The Strange Works of Taro Yoko E-Book

Nicolas Turcev

• Herausgeber: Third Editions
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 464

Beschreibung

Throughout his career, Taro Yoko was despaired by the image of humanity returned by most big budget video games.

Taro Yoko's strange work reviews the entire career of this extraordinary creator, his games (Drakengard, NieR) and sheds light on the link that constitutes his work.

Check out this complete book on Taro Yoko, which explores the contours of its games, their development, the complexity of their stories and their thematic depth. With a preface by Taro Yoko himself !

EXTRACT

Nowadays, most of the players who have heard of Taro Yoko do not associate his name to any particular face. Inconvenienced by public appearances, the director systematically equipped himself with a device to cover his face during meetings with the press, at least since the creation of NieR. Shortly before the announcement of NieR: Automata at the E3 2015, Yoko even had a mask made, based on the character Emil, by a plastic artist from PlatinumGames for a mere four hundred euros. Since then, he has worn it every time he is in the presence of photo and video cameras. His persistence in hiding his face under this thick layer of plastic naturally arouses curiosity. One might be led to believe that this is a communication strategy or the eccentricity of an enigmatic creator. Nevertheless, the visual anonymity of the director is in no way a means to nurture the mystery of his personality. Far from comparing himself to the likes of Banksy (a famous street artist and statement maker, who prefers to remain anonymous), Yoko just prefers to let his games speak for themselves. In fact, ask him, and he will answer with no difficulty that he grew up in Nagoya, in the Japanese prefecture of Aichi. Restaurant managers (izakayas, ramens, tempuras, etc.), his parents flitted from one restaurant opening to the next and entrusted their son’s education to his grandmother.

WHAT CRITICS THINK

"Overall, I enjoyed my time with The Strange Works of Taro Yoko, especially as a fan of the man’s works [...] It’s a great companion piece for long-time fans, and if you’re looking for more unofficial content to read about for the Drakenier universe, you can’t go too wrong." - RPG Site

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicolas Turcev - Journalist specialized in pop culture, he has contributed to the following magazines: Chronic’Art, Carbone, Games and Gamekult, and occasionally participates in the video game analysis site Merlanfrit. He is also the author of several articles of the Level Up collection at Third Éditions.

Leseprobe

The Strange Works of Taro Yoko: From Drakengard to NieR: Automataby Nicolas Turcev Published by Third Éditions 32 rue d’Alsace-Lorraine, 31000 TOULOUSE [email protected]/en

Follow us:

: @Third_Editions

: Facebook.com/ThirdEditions : Third Éditions : Third Éditions

All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the written authorization of the copyright holder.

Any copy or reproduction, by any means, constitutes a copyright infringement subject to the penalties authorized by French Law N°. 57-298 of March 11, 1957 pertaining to copyright protection.

The Third Éditions logo is a registered trademark of Third Éditions, registered in France and in other countries.

Edited by: Nicolas Courcier and Mehdi El Kanafi Editorial assistants: Damien Mecheri and Clovis Salvat Texts: Nicolas Turcev Proofreading: Claire Choisy, Jean-Baptiste Guglielmi et Zoé Sofer Layout: Pierre Le Guennec Classic cover: Bruno Wagner Collector’s edition cover: Johann Blais Translated from French by: Shona Carceles Stuart Smith (ITC Traductions)

This educational work is Third Éditions’ tribute to Taro Yoko’s video games. In this unique collection, the author retraces a chapter in the history of Taro Yoko’s games by identifying the inspirations, background and contents of these games through original reflection and analysis.

Drakengard and NieR are registered trademarks of Square Enix. All rights reserved. Cover art is inspired by Taro Yoko’s games.

English edition, copyright 2018, Third Éditions. All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-2-37784-048-9

PUBLISHER DISCLAIMER

We chose to use the written form “Taro Yoko” to put an end to the confusion surrounding this creator’s name, often written “Yoko Taro,” which suggests that Taro is his last name, whereas it is his first name.

In Japan, name order is different from the West. In the Japanese archipelago, as in China or Korea, the last name is placed before the first name. Indeed, “Yoko Taro” is correct in the Japanese sense, since Yoko is his last name. However, this is not the commonly used order applied by Western press or specialized publishers. We do not read about Miyamoto Shigeru or Kojima Hideo, but Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima.

Nevertheless, the confusion surrounding Taro Yoko is driven by various factors. The first is none other than the games themselves, whose credits specify “Yoko Taro.” Also, the creator enjoys casting doubt on this, even on social media (Yoko Taro on Twitter, Taro Yoko on Facebook). Finally, Yoko is a common Japanese first name-the difference being that it is in fact a female first name. This last point is probably what caused the initial confusion.

By choosing to write Taro Yoko, we simply comply with the traditional Western approach, which places the first name before the last name. However, we are bending the rules of Japanese to English transcription, which would result in “Tarô Yokoo”—but since even the official game credits spell it without a circumflex accent and with only one o, we will stick to Taro Yoko. The names of Japanese toponyms and Taro Yoko’s collaborators are however written with their accents in accordance with Third Éditions’ typographical methods.

FOREWORD

Hello, this is Taro Yoko.

I’ve been asked to introduce myself, so... How should I put it? I am the person who made the games which are (perhaps) presented in this book.

“Perhaps” because I have not read the book yet. Who knows? Maybe the author had fun writing things which have absolutely nothing to do with gaming and are solely focused on “kawaii” culture or the otaku trend in Japan, for instance. Either way, I like both. And in any case, only insane people take an interest in such cultures.

In short, it is obviously a great honor for my team and I to have our games featured like this in such a faraway country as France.

However, I cannot help but think that a book on such a subject is very likely to end up being an unprofitable venture. I worry about the author, but also tend to think that he must be somewhat crazy as well to come up with such a subject. Oh well, it does not matter.

Besides, I just thought of something. The person reading these lines must have played titles such as Drakengard or NieR-or at least have an interest in them-and is probably not the only one. They too must inevitably be strange people to read a book striving to describe such odd games coming from a remote archipelago like mine. In the end, we find ourselves in the following situation: some eccentric wrote a book on games designed by another eccentric and played by people who are equally eccentric.

Frankly, I worry about the future of our planet.

However, when I see crazy people all over the world getting excited with knives, rifles or missiles in front of cameras, when I hear about all these deaths on the news or, worse, when I watch these businessmen in suits holding a Starbucks coffee and getting excited about the stock exchange price instead of worrying about those dying that they see on the news, I suddenly find us much less eccentric. And to think that these businessmen are considered “normal” by society...

Who knows? Our world may have already gone completely mad.

With that,

Taro Yoko

PREFACE

Games have been more than just games for several millennia. The ancient Egyptians saw the game 58 Holes (ancestor of the Game of the Goose) as a spiritual vehicle on which the divine will was imprinted1. Long before Jean-Jacques Rousseau explained through Emile that games teach children the reality they will face as adults, mankind had already sensed that this entertainment allowed them to duplicate, play with and manipulate their environment and thus symbolize the world. But also to take part in it and, by a fair return, be influenced by the games’ symbolism. Playing cops and robbers already represents a view on society (repressive), it conveys a message (complying with the law) and internalizes it through performance. Thus, games represent the world just as well as the world represents itself, better at times, since they reduce it, break it up and paint it to isolate the meaning of the background noises that interfere with understanding. Incidentally, games, like any other medium, are valuable indicators of how we try to represent our interaction with the world and define its value system.

Hence, we can have legitimate concerns about the deep feelings spreading through our civilizations, when the majority of the most popular video games suggest the use of a firearm as the main means of action. The success of the Call of Duty shooting game series, for example, is enough to diagnose the ultra-militarized state of Western nations and the prevalence of the feeling of perpetual war in public opinion. Of course, nobody waited around for the FPS genre before they started to “play war”; chess and the game of Go have century-old traditions. But yesterday’s world, in the 10th and 15th centuries when these hobbies were invented, was essentially the theater of large battlefields. On the other hand, we are currently living in an unprecedented time of peace in history. A respite concurrent with the incredible multiplicity of game forms allowed by the advent of video games and microcomputers. Yet, violence still seems to be at the heart of the global entertainment project. It is in part this strange situation, to say the least, which inspires the titles of the Japanese director Taro Yoko.

Throughout his career, the image of mankind depicted by most big-budget video games has led this Nagoya native to despair. While games grant us the ability to understand each other and build bridges by allowing the player to experience different worlds than his own, the majority of the industry has chosen not to exploit this ability and instead suggests that we beat and dominate each other, by any means possible: crowbars, guns, punches, decapitations, tanks, the list goes on. Video games, in short, prefer to do business by glorifying violence rather than taking advantage of its interaction abilities in order to strengthen human bonds.

Through his works, from Drakengard to NieR: Automata, Yoko attempts to explore the reasons behind this strange fascination with conflict. Are men so vicious that they must triumph, discriminate, hurt and kill even for entertainment? In order to answer this question, throughout his approach the creator analyzes mankind’s dark sides: madness, war, perversion, suicide, among others. Consequently, his games, themselves particularly violent, are rarely viewed at first glance as channels through which human flaws are called into question. Since Yoko’s method is subversive, he appropriates the subjects that challenge him to better emphasize contradictions, false pretenses and a somewhat short logic. But the creator is by no means provocative or pointing fingers to shortcomings. In reality, we are dealing with an otaku full of kindness and curious about the world. Mischievous, intrigued, sometimes a little naive, slightly perverse and occasionally rebellious, Taro Yoko is above all endowed with an incredible ability to divert conventions in order to inject strangeness. He always positions himself one or even several steps apart, juggling with all sorts of unnatural alliances that generate the character of his games. Indeed, they combine, with an unusual majesty, the carefree melancholy of the entertainment practice with the story of mankind slowly perishing in long agony, because in the huge devastated battleground of mankind’s war against mankind, Yoko perceives entertainment as a hope, a horizon, a bulwark against evil. The director’s great altruistic project is part of the portrayed opposition between games and nihilism. By creating video games, Taro Yoko is not just experimenting. He wants to save the world.

NICOLAS TURCEV

Journalist specialized in pop culture, he has contributed to the following magazines: Chronic’Art, Carbone, Games and Gamekult, and occasionally participates in the video game analysis site Merlanfrit. He is also the author of several articles of the Level Up collection at Third Éditions.

1 Players threw sticks or jacks whose final position reflected the will of the gods.

CHAPTER I — CREATION

During the 2000s, a trend towards consolidation and centralization emerged in the Japanese video game industry. In just three years, from 2003 to 2005, three of the world’s largest conglomerates were created: Square Enix (then Square Enix Holdings Co.), born from the merger between Square Co. and Enix; SEGA Sammy Holdings, the outcome of the joint takeover of the developer and publisher SEGA by Sammy, a pachislot and pachinko1 manufacturer; and Namco Bandai Holdings (later renamed Bandai Namco Holdings), an entity created through the merger between Namco and Bandai Co, two major players in the entertainment industry. This massive reorganization thus claimed to address a twofold problem, both domestic and global.

On a local level, Japan’s technology industries were weakened following the Lost Decade and the deflationary spiral that followed the bursting of the Japanese speculation bubble-the abrupt stop of The Glorious Thirty‘s2 Japanese economic miracle. Combined with, at times clumsy, business strategies the difficult economic times prevented these video game leaders from stabilizing their profits, which were overly subjected to headwinds. The numerous mergers thus offset a structural need for consolidation induced by a dangerous climate. SEGA, according to Sammy’s CEO Hajime Satomi’s3 own admission, had been in the red for at least ten years on the day of the merger in 2004, partly because of the lack of solidification and uniformity in the company’s organization chart. Similarly, Square warded off the curse cast by the box office flop of its first computer-animated movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, by establishing a partnership with Enix. For the publisher, who favored in-house productions and generally assumed all risks, the merger ensured more flexibility in order to absorb this kind of impact. In addition to the economic slump, Japan’s video game industry was also facing a demographic dilemma: the extraordinary aging of the population. The phenomenon was abrupt. In a matter of about twenty years, from the late 1980s to the beginning of the new millennium, people aged sixty-five or older who represented one tenth of the total population now accounted for over one quarter. According to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the birth rate of 1.8 children per woman in 1980 dropped to 1.3 in 1999 and is just beginning to recover today. The share of young people aged fifteen and under fell by eight points between 1983, the NES’s launch date in Japan, and the year 2000, to come crashing down at 14.6% of the population. Set at 12.9% in 2013, this rate remains the lowest of the OECD in years. Teenagers, the beloved targets of video game communicators, especially in Japan where the industry was built upon the presence of consoles within the family unit, were becoming scarce. In the joint press release following the announcement of their merger, Bandai and Namco also noted the impact of the “drop in numbers of children” on their respective activities. Hence, in part, the need to acquire more striking power to win the favors of an increasingly smaller audience.

On the global level, the emergence of these small video game empires initiated the preparation of hostilities against international competition. Even though these Japanese holdings4were obviously in competition with each other, they were doubly so with the rising Western majors threatening to invade their console gaming territory. Yôichi Wada, appointed president of Square Enix at the time, was right: “This is an offensive merger, in order to survive5,” he declared in 2002. The first item on the counter-offensive list, common to all these new entities, was the pooling of production costs. The AAA titles or blockbuster budgets, even adjusted for inflation, had increased significantly as the mobilized teams had grown, sometimes reaching or even exceeding the size of Hollywood teams. The cost of labor was indeed becoming difficult to reduce, largely because of the vacancies related to 3D development (Motion-Designer, CG Designer, Shader Artist). This inevitably drove video games industry players to group and create synergies with their respective talents in order to save precious financial resources. This symbiotic spirit can be found in the new strategic complementarities that emerged from these mergers. Taking advantage of acquired rights on a large number of well-known Japanese animation characters, Bandai could for example insert strong licenses (Naruto, Digimon, etc.) from the in-house catalog into Namco’s games and thus strengthen its sphere of influence. Through such partnerships, these new major entertainment groups were seeking to take over the market with their flagship brands, using all possible channels and no longer being solely limited to the video games’ channel. Yôichi Wada named this tactic the “business model of polymorphic content.” “It’s very difficult to hit the jackpot, as it were. Once we’ve hit it, we have to get all the juice possible out of it,” he explained in 2008 to justify his theory6.

With the birth of these conglomerates, Japanese publishers also found themselves in a position whereby they could foster and structure the country’s productive fabric around themselves and beyond. Enix, which already had a tradition of delegating design to a small pool of loyal studios (tri-Ace, Quintet, ChunSoft, etc.) amplified the process after the merger with Square. A plethora of spin-offs based on Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, their two flagship licenses, but also other unpublished projects were entrusted to specialized studios whose orders were increasingly multiplying, driven by a strong subcontracting demand from major publishers. Three of these are of interest to us: Cavia, Access Games and PlatinumGames. Like many of their counterparts, their history and the history of the Drakengard and NieR games design are inextricably linked to the configuration of Japan’s industry and the ups and downs of its leaders.

DRAKENGARD

Cavia’s birth

It all started with a drink. In 1999, Takamasa Shiba and Takuya Iwasaki met in a bar. The former was a producer at Enix, and the latter a jack-of-all-trades at Namco, who had recently been put in charge of the military flight game Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere’s development. Iwasaki took advantage of this meeting to make a proposal to his colleague: what if the player wielded a dragon instead of Ace Combat’s fighter planes? In no time at all, the two men laid the foundations for the future Drakengard (Drag-on Dragoon in Japan): a dragon flight simulator taking place in a medieval fantasy-type universe. At the time, negotiations between Square and Enix had not yet begun, and Enix, mainly a publisher, could not count on its main partner studios to handle the design, as it was busy with the production of the next iterations of Torneko, Dragon Quest or Star Ocean. Iwasaki resigned from Namco and founded Cavia in March 2000 to begin the development of the title, with Enix’s support. A large portion of the employees then emigrated from Namco, since they mainly came from teams that had worked on Ace Combat, Ridge Racer and the Resident Evil and Crisis franchises. At the same time, the modest structure opted to subcontract in order to fill its order book. Created in the midst of the Japanese animation boom, Cavia chose to position itself in the games’ niche linked to licenses that spread the otaku subculture throughout the archipelago. At the same time as Drakengard, it launched the production of a Game Boy Advance game bearing the name One Piece and the Resident Evil: Dead Aim spin-off on PlayStation 2. It was also during this period that Taro Yoko, barely thirty years old and a confirmed otaku, stepped in.

Beneath the mask

Nowadays, most of the players who have heard of Taro Yoko do not associate his name to any particular face. Inconvenienced by public appearances, the director systematically equipped himself with a device to cover his face during meetings with the press, at least since the creation of NieR. Shortly before the announcement of NieR: Automata at the E3 2015, Yoko even had a mask made, based on the character Emil, by a plastic artist from PlatinumGames for a mere four hundred euros. Since then, he has worn it every time he is in the presence of photo and video cameras. His persistence in hiding his face under this thick layer of plastic naturally arouses curiosity. One might be led to believe that this is a communication strategy or the eccentricity of an enigmatic creator. Nevertheless, the visual anonymity of the director is in no way a means to nurture the mystery of his personality. Far from comparing himself to the likes of Banksy (a famous street artist and statement maker, who prefers to remain anonymous), Yoko just prefers to let his games speak for themselves. In fact, ask him, and he will answer with no difficulty that he grew up in Nagoya, in the Japanese prefecture of Aichi. Restaurant managers (izakayas, ramens, tempuras, etc.), his parents flitted from one restaurant opening to the next and entrusted their son’s education to his grandmother. These were the 1970s and the standard Japanese family unit still encompassed three generations. When he started high school in the 1980s, young Yoko discovered the otaku culture, the result of strolls through amusement arcades and muggy afternoons spent watching loads of anime. “Dark and unattractive” according to his own description, Yoko did not belong to the small circle of popular boys at the time-he would secretly curse his friends when they went to the beach to have fun with a few girls. Furthermore, the situation would not improve during his years at Kobe Design University: he had by then become a true otaku and girls always avoided him. The “ladies” as he calls them, were not part of his youth. Yoko, like a perfect metronome, always comes back to this subject during public statements. Sometimes as a joke, though more often to try, visibly, to revisit a key moment of his past. At this point in his life, Yoko was aware that he was on the losing side of the human lottery-or rather of the symbolic relationships of dominance during puberty. So it is probably no coincidence that his later works show so much fascination for the harmful effects of pitting people against each other.

The video game which made him want to become a designer was from the shoot them up genre: Gradius. Amazed by the deluge of bullets, endless possibilities seemed to present themselves to him: “You just have to take a black screen and put a few dots on it, and that’s it, you can really feel that space,” he raved. The potential of the medium seemed infinite, capable of expressing poetry as well as cinema. At the end of his studies, he began his career at Namco as a CG7 Designer, then joined Sony Computer Entertainment, from which he was dismissed, before finally landing at Cavia in 2001, where they wanted to make him the artistic director of Drakengard, before granting him the reins of development.

Project Dragonsphere

Indeed, overwhelmed by his work as director on Resident Evil: Dead Aim and his numerous contributions to other titles8, Takuya Iwasaki rapidly promoted Taro Yoko by granting him the project leadership role in his place, and settling for a co-producer role with Takamasa Shiba. Scriptwriter Sawako Natori tackled the writing process with Yoko, while the rest of the main team revolved around them, including character designer Kimihiko Fujisaka, executive producer Yôsuke Saitô (Square Enix), composer Nobuyoshi Sano and head designer Akira Yasui. Most of them will be involved, at different levels, in future sequels. Together, they started bringing Iwasaki’s original dragon flight simulator idea to life. Code name: “Project Dragonsphere.” But Enix intervened after some time. The publisher was impressed by the success9 of the beat ‘em up Dynasty Warriors 2 game (the Musou series in Japan), which involved saturating the screen with enemies to allow the player to wreak havoc. Shiba therefore pressured Cavia into incorporating hack’n’slash10 combat phases into the game in order to broaden the target audience. It was also, at the time, a means of innovation. For the producer, Drakengard was an opportunity to push back the boundaries of RPGs, action games and flight simulations by mixing the codes of these genres. “All three modes merge into one very interesting game,” he declared to the European press in 2004, after the release of the game. “So one could argue that the overall effect is like an orchestra, where a cello or a violin doesn’t exist individually, rather they are merged into one harmony.” Shiba’s vision, which differed somewhat from the original project, belonged to a system hybridization trend, popular among major publishers who sought to fill their games with varied content in order to satisfy the appetites of the most hardcore players. In order to influence Cavia and raise the teams’ awareness of the Dynasty Warriors style, Shiba gathered the team in a corner of the office and made them watch DVDs of epic movies saturated with massive battle scenes: The Mummy, The Scorpion King, Gladiator and so on. The aim was to transpose the feeling of power in the face of adversity from these scenes into the game. But according to Yoko, this shift generated, above all, an uproar in the studio: everything, or almost, had to be redone.

At that moment, Cavia, a small studio cut out for relatively modest projects, found itself wading out of its depth. From a flight simulation game, the project had transformed into a medium-sized action-RPG, draining the work force of just over a hundred people within a relatively narrow structure. The first drafts of the game not being calibrated for the beat ‘em up genre, Cavia resolved to rework the skeleton of Drakengard itself. New problems arose. How could they display a mass of characters, and model a map big enough to make it look like the fight is taking place on a real battlefield without ruining performance? How could they adapt the camera and controls to ensure smooth transitions between ground combat and flight phases? In addition to these programmer headaches, the new specifications included the appearance of magic spells with saved animations, which were both classy and expensive. But there was no other choice: they were part of the essential prerequisites for the heroic fantasy orientation claimed by Enix, and later Square Enix. In light of these technical challenges, Yoko planned to make Drakengard fit on two discs, but production refused. Obviously lacking human and technical resources, Cavia could not deliver a properly finished product. The jump mechanism, since it could not be debugged in time, does not appear in the final version. The camera, tight and difficult to handle in the Japanese version, was reworked in the American and European versions, together with the removal of the rather flagrant bugs. But it was still not enough. Unsurprisingly, during its release in the West in 2004, Drakengard was criticized by the press and critics for its mechanical and technical shortcomings. The graphics engine hiccupped as soon as the screen was even remotely overloaded, the display distance was fair at best, the ground environments were, most of the time, dramatically empty and dull, the modeling of enemy infantry units and their animations were hardly credible, and the beat ’em up action in particular, even for the time, drastically lacked originality and variety. The movements of Caim, the hero, were limited to a handful of takes, often similar and extremely repetitive, in addition to being slow. In Japan, the euphemism “slow action ” is used to define this general failure. Later, when Drakengard 311 was released, Shiba implicitly acknowledged a distribution error. Primarily specialized in the creation of Namco arcade games, Cavia did not have the necessary expertise to refine and adjust the action aspect set by Enix. However, the teams did offer something new by overlaying the Ace Combat structure on the role-playing one.

Ace Combat’sheir

Many have seen Drakengard as an attempt to reinterpret Team Andromeda’s Panzer Dragoon rail shooter series, which itself made an attempt at role-playing games with the Panzer Dragoon Saga installment. But Drakengard’s essence, like many of its ideas, in truth inherited Iwasaki’s work on Ace Combat 3. Several of the series’ recurring motifs which contributed to its success and identity came from Namco’s game. We can naturally begin by mentioning the third-person flight mode and free-moving camera, the “Strafe Mode,” in which the red dragon Angelus, controlled by the player, can burn the battlefield from the air. The family lineage was probably concealed by the press due to the catastrophic Western porting of Ace Combat 3, which deprived it of many of its assets. Among the elements cut during localization were six possible endings and different storylines that depended on the player’s performance during the main missions. The original version was widely staged and also contained long radio communication sessions between the main characters as well as cartoon scenes, all of which were fully dubbed. Many elements cut from the version sold to Europeans and Americans were added to Drakengard’s structure.

Divided into thirteen chapters, themselves subdivided into sub-chapters available from a map menu, Drakengard contained three types of missions: airborne missions, ground missions, and a hybrid type of mission where the player could alternate between the two. In addition to the main campaign, various side quests offered to revisit previous areas in order to collect additional weapons and treasures. Nothing more common, in short. This became more complicated once the player had finished the game for the first time and had to navigate between sub-chapters to try and reach the additional endings. In accordance with the arcade philosophy that permeates its programmers, Cavia hid part of the storyline behind performance conditions. The stories of the supporting characters, in particular, were only available after finishing specific parts within a certain time limit. But the craziest challenge, in the sense of insane, remained the collection of every single weapon, necessary to reach the fifth and final ending, called “ending E.”

In addition to non-linear storylines and multiple endings, Drakengard actually introduced a mechanism that would be replicated in all the other games of the series12 : the weapons collection and enhancement mechanism. There were sixty-five in the first installment, divided into several categories (sword, pole axes, etc.), which had their own statistics and combos. The more a weapon was used to kill, the more experience points it would gain, and would therefore be able to level up, three times at most. In addition to the change in appearance that accompanied this power increase, each level up revealed a small part of the weapon’s history, almost always incredibly tragic. And as in its sequels (with the exception of NieR: Automata), Drakengard required the player to collect the entire arsenal in order to access the final ending. An almost impossible task to accomplish without the use of a guide, given their at times preposterous acquisition conditions13. Just as eccentric, the ending E teleported the player into modern Tokyo. A “joke” according to Yoko, inspired by the alien easter eggs of Silent Hill14. Actually more than a joke, this was the culmination of a strategic demarcation process undertaken by Cavia during the design phase.

Operation Distinction

The dilemma was: how could Drakengard set itself apart from the competition? The stakes were crucial as the market in which the game had to position itself was saturated, both by the annual presence of Dynasty Warriors and the flood of titles. Between 2001 and 2003, over a hundred Japanese role-playing games appeared solely on the PlayStation 215. Shiba’s insistence on using heroic fantasy codes with a Dungeons & Dragons’ approach in this game did not help find a solution: this kind of universe was already all over the stalls of video game stores. All the same, Yoko was asked to design a fantasy universe close to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. Knowing that he had no chance of overthrowing these two leading lights on their own turf, the director preferred to follow a different path. He set the action in European medieval folklore (notably Celtic myths). He then tried to introduce real country names to bring a sense of reality at odds with the fantasy genre: France, Germany, etc.16 But production objected to this, and forced him to use more generic and less realistic names: “Land of forest”, “Land of mountains” and so on, and since he could not differentiate himself with an original universe, Yoko chose to change the tone. Taking the opposite approach to the Japanese RPGs for teenagers, often bright and good-natured, he intentionally turned towards darker, even taboo themes. The game theme was based on immorality. The strong presence of hack’n’slash elements would serve as a foundation for this orientation. In Yoko’s mind, it was indeed the perfect opportunity to reflect upon the tendency that video game heroes had towards killing without shame, without the slightest trace of moral distress. At the time, Dynasty Warriors was ironically the most obvious example, since the series had built its reputation on the scale of carnage it produced on screen. Surely, Yoko thought, the characters participating in such atrocities must actually go mad and should not deserve a happy ending. Madness thus became the leitmotif of the first Drakengard, whose characters suffered all more or less from insanity, in one form or another: incest, pedophilia, cannibalism, blood lust, the overstatement was intentional and exaggerated17, but not totally meaningless-both on the marketing and the artistic levels. For the director, displeased with the inclusion of ground action phases, reviewing the beat‘em up genre with a narrative overlay allowed him to distance this violence imposed on him and to deploy an atmosphere original enough to be noticed.

To accompany and underline this tacky atmosphere, Nobuyoshi Sano (Tekken 3, Ridge Racer) composed a chaotic orchestration soundtrack elaborated from extracts of popular classical music (Dvorak, Debussy, Mozart, Wagner, etc.), twisted and distorted to the extreme. The request came from Takamasa Shiba, the producer. The latter asked Denji Sano, the musical director, for something “classically sophisticated” with a dark madness element. The team in charge of sound then theorized a method to obtain “otodama,” meaning “mystical sounds” or “spirit sounds.” Takayuki Aihara, co-composer, selected the greatest classical music phrases that would serve as raw material. These were orchestrated, then digitally reconstructed. They were then superimposed, mixed and cut using a computer, as if a madman had put them in a shaker, with no real will to harmonize times and atmospheres. Sano used the entire technological arsenal to break down and rearrange tracks: loops, reverse playback e tutti quanti. Altered through techno music technology, the initial classical music extracts no longer resembled anything recognizable, other than a long contorted incantation or a never-ending tainted trance. This allowed the composer to corrupt anything familiar, to bring out the agony, echoing the mental cacophony of the characters and the horrors of the battlefield. The effect was so striking for Sano that he felt like he had perverted history. At the time, the soundtrack’s deconstructionist approach did not really please the critics or the players. Too cacophonous, too loudly ahead of its time. Accustomed to more melodious and harmonious compositions typical of Japanese RPGs, fans of the genre were disconcerted. However, Drakengard’s soundtrack remains one of the most interesting attempts of mixing the use of noise and the expressionist approach with a large variety of classical music in video games. The very fact that it could exist was a feat, as progressive rock or lively scores were standard at the time. But for the producer Iwasaki, this musical orientation was obvious, as he would explain in the booklet accompanying the soundtrack reissue18: “Drakengard depicts the pitiable madness of those people who have been brainwashed. The player acting this out needs an accompaniment that makes him experience those negative feelings.” Iwasaki concluded by rejoicing that Drakengard’s music worked as “a hallucinogen inducing a nightmare that will not end”, a sign that any compromise on this subject was rejected in favor of radical experimentation. But Taro Yoko is the best person to talk about this strange musical object. We cannot resist the urge to share his entire analysis with you, also released with the soundtrack reissue in 2011. Bittersweet and poetically naturalist, it sheds light on both the game and the personality of the person who designed it.

“It would be difficult to explain the music of Drakengard in a single paragraph. I want you to imagine the following: on a morning without school or work, a carefully selected egg has been lying on the table since the previous night at room temperature. You lightly pluck the egg off of the table and crack it over a bowl filled with cooked koshihikari19 rice, adding a dash of katsuhobushi20, finely grated on a wood block. To top it off, and here you need to be careful, you add a few drops of light-colored soy sauce. You take your time to lightly stir in these ingredients. Filtered amidst the grains of cooked rice, part of the egg cooks, and part remains raw. It must not be mixed in too thoroughly. If it is possible, it is best to leave two to three clumps of white rice completely untouched by the egg, sitting like clumps of marble. Combined with the raw egg, this rice, which is as hot as possible, will make the perfect temperature. We calmly debate the merits of our respective ingredients as all of this spreads inside your mouth and fills your empty stomach. Then, we consider the song as we kill each other.”

A real gourmet, Yoko is also, as has been said, an experienced otaku. To nurture the deviance of his protagonists and the repulsive climate of his game, he will draw his inspiration from seinens, the name of adult mangas with usually more complex and morally ambiguous themes than mangas for teenagers. The Berserk manga and Neon Genesis Evangelion animated series were taken as reference points. The former for its dark fantasy atmosphere and the character Guts on which Caim was later modeled, the latter for its gloomy ambiance and its casting of tortured teenagers on which Yoko and Iwasaki intensely based themselves to create Drakengard’s climate. The director also took this opportunity to settle his scores with some Japanese animation stereotypes which he found questionable. In addition to the violent failings of video games, his deconstruction initiative targeted the animation series Sister Princess and its fetishism of the perfect little sister cliché. Released as a manga, on television and in video games in the form of an eroge21, Sister Princess tells the story of twelve sisters who idolize their only older brother. A popular example of the abounding harem literature22 in Japan; Yoko offered an acid satire through the character of Furiae and her incestuous desires towards her big brother Caim. The ending B, in which Furiae transforms into a monster and multiplies endlessly, is devised as an illustration of these sisters’ superficiality and cruelty.

Although these examples are aimed at illustrating the room for maneuver that Yoko had in order to impose his vision, the truth is a little more nuanced. Throughout development, the director had to fight to ensure that his ideas prevailed. The increasing accumulation of small trifling details irritated Yoko to such an extent that he gave up directing Drakengard 2. First, he was asked to color the sky blue instead of the red and gray hues used to give the game its surrealistic cachet. Then, to adopt a new nomenclature full of gibberish invented for the game when it could be based on existing mythologies. Above all, producers had to intervene before the characters became too dark. For example, the actions of Leonard, the pedophile priest, were supposed to be further explored.

Cavia restructures itself

When Drakengard was released, it won the support of a large number of players from Japan and the West. In the archipelago, the game sold twenty-two thousand copies during the first week and rose to the top of the sales rankings. This number had doubled by the end of 2003. In Europe, the game sold a little over a hundred thousand copies during the first year following its release, a fair result given the time and the targeted niche market. This success was enough for Square Enix to give the green light for the development of a sequel. Yoko then proposed a concept that would reconnect with Cavia’s arcade roots: a space shooter with dragons. But his idea was rejected fairly quickly. Instead, Drakengard 2, designed by the same creative executives with the exception of Yoko, essentially took the hybrid beat ’em up formula of its predecessor and tried to improve upon it. The action theoretically takes place23 eighteen years after Drakengard’s ending A, when Angelus, the red dragon, becomes the Goddess of the Seal after Furiae’s disappearance. Some of the original characters, including Caim, Seere and Manah, cross paths with the hero, Nowe, one of the knights in charge of protecting the Seal. Directed by Akira Yasui, head designer of the first installment, this second creation fell in line with Japanese RPG standards and offered a much more colorful, lively and teenage world than its predecessor. Square Enix sought to soften the tone so that Drakengard could convince a broader audience and thus become one of its flagship licenses. But this shift disappointed many early fans, who cherished the gloomy atmosphere of the original installment. In retrospect, Shiba will concede that his publisher’s request had been a mistake24, as critics had received this new episode more indifferently—this time, the more conventional universe and characters could not make up for the gameplay’s shortcomings, which remained virtually unchanged.

As for Yoko, busy with other priorities, he only intervened in the last design phase as video editor. His detachment from the project did not, however, prevent him from expressing his creative disagreements to Yasui, with whom he maintains what he calls a “love-hate” relationship. Their rivalry took on such proportions that it was immortalized in the game, through the history of the Kingsblood weapon. This story tells of the near fratricidal battle between two generals who were once friends, provoked by their identical covetousness for a unique sword. Quickly, the battle led to war. To defeat their opponent, one used sheer strength (Taro Yoko), whilst the other used strategic flexibility (Akira Yasui). It seemed they had reached a stalemate. The apologue ends with the comment of a villager on the battleground, who noted that the two generals were both brave warriors, and that the world would have been a happier place if they had cooperated instead of sowing destruction. As for the two programmers, on good terms outside the office, they never worked together again.

Nevertheless, Drakengard 2 sold well. Clearly well enough for Cavia, reassured by the good results of Ghost in The Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles, to increase the scope of its operations. In October 2005, Cavia changed its name and became a holding company for studios: AQ Interactive. The former president (1984-1998) and founder of SEGA of Japan, Hayao Nakayama, taking over the chairmanship of the new company’s board of directors, was behind this operation. The apple does not fall far from the tree, as AQ Interactive’s structure replicated the structure of the blue hedgehog’s firm before its acquisition by Sammy, namely gathering together several development units with low synergies25. This is no coincidence, since AQ Interactive placed under its protection subsidiaries formed or joined by SEGA defectors who left shortly before or after the merger with Sammy. We can mention Artoon, founded by Sonic Team character designer Naoto Oshima, followed into his exile by a large part of his team and that of Team Andromeda, including Yoji Ishii (OutRun, Panzer Dragoon) who would take on the CEO position of the holding company. Transformed by Microsoft Game Studio Japan into a support studio for the production of Mistwalker26 games, including Lost Odyssey, the company Scarab, renamed Feelplus for the occasion, also fell into AQ Interactive’s hands. Renamed Cavia Inc., the third and last subsidiary assembled the video game programming processes of the original company. The offensive announced by this reorganization was initiated during the holiday season: in December, each of the three studios announced the development of one or more titles for next-generation consoles.

Set up like a war machine taking the new consoles (Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3) by storm, AQ Interactive followed the centralist trend, a feature of the Japanese industry at the time, aware of the Western landslide which was about to sweep in. Nevertheless, it stood out as it avoided directly absorbing production teams in a parent company and preferred maintaining relationships step-by-step. This applied not only to the cooperation between Feelplus and Mistwalker, but also between Mistwalker and Cavia Inc. for the creation of the Cry On RPG, Cavia’s first major project using high definition consoles along with the extremely second-rate Bullet Witch. The action-RPG Cry On, of which little is actually known27, would however be canceled by AQ Interactive at the end of 2008, three years after its disclosure, and more importantly only a few months after the American subprime28 crisis, which did not spare the video game sector.

Cavia, which ended up with a big gap in its calendar, did not greatly benefit from AQ Interactive’s contribution either, whose biggest mistake was probably to have partly focused its publishing activity on the Xbox 360. Not very popular in Japan, the American console never really managed to find its audience there. Many Japanese studios, including Mistwalker, which thought they were getting a head start on the Western market by offering exclusives, suffered a severe setback. Thus, Bullet Witch and Tetris: The Grand Master Ace, Cavia’s two main titles published by AQ Interactive on Xbox 360, were a flop. Despite everything, the studio managed to keep up with its order activity by subcontracting for Capcom (Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles), Bandai Namco (several games from the Fate series) and SEGA (the Wii adaptation of Sega Bass Fishing). But in the midst of the Japanese video game crisis29, which was reinforced by a renewed economic recession in the country, Cavia’s future became uncertain. Its next game, NieR, was to become its swan song.

NIBR

At first, a yearning for magic

The first brainstorming sessions for Drakengard’s next episode began shortly after the release of the second installment, this time with Taro Yoko on the front line. However, Shiba warned his colleague that with the arrival of seventh generation consoles, AQ Interactive would not support a project on the PlayStation 2, which was sentenced to death. The game was therefore shifting to the next platforms. The Xbox 360 was initially considered. But little by little, what was to become Drakengard 3 on paper mutated into something completely different. So much so that, internally, the name was abandoned and replaced by NieR. The first script drafts speak of a battle taking place in a world shaped by the imagination of picture books. We find the traces of this preliminary work in the boss names of the future game, all inspired by popular tales like Pinocchio or Hansel and Gretel. But the magic approach was abandoned relatively soon in favor of a more fantasy and adult universe. NieR then evolved into a spin-off of the first Drakengard, and would later even be considered as its sequel, since it developed on the ending E. Although the creators did not express themselves publicly on the reasons for this shift, at least one reason can be easily identified. At the time, Square Enix showed interest in the project, and the publisher already owned a franchise exploiting the children’s fables niche: Kingdom Hearts. Moreover, the birth of Kingdom Hearts embodies a turning point in the publisher’s strategy, that of action-RPGs, which greatly influenced NieR’s positioning.

Square Enix’s hesitations

Around the end of the 2000s, the firm noticed the exhaustion of the traditional turn-based formula of Japanese role-playing games. While the numbered episodes of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were still selling just as well, their secondary products based on this old model were increasingly struggling to convince. And at the company’s headquarters in Shinjuku, it was clear that the increasing power of graphics processors announced a new era for video games, more resolutely focused on action. Thus, some of its flagship series such as Final Fantasy VII or Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles were put through the action-RPG mold30. This repositioning, ceremoniously initiated by the publisher with Kingdom Hearts and its collaboration with Disney, spread throughout the production chain and impacted the publisher’s partner studios.

The behavior of Yôsuke Saitô, producer at Square Enix responsible for Cavia, perfectly illustrates this transformation. First in favor of Yoko steering NieR in the direction of an epic RPG in the same vein as Final Fantasy or Star Ocean, the executive changed his mind during development, instructing instead the director to produce a “truly action-based” game. Yoko only partly listened to him and delivered a traditional action-RPG in terms of its game mechanics, doing rightly so seeing that Cavia did not excel in the beat ’em up field. But Saitô’s U-turn was not devoid of logic. Square Enix did not yet have an action-packed flagship game explicitly aimed at adults-in short, the equivalent of a Kingdom Hearts for the twenty-five to thirty-five age group. The stakes were high since, as indicated in the preamble, the audience was aging and the publisher was seeking to retain players who had grown up with the brand. Yôichi Wada, the CEO, was also aware that Japanese people in their thirties, today’s working adults and yesterday’s teenagers, no longer had the necessary time to immerse themselves in a grand adventure for hours on end. Action games, shorter by convention, could therefore offer an interesting solution to this problem31. More than an editorial epiphenomenon, NieR therefore represented an opportunity for Square Enix to fill a void in its catalog32. And although the vision conferred by Yoko did not fully meet its specifications, synergies still existed. At least the main conditions were met: hack’n’slash gameplay, dark universe, tragic plot, dialogs full of swearing, an abundant amount of blood... Although it did not get its own Devil May Cry, the crystal firm at least made sure it had its place on the starting line.

NieR is split in two

A few signatures later, Cavia was launched at full speed on the rails of a project that would last three years, generously assisted by Square Enix’s teams (50% of the team on average) who heavily relied on the success of this new license—especially for export. This took place to such an extent that a close collaboration was established between the publisher’s American offices and Cavia’s management. During a presentation meeting in Los Angeles to gather Western opinions, Yoko and his producer were invited to give a presentation on the scenario: in a desolate world, a young warrior tries to save his little sister, Yonah, from a terrible disease thanks to his fighting skills. The Americans reacted strongly to this. Nier’s character, sixteen, thin, androgynous, visibly fragile, almost feverish, did not meet the Western market’s expectations. According to the decision makers, the fact that such a young man could wield enormous swords might look ridiculous. Everything was disrupted: the hero must change. Small side note: it is probably worth noting that this occurred in the midst of a video game dadification33 trend. Yoko responded and worked on the development of a second protagonist, or rather a more westernized and mature version of the hero. Nier is no longer a brother, but a forty-year-old father built like a tank. Square Enix validated the marketing of two versions: one with the young character, the other with the old character—with (almost)34 no other difference between the two. At the same time, a PlayStation 3 version was initiated to maximize chances of success. After a sharp cultural analysis, the company finally decided to only release the box containing the father version of Nier’s adventure in Europe and America, published as NieR on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. While in Japan only, this variant would be named NieR Gestalt, and was released exclusively on the Microsoft console. As for the Japanese PlayStation 3, it received the young Nier in NieR Replicant. Child’s play really. Except that the original version, the one contained in NieR Replicant, came close to not being released. During another gathering across the Pacific, Square Enix’s US staff, concerned about the potential delays caused by the porting of the game on Sony’s machine, proposed to cancel NieR Replicant and only keep NieR Gestalt. Yoko, outraged, successfully opposed the proposal by warning his management of the consequences of such a decision on the team’s morale and of the inevitable drop in productivity which would certainly follow, condemning NieR Gestalt to suffer an even greater delay. A victory that felt like revenge for the creative director after his repeated struggles with production on Drakengard, but which, above all, underlined the great degree of freedom he enjoyed, confirming his author’s position in a relatively sparse Japanese landscape in this respect.

Programming based on diversification

From the outset, Yoko rejected the idea of repeating Drakengard’s eccentricities and wanted his game to focus on more radiant themes such as friendship and effort. The director quickly got bored, though resting on his laurels was out of the question. Above all, he wanted to avoid struggling for the validation of his creative choices. “I thought, with NieR, that I would make a normal game. That’s what I tried to make, a normal game,”35 he recalled shortly after the announcement of NieR: Automata. But he was quickly forced to admit to himself that in reality, he “can’t make anything but strange games,” as he would later recognize in a long interview published in the Grimoire NieR36. So it was goodbye to the joys originally envisaged, and make way for the strange and uncomfortable.

Yoko drew NieR’s strangeness from the events of September 11, or rather from its direct consequence: the war on terrorism. The Iraqi conflict unsettled his feelings about murder and the domination desire. While he was convinced that you had to be crazy to slaughter tens, hundreds or thousands of people, as Drakengard tried to demonstrate, the vehemence of the Middle-Eastern conflict persuaded him that, in reality, thinking that you are doing what is right or being convinced that you are within your rights was enough to kill. Influenced by this revelation, NieR, from the moment of its creation, undertook to play on points of view.

The pre-production fable, which was to serve as a script, told the adventure of a group of heroes trying to prevent villains from picture books from resurrecting their leader, a scientist. Classic. Except that the antagonists’ intentions were not necessarily the ones we expected. In fact, they realized that in the fairytale world, the same story repeated itself ad infinitum and that, therefore, their destiny was to be forever evil and eternally punished. The scientist they are trying to resurrect once attempted to deliver them from this torment, before he was killed by the heroes, who once again hope to foil the villains’ plans. Moral of the story: it is all a matter of perspective.

In the final version of the game, this desire to broaden the horizons of the unique perspective is reflected in the game mechanics of the New Game +37. Unlike Drakengard, it is no longer just a question of offering an alternative ending, but of changing the direction of the spotlight focused on a singular and unique reality. The decision to make the Shadows speak and the additional scenes scattered along the way to the second ending instilled doubt, and drastically rearranged the understanding of the initial script. A likelihood concern for Yoko, using this to accuse the vanity of our convictions. It is this same attention to reality that consciously drove him to leave a large part of the operation of the Gestalt Project’s complex machinery unexplained. Jointly developed with Sawako Natori and Hana Kikuchi (his new script recruit), the aim of this element was only to control the action. The emotional arc of Nier and his sister or daughter was the priority. In short, a situation quite similar to the state of our world for Yoko; the reasons motivating the outbreak of one conflict or another being forever truncated, distorted, hidden under the ramifications of history.

Also equipped with the framing theme, the gameplay unfolds like a portfolio of video game genres, juggling with camera angles like so many lenses, diffracting the player’s vision of the universe he is traveling through. The heart of the action mimics God of War-dantesque boss battles, beat ‘em up jousting–and constitutes only one aspect of a multifaceted prism. The profusion of genres–visual novel38, danmaku39, platform, etc.-a protean tribute of Cavia’s otaku to video games, was precisely born of Yoko’s frustration with the limitations imposed by the genre, by the triumph of one classification over the other. As part of his great undertaking of decompartmentalizing points of view, with NieR the director sought to destroy the very concept of gender, break down walls, and blast foundations. Hence, the crazy idea of erasing the player’s save during ending D.

The idea germinated quite early on in the director’s mind, but fearing that production and the rest of the team would express their disagreement, he preferred to remain silent. However, when he finally revealed the functionality a little later, producer Yôsuke Saitô approved it and arranged for it to be included in the final product. Shortly after the release of the game, a torrent of traumatic testimonies abounded on Internet forums. The players shamelessly hailed him as either a genius or a criminal when their precious save was overwritten. Then, one particular detail aroused their curiosity. When launching a new game, it proved impossible to reuse the name of the character chosen in the lost save. This was in fact the legacy of a different game architecture, contemplated by Yoko in the event that the overwriting had not been approved. According to this plan, the player would have to complete the game no less than seven times before reaching the last ending. After the first three endings, A, B and C, the console would reserve the name given to the main character and the player would not have been able to reuse it. If the player once again reached these same endings (with another character), he would enter The Lost World short story (published in the Grimoire NieR).