What I Learned About Art from the Nonsense Music of Nier: Replicant

Nier: Replicant is an actually pretty obscure PS3-era action-adventure game, directed by auteur Yoko Tano, whose games are my very favorite kind of media: Desperately, needlessly complicated narratives created by freaks.

One of the best parts of this game is its unique approach to the music. Many of the songs have vocals, which is extremely rare in video games. And that makes sense: You don’t want to have song lyrics pressing against your attention while you’re trying to fight bad guys or rescue the princess or whatever. But the game addresses this design challenge in a fascinating way: They made up a language.

Well, kind of. Though it’s not immediately apparent, the game takes place in an impossibly distant future, and one of the ways they depicted that was in the music. Each song is written to sound like a specific language that has evolved over hundreds of years to the point of being unrecognizable to modern ears. Each song’s lyrics evoke English or Gaelic or French or even Latin, but the lyrics don’t connect to any words in your brain. The result is the sound of a human voice that just flows over your attention the same way an instrument would.

But the reason I’m such a huge dork about this is that it accomplishes so much more than that. It serves a mechanical gameplay function—don’t distract the player from the game—and a narrative function—make the game world feel ineffably alien, a place out of time.

Some enterprising weirdos actually wrote “translations” of the various lyrics, and they are, in my opinion, a triumph. Because the truth is, even though these songs don’t have any human language in them, they are very clearly about something. And I just love the idea that this ‘translator’ found a novel way to engage in an unauthorized collaboration with this group of artists.

As a game, Nier: Replicant more or less demands that kind of collaboration. It does one of those things that I love, which is to rope off a huge amount of its content behind a frankly rude amount of replays and esoteric choices. In order to see everything this game has to offer, you have to beat it—the whole thing—at least four times. This game is not like a Castlevania, which positions itself as your enemy. And it’s not like a Call of Duty, where the game wants to be more like a sport.

This game is your co-worker.

If you will rise to meet it on its own terms, Nier: Replicant might show you what it showed me, which is a story that changed the way I think about all games. All music. All art. All culture. Because Nier: Replicant is a conversation. You can feel things for this game that the creators may not have intended. And the game can feel things for you that you might not have expected. Trust me, that makes way more sense when you see the game’s “True Ending,” but you will have to put in dozens of hours if you want see it.

The good news? The music will never get old.