The First Fifteen Minutes of Nier (2010)
My favourite games vary. If I was asked my immediate answer is usually Final Fantasy VI or Fire Emblem: Awakening. Nier however takes the prize of having my favourite game opening. With the recent church drama relating to a modded version of the Copied City area of Nier: Automata that seemed to have links to the ending of the first game, there is proof of how dedicated fans of the games are to finding hidden secrets. Nier is the perfect game if you are interested in deep diving into symbolism and mystery. The first game was inspired by a joke ending to series creator Yoko Taro’s earlier game, Drakengard, a game which unfortunately due to being a huge Taro and Drakengard-Nier lore fan, I have played in its entirety. All three games in the series.
I first played Nier back in 2019, hunting down a copy after playing Automata and playing it pretty much entirely in a couple of days. I was obsessed; the opening so powerful that I sat speechless. Then, I had no clue the links to the overall lore that the opening has, and what it means once you’ve completed the game. All I knew was it had a sense of unease and tension that I had never felt from a video game opening.
Take my power. Take it and save your daughter. All I ask…is your soul.
The opening track is haunting; a choir of light voices that grows and accumulated, bringing in beating drums and a full orchestra. The scene? Snow. The season? Summer. This struck me more than it probably should have at first. It has that Orwellian ‘clock striking thirteen’ ring to it; the abnormal present beside the normal. The game tells a futuristic science fiction/fantasy story where things outside our realm are possible. Yet it shines with simplicity. No high action or pounding music. Instead, a crumbling city, and a man as out of place as the snow is, in a city where he is now powerless, doomed to fail from the very beginning.
We are brought to a bleak future in Tokyo, and cradled in an abandoned supermarket is our protagonist who for the sake of this article will be referred to as Nier. In my preferred version (the Western and Japanese Xbox 360 2010 release), he is a father. An older man, huge yet vulnerable, hooded and sheltered from the storm that rages outside in a concrete jungle that has been reduced to rubble. Armed with a pipe, he fights. He fights for what is revealed to be his daughter, for her safety in a self reliant fashion despite the temptation of power that haunts him by the voice of the book.
We haven’t been shown his daughter yet at this point, but we know he’s fighting for something as silence follows breaking with an exclamation by Nier himself, appearing to not want to give in to the voices that have just spoken. His determination or perhaps stubbornness that is a main trait of his character arc is set up perfectly within the first few minutes. It may be because I’m a daughter who knows her dad would fight in the same way, but Dad Nier hits me the most. It’s an unconditional love and this man breathes and wakes up everyday in service of his daughter, hoping to find her a cure for her illness.
The music begins again. Then it stops. The scene shifts. We are confronted by eerie moans, the sounds of the ‘monsters’ that seem to disturb the peace. They’re out of place on this alternate Earth, cubes of black and gold shadows not quite resembling people, not quite resembling anything. There’s a fight. They bleed. I always remember finding it curious that the Shades (the enemies) bleed in Nier, as they’re formed seemingly of shadow, coming out only when darkness covers the land unable to survive in the sunlight. I assumed it was a hark back to the extreme violence of Drakengard, with blood splatters common place in its Dynasty Warriors-like gameplay. Yet, it hints at the bigger picture. One that the opening is incredible at concealing at first despite being so obvious once the whole story is revealed to the player hours and hours ahead at the end of the game.
Then, a cough echoes. The cry of a young girl for her dad, despite her reassurance that she is okay. Yonah is introduced as a young girl with wisdom clearly beyond her years due to surviving in a dystopian city, assuring her father, yet with fear in her eyes, unable to stop coughing. Nier warns her not to touch the book and goes off to protect her again. The amount of Shades increase and he can’t cope anymore. Just as it looks like he will face his end, he touches the very book he forbids Yonah from.
This is the moment where the main themes for the entire game shine the most, without you realising at first. He’s doomed to fail, he can’t stop what has already started and once he is finished fighting for Yonah he watches as a strange black text scrawls (pun intended) across her body, her illness worsening and his desperation at its worst. Despite his efforts, he hasn’t been able to stop the inevitable. Then in one of the most random time jumps in gaming, we are met with the same Yonah and Nier over 1000 years into the future from our opening.
You can complicate the beauty of the opening by finding out what everything is. What the ‘snow’ really is, what the Shades really are and why they’re even in an abandoned supermarket to begin with. There are reasons within novellas, CD audio dramas and especially from Drakengard Ending E for everything that happens in the fifteen minutes it takes Nier to begin. But I can’t forget the feeling I had the first time round, wondering what everything meant. Yes, I had to become obsessed to find out the exacts behind it all. The snow isn’t actually snow if I haven’t hinted that. It makes sense to me now but the joy of discovering that and even the thrill of the unknown is what makes this opening a work of art. It sets up a simple story of a father (or brother, I’ll admit the Japanese release and remaster Nier exists) and a girl. They’re lost in a world that was once theirs but is lost to them, controlled and facing the inevitable no matter how hard they try to fight it. For a game that originated from a joke ending featuring a dragon crashing into Tokyo, it achieves a lot in such a short amount of time.
I found a New York Times article from around the games release, talking about the ongoing discussion that has lingered since the dawn of gaming about violence and exposure of certain themes to children through video games. It explains that yes, Nier isn’t a children’s game. Kaine uses as many profanities as she can fit in a sentence, the blood and violence is graphic and once revealed, the story itself has many disturbing elements to it if explored. But it concludes that Nier is an artwork, combining beautiful music, immersive gameplay and entertaining characters to create a rich story, one that inspired me to keep reading into the lore of Yoko Taro’s works. The opening of Nier was enough to not only keep me going for a few hours, but to keep me wanting to finish the game. The story hits the parts of us that make us feel the most human in a story with technically, no humans involved most of the time. Family and what we do when we experience the loss of it. I hope Yoko Taro pens another story of this kind even if it is completely outside of the Nier universe and I look forward to being shocked again by what he has in store.
