#fio nier reincarnation | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

astralartefact · 10 months

Text

a nier reincarnation tierlist, but why make it easy if you can be annoying and write an analysis of every theme in the gacha game nobody cares about

notes

the following contains far too much analysis for my own good

for many of these you need to also at least know their dark stories to make sense of what i'm writing below the cut (but don't worry i haven't read them all either)

i just wanted a picture for my write up and was too lazy to draw 21 characters so don't take the tierlist too seriously

i call it reinkane for short bc that's its japanese hashtag (i know cane and kane are spelled the same in katakana but as a german i'm more comfortable with ks i guess)

also i know it's Gamer blasphemy to praise a gacha game but i think reincarnation is my favorite nier game im sorry okay i know that's a bad thing to admit but i need you to know i have bad taste

on reincarnation's theme

...and write an analysis of every theme in the gacha...

there is only 1 theme. probably more, but you'll see what i mean

it took me an embarrasing amount of time of going "well, but what is this game really about" (you know, since the other niers are about something too) to realize that it is indeed just about reincarnation - it's just thinking about it in a more abstract/straightforward way.

because the thing that tripped me up was that only about 2 and a half stories are actually about what I thought of as reincarnation (death -> next person) so it can't possibly be about that, right? but if we think about reincarnation as an abstract concept of "something is passed on to somebody else next in line" then basically every single one of these character stories is about that in some sort of way - and at the end of the day isn't having children some form of reincarnation? one of those things where i'm like did everyone else already notice this and its just so basic of an observation that nobody talks about it and i don't want to start the conversation in case it makes me look dumb

the core theme reinkane explores isn't just that though, it's more specifically the loss of agency through this "reincarnation" - it's about parents making decisions for their children, it's about people who don't get to decide for themselves because others already decided for them and in that the writers repeatedly pull from certain 'sub-themes' aside from familial ties:

royalty (basically a more overt version of loss of agency through birth/familial ties - children of reigning royals are born with certain responsibilities they never asked for simply by being children of their parents)

robots (beings created for a purpose by somebody who decides that purpose for them)

heavily enforced societal rules / decisions (rules you have to obey just by being born without any choice not to. it's more of a broader reincarnation in that entire generations make decisions that generations after suffer from instead of 1 person to 1 person)

war (similar to the above, war is basically about somebody forcing their decisions onto somebody else and especially the people who don't even have a say in it have to suffer for it)

and for the most part all of the stories (with a few exceptions) are to some degree about one or more of these. so let's get into some of my favorites:

sarafa

my love. it took a while for me to warm up to her, but once i put it all together i'm just... *chef's kiss* i hope they don't introduce new characters (aside from major ones like mama's true form or something) because she's the perfect book end character to end on.

not only is she a royal character like the very first character (rion), she's also one of the few characters to actually interpret this sort of reincarnation as a good thing!

it's very found family in that the "royal reincarnation" is still very very bad and even worse than rion's for example, but the reincarnation as part of this line of princesses sent to the slaughter also harbors a good thing, since only through their inter-generational sharing of knowledge that is built on all of the princesses that came before sarafa she can finally break the cycle, even if it ends up revealing something far worse.

saryu, hina & yuzuki

if you haven't noticed it yet, the current era of nier (starting after automata) is the "we're ruining our children" era. yorha:dark apocalypse, reinkane, all of voice of cards and even yoko taro's amazarashi (nier anime ed) music video is about it. like literally all of it.

anyways: all three of them (for saryu it's her ex story) are about how their parent's decisions influence their children's lives to a massive degree, in saryu's case it's the absence of her mother that shapes her entire life and with hina & yuzuki it's obvious i think.

hina & yuzuki get bonus points for being the most straightforward "this is how this theme looks in real life" about the theme even if them murdering their parents is obviously heightened for dramatic effect

also i have nothing to say about the hamelin lore except yuzuki turning into a red eye makes him canonically an incel and i won't explain why

priyet

another one where it took me a while to really get what is going on. at first i wasn't too keen on her story since i read her being a monster that wants to hide herself as one of those queer-werewolf allegories that I personally am just not really a fan of. but then i read her hidden stories (because yes. the first four hidden stories for every character are "lore" relevant. somebody is having an aneurysm as we speak foaming at the mouth over "kingdom hearts bullshit") and i like that a lot more even if it's probably more problematic?

basically since most people probably didn't read them bc unlocking them is a bother (if only there was a website for that) the guy who is friends with her and saryu (the one that priyet murders at the end of saryu's story) has a crush on priyet (literal love triangle!!!) and through misunderstandings and bad communication he keeps escalating their relationship until

His whisper played in my ears over and over and over and— "No! I hate this! I HATE it!" Every place he touched me was covered in filth. Every glance caused my hair to stand on end. "I'm gross! I'm dirty! I'm disgusting! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I'm going to be sick!" I took a pair of scissors and jammed them into my bed over and over. By the end of it, my room was a disaster and my throat raw from screaming, but I still felt no better. "Why...?" If things went bad between the two of us, what would happen to me and her? Oh, but I knew. She'd take his side— of course she would. And then we wouldn't be friends anymore.

her hidden story is a surprisingly nuanced look into what makes consent (or rather what doesnt) that i very much appreciate especially coming from japanese writers who are kind of universally handwaved as 'well it's a different culture, they're living behind the moon'

of course that boy is just a child and made a mistake, but society taught him - intentionally or not - to assume that her being nice (because they're friends) must mean she's fair game and her saying no is just her "not being confident" so he just keeps going and it results in her literally becoming a monster that needs to hide her sullied body beneath a table cloth.

and there's also something in there where this interacts so beautifully with her being gay. like it doesn't even occur to the boy that priyet might not even be into boys in general and now everything has gotten so much more complicated for her at a time in her life where everything is already complicated enough as it is, only because a guy decided he likes her and gave her no real choice about it - and all of that because society thought it was a good idea to demand eternal romance bonding at 14 because without that the boy wouldn't feel the pressure to establish a relationship in the first place (there it is, we took the long way back around to the theme of societal rule enforcement)

(side note: i fully understand if some people like this less than queer werewolves especially since it's a really sensitive topic. i personally think it's fine - since all of this game is about the fact that we learn/"reincarnate with" bad things from our predecessors i read priyet's story as that, a situation where all of these terrible values come together to utterly fuck her up - but if it's a no from you i think that's perfectly valid as well.)

also the absolute gall of reinkane to introduce a magic school and make one of the two protags meaningfully gay right when jk pops off

marie & yurie

these two are special because it's just one and zero all over again and i will take any dod3 reference i can get... their chapters are literally called "One Vow" and "Proof of Zero" - and yes that's also a binary code reference but yurie literally doesn't have a right eye how much more overt can it get... well maybe like this:

marie being the "heroic ruler" who wants to save everybody and do right by her people, who sings to spread her magic (of hope), but fails not only because it's not meant to be since the world doesn't allow for happy endings but also at the hands of her ruthless sister... why yes, I also approvingly nod my head at war crimes because they're drakengard references.

the only minus marie gets from me is that all of her concept designs are so much better. but this one looks so similar to hina. i get that her hairstyle looks more like one now but you could at least have given her black hair or something idk

they fit into the general theme that noelle and dimos (and F66) also partially explore, that robots are created with a purpose that benefits us humans - but if these robots are genuinely thinking beings, do we rob them of their agency by pushing our needs onto them? And Yurie only wants Marie's eye because humanity tells her that she "lacks it" - so even when she decides to take it because she knows she lacks something, is that really her agency? Fascinating stuff to think about.

(also the fact that humanity created a robot and took the robot's agency about taking humanities agency)

yudil

he is the bestest boy, he speaks to me as a ffxiv samurai main. i haven't read most his non main stories yet, but i have a feeling it's the one nier story that is at least in part about capitalism??

also it's nice to see that this game at least tries to not only have pale skinned characters. it's probably not a particularly noteworthy depiction of an arabian nights sort of setting, but i guess we have to set the bar low since a certain other insanely lucrative gacha game is planning to introduce a literal prison wasteland as the country all black people come from and a certain other recently released game that adds 2 more lore units to 14 can somehow literally be about the discrimination of minorities and slavery and still decide that the progressive option was to delete all black people from existence (honestly the writers/whoever else is to blame for that should be ashamed. can't call that anything but ludicrously tone-deaf and embarrassing.)

F66x

I'll be real. I appreciate F66x being here. I think it's really cool they commit to her bald head in all of her costumes (despite me loving her dark story 4 hairstyle...) And you can just tell she has it going on. Like Super Mario RPG levels of "I never really played this but I just know this is special and deserves all the praise it gets." But I just. Don't really care that much for some reason??

The thing is I really should!! She has the flowers, she has weird religious shit going on, all of the signs of some relation to the groteskerie queen - but I guess when her and 063y's chapters first came out the connection to dod3 was too obvious, which made it unappealing to me? idk it felt like a red herring (and it honestly still does) so i never really connected to it all that much

argo, 063y and gayle

the dads + gayle are interesting because they actually reverse our viewpoint on reincarnation. most of the other stories are from the reincarnated person's view, but these stories are about the characters that were reincarnated from and how that fucks them over too.

well, okay, argo not really, argo's story isn't about him it's about his daughter, which means technically it is exactly like the other ones, but i include him because the first part still applies (which is btw why he scores relatively high on my list, once you realize his story isn't about him i think that makes it more interesting. does it replicate the heightened value fathers get ascribed to in family dynamics or does it comment on it...?)

but 063y and Gayle also lose their agency because something happens to the person that reincarnated from them. Every version of 063y fights the flowers to protect his son - because that's what fathers do. But is that really agency? Is there really a choice in that? Same thing with Gayle even if it's about her sister instead.

of course that's also where the war theme comes in since it made this lack of choice even happen in the first place - but it's easy to imagine that without a sibling/child (/parent in the case of lars, who is very similar in that regard but from the other side of reincarnation) all of these people could have more easily chosen different and try and get away for example.

kaine's grandma

and this is where i announce that we have a special guest tonight, it's the one and only Kali from NieR Replicant and she's joining the ring with a steel chair!!!

no really though

when i first saw that scene at the end of sun/moon in the trailer for the final episode (the one where hina/yuzuki are trapped in the lunar tear meadow with kaine's shack) i sighed. is this necessary? literal reference for references sake. where does this come from. you just took that one scene people know and stuffed it in here. could you not come up with anything else that you could have referenced? like come on we're all only waiting for accord here.

turns out i was wrong, it's not just a random reference. it perfectly fits the theme :) with good-enough dreaming energy you too can explain away any plot inconsistencies

it took me until i did the scene again to get to the secret ending, but i realized that kaine's relationship to her grandma is one of those "reincarnations" that actually works. and while she does fall into a "revenge for dead relative" thing similar to gayle and lars, the things she learned from kali are the things that end up protecting her. without kali kaine wouldn't have become the person that would end up helping nier and emil.

it's a reincarnation story that never put kaine into a place where simply because she was kali's grand-daughter she was in a worse place than before - and unlike lars or gayle she can decide to go after hook on her own terms because hook isn't a literal war that she doesn't have any meaningful impact on. (i'm losing the thread here i think but i hope you get what i'm talking about)

(and yes i do think that was the point of including that scene since you find the key to the door next to where kali's picture is and also the replicant event quest is about kaine and kali too so it was probably already on their mind)

the rest (sorry season 1)

honorable mention to rikachimalu(fio's jp seiyuu) bc i love her, she's precious and i think it's kind of funny that she's voicing a nier protagonist and as such is one of the most frequent guests on reincarnation livestreams despite being kind of out of place lol (don't have much to say about fio though except that she's also firmly in "reincarnation through royalty" territory while also getting some "enforced societal rules" through the oppressive caste system she finds herself in)

kind of pains me that i don't have a seperate section for noelle bc i do think she's interesting, but i already said everything i wanted to say about her in the sections above

akeha is super straightforward family baggage, i think you can figure her out on your own

levania and his whole thing with his mom (hidden stories) tells me that they probably also fall into the entire theme of agency loss through reincarnation much more than i first thought, but i haven't looked into it enough to make any statement on it

i included mama since we finally get to know more about her in season 3 - which does look like it follows the established theme too btw! for speculations sake i do think it would be very in theme for mama to basically add her own story into the cage to help the fight and now this character mama - as a seperate version of the 'real' mama - has to deal with existing as a reincarnation bound to wander and defend the cage by her real version's choice

you couldn't pay me to care about rion and dimos, it's not happening and trust me i tried. it's an aesthetic thing, i liked rion's original design so much that i assumed he would lean into a different aesthetic and now all of his other outfits were disappointments and i don't like him. yes i do judge books by their cover too

finale

i know reinkane gets a bad rep bc it's a gacha game that god forbid expects you to play it and while i do think the gameplay is a dumb reason to hate it since some people - especially japanese players apparently - just love this style of game, i also won't be the person to tell you to play a gacha game.

it is some level of commitment to successfully free-to-play it and especially if you're prone to spending money on gachas please just stay away from it and check out videos or the stories on nierrein.guide. while they are still giving out lots of stuff every so often they also have in recent times added more and more stuff to push you to spend money (before awakening stones there was no reason to re-pull characters since you could upgrade the re-pull stuff with event items and before the character elements you also didn't need that many characters)

and while i can wish all i want that it wasn't a gacha game, at least with yoko taro i know that this thing i love wouldn't exist if it wasn't a gacha game. (no really the people who 'wish it wasn't a gacha game' need to realize that he wouldn't have made anything remotely resembling this if he wasn't told to make a gacha game. you can still wish it! but him being forced to make games and making the best of it is yoko taros whole thing)

also i know we attribute all of the nier stuff to just yoko taro as short hand - and he definitely deserves punishment for what he has done - but this is once more an invitation to also cuRSE YUKI WADA'S NAME!!! HE DID SUN MOON STORY AND VoC FORSAKEN MAIDEN TO ME!!! ALSO GIVE ME ANOGG YORHA DARK APOCALYPSE AS A REINKANE CHARACTER SHE FOLLOWS THE THEME PERFEC-----

#nier reincarnation #nier #yoko taro #video game analysis #...of a gacha game #this man makes me do insane things #don't worry though they won't get a cent out of me #except for merch i own a mama plush and the fio nendo but that's different!!!!

11 notes · View notes