NieR Replicant for PC is an action role playing game with something of a history. A spin-off from Drakengard – one of many and not the last NieR game – was called NieR. NieR, the western game, was sold in Japanese as, respectively: NieR: Replicant, with a young protagonist, and NieR:

Gestalt with an old hero. Replicant has been remade into a Western-friendly game, which goes by the full name of NieR: NieR Replicant ver.

NieR Replicant ver. 1.22474487139… (the number is the square root of 1.5, perhaps to show that it is not the second game in the series, nor a redo of the original, but somewhere between the two?) picks up the story after the fifth ending of the Drakengard, and is temporally located a massive 1,000 years before NieR: Automata, one of the other games in the spin-off series! The protagonists of Drakengard have accidentally introduced magic to this world…

Research and experimentation with that magic has resulted in a number of issues, not least of which is The Black Scrawl which is almost always lethal. When the protagonist’s sister falls prey to the disease, he must set out to find the cure. He is aided in his search by the Grimoire Weiss, a sentient book who has suffered memory loss from trauma at some point in its past. They are joined by various companions as they search for The Sealed Verses, hoping to find a cure.