In Nier: Replicant, composers Keiichi Okabe, Kakeru Ishihama, Keigo Hoashi, and Takafumi Nishimura have created a possession more than a listening experience. The kind of song where not knowing anything, where just being present in the melody swells the tongue in the back of your mouth as you are inert against Ghibli-esque tears welling against the corners of your eyes. And then there’s Emil’s song, where the serene humanity and instinctive immediacy of choir has never been so effective in a videogame. Again, deep-the kind you feel in your organs as blood moves in supernal ways, while others that innervate and exalt wind round. There is vibration throughout Nier: Replicant’s soundtrack. Deep resonant plainchant ones, vast diaphanous lamentations, or the quavering pierce of a child. Vocals in far flung amalgamation of tongues, the occasional whip-like driving rhythm, massive pounding drum important, but overwhelmed by the quietude of string, and bell, and key. But the effect of being in a bubble in this strange world, born of our own but not, communicated all the better for it. I heard the soundtrack before I put fingers to thumbsticks and actually played it, in a friend’s truck, driving home on 64 East to an apartment I didn’t want to be in. I was hating everything I wanted to listen to, overwhelmed by the noisiness of it all. I tried going through some ideas for this column, but my focus was off. I had a podcast to record on Sunday that I somehow managed to rally for, but then immediately fell apart after. Not knowing why I stood up when I had, looking at my partner from the kitchen and weakly saying “I don’t know.” Other times it was confusion, pain, chronically on the verge of tears but unable to cry. I’d fall into a heap on the same bath sheet on the bedroom floor. I plunged myself into hot epsom salt baths and scalding showers whenever I could bear standing or the pain got too bad. I tried to sleep as best I could, passing out for 20 minutes here and there, sometimes a sustained hour or two. The next two days I felt like I had the worst flu, I couldn’t breathe because the muscles in my chest and abdomen were too tense and exhausted to allow my lungs to fully inflate. Bodies and psyches have limits and I finally had hit mine. Expand that over several hours and I guess my body just desperately needed calories and serotonin? Eventually I just passed out. A panic attack is like doing an untrained, unexpected 100-yard dash. At some point I remember asking for a tray of Oreos and a bag of Tostitos, cramming them into my mouth and dry swallowing them. I tensed every part of my body as taut as a mooring line in a violent storm. Intermittently growl-begging for my partner to just knock me out entirely. I went to take a shower, felt better, then spent 25 minutes convinced I was dying. Then it began to hit in the middle of a phone call with my partner and their mother. This time I spent an hour leading up to it feeling out of sorts. Usually it’s just a non-specific anxiety, a PTSD reflex, a long undercurrent of small dread, or a brief bursting hiccup.
Going into the weekend I had a panic attack.
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