There’s a curious sort of amnesia that afflicts the players of Yoko Taro’s Nier series. It’s almost like one of those bizarre mystical diseases that are always threatening to destroy the games’ protagonists, and the teetering-on-the-edge-of-apocalypse worlds in which they live: Like magic, the moment you look away, the most annoying, frustrating, or boring parts of Nier’s designs always seem to fade from memory. What’s left behind, inevitably, are the highs, the moments of transcendent cleverness, narrative impact, or outright beautiful cruelty that writer and director Taro traffics in at his best. The phenomenon is pronounced enough that it feels shamefully petty, for instance, to note that 2017’s