How Nier needed Platinum Games to fulfill its creators’ vision

LOS ANGELES — Square Enix always wanted to do a Nier sequel — it was just waiting for the right partner.

Square Enix surprised fans and Electronic Entertainment Expo attendees this week with the announcement of the return of one of its lesser-known game franchises, Nier. The company tapped Bayonetta developer Platinum Games to head up development, working together to chart a new course for the cult hit, which made its debut in 2010 on PlayStation 3.

GamesBeat joined a group of other journalists to speak to executive producer Yosuke Saito and director Taro Yoko immediately following Square Enix’s announcement yesterday. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Yosuke Saito: Even from when we were planning the original Nier, we always wanted to create a successor eventually. I covered this in the presentation earlier this morning, but we have a very strong core fanbase for Nier. We want to give a great experience to them. But Nier wasn’t a complete success. We needed more time and preparation to get everything in place so we could deliver the experience we’re looking for. The core staff remains the same. It’s the two of us, Keiichi Okabe doing the music, and Akihiko Yoshida doing the character designs. With Platinum Games’ assistance, we felt we could deliver the experience we had always aimed for. For me as a producer, as soon as that collaboration with Platinum was decided, I knew we were gold. It’s up to Mr. Yoko to do his thing now.

GamesBeat: To me, it’s interesting that you might be balancing so many things. You have a new partner in Platinum, the pressure from your fan base, and keeping this open to totally new players. How do you work all that into one game?

Yosuke: From my perspective as a producer, Mr. Yoko is a very unique individual with a unique world view in his games and his designs. I was a little worried about whether we could bring that about properly through this collaboration. We spent six months on pre-production with Platinum, talking with them and preparing. We were lucky, because some of their younger staff are fans of Nier. That helped out a lot. They understood the vision we had. Once we were able to talk about that and come to an understanding with each other, it felt like the right fit.

Taro: That preproduction, those six months, I told Mr. Saito, let’s give it six months, and if it doesn’t jell, scrap it. But I got along great with the people at Platinum Games, so I decided to take the next step into production. As far as your question about new and core gamers, with core gamers it’s very difficult. It’s such a unique vision, a unique world view. It’s a pretty niche sort of core, in a sense. As far as garnering new players, I’m not great at making games that draw new players. If I were, the last game would have done amazingly well. As far as that kind of stuff, I don’t spend much time thinking about it. I just try to make my vision come true.

GamesBeat: If you had stopped after those six months and word had gotten out about it, people would have demanded that you finish it.

Yosuke: I probably would have been fired if word got out, too.

Yosuke: For me, I was pretty confident we could expand this game to reach new players. In terms of core gamers and fans of the franchise, that’s a lot of people who love Mr. Yoko’s design and world view, his image of this world. As far as trying to get new people on board with the franchise, I felt that music was very vital to that. We got a lot of positive feedback from the last game. That’s something we couldn’t change. We had to maintain that high quality of music to keep up that feedback. The first impression, utilizing Mr. Yoshida, who designed characters for Final Fantasy XII—getting him involved broadened the design more, not just to the core fans of the series, but to people who may not have tried the Nier games. On top of that, we have Platinum Games, who developed games like Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising. Their game controls are very fluid. They feel natural. They’re good at making games like that. I felt confident this would work.

Question: I’m not sure how you’re going forward with certain characters. The original Nier was two sort-of separate games. How are you going to resolve that? Are you only going to follow on the PlayStation version of the game? How do you expect Xbox fans to react to that?

Yosuke: In terms of the characters, we decided to go with two different character designs in the original. One was geared more toward western audiences, and Replicant was more geared toward Japanese audiences. That was based on a lot of feedback we received from our North American and European counterparts. For this one, we kept an action-RPG mindset in the development and designs. We wanted to hit a great, high-level JRPG, so let’s just stick to one design. As far as your question about how Xbox players will react, all we can say is, please play on the PlayStation.

Question: Do you feel like the time has passed when you need to design a character for the West as opposed to for Japanese players?

Yosuke: Yeah, I believe so.

Yoko: My personal opinion is that not a lot of Square Enix fans make that distinction anyway.

Question: One thing I loved about Nier was the multiple endings. It encourages you to replay. You had more character development. It opened up the world a lot more. Then you had the ending that completely wiped your save file, which was a very bold statement to make. Will we see those same strong decisions and encouragement for repeat play in the new game?

Yosuke: We are going to maintain the multiple playthrough idea, but as far as save file deletion, we probably won’t. We’ve done a lot of that before. We want to do some new things. But we will have multiple playthroughs.

Taro: It is still the early phases of development. He may change his mind and say he wants to delete your save file after all. You never know. Honestly, with the save file deletion, before Mr. Yoko told me about it, another staff member informed me that he was contemplating putting that feature in the original game. “Do you think this will be OK?” I said … no, it’s probably all right. It’s fine. He actually kept it a secret for a whole year. Then the other staff members were worried, so they told me.

GamesBeat: I wonder if you think this new game is an opportunity to open up the door for new fans to the franchise to check out the first game. Have you built in anything to help out people who aren’t familiar with that game?

Taro: In terms of my design, it’s more for newer players. People who’ve played a previous installment may actually get more confused in terms of the gameplay. It might feel foreign to them, whereas people who haven’t tried the previous game may be able to get involved more and enjoy it more.

Yosuke: There are some connections to the previous game world, but that’s why we didn’t go with the title Nier 2, to make a distinction about that. This isn’t directly connected to the previous game. Getting back to the idea of how the first one didn’t do amazingly well, if it had, we’d go with the title Nier 2 and make something more directly related. But since it wasn’t such a big blockbuster, we wanted to make that distinction. This isn’t as drawn in, but it still has connections. If players try this new title and enjoy it, they can go back and play Nier. If we called something Nier 2, it would seem like you had to go back to the first game and play it to get the full story, the full picture.

Question: Can you talk about where you are in development? When did that six-month preproduction end? What’s the current status of the game?

Yosuke: About December of last year was when I was busiest. That’s around when preproduction completed. We’re about a year into development now. I’d love if we could show off more gameplay-related stuff by this fall if possible. Maybe not the Tokyo Game Show, though.

Taro: In the trailer we showed today, at the very end we used the game model. There’s just a slight blip at the end that’s pretty much from the game. We’d love to be able to show something longer and show people what we’re looking to create and deliver.

Question: Something else that made Nier unique was how you changed up the gameplay a lot. Some parts were top-down, some were set up like a platformer, and you had the third-person action. Will we see that same swapping between genres?

Yosuke: Some of that’s come up. We’re thinking about possibly doing that. But personally, I don’t like to repeat myself. I want to bring in some new things. We may do that, but not as much. It’s very much up in the air, but that’s something we are considering.

GamesBeat: I’m interested in the musical score, because that was a huge standout in Nier. A lot of people enjoy the score haven’t even played the games. I’m curious how you’re approaching that. Has work started on the soundtrack? Has music informed the game’s design in any way?

Yosuke: As far as the score, we’re starting to compose. We’ve compiled a list and we’re starting on that process. That song in the trailer is from the original Nier, called “Song from the Past,” or something along those lines. It’s something Mr. Okabe specifically composed for the occasion. He did the piano arrangement for this trailer at E3.

Taro: We cut up the score and do a lot of different things with it. I’m pretty sure that Mr. Saito will agree with me, but we don’t really know why people are so in love with it. I’m sort of sick of it. I wonder why it sold so well.

Yosuke: We’re probably a little negative because we have to listen to it all the time. But it is a big part of the game. We just try to get the music to work with the game, to get in sync with the game world and its vision. Say a certain type of enemy comes in. We’ll have a percussion part come in to attract that. Little details like that make it work with the game world.

Taro: Another example, if it’s a very sad part of the story, we’ll obviously use a somber tune. We’ll do things like that design-wise. But honestly, the fact that the soundtrack sold so well and the game didn’t, I’m very jealous of that.

Yosuke: Mr. Okabe is actually a school friend of Mr. Yoko’s. Mr. Okabe wasn’t doing so well. He was actually considering leaving the game industry as a composer at the time when we approached him for Nier. Then all of a sudden he became very popular and very famous, and he’s getting work left and right. We were telling him that it’s thanks to us that he’s so successful. He’s working on anime, TV dramas, movies, all kinds of things.

Question: I wanted to ask about the action element of the game and why you’re working with Platinum. They’re known for very fast-based, twitchy reactions in gameplay. What are you asking Platinum to do as far as how they’re developing combat?

Yosuke: The only thing I really asked of Platinum, to give you some background—as you said, Platinum is very action-oriented. They make very fast-paced action games. But because of that, people have these preconception that their games are very difficult to get into, that they’re not for everyone. With Nier we had many female fans. Part of it was because of Mr. Okabe, but also because of the characters and story and world view that Mr. Yoko created. I asked Platinum, when we decided to do this, to make an action games, but something women would be able to appreciate and enjoy. That’s the key thing I asked for.

Taro: For me, obviously Platinum is great creating action games. We asked them to make it a little more simplified, just slightly, but—at first I thought this would be a heavy battle action game. I was a little worried. But luckily for us, a lot of their staff members really respect Nier. They took it to heart and understand that project and that title. They essentially took the battle system and game design of Nier and added Platinum-type elements on top of it, to make a hybrid of a kind. But it’s not a completely new game where they deconstructed everything. They really have respect for the previous game. That made me happy.

Question: Nier and its parent series have always been very mature in tone. You’ve had incest, intersexed characters, a lot of violence, a lot of profanity. It’s very unafraid to be what it is. It seems that the industry is currently in a state where it’s a little sensitive to sexualization and violence. Do you plan on keeping the tone you’ve always had in the new game, or are you planning to change that at all?

Taro: Drakengard was my first title as a game director. We were told a lot by our board, our censorship board, to do retakes and make changes. Honestly, I was thinking, screw this, I’m not going to make another one. With Nier I wanted to make a more normal game. Of course, for me it’s a normal game. People still think it’s very dark and very somber and whatnot, but for me that’s more normal than Drakengard.

GamesBeat: Revisiting Nier, looking back at the performance of the initial release, were you hoping for a fresh start? Were there things you wanted to do? Going into this with Platinum, it feels like you’re handing off a bit of what you could have done. Would you call this a more new game, or do you want to tie it closer to the previous one?

Yosuke: For the original, it was a new IP. It was a challenge building something from the ground up. I specifically chose a character designer at that point who wasn’t that well-known. But in terms of development, we were still using the Drakengard team. So it was similar in that regard. But with this project, we really wanted to grow the brand. That was one of our main goals with this title. In order to do that, we felt that we needed to pull out all the stops. We wanted to use a well-known character designer in Mr. Yoshida. Obviously fans love Mr. Yoko’s world view and the world these characters live in, as well as the music. I specifically wanted to work with a developer who has a strong fan base because of their game designs and gameplay, who are well known for that. That’s how this discussion came about. Once we decided to all go together, it was just about trying to make that vision come true.

Taro: For me, touching on what Mr. Saito addressed already, on the new stuff we’re trying to do and maintaining some form of connection to the previous game—the way some members of the media—the way I look at the original Nier is like your mom’s home cooking. It might not be great, but it’s OK. You’re comfortable with it. Some members of the media told me that the original Nier is like a puppy someone threw out. It’s cute in a way, but there’s something wrong. You can’t help but love it. There’s something missing. It’s cute, but something there you can’t put your finger on. This time, working with Platinum, with Mr. Yoshida, with Mr. Okabe, we have these great ingredients to work with. It’s going to be too perfect. We have all these great ingredients and great chefs working together. But is it going to be missing that thing that made it so endearing to our fans? After thinking about it, we said, let’s just give it a try to see where it goes.

Question: You seem very secretive about the name. You’ve talked about how it isn’t necessarily Nier 2. Do you feel like you’d be giving too much away by announcing the title at this point?

Yosuke: As far as the subtitle, technically we could have announced it, but—the problem is, there’s a word in the subtitle that plays a vital role and would give away a good idea of the story and the concepts we have in mind. Another reason why we haven’t made the announcement is that we haven’t come to a complete agreement on what the subtitle will be. That’s why we haven’t announced that yet. Going forward we’re going to have more discussions and come to a final subtitle that we’ll eventually release.

Taro: Simply put, we just ran out of time. We didn’t come to a decision soon enough.

Yosuke: Honestly, if we really tried, we probably could have come up with a subtitle and made an announcement, but there’s a lot of planning we have to go through. We’ll take the time and hopefully come up with an announcement around the fall.

Question: Is it safe to assume that the woman we saw in the trailer is the protagonist?

Taro: We have three playable characters. She’s one of the three.

Yosuke: There’s actually another video we have with a different playable character in it. It in the trailer, if you look very closely. There’s a little boy, and he’s another one of the playable characters. He’s on the roof of a tall building.

GamesBeat: You mentioned a sense of responsibility to fans. While that makes sense, it seems strange when you’ve acknowledged that maybe the original didn’t sell well from the get-go. Is that because the fans are so vocal and dedicated? Where does that responsibility to fans come from?

Yosuke: This may seem like a pretty vanilla answer, but there are several reason. One is, in terms of my job title, I’m responsible to sell copies. That’s the nature of the business. Another is that we need to make money. In order to do that, we need to sell copies. I just spent time thinking about what we needed to do to sell better, and that’s where this all came about for me. Honestly, I’d like to ask what we need to do to get better sales. If you have any advice, I’m all ears.