NieR/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • 8.8: Gamespot slapped it with a 5.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Father Nier a good father? He travels to hell and back searching for a way to save Yonah's life, but in doing so he spends so much time away from home that it borders on Parental Abandonment. It's achingly clear that Nier's absence hurts Yonah far more than her illness.
  • Awesome Ego: Weiss. He is VERY full of himself, but he's so charismatic, most people find his arrogance comical or charming as opposed to grating.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Step One: Get the Phoenix Spear. Step Two: Upgrade it. Step Three: Dive-attack everything in the game to death.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: The entire soundtrack. Seriously. This is true for every single track. It is amazing.
  • Cry for the Devil: The Shadowlord's only wish was to live together with Yonah, just the same as Nier. Most of the evil goings-on were the fault of Grimoire Noir or the Twins.
  • Cult Classic: Has this reputation nowadays. While the gameplay is generally considered bland, its soundtrack and art design are well-liked, and its plot and characters have been well-received for providing something fresh and interesting in the JRPG genre.
  • Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Falls into this for a lot of people due to being a really depressing, tragic story, but many people find it easier to become invested in this game compared to the rest of the Drakengard franchise due to its more sympathetic (if still heavily flawed) characters and heartwarming moments.
  • Designated Hero: It's revealed that Kainé, unlike Nier, is very well aware of fact that Shades are sentient; however, she never even remotely tries to hint on it or stop merciless slaughter. It's revealed that she's trying to convince herself that they aren't human when Tyrann mocks her numerous times for killing innocent souls, and she yells at him to shut up. To her defense, the lizard shade taunted her by pretending to be a grandma early, so she might not trust what the voices says.
  • Fan Dumb/Fandom Heresy: The two versions of NieR, coupled with many people only hearing about the game via poor and sensationalist games journalism, occasionally leads to bizarre statements and accusations being made in comment threads whenever this game is mentioned. A common argument comes from certain NieR Gestalt fans saying that NieR Replicant only exists because the Japanese are so superficial that they won't play a game without a bishounen in it, but the dumb can run deeply on both sides. The director having a Viewers are Morons moment and suggesting in one interview that NieR Replicant might have sold well in France, with the implication that only the French could appreciate Japanese culture, didn't really help....
  • Game Breaker:
    • The Phoenix Spear. Without upgrades, it is the best combination of speed and raw attack power, and can one-shot most enemies by the time Nier gets enough money to acquire it, making the rest of the game trivially easy.
    • The Beastbain, which is sold by the blacksmith in Nier's Village, may count too. It's expensive, but if you're lucky enough, you can get both enough money, and enough items to upgrade it, to make the first part of the game pretty easy.
  • Iron Woobie: Replicant Nier. Both of his parents died before he was ten, but he forbids himself from mourning them in fear of making Yonah sad. Instead, he focused on earning money doing odd jobs in the village, but when Yonah became sick with the Black Scrawl, he couldn't afford her medicine. Nier eventually had to resort to prostitution to provide this (he developed a phobia of people touching his hair from these experiences, which led to him tying it up), but even then, he bears it silently, believing that it's for Yonah's sake. Later on, it's even implied that he killed the sex buyer in a Shade-slaying job. Since this is never mentioned in the actual game, you can't even tell from his general positivity that these things even happened.
  • Player Punch:
    • Can't get much worse than the haymaker that is the forced deletion of ALL your save games you've put 30+ hours into in order to see the ending D, complete with each page of Grimoire Weiss being erased one by one, finishing it off by deleting the save files themselves.
    • It would be more accurately described as Rapid Fire Player Punches. When seeing a harmless, pretty flower on the title screen reduces even hardcore players to sobbing wrecks...
    • Although maybe not as strong a punch, learning what happened in the prologue counts, namely that the Nier we spent the opening ten minutes playing as transforms into The Shadowlord, and will spent the next 1,312/1,412 years trying to (and failing) to save and reunite with his daughter, only for him to be killed by the Nier we have been playing as for most of the game and his daughter deciding it's not right to take the current Yonah's body for her own since she keeps crying out to Nier, leaving her body and essentially committing suicide by floating into bright sunlight flooding from a large window nearby a few moments before that.
  • Stoic Woobie: Especially after the time skip, Nier and Kainé are usually too busy killing things to complain about their problems.
  • That One Achievement: Forging Master, due to the MASSIVE amount of item farming it requires.
  • That One Sidequest:
    • The Runaway Son. You have to run about half-way around the world to bring the little bugger back! And then it turns out you were being scammed the whole time. Worse yet, you get no reward for completing it.
    • Life in the Sands. You have to get 10 pink moonflower seeds. Trouble is you can't find them anywhere, and the only moonflower seeds you can buy are red, gold, and blue. To get pink seeds, you have to hybridize gold and blue moonflower seeds to get indigo seeds, then hybridize those with red seeds to get pink seeds. Oh, did I mention that it takes about 36 real-time hours to be able to harvest these seeds? And that after all that time, there's no guarantee that you'll get the hybrid seeds?
    • A good number of other less important sidequests also count and some of them seem to be specifically tailored to piss off the player by forcing them to gather a ton of rare items for a ridiculously mundane purpose (such as 10 rare metals just to make a single kitchen knife or 5 sharks for a dish that's ultimately decreed by both the chef and Nier to be better without any), especially considering how much more reasonable the sidequests with actually useful rewards are. Thankfully, you don't miss anything by just ignoring them, and they largely seem to exist to taunt OCD people about their completion percentage being lower than 100%. The banter you get for each one is nice to hear regardless, even though for most of them it's not worth the trouble.
    • Not the hardest (relatively easy fetch quest) one, but the most thankless is a sidequest where the quest giver refers to you as the idiot who will do anything for money no matter how demeaning it is. It's pretty much here you think yes screw 100% completion.
  • True Art Is Angsty: The game was overlooked on the whole, selling poorly in the West and greeted by mixed reviews. However, a few critics and a number of the people in the game's small fanbase consider the game unusually well-written and interesting, not just for a JRPG, but as a game in general. It's also easily one of the most depressing and oppressive games in recent memory.
  • Vindicated by History: When it first came out, the game was left to rot on store shelves by uninterested gamers and was largely forgotten. Nowadays, it is generally well-regarded. For just one example, Joystiq initially slapped the game with a zero, only for them to later acknowledge it as one of the best games of the last decade. Its passionate cult following helped pave the way for a sequel NieR: Automata, and the subsequent acclaim and surprisingly strong sales that followed has only drawn more attention to its predecessor.
  • The Woobie: Emil is one of the most optimistic and positive characters by the end of the game despite having a pretty shitty life, being turned into a human weapon whose only purpose is to kill his sister (another human weapon) if she goes rogue, being treated like an outcast by everyone but Kainé, Nier and Weiss once he actually finds friendship, etc.
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