Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games”

Yoko Taro is weird, some would call the Drakengard and Nier creator a bit of a nut head. The 55-year-old Japanese game developer walks around with a Moon-Faced helmet of his eternal teenage boy character Emil and rolls around on the floor screaming, “sh*t, Square Enix”. And we love him. 

Yoko Taro is weird, and that’s led to some of my all-time favourite games: NieR and NieR: Automata. There’s brilliance in their weirdness, and darkness, too. So, why don’t we see more games just like this? Well, in the screaming 55-year-old’s own words, it’s because there’s “less weird people” making major releases nowadays. 

Yoko Taro on bland game releases

In a recent Q&A with fans, Taro was asked about the strangeness of game developers now versus the time when Drakengard was first conceived. 

While Drakengard is a pretty standard game throughout, its true ending (which ties into the beginning of NieR) ends with Caim and his dragon smashing into modern day Tokyo to fight a big nude stone lady. It’s pretty weird, actually, and leads straight into NieR. 

“I’ve been a part of the game industry for 30 years, but I feel there’s less ‘weird people’ now,” the game director said in response. “I don’t know if this is something simply happening in my field of view, if the game industry ended up like this, or if the whole world is like this now.”

Of course, there are still weird people making games in a AAA space, but that’s mostly Hideo Kojima. However, over a decade ago, the industry was filled with AA and even AAA games constructed by weird creatives that were allowed to express themselves. Look at Banjo-Kazooie or Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Obviously, the people behind those titles were absolutely wacko. 

However, the weird people making games have not disappeared, they just don’t have AAA funding. Indie games are truly bizarre with titles such as Undertale and Deltarune, or Doki Doki Literature Club, or Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, Disco Elysium, Frog Fractions, and countless others. 

There’s some truly weird stuff out there, and occasionally it breaks through and becomes really popular. Unfortunately, as games cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, AAA studios don’t want to take the risk of making something bizarre. Unless they’re SEGA releasing a pirate spin-off game for the Yakuza series. They are crazy. 

Maybe this is why we haven’t seen an official sequel to NieR Automata in the soon-to-be-decade since its release. Maybe Yoko Taro is too weird for Square Enix to risk a hundred million dollars on, despite the popularity of his last game. On the other hand, maybe they’ve been secretly cooking something up in the background for years. We can only hope.