At first a few of us couldn’t understand what was so “dark and depressing” about it other than what was obvious so he decided to go through the lyrics and break it down as the song played. Meticulously, he made sure to pause the song after every line and explain both the direct and the poetic/metaphorical differences. It was funny because by the time he was done, all of us had these expressions on our faces that was a mix between a cringe and being impressed. Impressed in a “what the fuck, that’s really fuckin’ tragic” way, and the cringe was from how agonizingly dark his interpretations were.

As everyone was gathering their emotions, I was already on Amazon.com clicking order on the game, NieR, for the Playstation 3. It was the most impulsive buy I’ve ever done for a console game.

He told us he never actually played the game and that a close friend of his raved about the game and it’s stellar soundtrack to him back in 2010. He said he knew nothing about the game, not even the basic premise or plot, just that he would listen to the OST on and off for the last few years, and yet he would later end up being super accurate about what happens in the game’s story after we all play through the game a few days later. He readily admits since he’s not good at dissecting “poetic and artsy stuff” that his accuracy was purely a testament to how much of a genius the composer of the soundtrack for NieR really is.

It’s important to note that the rest of the songs in the OST are sung in a made up language. Composer Keiichi Okabe asked the singer, Emi Evans, to come up with her own lyrics in futuristic languages. She tried to imagine what current languages would sound like 1000 years into the future.

Maybe it was whatever we were on, but we all came up with the same basic thoughts after playing the game and revisiting the OST on another gathering one night: That the songs (especially the one titled “Grandma”) told a story or narrative, despite being sung in a made up language. That it expressed the thoughts of one of the characters in the game, yet proposed a dark philosophical paradox concerning the duality of human behavior, all through a made up language using specific syllable and tone usage to evoke these lines of thought via the subconscious.

If you ask me, I don’t think this is too far from the truth of what was actually intended, especially since Ashes of Dreams up there is the same exact way except it’s actually written in English. Many fan theories are out there on the internet explaining that “Ashes of Dreams” is actually a poetic chronological summary of the events leading up to NieR. I’m not good at these things so if I decide to share that breakdown in the future I’ll have some friends share their thoughts on it and I’ll post it here.

The song that really stands out for me, and for everyone else in my tightly knit circle of friends, is “Grandma”. To quote an excerpt from wikipedia:

For “Grandma”, she sang in a French style, trying to “put in as much anguish and melancholy” as possible; she created the song in a single recording, and it is “one of the most memorable songs” that she has sung.