NieR Replicant (Part 2: Themes of Violence and Sacrifice)
In part 1, I examined the doubled narrative form of NieR and suggested that it makes sense to consider the significance of this form as a negotiation of a contemporary desire for stories that exist between myth (timeless, cyclical, and essential) and history (chronological, linear, and causal). In part 2, I wish to deal more directly with some of the themes that began to emerge in my overview of the game’s story in part 1. In my opinion, NieR is notable in the context of contemporary AAA games (big budget games published by one of the industries major publishers) because of it’s concern with the meanings of human behavior. In particular, NieR explores forms of behavior that are commonplace in gaming, but are not often interrogated or placed at the center of gaming narratives. Chief among it’s concerns are the boundaries between the self and other, notably in terms of questions of the distinction between selfish and selfless behaviors. Furthermore, violence and violent impulses are held up and acknowledged as a central aspect of the human character, something that is complex and meaningful and deserving of more careful consideration than what it usually receives in video games, especially given its predominance as a mode of interaction across a wide range of genres.
Starting with the latter, violence in video games is typically treated in one of two ways. Typically it is adopted and embraced as the primary mode of interaction in many games due to it’s exhilarating and demanding forms. In these games, little attention is typically given to the reasons behind engaging in violent behavior or the consequences of such actions. External discourses often celebrate these games as an appropriate release for violent and aggressive impulses that allow the related urges to be sublimated in daily life. Alternatively, critics argue that frequent exposure to violence in these games, especially among children, can lead to an increase in the prevalence of aggressive impulses and a narrowing comprehension of the range of possibilities through which people can interact with others and resolve our conflicts with them.
Violence in video games is typically not scrutinized by the games themselves. It is a means to an end, a way to achieving an engaging interactive experience that emphasizes skill, strategy, and dexterity. However, the alternative trend has been to engage with the critique of violence in video games outlined above in order to tell stories about characters whose violent impulses detract from their ability to function as empathetic, rational, well rounded human beings as well as to present the possibility of desirable alternatives. Two good examples of this sort of game that are roughly contemporary with NieR are the critical darlings Spec Ops: The Line and Undertale.
NieR takes a slightly different tact. Although it too features characters who succumb to violent impulses and are limited and even potentially damaged by the effect of engaging in such behavior, rather than condemn the behavior and the characters who perform it or suggest and provide the opportunity for alternatives, NieR considers violence as a necessary and even essential aspect of a cyclical pattern of behavior that in some ways defines for the game what it means to be human. In other words, the game neither celebrates nor criticizes violence, but instead provides a compelling framework for understanding it that allows us to consider the significance of violence in human nature and contemporary history, as well as in our own behaviors as players of violent video games.
The role that violence plays in NieR is initially one connected to a collectivities prospects for survival. The first creature that the player kills in the game are sheep who wander the plains just north of the protagonist’s village. Killing for food quickly becomes killing for protection as the player is informed of an attack by Shades on a group of human workers attempting to rebuild a bridge that connects several human settlements to the player’s village. From there, killing gradually shifts from something protective and retaliatory to something proactive, capable of fostering greater powers for the protagonist. Once the player has teamed up with Grimoire Weiss and the idea that Shades contain within them “sealed verses”, capable of augmenting the players magical powers and brining an end to the disease that plagues his people, the Shades shift in significance from a menace to resource that must be culled in order to be harvested. The old excuse about needing to protect and/or avenge people still presents itself at different moments of the game, but the player hardly needs a reason to kill. Their violence becomes indiscriminately targeted towards an entire population of creatures, even those that seem to serve no immediate threat and whose elimination fosters the completion of no immediate goal. This process of gradual abstraction where killing becomes detached from more immediate causes and broadly justified by a totalizing mission is a pattern that can be found throughout history, but can immediately and obviously connected with the war on terrorism that Western countries have been waging for the last quarter century.
Along with this evolving rationale for enacting it, violence in NieR also can be connected with a general ignorance and obliviousness to the world one lives in. Throughout the game, strange and unique situations that range from the seemingly evolving intelligence of the shades to the existence of strange and difficult to explain locales and phenomena are hand-waved away by the protagonist in favor of maintaining focus on the more immediately demanding and gratifying violent spectacles in which they are engaged. Even towards the game’s conclusion when information about the circumstances of their world and the consequences of their actions are being directly and forcefully explained to them, the protagonists ignore and block out this information by focusing on the violent acts at hand. There is here a debate about means and ends that can be had such that it could be argued that a focus on the violent means by the characters really reflects their total commitment to their end goals. which are noble. However, it is equally arguable, and in my opinion more convincing given the ways the protagonist’s commitment to their violent actions are demonstrated to be beyond reflection such that even if new information arose that challenged their thinking in terms of how best to reach their goals, they would continue to pursue their violent course because it is the means and not the ends to which they are more committed.
This idea of violence as something so directly engaging that in precludes the accumulation and processing of new knowledge is an interesting one and something that relates back to part one’s discussion of the relationship between myth and history. Violence in NieR seems to have the effect of perpetuating the mythical cycle of extinction and rebirth precisely because it precludes the protagonists becoming aware of the historical context in which they are acting. The protagonist refuses to grasp their role in wiping out a previous form of humanity and it is because they never gain this knowledge about the historical significance of their actions that they are able to carry them out. Violence is, as has often been stated in other contexts, something of a cyclical phenomenon, with patterns of action and retribution that continue in perpetuity across history. However, instead of suggesting that violent atrocities have stood in the way of history, or set society back, it might be more effective to say that violent actions keep people involved at a mythical level of understanding and involvement with the world around them and prevent them from entering into a historical one. Emerging from this, the question that NieR seems to beg is whether or not this mythical level of acting is immoral or not.
The events of NieR are certainly tragic. They concern the extinction of a form of humanity, carried out but another form of humanity that lacks the knowledge of the full significance of their actions. However, the game also seems to suggest that there is little room for alternatives as it relates to this matter. There is no possibility for coexistence between Gestalts and Replicants. Either the Gestalts themselves share this violent predisposition and pose an immediate and unavoidable threat to the Replicants, or else they are as committed to their own survival the the replicants are and rely parasitically on the Replicants to achieve it. This is, of course, most pronounced in the case of the Shadow Lord, who, like the protagonist, will do whatever it takes to save his sister, even if it means committing atrocities against another intelligent form of humanity. Since the parasitism of the Gestalts ultimately leads to madness and the destruction of the intelligence of both Gestalt and Replicant, the elimination of the Gestalt threat is a necessity for intelligent life’s continued survival. While one can empathize with the Gestalt, there is no denying within the system that the game has established, they are, so to speak, on the wrong side of history, which is to say that their existence must come to end for humanity itself to continue. However, their fundamental sameness to the Replicants in terms of their right to be considered human is undeniable. It is this sameness, this inability to distinguish between the moral and human rights of either side that causes a major problem for humanity’s continued existence.
This is where the mythically oriented violent disposition of the protagonist becomes important. The violent outlook is capable of creating dichotomies where none exist, of disrupting markers of commonality and sewing division and discord. While these aspects of violence are rarely celebrated (or worth celebrating) they are capable of allowing life to orient itself by the cyclical form as opposed to the stable form of history. They preclude the definition of the human based on intelligence and consciousness and and preclude rational and emotional connections with others which might break the cycle and establish the alternative trajectories of history. The cycle is a sort of trap or prison, but it is also something that inevitably continues and this may hit closer to the essence of what life actually is than the many ways that historical consciousness allows us to envision life as something that evolves and makes progress, or, alternatively, collapses and comes to an end.
It is in this sense that the game does not render a traditional moral judgment on the actions of its protagonists, what it offers, or at least tries to offer, is an alternative orientation (that of cycle and myth) to view these actions from so as to make sense of them. Moral judgment does not exist in the same way within myth since the cycle is fixed and eternal and thus morality has no weight as a means to determine the direction in which human life should proceed or the means by which it may be judged. However, as stated in part one, the game does not wholly commit itself to myth, nor is the mythical outlook able to supersede the historical. Even if the protagonists fail to grasp the historical weight of their actions, the player has the opportunity to come much closer to doing so. They are torn between two poles, the desire to play the game and the desire to make sense of the story and these poles are roughly aligned with the mythical and the historical respectively.
Playing the game, participating in the thrill of combat, becomes something that supersedes the story world in many games, including NieR. Because combat in games is essentially mechanical, which is to say that it is defined and governed by the rules of an abstract system, it is endlessly repeatable and detachable from its context. It is always possible for the player to detach themselves from the world in which the action takes place and to focus on the combat. NieR itself explores and encourages this relation by encouraging multiple playthroughs in which the details of the story, since they have already become familiar, recede into the background, while the more abstract stimulation of the mechanically challenging combat becomes the focus. However, what is intriguing here is the way that NieR, in a seemingly contradictory manner, ties this mythical and cyclical engagement to gameplay systems into a continued desire for historical understanding. Many games now offer what is commonly known as New Game +, which is basically a mode in which the player can replay the game that they have already completed with the narrative remaining entirely unchaged but allowing them to keep their character/abilities/items/etc. and be faced with more difficult gameplay challenges. New Game + modes obviously place almost exclusive focus on the player’s desire to continue to “play the game”, pushing the story to the background as something that has already been completed and fully experience. However, NieR promises the player small and subtle, yet revealing and significant differences to the narrative upon subsequent playthroughs. As such, in the instances where systems would appear to be the major driver of the experience, NieR doubles down on the desire for story in order to challenge the straightforwardness of this progression towards gameplay focused abstraction.
NieR continues to hold out the prospect of more of the narrative to the players, even after the characters involved and their fates have largely been settled. It conveys the protagonists own imprisonment in the mythical cycle but also delivers to the player the promise of narrative progression. What seems to be the case is that ultimately the pull that NieR makes on the player is undecidable. Instead of narrative receding in the face gameplay as the primary motivating desire upon subsequent playthroughs, it becomes difficult to say at which level the player’s desire is more firmly rooted. NieR offers the possibilty to see its events cyclically by replaying it at the same time that it promises the ability to break that cycle by revealing new aspects of the story. Ultimately, NieR doesn’t restrict its player to either commitment, it asks them to move between the two, to experience the game and its events in both ways, not to judge which is the more proper way to view the game, but rather to suggest that the game is a novel form that allows for the experience and awareness of both.
This seems to me to be one of NieR’s major contentions about video games: that they offer something like an evolution in terms of the way we understand the world as well as tell and experience stories because they lend themselves to this simultaneous mythical and historical engagement with the world in a way that other forms do not. They allow these two forms of desire to coexist without extinguishing one or the other. The player, in the end, does not fully have the means to render a historical-moral judgment on the protagonist because despite their efforts they do not have the full picture. The mythical cycle of the game is incomplete and yet compelling in its form so as to justify itself and its continued existence (similar to the way human life is able to justify its continued existence despite the moral obstacles placed in its way by the narrative predicament NieR poses). However, neither does the protagonist have the ability to fully embrace the myth. There is too much historical and moral weight to knowledge they have accumulated while playing the game to feel that the protagonist and their role in the cycle of extinction and survival can be identified with and accepted. The player finds themselves feeling both inside and outside of this cycle, both related to and estranged from the characters they control. This is a unique position in relation to a story such as this and one that is not entirely satisfying. It presents the player with gaps and contradictions in their own experience as well as in the desires upon which said experience is structured.
If the mythical cycle is a prison that allows life to continue but locks it into an inevitably limited, cyclical awareness of its relation to the world and the historical offers lines of flight that may lead towards shared progress, but are just as likely to lead towards total ruin, NieR puts forward the need for an alternative. This alternative is the perspective of the player, at once within the world and out of it, at once able to know and judge as well as too limited in scope to make such knowledge and judgments definitive. In short, this is a means of experiencing and understanding the world that puts a premium on more immediate involvement in an experience as opposed to more detached contemplation of it, but also wants to include means of contextualizing that experience that are emotionally challenging and thought provoking without being overly moralizing or didactic. As such, what this alternative perspective seems opposed to is the rigidity of uncompromising moral and historical lenses while simultaneously rejecting the atomization and detachment of the cyclical over-investment in direct action (figured predominantly through the figure of violence). It imagines the game as a system for negotiating these two poles and thus for knowing the world differently.
NieR might, in this sense, be seen as functioning dialectically, producing a new means for understanding the world out of a clash between opposed alternatives. In my view, it provides an elegant view of stakes against with humanity threatens to exhaust itself. It offers something fluid yet thought provoking and it leaves us with a sense of these characters and their world that demands more of us in terms of our ability to make sense of it. If neither the mythical outlook nor the historical one can give us a satisfying account of the meaning of NieR, we are spurred to look instead at how we experience the push and pull between these two perspectives in our own experience. This reflexive knowledge that games can create through juxtaposing their systems and narratives with the player’s desires and experiences is, in my view, crucial to getting people to reflect on meaning differently. Whether or not it represents that transcendence necessary for life to mean something more than an a cycle or a linear progression remains unanswered. However, the way it involves the individual and their own negotiation of experience and what can be known about it is important to me, because it involves a fundamentally questioning of how we make sense of things. I hope that it engages people in a way that can’t be resolved by resource to rote ideologies or abstracted patterns of involvement, but instead makes these two domains relative to each other, leaving the player with need to sort through their own sense of how to make these domains most compellingly work together. For myself, as it relates to NieR, this means acknowledging something in my own desire for knowledge of causality that keeps me involved in the mythical cycles of violence that the game depicts. There is something in my experience therefore that cannot be reduced to either one or the other.
We can establish a contrast between the way violent impulses and violent behavior function for the protagonists of NieR and the way they function for players of the game. Of course, there are many who do play games with the mentality displayed by the protagonists. They play games for the action, they skip cutscenes, they tune out dialogue, they are bored by anything resembling downtime. For people with this approach, NieR is a game whose story recedes into the background. Important dialogue is often conveyed during fights and thus is easy to ignore. Important portions of the dialogue can even be missed entirely if the player completes segments of fights too quickly, something that in my experience occurred fairly often unless I actively held back. In the second playthrough there are totally new segments of dialogue spoken by the boss-shades that the player fights, but they are not spoken in english (or whatever language the player is playing the game in) and must be read via subtitles, something that is difficult and requires conscious effort during a frenetic fight scene. For the player who is keen to focus on the action NieR makes it easy, but for the player who has an interest in the story, these devices create the kind of dissonance that symbolize the conflict between these two desires through setting the players experience of both at odds with each other.
As such, for the player with some sort of desire to understand the narrative, violent action in NieR becomes something like an impediment to receiving the story. An intense focus on the gameplay, something most action games demand, is actively at odds with the player’s experience of the story. Even player’s like myself who do care about the story and desire to understand it may find themselves slipping habitually into preoccupation with the action and only once it is too late realized that they have missed something that they wanted to see or hear regarding the story. This is highly characteristic of a common vein of difference in video games between the habitual nature of gameplay, particularly fast-pace visceral action oriented gameplay, and the unexpected interruptions of story that seek to command the player’s attention with their difference from the usual experience of the game. It also symbolically stands in for the way certain actions, notably those violent in nature, can stand in the way of our ability to understand the wider context of our actions, as I have already discussed above.
However, in NieR, as in most action games with prominent narrative components, violence is not only an distraction from the story, it is also the only means to access it. In a meaningful contradiction, the player forced to perform the violent actions of the gameplay in order to reveal further aspects of the story. Violence is thus depicted as not only as consuming and narrowing the player’s focus, but also as opening up and revealing more and more about the world. Players do not just commit violent acts in games because they enjoy them, although they may, violence is a means to progression in the overall narrative structure of many games, including NieR. It takes the characters to new places, it introduces them to new people and creatures, and it leads to many other moments of revelation, even as it also actively threatens to obscure and destroy what it potentially reveals. The player is perhaps more aware of this double-edged nature of violence than the game’s protagonists are, especially if they have a desire to understand the world of the game, which the characters who live in that world do not. This struggle between knowing what violent actions are capable of revealing and also understanding how they threaten to destroy or deform those revelations is a major characteristic of the experience of playing NieR. It is an uneasy knowledge that the player may sometimes actively suppress in order to feed their desire for kinetic stimulation while at other times it will erupt and confront them with the limitations of their means of interacting with this world.
Ultimately, if one way to read the gaps and ellipses in NieR’s narrative is to see it as a negotiation between different knowledge systems and are conflicting desires to understand the world, another way to read them is as a critique of our limited means of access to understanding that our means of interacting with that world provide. If we had some other means of interacting with this world we might be able to come to a more satisfying means of understanding it. However, for whatever reason, whether it is because of the limitations of our protagonists or because of the limitations of the commercial video game marketplace that allows this game to exist in the first place, we are left with a story filled with gaps and ellipses because the violent action takes precedence and determines the form of the former. This is a more critical and moralizing interpretation of the role of video game violence, but it is certainly a valid one.
Another similar and yet different interpretation of these same points would claim violence as necessary and integral, not just to this game and these characters worldviews, but to human life in general. It would claim violence as something properly human, something essential to our will to survive and protect our sense of self. As such, the game would be less about the limitations of the protagonist’s or the gamer’s perspective on the game world, and more about the limitations of humanity’s perspective on the world in general. Returning to the points above we could see these limitation as an impediment to a more complete form of historical knowledge that we desire, or we might also see them as the reason we become locked into a cyclical form of knowledge that is always relative to our position in a repeated cycle. Or, as I have more affirmatively suggested above, we may take these limitations as affordances and see them as the tools that we are capable of working with, and from them attempt to devise more satisfying and productive means of understanding the world that do not depend on an outright rejection of the violent means by which we as human beings often propel ourselves forward.
In either case, this is a much more complex and ambivalent take on violence than what we are often granted by other video games, one that forces us to reckon with the integral place of violence in our lives and its role in enacting our desires, even as we recognize how it warps and limits us and the world around us.
The other aspect of NieR worth examining is the question of selfishness and sacrifice. Many video games over the years have purported to have moral choice systems. These often boil down to a rudimentary binary where the player is either able to act selfishly or selflessly and see some sort of impact based on their choices in the events of the story and in changes to the world around them. This trend reached its zenith with the 360/PS3 console generation and was typified by the likes of Mass Effect, Bioshock, and Infamous. Although many classic CRPG’s such as the Fallout series featured a wider range of more nuanced moral choices, the distillation of this concept in these more commercially prominent series has served in large part to define how we think about moral choice, for better or for worse, in contemporary video games. Since many of these games (as well as a plurality of games in general) grant players great and substantial powers in the context of their worlds, games are often dealing with fundamental questions about heroism and its possibility. They often treat on the old theme from Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility”, and spur the players to think more about the impact that their desire can have on the world around them.
NieR is an interesting game because it bucks many of the presiding trends in video games related to exploring what effects a powerful, potentially heroic character can have on their world. Generally, It doesn’t give the player choices about their actions. The positive or negative effects that the protagonist’s actions have on those around them, such as the decimation of the Aerie or the eventual destruction of Project Gestalt itself are ultimately outside of the players control, part of an escalating cycle of power-accumulation and violence spurred on by the looming threat of extinction for Gestalts and Replicants alike. The player is swept up in a current of events occurring in the world of NieR, acting before they fully understand the implications of their situation, forced to serve as the catalyst in terrible cycle of death and rebirth, an integral part of an enormous machine whose function is beyond their control. In this way, the protagonist’s involvement in the story of NieR is something like an allegory for the nature of the player’s involvement across the medium of video games. Although player’s of video games often do have a great degree of control as it relates to their interaction with gameplay systems, the same cannot be said about the stories and worlds within which such systems are contextualized. Typically moral choice systems in games work to combat or obscure the sense in which the player’s role in determining the story of a video game is pre-determined and their agency circumscribed. NieR takes the opposite track, reveling in making the player aware of the way that the fate of the world of NieR is almost entirely outside their control, regardless of their intentions for it.
While the mandatory missions at the center of NieR’s story always play out the same way, where the player is given more agency to shape the events of the game’s story is in relation to the game’s side quests. Unlike the main objectives that must be fulfilled for the story to progress, side quests in NieR are entirely optional. (The only exception is that if the player wishes to reach endings D and E there are certain side quests that they must complete in order to collect all the in-game weapons. Endings D and E represent the biggest part of the game’s story where the player does have some degree of agency. I will discuss them in more detail later in this piece.) The greatest sense in which the player has agency has to do with whether or not they are interested in taking part in these side quests to begin with. Since they all tend to revolve around the player taking on errands and requests from people who would be at greater risk from the dangers of the outside world than the protagonist would be, these side quests are an important area where the themes of selflessness/selfishness and heroism are explored.
In RPGs, side quests will range in terms of their significance to the larger themes and stories of the games. Often they can be acknowledged as forms of mindless busywork, intended to allow the player a structured means to gain power and resources, or else a way to pad out the game’s content and serve as an interlude between the more eventful mandatory missions. Other games use side-quests to tell relatively robust stand alone stories that contribute to the player’s overall sense of the world and develop the game’s various themes. NieR falls somewhere between these two poles. In NieR, side quests vary in terms of their subject matter, but are generally relatively mundane in terms of the tasks involved. They often revolve around revisiting previously explored areas to kill a dangerous shade or to track down some missing or needed item for a given NPC. However, they are typically much more interesting in terms of how they contribute to the player’s sense of the game’s world and its central themes. While the tasks themselves are typically quotidian, their meaning often deepens and evolves upon reflection. All contain at least a few extended conversations with the quest giver and usually also include some dialogue between the protagonist and Grimoire Weiss. It is in these instances of dialogue in which the characters are able to reflect on and consider the significance of their actions before and after the fact that surprising and unforeseen aspects of them typically become apparent.
There is something like a general pattern that the side quests in NieR follow that I would summarize as the following: The protagonist receives a fairly innocuous request, Grimoire Weiss comments on the protagonists tendency to involve themselves in the problems of others, despite them having their own more pressing concerns, the task is completed, but something begins to feel off about the whole thing, and, finally, the player returns to the quest giver where they are forced to confront the reality that some other purpose was being served by the protagonist’s actions then the one they thought they would be fulfilling. The general tone of these quests can range from the silly to the serious. In one, for instance, the player helps a family to track down their missing son, only in the end for it to be revealed that said family was a family of criminals and that the son who you tracked down and forced to return home was attempting to flee a life of crime. This ends up feeling strange and slightly comical, a sort of “whoops, perhaps we should have been more careful about what we were getting ourselves involved in,” moment. In another, things become much more serious, when upon delivering letters to an old woman who lives in a lighthouse at edge of the village of Seafront it is revealed that the letters that arrive from the woman’s lover living overseas are an elaborate multi-generational ruse devised by the villagers to protect the woman from learning that her lover is dead and to ensure that she continues to wait in Seafront and continue to operate the lighthouse to the benefit of the entire community. At the conclusion of the quest, the player is given the opportunity to tell the old woman the truth about these letters and the fate of her lover or to continue to perpetuate the lie.
Apart from the choice about whether or not to engage with these side quests in the first place, these sorts of unexpectedly harrowing decisions about whether or not to tell someone the truth about the sinister, deceptive, and/or tragic circumstances of their life are the other major form of agency that the player has in the side quests that they do not have in the main quest. Their decisions ultimately do not substantially change the events of the game or the world around them. Sometimes they lead to the player receiving one reward or another, but more often than not, their only impact is in terms of how the NPCs involved understand the significance of their lives, as well as how the player views the protagonists responsibility to these characters. The player may choose to lie and keep the truth of a situation from an unwitting NPC or they may choose to tell them the truth. However, even in the latter context, the NPCs always reach an acceptance of this revelation that allows them to keep living their lives be at peace with the tragic or unexpected circumstances that have affected them. While the player may have feeling that they express through their choices in these moments about whether these NPCs are better off knowing the truth or remaining blissfully ignorant, ultimately their choices do nothing to alter the fates of the characters involved, nor their own. Telling the NPCs the truth doesn’t do anything to make the player more able to face the truth of their own situation. Neither does choosing to keep the truth from them cause the player to look away from the reality of the circumstances they are in.
Ultimately, the characters in NieR are compelled to live their lives, to fulfill their roles in their societies, whether or not they are given the opportunity by the player to come to terms with the truth. The player may agonize, feeling the weight of the choices that are put in front of them and their responsibility to these NPCs, but ultimately the player and their choices don’t have the ability to change the lives of these characters, for better or for worse. The player may have the desire to act selflessly, to behave heroically, or else they may make choices out of self-interest that best serve themselves. However, despite having the power to be in this position where the player has the ability to imagine themselves as a hero, in truth, if heroism and selflessness are about having the power to make sacrifices that improve the lives of others, then the player is ultimately unable to live up this standard. In this sense, we can see NieR as being about how a powerful and potentially heroic figure remains relatively powerless in the face of larger and more mysterious forces that they fail understand, let alone control, or, alternatively, only understand too late when the opportunity to make a decision that might positively or negatively affect the lives of those around them has already passed.
This “too little” or “too late” sense of heroism is ever-present in NieR and goes a long way towards contributing to the general aesthetic of the game. It is a markedly different experience of having power and aspiring towards heroism than the ones that are typically offered by other video games. It conveys a sense in which having power is not the same as having agency, but instead contributes to a more acute sense of ones limitations. NieR is a game about being trapped in a cycle, about the inevitability of tragic events, and about a desperate desire to resist those things that must remain largely thwarted. What it means to try to act heroically in this context serves as a powerful and enlightening corrective to the sense of heroism put forward by other games and media.
We can explore this sense of heroism in more detail at this point by refocusing on the main narrative of NieR. As previously mentioned, the player has little to no agency as it relates to shaping the events of the larger story. However, the game’s plot deals directly with themes of heroism and sacrifice, as well as their limitations. At the center of the narrative is the protagonist and a few different sets of relationships. Chief among these are the relationship between the protagonist and his sister Yonnah, the relationship between the protagonist and his companions, Kainé and Emil, and finally the protagonist and his relationship with his allies and enemies, notably the games many quest givers.
The protagonists relationship with Yonnah in particular poses interesting questions about heroism, particularly as it relates to the distinction between selfishness and selflessness. A recurrent motif throughout the game, especially the game’s first half, is the idea that acting to protect/cure/save Yonnah means becoming more distant from her. The sense that Yonnah is trapped and imprisoned, even in the game’s first half when she is in the protagonist’s village, not yet captured by the Shadow Lord, is the most prominent aspect of her character in the game. She is imprisoned by her failing body as much as she is by external forces. In the beginning of the game, we see the protagonist taking on minor tasks in service of the villagers, culling sheep, fighting shades, but these do not take the protagonist very far away from Yonnah. However, after Yonnah’s “escape attempt” where she searches in vain for a lunar tear before being captured, the player teams up with Grimoire Weiss, gaining substantially more power and beginning to take on greater responsibility. The quest for greater power that will ostensibly save Yonnah also takes him further and further away from her. This is primarily conveyed through the game’s loading screens which depict excerpts from Yonnah’s diary. These generally convey the sense that Yonnah is lonely, that she misses her brother, and that she wishes she could be more involved with the exciting life that he is living and meet the new companions that he has teamed up with.
The player may begin to feel. as I did, what Yonnah really needs is her brother’s companionship and that his tireless efforts to save her, which extend towards his becoming something like the hero of the land, may ultimately be more about his needs than about hers. It is not at all clear the plan to collect the sealed verses will work. The game is careful to indicate that the ancient song that gives rise to this plan is itself imprecise and not necessarily reliable. Still, the protagonist leaps to the conclusion that murdering shades in service of accumulating power is the right thing to do, precisely, I feel, because he cannot stand the feeling of being trapped and powerless, the same feeling that Yonnah inevitably has to live with. The protagonist has the power to resist this feeling, but in so doing he separates himself from his sister.
At the game’s conclusion, the protagonist successfully slays the Shadow Lord and brings Yonnah back home. The initial A end provides a sense of peace as well as a return to innocence, with the two symbolically reverting to their childhood forms. While this may seem to suggest that, in the end, the protagonist’s actions were justified and that now, with the dark threat eliminated, the two will live happily ever after, this ending is tinged with bitterness. This is because of the fate of the protagonists companions, who are either dead or left behind at the game’s conclusion as well as because of the the fate of the world, which the protagonist willfully ignores in his relentless desire to save his sister. We are left with a sense that by growing more powerful and expanding his horizons outwards, the protagonist had assumed responsibilities to people other than just his sister. In this light, the idyllic return home to a time of innocence reads like another selfish attempt to escape the burdens of caring for the sick and damaged, rather than a culminating reward for the protagonist’s selfless heroism. Saving his sister was ultimately possible because of the many sacrifices the protagonist made with an aim towards selfless devotion, but it is difficult if not impossible to separate these actions from their selfish aspects.
The relationship between the protagonist and his sister Yonnah in which the protagonist neglects her in order to try to save her and distance himself from her and the sense of imprisonment that she represents can be considered as the paradigmatic instance of a dynamic in which selfless and selfish actions are hopelessly intertwined, we can see this dynamic repeated in the relationship between the protagonist and his world. A consequence of the protagonists newfound powers are his ability to travel across his homeland and come to a greater understanding of the problems of others and their relations to his own. Part of the heroes journey is a gradual realization that the world is bigger than oneself and a subsequent willingness to accept responsibility for the problems of others. The protagonists journey in this regard is one of stunted growth. His continued focus on his sister’s problems ultimately lead him towards narrow solutions to the problems of others that benefit him and his smaller worldview. He never truly reaches an awareness of the most important problems of his world, not because he is unable to comprehend them, but because he is unwilling to.
Despite an abundance of evidence that the shades that he fights are intelligent and close to human, the protagonist never considers altering course away from his genocidal campaign of violence. He does not search for more nuanced solutions to the problems that other communities have with shades. As the game progresses, the player is able to see more and more clearly that the shades he’s fighting are not villainous, but rather misunderstood, but the protagonist never comes close to making these same revelations. In the most extreme case, that of the Aerie, the protagonist, although not entirely of his own volition, resorts to annihilating that village in order to defeat a powerful shade. This unconcern with the fate of other living beings speaks to the protagonist singlemindedness as it relates to the growth of his power, a single-mindedness that leads to his greater failures to comprehend his responsibility to the world around him.
This reaches a culmination in the game’s conclusion when the protagonist refuses to understand the information about Project Gestalt that Devola and Popola supply him with. It is not that he accepts what they tell him, that he is essentially committing genocide against the previous iteration of the human race, and decides that there is no turning back at this point. Instead, he simply stubbornly refuses to listen to and consider the meaning of any of it. In the end, it is Yonnah, and more specifically the Gestalt version of Yonnah, that grasps the full truth of the situation that their world has found itself in. It is in her sacrifice of her own life that we see what it means to come to terms with a responsibility to the world around her and to humanity in general. It is only in the depths of her confinement, rather than in the liberatory potential of the power possessed by both the protagonist and the Shadow Lord, that she finds the capacity to acknowledge the reality of the world around her and to truly make a heroic sacrifice.
At the game’s initial conclusion in ending A, despite its idyllic semblance, the ending is tragic because the protagonist’s failure is so pronounced. He has failed to understand anything, and this failure is perhaps most prominently symbolized in the moment where he holds out his hand to the Gestalt Yonnah who procedes to walk right by him. It is in this light that we can see that something in his potential journey towards heroism has failed. However, it is not only in this light. The protagonist can also be seen to fail in his journey in terms of his ability to help and understand his companions. Kainé and Emil are both characters who have their own tremendously impactful struggles and the protagonist’s ultimate ignorance towards them is another black mark that signals his failure to arrive at consciousness of his own situation.
(Mention the episode where Devola and Popola ban Kainé and Emil)
In a sense, NieR is about how a powerful and potentially heroic figure remains relatively powerless in the face of larger and more mysterious forces that they cannot understand, let alone control.
NieR is also a meditation on the difficulty of separating selfless and selfish actions and the ways that intending to change things for others inevitably ends up being about changing one’s own awareness and understanding of themselves. As previously stated, rather than changing the lives of the other characters or the world around them, the players attempts to be a hero only really have an effect on themselves. They aren't able to change the course of the world for worse or for better, but they are able to shape how the player knows and feels about the world. This leads to a different sense of what heroism means in the context of humanity and suggests that the selfish and selfless dichotomies that underly so many of our stories about power and how it ought or ought not to be used are reductive and fail to account for the ways that having power is itself a perspective on the world.
The premise that one can be good or bad, selfless or selfish, with the use of power, suggests that they can have a worldview that they bring with them into their acquisition of power that remains intact. It suggests that what will change when a person becomes powerful is everything around that person, rather than that person themselves. But this focus on selfishness and selflessness obscures the degree to which power is essentially a change in ones own worldview and that how one uses their power is ultimately something that has consequences for the self, not something that changes the world. Power is thus far less liberating than it is often imagined to be and primarily serves as challenge to the individuals sense of themselves, often in a way that brings them closer to their limitation as an ordinary human being, rather than something that allows them to transcend them.
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