Writing when drunk and turning in your script months late: A Nier: Automata interview

Yoko Taro is, in many ways, a caricature of a game developer.

There’s the obvious factor — he wears a mask during interviews and public appearances, saying that he wants games to stand on their own and that he thinks it’s more appealing for players to look at a strange character than an old man.

And there’s the slightly less obvious — he goes by a pen name to differentiate himself from his persona. In English, that means Yoko Taro (officially, “YOKO TARO”) despite Taro Yoko being his real name, and in Japanese he uses a similar twist to separate the real from the persona.

But he says he doesn’t care what name people use to refer to him. In fact, he says he’s happy if people don’t mention him at all.

“If anything, I could just be called 01 and I’d be happy with that,” he says.

Despite his attempts to hide in plain sight — or perhaps in part because of them — Yoko has become one of the most popular developers in the game industry in recent years, with fans eating up his playfulness and self-deprecating attitude. It also helps that he directed the 2017 critical darling action game Nier: Automata.

Irwin Wong

At this year’s Game Developers Conference, I sat down with Yoko and PlatinumGames senior game designer Takahisa Taura to discuss the idea of developers exaggerating their personalities in public, what happened when Yoko turned in Automata’s script late and their thoughts on the last 12 months of Nier.

Polygon: I know people talk about your mask a lot so I don’t want to focus on that too much, but it makes me think about the idea of game developers as entertainers. In Japan especially, it seems common to see game directors and producers take on personas and almost become characters or exaggerated versions of themselves in the public eye. Where do you think that comes from?

Yoko Taro: Personally, I don’t like going out in public. I know that doing interviews and appearances is one of the main ways to get information across to players, but when I do it I’m careful not to distract too much from the game. I feel that a developer should let their game speak for itself. For Nier: Automata, Square Enix kind of ordered me to promote the game, and I actually had a little bit of a quarrel with our producer, Mr. Saito, about not wanting to do it. After many discussions and arguments, we ended up with the mask. So I gave in with that condition.

Polygon: Is it literally in your contract?

YT: It’s not in a contract but it’s a verbal promise I made to him.

Polygon: Apart from you personally, do either of you have a sense of why it’s common to see those sorts of developer personas in Japan?

Takahisa Taura: Like, for example, Kamiya-san from PlatinumGames?

Polygon: Sure, yeah. I guess the best examples I can give are probably Harada and Ono and how they’re always on stage and dressing up and that kind of thing.

TT: I think that it’s just because a lot of people like being in the public eye. But I think that it’s a very small percentage of the population in Japan who really want to assert themselves that way.

Polygon: When you have the mask on, do you consider yourself to be playing a character or is that still you?

YT: I try to be myself, even with the mask on, but I also try to be careful that I don’t break the image that other people might have of me and I try to keep things light, I guess.

Polygon: Would you say it’s a slightly exaggerated version of yourself? Is that an accurate way to put it?

TT: Just as someone who knows him, I do feel that way.

Polygon: Do you see any specific differences between the version of you in the mask and the version of you at home?

YT: Yeah, it’s different from when I have the mask on or when I’m at home. But that’s because when someone purchases a product of ours, I feel like it’s important to consider how they perceive the game. So rather than me as a 47-year-old middle-aged man going up on stage talking about the game, I feel it’s more interesting to a player if they see a weird character represent the game. I don’t want to alter their perception of the game by seeing who I am.

I think Harada-san from the Tekken series takes a different approach. I think he wants to be out there in public. But I’m just trying to hide. So in the future, I want to have Taura-san do interviews by himself.

TT [to Yoko]: It feels kind of like you’re contradicting yourself when you say that you don’t want to damage the player experience by going out on the stage, but you’re trying to push me to be out there and be the face of the title.

YT: Well, it’s OK if you’re young and you’re handsome. You’re not going to damage the game. But when you’re old and like me, it’s more damaging than helpful.

Polygon: How much younger are you?

TT: I’m not too young. I’m 32 right now.

YT: Well, that’s 15 years younger than I am.

Image: PlatinumGames/Square Enix

Polygon: In your presentation on Wednesday [at the Game Developers Conference], you mentioned you write better but also slower when you’re drunk, which got a big laugh. How serious were you about that and how much were you playing that up for the audience?

YT: It’s 100 percent true.

Polygon: Do you have a specific process for that? Do you just keep a bottle of whiskey next to your computer?

YT: How else do you drink?

Polygon: For instance, do you schedule it? Do you only write at midnight or something like that?

YT: I’ll only drink at home. So if I’m in the Square Enix office I won’t drink there, obviously. But as for the time, it’s just whenever I feel like I want to work on it. It doesn’t really matter what time of day it is.

TT: When he worked out of PlatinumGames’ office, Yoko-san used to always bring big bottles of Diet Coke instead. He loves Diet Coke.

Polygon: What percentage of the script would you say you wrote drunk?

YT: About 10 percent. It’s easier for me to write the emotional parts of the storyline drunk but when it comes to the other parts of the game, like filler storylines, I have to do it without alcohol because I just won’t be able to get through it if I start drinking.

Polygon: You also mentioned in the presentation that you were embarrassed because you finished writing Automata’s story late. How late did you end up finishing it?

YT: About four to five months.

Polygon: With some games, there’s not a lot of flexibility to submit text late because other people on the team rely on it to do their work. Did that have a ripple effect where the rest of the game changed because of the script arriving late?

TT: We had to make a few changes here and there, but not too many because the overarching story was already in place. We didn’t have to go in and change too much after we received the final scenario.

Polygon: So it was less about the structure and more the literal words?

YT: Yeah, it wasn’t the overarching story but the smaller parts. For example, because creating the stages and the maps and the bosses takes the most time and costs the most to develop, we decided on those things first and tried not to change them from there. But with the smaller stuff — like, let’s say that you get a certain item from talking with a certain NPC and do a side quest there. Once we have that structure in place, it’s not fun for me to think about all the details in each of those scenes, so I’d leave some of that off to the side until late in the project. There would be dummy text on the screen.

Polygon: I recall the game was delayed at one point. I think the reason given at the time was that Square Enix didn’t want it to compete with other games releasing in the same window. Did the delay have anything to do with the script being late?

YT: It was mostly up to Square Enix to decide the release date, especially Mr. Saito, the game’s producer. Of course, having that bit of extra time helped to lessen the number of bugs and brushed up the quality. I think all that added to why we decided to delay the game a little.

PlatinumGames/Square Enix

Polygon: This is a random one, but last year there was a popular Twitter thread where a bunch of Western developers mentioned tricks they implemented in games where the mechanics basically lied to players to make them feel a certain way — for instance, how in a Gears of War multiplayer mode, the developers would secretly make a first-time player stronger so they wouldn’t get immediately discouraged, or how in BioShock, the first time an enemy shoots at a player it won’t damage them; it’s just to get their attention. Can you think of any tricks along those lines you included in Automata?

TT: There are a lot of things that we do that are very detailed and might not be as interesting as those stories. For example, to avoid an instance where you’re constantly being attacked and you can’t move, there is a certain period of invincibility that your character will have — once an enemy hits you, you become invincible for a fraction of time. Or when you push a button to attack, your character will turn slightly toward the enemy so that it will be easier for you to connect hits. It’s just really small details like those, but we have a lot of those in the game.

YT: Another would be, let’s say you’re running toward something and an event happens. The camera will automatically guide you towards where you’re supposed to go — where the story is taking you. Also, we try to make it so that you don’t see a tutorial prompt pop up if you’ve already done something in the game. For example, you can jump in the game by pressing the X button on PS4, but if you do that before the planned tutorial prompt shows up, then that message won’t appear.

And even in the menu tabs, there’s a small thing. The game only tells you that you can move between the tabs with the circle button and the X button. But we actually have this hidden function in there where you can use the L and the R buttons as well, just so that if people are used to moving between tabs that way in other games, it will still work the same way.

Polygon: Do you have any final thoughts on the last 12 months of Nier?

YT: Being able to be in interviews like this, even after a year after release, and having a lot of merchandise and events associated with our title — I’m really happy that it didn’t become one of those games where you just play it and soon forget about it. It was a year of just feeling grateful for everything and being very happy about it.

After we released the game, because we had commercial success, we started creating merchandise and other associated products, so in some ways it feels like the project is still going on for me. I have to oversee and approve a lot of things.

Of course, that keeps me busy, but I’m happy to have those opportunities because of the fan support. And of course, it’s not only fans. It’s the media as well. I feel like the fans and media both really helped to grow this title into something bigger and so I’m just very grateful to everyone for that.