is in the plaintext. Do games realize what they’re doing to their characters? Do games realize what they must sacrifice for the sake of a story?

Down to its raw mechanics, Nier is fundamentally about making a talking book punch plot monsters for the sake of obtaining verses to the unwritten narrative that will cure the world of a disease called “The Black Scrawl” — a disease that literally puts words on people’s skin until they die. I have to hand it to Cavia for having the guts to do something like that under Square-Enix’s roof. It’s a gigantic Screw You to games “about the story” — except that it actually makes something using the formula.

Nier is the brainchild of Yokoo Tarou, also known for creating the Drakengard series of games. In fact, Nier is a direct sequel to one of Drakengard’s five possible endings. It’s not necessary to have played Drakengard to play Nier, but it provides some context for the game’s, well, strangeness. Yokoo Tarou is himself a sort of strange guy, pictured below on the left.

Yokoo Tarou is, however, aware of the strangeness of both his persona and his games. He even gave a talk about it titled Making Weird Games for Weird People at GDC 2014. This gets to my greater point about Nier, and to some extent Yokoo Tarou. I really think that Nier is not that weird of a game. It’s plenty unorthodox, it’s incredibly experimental, and it’s definitely unique. But it’s not weird. In fact, Nier is one of the most plaintext, understandable games I’ve ever played. Still, It was doomed to obscurity and cult status due to a lack of advertising and a strange marketing campaign that consisted of two versions of the game for different audiences. Only released in Japan, Nier Replicant switched the main character to a generic anime protagonist who tries to protect his sister. But even this had a point; by creating two swappable protagonists, Nier makes a statement about the value of the protagonist role, and how it is used to define characters.

Even with all of this adversity, Nier is a pretty straightforward example of a game where everything exists for a reason. There’s nothing in Nier or its marketing that is haphazard or ‘crammed in’. Many critics said the game was dated, ugly, or derivative. People struggled over what genre to call it, and took the stance that Nier wasn’t ultimately worth playing if you could just find “better versions” of the same gameplay elsewhere. But I think these people are misguided, and can’t see the big picture. Nier likes to toy with narrative and how it is remembered and chronicled. One of the endings erases your save in a grand statement about the experience: No one will know of your exploits, it says. Things aren’t that easy.

Nier is a game about genre being a meaningless narrative constraint. It’s a game about trying to make sense of games and their narratives, as haphazard and cobbled-together as they are. It’s a game about respecting the arbitrary, chaotic struggles of game writing and trying to make something out of it. Nier questions the way we chronicle stories and asks people to think more about them. I think that is incredible.

If any of that seems ‘weird’ to you, well, Nier is trying to have a conversation with you. And I think you’d benefit from participating. If that’s too much to ask, then the least you could do is listen to the game’s cool Jazz arrange soundtrack.