NieR creator insists that his decisions are based on what he thinks will sell, while also quipping that 'at first I listen to what the publisher wants from me, but later I don't'
In a joint IGN interview with NieR creator Yoko Taro and Stellar Blade creative director Hyung-tae Kim, the two developers had nothing but praise for each other's work, while the famously eccentric Taro insisted that his surreal and existentialist fever dream NieR: Automata was just an Evangelion rip off that played to the market.
While the joint interview seems to have been inspired by the frequent comparisons between the PS5-exclusive Stellar Blade and Automata, as well as Kim's stated love for the 2017 action game, Taro noted that they both play very differently, with Stellar Blade having a greater emphasis on Soulslike precision and difficulty.
«If you actually play [Stellar Blade], you'll instantly realize it's a very different game,» Taro said. «If Stellar Blade would have been the same game with a macho main character, I think people wouldn't have pointed out the similarities. It just happens to be that there are not many games with a similar style.»
Taro also praised the tech and production values of Stellar Blade, noting that Korean and Chinese developers have been more responsive than Japanese ones to the general industry shift to middleware over proprietary engines, and arguing that this was part of the reason for the slump in the Japanese game industry in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
On his own creative process for the famously weird NieR games, Taro offered some slightly contradictory answers in his customarily self-deprecating style. When asked about Automata protagonist 2B's now-iconic character design, Taro claimed that he was just paying attention to the market: «I wanted to make a style of game that had less competition.»
Indeed, Taro claimed to be sales-obsessed in comparison to Kim. «So you make games as an artist without thinking about business too much and still have your own company with 300 employees,» Taro said, «While I think about business all the time and don't even have my own company yet?»
What about that famously moving and
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